Guild Wars 2

Since you are working on QOL, here are a few more suggestions of things throughout the game:

• Prevent Chat interrupts – When you are typing, if someone does one of several things (start fractal vote, invite, etc.) your chat disengages and you start spamming abilities. Leave the chat in precedence.

• Reliable sources of Leather and cloth – Unlike the other main resources, Leather and cloth lack reliable acquisition methods. Sometime you are rolling in it, sometimes you are short and can’t do much but go to the trading post. This problem is exacerbated by the level of the character you are using altering the results of salvaging. Node assets exist (only found from gem store) that could be placed in cities and towns, but even just making it more reliable that certain enemies will drop these kinds of materials would help.

• Normalize resource nodes – all the post-release maps are high level, and have Mithril and Hard Wood and higher only. This creates an environment where people tend to lack lower level materials but have a glut of these supposedly-rare materials. Please give a better distribution of nodes on new and existing lvl 80 maps.

• Post HoT maps lack basic vendors – There are very few basic vendors (salvage + harvest tools) on the post HoT maps (none on Bloodstone fen). This creates issues due to the low waypoint density where one is forced to lose large amounts of progress in order to restock. More vendors should have basic equipment.

• Better Default controls – The default controls are not very good, spreading all across the keyboard (just look at where the special action ended up: on -, almost the furthest key). Having a better or a few better default key bindings would help newer players. There are plenty detailed on the forums worth considering.

• Name check without commitment – Currently in character creation, if you are trying to figure out if a name is taken, your only choice is to try to click through and see. It would be better to be able to check a name WITHOUT committing to it immediately, so that we can more carefully consider alternatives.

• Mastery points for other bosses – Mastery points should be given to, at least, Shatterer and Claw of Jormag, as they have extensive achievement trees associated with them and/or are just as or higher level than Teqatl, and it seems strange that they lack them while Teq has them.

• Tighten up the location of services – Bank, Mystic Forge, crafting, trading post. These are the essential service in Lion’s arch. Yet they are spread needlessly far apart. You know this is an issue already, since you put in the shortcut from the bank to the trading post. Just do a small map change to bring all of these closer together.

• Remove annoying NPCs – In several places (Lions arch banks, etc.) there are NPCs who continually say the same line over and over. Please remove them or give them a more varies script.

Thanks for all the salvage all ability added in the latest patch. Since you are working on QOL, here are a few more suggestions for the inventory system:

• Improve sorting – When we sort, things should go into their proper bags, not just get shoved to the front or ignored completely. When you hit sort, weapons should go to the equipment bags, junk to the oiled bags, etc. instead of these only mattering on acquisition. (Note – making sorting inherent instead of based on bags would be better, but that might be too much redesign work for QOL)

• Sorting toggle – Having many types of bag ignore sorting (such as it is) makes it hard to manage everything. Give bags a toggle for whether they ignore the sort command or not.

• Bank access at Mystic Forge – This way it can work like regular crafting and not require a lot of back and forth.

• Bank check for overworld use – Look in the bank when we are in the world for things that need items, like charging quartz or giving bloodstone tributes. Requiring we have them in inventory just creates annoyance and delay (Accidentally hit deposit mats, then go back to bank, repeat) with no positive game play benefit. This is already done for vendors (Miyani and XP scrolls, DS plate vendors), just expand it for all cases.

• Automatic depositing of materials – there is no real need for this to be manual once the previous 2 issues are addressed. Save us all a ton of clicking.

• Gear menu to icons – there is no reason these items couldn’t just be buttons or toggles across the top, bottom, or edge of interface. having them in a submenu serves no purpose.

• Sorting options for the bank – the bank currently is completely manual. Give us the ability to set up criteria and sort.

• Keyring – put the various map keys in a unified area accessible to all characters. This will cut down immensely on continual cross-character management annoyances.

• More material slots – Give newer materials such as shimmering/tenebrous crystals, reclaimed plates, blood rubies, etc. a slot in the material bank. This will simplify management, just like the keyring will.

• More display options – right now, we can either give up our ability to tell which slots belong to what bag or make our inventory involve more scrolling or more horizontal space. The ability to at least set only SOME of the bags to unified display instead of all or nothing will improve matters.

• Make bag expansions universal instead of character bound – This practice encourages buyers remorse, forces people to keep toons they wouldn’t otherwise, and generally discourages purchasing of this feature. I realize making them account wide might slightly lower ANet income, but the number of people who won’t get them at all who would if they were account bound should compensate a great deal if not completely, and lead to far less dissatisfaction. Satisfied players will buy more of everything else.

I very much agree with this. Once you reach the maps with Mithril and Hard wood, they should definitely have everything rather than just the highest tiers. This extremely arbitrary distribution causes more and more issues as we get more and more lvl 80 maps with nothing but Mithril and Hardwood. We also need better ways to get leather and cloth.

I am glad to see that some of these were addressed in the summer update. Snowblind and Molten Furnace both had the slow sequences removed or at least sped up to the point where you aren’t waiting around. The respawn point in Volcanic was moved to right in front of the boss. I look forward to reworks of Aetherblade and Thaumnova.

In the last story step for Out of the Shadows, Rytlock and Marjery LITERALLY STAND THERE AND DO NOTHING during all the boss fights. This is ridiculous; there isn’t even something blocking them from reaching the fight or keeping them busy like in LS2. They are literally in the middle of the battles doing nothing and being ignored by the enemies. It’s completely immersion breaking and non-nonsensical.

Thanks for all the quality of life improvements in the latest patch. Since you are working on these, here are a few more suggestions:

• Allow for free resizing and relocating of the interface. We currently have a few fixed scales but no location control, and scale resized EVERYTHING together right now, which may not be desired.

• More control of the various lists in the upper right. It should be possible to track achievements you want to without completely suppressing location and daily tracking. It should be possible to suppress the story prompts on a character, not the whole account.

• Change skills out of combat when on Cooldown. This doesn’t mean the cooldown gets skipped, but rather we don’t have to wait up to 2 minutes to change things. We are already out of combat; we shouldn’t have to stand around just to make changes.

• Change underwater skills from build pane at any time. Currently we can only see underwater skills when underwater, which means you forget what they are and can’t change them when you are redoing a build. There needs to be a toggle to allow showing and setting underwater skills.

• Remember dye sorting. Currently, it always returns to ‘by set’ whenever you exit. Please let it remember if it is set to ‘by hue’ or ‘by metallic’. Some other sorting would be nice too.

• Allow the minimap to be locked. Currently if you happen to stray over the minimap you can inadvertently zoom and resize it.

• Leave the minimap on targets. CUrrently, if you look for the location of a daily or event, the minimap zooms to it, circles it, then, without letting you click on it, returns to your location, forcing you to go back into the map and move back to the location manually. This defeats the purpose. Zoom to the location, leave it there, and let us use the waypoints. If we decide not to go after all we can close the map normally.

• Let us equip gathering tools in combat. These aren’t like weapons; there is no need to have this restriction in place.

Sometimes during the various fights while gathering Bloodstone pieces, particularly during the fight against the Ley-infused Weapons, Caithe will become completely non-responsive, taking no action whatsoever including failing to revive you should it be needed.

My main complaint (aside from some bugs with distance detection for the pull in Chaos) is that both Chaos and Swamp are currently far too melee unfreindly. You shouldn’t be able to stand in front of them and tank everything, but you shouldn’t be unable to ever close in except when broken either.

Ayrilana.1396:

Boogiepop Void.6473:

I’m almost done with Central Tyria. I just need 4 mastery points to be finished. But there is no way to get the kitten things.

I don’t have the money to buy all the cultural armors, or the resources to get all the fractal skins or ambrite weapons, etc.

I can’t get a WvW spoon to drop. Thanks for tying that to RNG.

I’m nowhere near world completion and that’s only 1 point anyway.

I did all the fractal ones already, except the dolphin one which, now that they fixed the bug that let you get it for doing darkness and then going backward out of the boss room, is impossible without a full party on Voice Chat.

I did teq and triple trouble already. Why don’t the other world bosses have mastery points with them? At the least for the shatterer and claw of jormag, since they have their own achievement sets.

I did the karka hunt in Lions arch, and the queen karka, and the skritt queen, and the diving.

I have no interest in doing LS2 over and over and over for hours on end. Can you even switch characters, or do you have to do the story once per character before you can get the achievements with them?

I can’t get the legendaries to appear on the Silverwastes. No matter how much is at tier 4, not matter that we get the vinewrath going, the legendaries never appear. Thanks for more RNG.

If the stupid silverwastes weren’t all RNG, I could be done, but instead all I can do is spend all day in the map for no results.

If you write off so many of the available MP the. Of course you’re going to have difficulty getting them.

Also, the dolphin one in FotM can be done solo. You do not need to have a group on TS to do that.

For SW, the easiest would to put up a LFG for what you need.

I tried LFG for the SW stuff. Simone joined just long enough to tell me to stop, because, rightly, no one is going to join since it’s not something that can be triggered. All you can do is go to SW event maps and hope things show up.

Malediktus.9250:

they are called mastery points, obviously you have to mastery some stuff to be worthy of having unlocked all masteries
I am glad not all mastery points are useless 5-15min tasks

The silverwastes legendaries have nothing to do with mastery of anything but luck. You are running around hoping the RNG will decide to bless you with a spawn. There is nothing TO master about this.

I need CT mastery points, not HoT, so I need to get LS2 achievements. But I refuse to waste my time playing through once for all my alts before the achievements will unlock.

This is a kittening waste. I have spent over 24 hours on the silverwastes in the last week and I have never seen or even heard of a single legendary appearing. I could be playing the new content, but instead I get to sit on empty maps waiting for the RNG to get off it’s kitten . Because tying mastery points to RNG was such a good idea.

The change to account bound recipes is appreciated and long overdue. However, it renders recipe drops far less desirable, particularly those drops with few choices like the Minstrel Jewelry Recipe Book. These drops are common enough that they become worthless rapidly, as no one needs them anymore for alts and they are unsellable in the trading post. Please give recipe drops more options so that these common drops return to having some value.

I want to do the story achievements, but I want to do them with varied classes for different experiences. Your current system of forcing people to play through once on each character before unlocking the achievement might be “thematic”, but it doesn’t reflect how people play. We have lots of characters. Stop treating every character as thought they exist in a vacuum. You don’t encourage replaying the story that way, you encourage ignoring it, and the achievements you put in to accompany it.

Yes, I did the hidden gardens, Retrospective runaround, and the badges. I have gone through the LS2 story, but if I am going to do it again I don’t want to do it with the same character. That’s boring.

By the way, concerning the badge, I want to say to anyone who is listening: STOP DESIGNING PIXEL PRECISION JUMPS. GW2 DOES NOT HAVE THE CAMERA FOR THIS.

I’m almost done with Central Tyria. I just need 4 mastery points to be finished. But there is no way to get the kitten things.

I don’t have the money to buy all the cultural armors, or the resources to get all the fractal skins or ambrite weapons, etc.

I can’t get a WvW spoon to drop. Thanks for tying that to RNG.

I’m nowhere near world completion and that’s only 1 point anyway.

I did all the fractal ones already, except the dolphin one which, now that they fixed the bug that let you get it for doing darkness and then going backward out of the boss room, is impossible without a full party on Voice Chat.

I did teq and triple trouble already. Why don’t the other world bosses have mastery points with them? At the least for the shatterer and claw of jormag, since they have their own achievement sets.

I did the karka hunt in Lions arch, and the queen karka, and the skritt queen, and the diving.

I have no interest in doing LS2 over and over and over for hours on end. Can you even switch characters, or do you have to do the story once per character before you can get the achievements with them?

I can’t get the legendaries to appear on the Silverwastes. No matter how much is at tier 4, not matter that we get the vinewrath going, the legendaries never appear. Thanks for more RNG.

If the stupid silverwastes weren’t all RNG, I could be done, but instead all I can do is spend all day in the map for no results.

If you are a bit behind the rest of your party, it’s possible for the platforms before the anomaly fight to vanish, leaving you unable to proceed forward.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that a lot of people ran with all the AR in the 6 trinkets so they could swap characters without worrying about gear rate. The new system gimps all these people badly.

It’s really kittenty of ANet to gate 5 whole mastery points, literally the difference between finishing and not finishing CT, behind uncontrollable random appearance that requires huge coordination to achieve. Coordination that, at this point in the map lifecycle, isn’t going to exist unless you have a 150+ person guild you can get to show up and do it (which they aren’t going to want to do since the whole thing is random).

The crafting ui needs a major overhaul in general. Having huge scrollable lists is not good design. There should be separate tabs for refinements and upgrades, better sorting by more criteria, starting with only the highest crafting level open should be default, more logical assignments in terms of rarity levels, fewer popup confirmation windows, etc. The entire right side of the crafting interface is unnecessarily large and mostly non-functional anyway.

Keep in mind that the rate for AR + Stat infusions is 1/10 off of stabilizing matrices. It’s insane. With every matrix I have ever earned, I still can’t buy a single +9 level infusion.

I really need to get the legendary mordrem achievements on the silverwastes. They will give me enough points to finish my Central Tyria masteries. How do I get them to appear?

That’s another issue: yet another account bound item taking up space.

I’m not enthused about the asset reuse in the new fractal. The actual design of it is fine, but seeing literally everything being a ripoff of other fractals visual and audio wise (other than the new dialogue) is disappointing. The swamp rework is a disappointment; we actually killed Mossman without even realizing we were fighting him due to how weak he was (we thought we were fighting some wolves before we got to him; he died from incidental AOE). Also, Thaumnova needed a rework far more than either swamp or snowblind; the heatroom and collider room cause huge frustration and slowdown to most groups, to say nothing of the anomaly bossfight. Aetherblade spinning wall puzzle could also use a rethink; maybe actually add a path based on navigating the pattern instead of depending on dodges to get through. Also, I am sad that the issue where Guardians cannot be used above level 80 fractals was actually made worse, rather than addressed.

Loving the autosalvage, although I still wish for automated material depositing, material storage for things like reclaimed plates and now blood rubies, automatic bank access for the mystic forge, vendors, and events that need materials (charging quartz, bloodstone tribute for the first bifrost collection, etc.), and for a keyring (although at least the new map doesn’t introduce yet another map specific key to try to always have on the right character). Not liking that you can’t get to the new map with alts without replaying the opening of LS3 over and over, and that I can’t get any experience to spirit shard conversion if I happen to not have the mastery points to finish every last track.

I’m annoyed by the AR rework because the added cost in stabilizing matrices is not made very clear beforehand. I actually pulled all my +7 simples, sold them intending to use the relics to replace them, then realized that every stabilizing matrix I have ever received (never had cause to use them before) isn’t enough for more than 15 of the new currency and I had to stuff whichever I had in standard infusions onto my items. I ended up losing over 10 AR, to say nothing of the gold lost buying lots of extractors. This is of course not the fault of the system, just the communication of it. However, I do not like the insanely high stabilization matrix requirements this brings.

Artanis.4963:

You can turn off snapping in options, or set a hold-down-to-toggle keybinding.

But if you turn it off, you turn ALL of it off. Snapping is extremely helpful for using ground target abilities in action camera. But it breaks a lot of the wall type skills. Hence they need to separate or change the snapping functionality. It’s a case of one size fits all not actually working.

The answer is yes. As currently designed, due to boon thieves, you cannot use a guardian above fractal 80.

Also it only appears to work on the one map, which makes no sense.

Play the second step in Out of the Shadows and tell me how many times you had to revive Rytlock. I did it twice then stopped bothering, and that was before the 2nd ‘wave’ of enemies (if you can call those waves). And that was a super easy fight. I had similar experiences throughout LS2 and HoT (and that’s not counting the times when my companions didn’t join me for the fight for various not-entirely-sensible reasons like the vinewrath fight near the end of LS2).

(sorry for the oblique language, trying not to spoil anything)

That is awkward comparatively, especially since you need the currency for other things like unlocking flight abilities (why aren’t these part of materies?). I haven’t played the new map enough tot get a sense of how easy or hard it is to get the currency yet, though, so maybe we are just bathing in the stuff and we won’t notice. Would still make more sense to have a portal from verdant brink somewhere, though.

It would be really nice if wall type abilities (Spectral Wall, Line of Warding, Wall of reflection, Unsteady ground, Flame Wall, etc.) wouldn’t snap to the enemy we are targeting when we are in action camera. Unlike ground target abilities, these are not meant to be cast directly on an enemy. While you can get them to unsnap by looking far away from enemies, if you need to cast them in the direction of the enemy your only choice is to toggle out of AC for a bit, which makes them awkward. Several of them are ineffective or minimally effective if they are cast on the enemy instead of between you. It would be better if this kind of ability were just excluded from the snapping in the first place. If it must snap, it would be better to snap to a point between you and the targeted enemy, rather than on the enemy.

The bigger issue is having wall type abilities snap to the enemy you are targeting when in action camera. I wish they would change that.

It is a grammar issue. The possessive is not being used properly here.

Given the way you get there, does this mean you have to play the story steps over and over for each alt? Is there a good way to get there without going through the story over and over, ie walking into Verdant brink via Silverwastes instead of playing the prologue over and over?

It would be really nice if NPCs like your fellow Dragons Watch members weren’t so easily killed. This has been an issue since the original personal story, and it’s only gotten more ridiculous as we have continued with the living world. How are we supposed to take the characters seriously if they die to everything we fight? I’m not saying they should be able to solo things if we just decide to stand around, but I also shouldn’t have to revive them after every fight and have them go down after less than 5% of an encounter. We know that they can be made useful, such as they were in the last fight for HoT, and having them be this stupid and useless during the normal story steps is just disappointing.

Why are the flight abilities being handled in such a weird way? Aren’t these exactly what the Mastery system should be for? Why are these connected to a vendor?

I have finished everything to do with XP, but because I don’t have enough CT mastery points for the last Legendary crafting mastery that I will probably never even use, all my XP in the entirety of central Tyria is wasted. Locking the XP system to another one that requires completing arbitrary achievements, which are not trivial to complete, is bad design. You are constantly flashing XP in front of people, then essentially taking it away from them because they haven’t gone and done something else they may not want to do. What about people who don’t WANT to do the legendary crafting mastery line? Well too bad; if you don’t want your XP to be worthless, go do it anyway. What is your only mainstreaming achievements are things like getting a random drop in WvW (which you don’t play), buying every cultural armor in the game, or getting map completion while not receiving tons of XP for all the things you are doing? Too bad.

If I am waiting on mastery points to unlock, then let the XP go toward something. I would prefer real reward tracks like in PvP and WvW, but at least spirit shards are something (albeit something that isn’t all that useful currently, but hopefully they will add more varied vendors if the currency becomes more common), instead of absolutely nothing.

Or they could just get more stat combos in so things aren’t doubled up anymore.

I didn’t realize that the currency you need to buy the new infusions is 1/10 stabilizing matrices, so I traded in all my old +7 versatiles, then realized I couldn’t just buy replacements with the fractal relic refunds. With all of the matrices I have ever acquired, I can’t even afford 1 +9 AR +5 stat infusion, and I could only get 3 +5 AR +5 stats. End result is I have dropped over 10 AR and I’m going to have to extract the +5s that were all I had available at some point, using a lot of extractors. Which are going to need to be used a lot more in general now, since we will need to constantly pull stuff out of our gear in order to use it to upgrade from AR to AR + stat and to upgrade among the AR + stat infusions.

Why does he only offer odd AR numbers? Also is it just me or, for the stat-bearing infusions, can you not upgrade 7s to 9s?

5959 takes money instead of thermos for his infusion upgrades. Is the amount still the same, is it better to use and artificer, or is it better to use 5959?

Been through the fractal multiple times getting it to 19 without going to 20 multiple times on each run, and it still will not award the achievement. Either there is something extremely picky about how it works that no one has bothered to write down or the achievement is broken.

Ayrilana.1396:

Well you technically haven’t completed masteries so there being a reward track afterwards would not really help you anyways.

I have finished everything to do with XP. Locking the XP system to another one that requires completing arbitrary achievements, which are not trivial to complete, is bad design. You are constantly flashing XP in front of people, then essentially taking it away from them because they haven’t gone and done something else they may not want to do. What about people who don’t WANT to do the legendary crafting mastery line? Well too bad, if you don’t want your XP to be worthless, go do it anyway.

And just to prove my point, they give me a large cache of experience for finishing the first bit of LS3… Which is worthless because my mastery track is maxed out, but I don’t have the points to buy the last item in the legendary crafting tree.

It would be really nice to have reward tracks or something equivalent for PvE. It’s so depressing watching all the XP numbers pop up and knowing that they mean nothing.

What they should really do is just get rid of half the ascended rings and trinkets (convert those you have to the equivalent). There is no purpose to having 2 of each stat combo anymore, since they don’t have either a gameplay or cosmetic purpose anymore.

I am also getting this.

FrostDraco.8306:

Boogiepop Void.6473:

gimrob.9071:

General speaking I find people in 35-70 range are lacking the basics of fotm, running soldiers, lack dodging, just spam one weapon, can not even eat basic food or pots, or even listen. And why run that tier when u can do t4. Which keeps some of the bad players out. Just run 75 that’s a daily a lot.

Some of us need to raise our level to access the T4 and need money to get ascended stuff because the needed AR for T4 can’t be obtained from drops below T4 (never get weapons or armor drops below T4, only rings (and you can buy amulet and trinkets), and rings + amulet + backpack + trinkets can’t get you enough AR for T4).

This is a complete bald faced lie. It has been confirmed by the people who runs fractal drop rate research that t2 and t4 chest have the highest drop rates for armor. And most of the armor and weapon chest i have gotten this month have been t3 and t2 chest. And there is always the option to craft ascended, which is cheap assuming you actually play the game. If you think you can only get good drops from t4 chest to run t4, you have a rude awakening coming.

Then you have freakish luck. I have never once in all my time in fractals up to 70 (highest my AR allows with +7s on rings, trinkets, amulets, backpack, and a mask that luckily dropped from Teq and +10s in all my available slots, where everything is infused and attuned that can be) gotten anything other than ascended rings and recipes.

gimrob.9071:

General speaking I find people in 35-70 range are lacking the basics of fotm, running soldiers, lack dodging, just spam one weapon, can not even eat basic food or pots, or even listen. And why run that tier when u can do t4. Which keeps some of the bad players out. Just run 75 that’s a daily a lot.

Some of us need to raise our level to access the T4 and need money to get ascended stuff because the needed AR for T4 can’t be obtained from drops below T4 (never get weapons or armor drops below T4, only rings (and you can buy amulet and trinkets), and rings + amulet + backpack + trinkets can’t get you enough AR for T4).

Melee range vs the anomaly doesn’t seem like a good plan.

Unfortunately due to boon thieves you can’t use a guardian (unless you play very very carefully) in the highest fractal tiers (81+). The enemies will steal retaliation and cause your group to wipe a lot. So you might want to start transitioning to a different class.