Guild Wars 2

Yeah I have had this problem. You basically have the two hours after reset to get anyone into T3 fractals in the 60+ range, and that’s only if you are lucky. And even when you do, there is a lot of wiping and leaving as people decide to go do the 50s instead.

It’s not about if people leave. If, after the entire pregame setup, someone HAS NEVER ONCE CONNECTED to the match, it shouldn’t start. That’s not gaming the system, that’s connection failure. Please read the actual post instead of just the title before you comment.

In the last hour, I have had 5 4v5s (with myself on the 4 because that’s how my luck rolls). In 4 of those, the 5th never for one second connected (the last the 5th showed up right at the end when it didn’t matter). given that 4v5s are known to be almost 100% guaranteed loss for the 4 side, why, after the prep period, would the game proceed if the 5th never connected. they had 2 minutes + the map selection time to do something. If they still haven’t connected, abort the kitten match and stop wasting peoples’ time.

It takes me longer to change characters than it does for the entire match prep. Unless they streamline the system it’s not a viable option. Or unless there is some fast change method for PVP that is hidden somewhere.

The matchmaker should not allow duplicate classes. It creates very uneven matches and some combinations are almost guaranteed to lose just due to DPS and/or Tankiness imbalance. It would go a long way to balancing things if you couldn’t stack multiple Elementalists or Warriors or couldn’t get stuck with multiple Thieves or Guardians.

I am not sure what to do with this. Leaving aside the issue where people are constantly leaving, at 64 and up the anomaly puts out so much damage, not from agony (I am fine on AR) but from the undodgeable beam, which, if it happens to target me multiple times in a row (which tends to happen at some point in the fight) blows through all of my mitigation and healing and downs me normally. Again, I am not falling down (or at least not until already downed). What are you supposed to do about that?

Note: my fractal runner is an Elementalist, and as the I only have light ascended armor (luck of the drop) and that is my only light using class, I cannot change characters at this time without losing tons of AR.

Do the guild armors change to display your current guild, or do they always display the guild you got them from?

The legendary guy won’t give you more Jotun star pieces. It’s a known thing.

Crap. I was working on Bifrost and I sold the fragments from collection 1 assuming that they were only good as trophy collection items like everything else I have ever gotten that is collection related. Now I find out that they are crafting materials and that they can only ever drop once and can’t be reacquired. So I think this means I can now never get Bifrost. Is there any way to fix this?

Crap. I was working on Bifrost and I sold the fragments assuming that they were only good as trophy collection items like everything else I have ever gotten that is collection related. Now I find out that they are crafting materials and that they can only ever drop once and can’t be reacquired. So I think this means I can now never get Bifrost T_T

Why is the singularity in the molten boss fractal up on a tower, and one we can’t jump down from too? Can we please put it in a more convenient location? I know it seems minor, but when you are doing tier 4 with new people and wiping a lot as you try to teach them, going up and down that tower over and over and over gets really annoying really fast.

The one in the uncategorized fractal is also a little out of the way, but not so much. It would still be nicer if you put it at the top of the stairs before old tom instead of behind them off the main route.

The problem is that these extremely common high tier materials all depend on extremely uncommon materials like Obsidian Shards to craft anything. So while I have built up huge stocks of these materials, I don’t have obsidian shards to craft them into anything. I’m sure that at some point the stuff I craft them into will also rack up, but for now it’s the base materials that are the issue for me.

I am swimming in piles of Airship Oil, Exalted dust, Bloodstone, Empyreal Shards, Dragonite, Amalgamated Gemstones, etc. There is too much of it, it is all account bound, and the bank fills up so quickly. Sure, a few of them have eaters like Mawdrey II or Princess, but even that barely addresses the problem for those materials and in any case doesn’t help with any of the others. Please just unbind these basic high level materials so we can send them around.

Ironically some of the other materials, such as anything charged due to the ludicrous time gating and difficulty in acquiring Quartz, are in very short supply.

Just put a toggle on it. Don’t get rid of it completely. The voices were most of what made the trons unique.

This is poor design in general. You shouldn’t have to worry about character level; RNG bags should be RNG and be insensitive to who opens them.

blueberry.2504:

I agree, and i have a feeling LS 3 will create even more keys and tokens mess. Why for every new content release even more of them, rather have it efficient and clean. They all have the same function, only another pic.

They do it that way so that you can’t farm any one map and use the keys on another map with better rewards. Wouldn’t you rather farm Auric Basin than Tangled Depths if you could? It’s not inherently a bad idea, but the execution in terms of inventory management is where it falls down.

I never knew that you didn’t need to have Chak Eggs and Reclaimed Plates on you. Given the description of the items and the way everything else works, I never even tried not having them with me. Still, that’s 10 shared slots occupied. And I mentioned doing the bank shuffle, but that means that you have to start and end every play session where you intend to change chars at a bank location, of which there are exactly 0 in all the HoT maps. And given the low numbers of waypoints and the difficulty of reaching some places (cough Tangled Depths cough), you don’t want to be pulling your characters out of place in a lot of cases.

The number of keys and tokens has gotten out of hand. We have Zephyrite Lockpicks, Bandit Skeleton Keys, Bandit Shovels, Key of Greater Nightmares (and pieces), Pact Crowbars, Exalted Keys, Vials of Chak Acid, Machetes, Aetherkeys (in pieces and complete), Chak Eggs, and Reclaimed Metal Plates. All of these need to be in your inventory when you want to use them.

Counting the incomplete pieces, that is 12 items that, ideally, EVERY CHARACTER SHOULD HAVE unless you intend to never go a map with them. If you are fortunate enough to have shared inventory slots, these items take up all but 2 of them if you have the max available, and keep in mind that it costs, at current gem prices, 7490 gems or nearly $100 (or 2019 gold at time of writing) plus the $74.99 or $100 HoT edition.

If, like the majority of players, you do not have more than the single shared slot, then you have to park all your characters at Lions Arch or another bank location constantly so you can swap all these items into and out of every character’s inventory manually whenever they go to the relevant map so you have the ability to make full use of them.

This is ludicrous. Either these need to be added to the wallet so they are available to all characters or we need a keyring or some new shared system for them. You shouldn’t need to spend $150+ to be able to manage your inventory effectively, and if you have you should be able to use those slots as you want, not have them constantly occupied by these items.

There are plenty of people who have stopped doing guild missions. It’s not that they aren’t involved in their guild, they are just so bored of doing the same things over and over that they have stopped doing guild missions. You have 500+ strong guilds that can’t even pull together 15 people to do a race in one go. You have guild leaders doing the races 15 times by themselves to get upgrade currencies for the guild, and others begging people or even turning it into a membership requirement that people show up to do guild missions on a schedule. Practically the only reason ANYONE is doing these anymore is for the needed points and levels. None of this is healthy for the game in general or for guilds.

There are not enough things to do as guilds. There are only 3 guild puzzles, 7 races (although in the last several months we have seen only 4 of them over and over), and 6 challenges. Only the bounties have enough that you aren’t seeing the same ones over and over in quick succession. Most people don’t want to do guild missions out sheer boredom. Please improve the variety, and the geographic spread.

CptAurellian.9537:

Yeah, adaptation as a guard to boon thieves is a pretty simple thing: play another class which doesn’t get wrecked by this kind of stupid design -.-

Not everyone has multiple classes with the needed equipment to rock 150 AR. For some people, they have one toon who is the only toon that can do fractals due to Ascended equipment and AR availability, and if that toon is a Guardian, they basically cannot do the highest fractals through no fault of their own. Guardians do retaliation. It’s essentially their main mechanic. Making things HARDER is one thing, making them unplayable for an entire class is another.

A guardian running maximum reflection/projectile block is really good on the uncategorized fractal, so you can’t just DPS the harpies without having to worry about being knocked around.

I’ve never been able to complete it. Either my glider won’t deploy or the updrafts don’t spawn so I can’t stay in the air or the vents from the ground don’t work so I can’t get in the air to begin with.

If takes way more time and effort to get the Gift of Exploration than to get the Gift of Magumma. It’s very uneven to have them both end up being roughly equivalent in terms of function. It would make a lot more sense to break things down a bit more, and give us gifts for each of the regions of Tyria equally, ie Gift of Kryta (Divinities Reach, Queensdale, Kessex Hills, Gendaran Fields, Harathi Hinterlands), Gift of Tarnished Coast (Bloodtide Coast, Sparkfly Fen, Mount Maelstrom, Timberline Falls), etc. Then all the gifts would be for areas that are approximately equivalent in size. This would require some playing with the recipes (probably you would need a few gifts per), but evening it out so all legendaries have the same amount of effort involved would be nice from a balance perspective.

Then there is all the stuff that makes no sense, such as Agony Infusions being fine quality in artificing. And the sort parameters are pretty useless, since they are so broad.

Ok, this has gotten very far off of my original point, partly by my own wingeing.

One of my original points, and the most valid issue from a design perspective, concerns the Collider room and the safety shields. We can debate whether you should or should not use the shields, but it is a major design flaw that, if you should have trouble, you lose the option to use them because they are lost inside the maze. That does mean that effectively the room becomes harder if you don’t succeed at it on your first try for whatever reason.

As I said, over 16 people cycled through that group from LFG in the course of more than an hour. I’m not going to say that that is a representative sample of all fractal players, but it’s not really ‘just [me] being bad’ as seems to be implied by some posters. This is not the first time I have run into this issue, but it is the first time it hasn’t been solved by someone who knows how to so it showing up after at most one full group replacement. The fact that “keep replacing people until you luck into someone who can do it” seems to be the DEFAULT strategy for a lot of people, not just me, as explicitly stated by some of the people who cycled through, is indicative of a problem.

Well just spent over an hour trying to do 64 for the daily. Between the heat room, the colliders, and subject 6, we all said kitten you ANet and quit. None of the 15 or 16 people that cycled through that party from LFG will ever be doing this fractal again.

I don’t have a necro. My fractal character, as in the only one with enough AR to do high level fractals, is an elementalist. My other chars are a thief, a ranger, and a warrior (which I have discovered I don’t really like to play much). But I can’t use them in fractals because all my ascended armor is light armor.

At 64 and up you have to do all 4. If there is a room you are not good at, you cannot do the fractal at all.

Not only is the collider room a deathtrap from the rayguns, but it has golems everywhere AND it’s a kitten maze and due to how frenetically I have to move around JUST TO LIVE, I still don’t know the layout. I can’t map the area in my mind with everything else going on in the room. I’m too busy not being blown up by the beams.

The problem with this fractal is how unforgiving it is. If you don’t do the heat room right, you lose all progress. Even worse is the collider lab. If you don’t do it right on the very first try, then the safety shields end up all over inside the room and it become progressively HARDER the more times you aren’t able to execute perfectly. Literally your best option if you don’t do it perfectly the first time is to quit the fractal and restart. That is horrible design, especially since the chances of doing it exactly right the first time are minuscule for most people. This is made even worse by the golems spread throughout the rooms that, depending on your class, cannot be soloed at higher levels as you are unable to move around due to the increasingly rapid energy blasts, so as you go up in level you increasingly need multiple people who can do the room perfectly in sync. You are literally relisting your group in LFG over and over trying to find people who can pull off these 2 rooms, because unless you are that someone, your ability to do this fractal depends on getting lucky in LFG. At least the anomaly, for all it’s faults, doesn’t become harder if you fail.

The cultural armor is just not that good. It’s super expensive but only rare quality at best. I like the skin but I don’t want to pay that much just to immediately mystic force the actual items. Can we at least get some exotic option or just a skin buy?

I have done over 16 attempts at this in the last day, with more than 16 groups due to people leaving and being replaced. Every single time, we cannot clear the chest seal. The combination of fire zones, small area, and the enemy-explode-on-death instability makes it almost impossible to stay alive long enough to use the hammer. In all those runs the seal has never dropped below half health, despite reviving over and over until inevitably one r more people leave.

I don’t think requiring that you have the elite trait equipped to use the weapon and the utilities was a good idea. It basically forced you to always have that trait line equipped, even if you really don’t like the trait themselves, just so your entire class is unlocked. If those were unlocked just by having done the elite, but not with the elite required to take up one line, then it would open up a lot more builds.

I have stacks and stacks of these things. They don’t seem to be for anything, and from what I can find the only converter is only available in the winter. What do I do with these things? They are taking over my inventory.

I have been trying to come up with a good set of keybinds. So far I have:

1-5 Weapon skills
F1-F5 Profession
WASD – Forward, Left strafe, Back, Right strafe (Turn with mouse, action camera – left crtl toggle)
Q – Healing
E, R, F – Utility 1-3
C – Elite
G – Interact
~ – Weapon Swap

The issue here is that even though I can do my main skills with little movement, my profession skills on F1-5 are still a reach. I can’t figure out anywhere else to put them, though.

Note: I am using specific fractals to illustrate the argument. I am not saying others do not have these issues. Please do not misconstrue this as a rant against a particular fractal, but rather as a criticism of the methodology being used as a whole.

There are 3 things that are being used in fractals to make them longer and/or harder: Make things tougher, force a slowdown, and force a reset. The first is fair, just making the enemies harder. The second is less fair, and applies to things left over from LWS1, such as the slow mine sequence. It would be better if these items were removed where possible, because all they do is slow things down, not increase interest or increase difficulty. Lastly, what you have are forced resets, which seem to have been the main mechanism for difficulty in a couple of the fractals (Uncatagorized, underwater) These are either trivial once you have done it once (the knockdowns on Cliffside) or frustrating in the extreme but to no purpose (uncatagorized) because the method of difficulty elevation is to increase the amount of resets to the point of frustration.

The method of increasing difficulty used for the harpy fights in Uncatagorized is to first add an almost guaranteed reset knockback that is dodgeable (by jumping to other platforms, not by dodging, which is rendered useless), and then to keep increasing the number and decrease the spacing of the harpies such that the likelihood of multiple harpies aggroing and creating multiple zones such that dodging is impossible increases toward unity. This doesn’t make the fight more challenging, since you still fight the harpies the same way, you just have to keep rezzing, jumping back up, and picking up where you left off, it just makes it more frustrating. While an argument can be made for the knockback ability not inherently being bad design, it becomes a problem when you combine it with the possibility of multiple overlapping zones and the paucity of available platforms and this leads to a guaranteed reset.

This is actually a theme with fractal issues: take an interesting mechanic (knockback off platforms), add a way to deal with it (jump to another platform), then don’t consider the consequences of increasing the number, toughness, or grouping of the challenge leading to a bad situation (unavoidable reset).

Contrast this with a well designed fight like Old Tom. His strength is the gas and his projectile spam, but there is a clear way mitigate your disadvantage and it just requires some coordination. He isn’t made harder because he constantly kills you, he is made harder because you have to constantly balance killing him, dodging attacks, and keeping the gas under control.

There are all kinds of bugs preventing me from finishing the Mordremoth fight to complete the story. Half the time the updrafts or the flight don’t work (can’t get up, can’t deploy glider, updrafts missing, updrafts invisible). So as soon as I get the the big attack aka the electrified floor, I instantly get killed because the thing that is supposed to let me survive is broken. The more times I attempt the fight before quitting in disgust, the more stuff seems to bug out.

Can we please get rid of the NPCs right next to the Mystic forge and the bank in Lion’s Arch? They are constantly getting clicked on by mistake when you are trying to use these services. They are simply in the way and too close. Also, If I have to hear about Violets ONE MORE TIME….

Stompy.1387:

Boogiepop Void.6473:

It’s because this game simply doesn’t have the interface to give me the control I need to do it. Taking my finger off the WASD in order to activate and deactivate abilities is all it takes in terms of delay and loss of control to cause me to fall out of this puzzle.

If you need to take your fingers off WASD to activate your number 1, 2, and 3, skills, something must be seriously wrong with your keybinds. Also, it sounds like you’re keyboard turning; you should turn your camera with your mouse, which will give you a lot more control over your movement.

My keybinds are fine. I use action camera, but I still need the WASD; the mouse can’t do everything.

I’ve watched videos. I can’t figure out how people are able to do what they do. I can barely make it through half the gates on most of my attempts without something going wrong due to the rush. I am not a speedster on jumping puzzles. I can do them well or I can fail to do them fast. I can’t do both. And this isn’t because I can’t do jumping; I have finished Super Meat Boy. It’s because this game simply doesn’t have the interface to give me the control I need to do it. Taking my finger off the WASD in order to activate and deactivate abilities is all it takes in terms of delay and loss of control to cause me to fall out of this puzzle.

The shooting gallery? Really? The shooting gallery is the second easiest gold in the whole of HOT (the salvage pit is the easiest, especially if you bring a daredevil).

I’ve only ever even gotten to the end of it once out of probably 100+ tries, and then not even in Bronze time. You have to do so much with pixel precision and pixel perfect timing, you need lean techniques, there are so many places where the idiotic “if you stick on terrain that has nothing to indicate it is different from the terrain in front of it, you move to the side on the pixel wide object and fall off before you can react” places that you constantly fall off anywhere from at the start to at the end, there are multiple spots where you can go through a gate too high to trigger it… The list of problems with this adventure goes on and on.

Guild Halls are far too big. You have an area almost as big as Auric Basin and there is almost nothing in it. Yes, we also need crafting stations, maybe a mystic forge, mini games and other stuff like that. But we just plain need a more sensibly sized space.

There are a number of issues with the design of several fractals I have noted:

• High levels of AR are pointlessly expensive to achieve, since in general most will only do the higher fractals once before dropping back to the minimum T4 fractals so as to have an easier time, due to rewards being based primarily on personal fractal level rather than fractal played.

• Several fractals have respawn locations that are inconvenient, as they require retraversal for no real reason, as either the enemies are already dead so it is walking through an empty area, there is a jumping sequence that is boring to do multiple times, and/or the path is needlessly long. Examples include Volcanic, Uncatagorized (respawn before the last jumping sequence if wiped at boss), and Snowblind (respawn at the beginning and have to walk all the way back down if wipe at or before Source).

• Volcanic: The corridor with the boulders in it is thematic but serves no purpose but making the fractal longer.

• Volcanic: The burn DOT radius from the lava pools is very badly indicated.

• Uncatagorized: Giving the harpies knockdown at higher levels doesn’t make them harder, since you just respawn immediately. It just makes them annoying and forces needless repetition of the simple jumping sequence.

• Aetherblade: The underwater mine sequence serves absolutely no purpose but to delay actually starting the fractal. The mine triggering radius is not clear and seems to be inconsistent, and in any case all that happens is you immediately go back, revive, and then swim it again with the mine you hit gone. You could theoretically have your entire group kamikaze the mines if you wanted to and there would be no effect on the fractal. It does nothing but annoy people, cause people to leave, and lengthen the fractal for no reason.

• Aetherblade: The second electrified segment is hard to no apparent purpose, since you just respawn in front of it. This makes it annoying rather than challenging, especially if too many of the people in your group are bad at it. Especially egregious in that the console area at the end is still in range of the fields (barring some inobvious spots), meaning that if others are having trouble, the player(s) who got there first have to walk in circles while they wait.

• Aetherblade: The door guard segment is too easily defeated by stacking in the corner right next to the platform.

• Swamp: The wisp segment is boring and serves no purpose, as it is neither hard nor a puzzle. It exists only due to the achievement for not hitting a trap.

• Aquatic Ruins: The darkness segment is too unforgiving of even a pixel stick worth of delay.

• Aquatic Ruins: It is common for anyone having issues with dolphin or darkness to simply die on purpose so they will respawn outside the boss room, as long as one other person has made it. This encourages people to not care about these segments while placing a burden on those who do.

• Snowblind: Initial cliff descent serves no purpose but to increase the length of the fractal as nothing can happen unless the players ignore the bonfires, which can only happen the first time, and is needlessly long with multiple fires after the point has been made. Explanation of mechanics could be accomplished by walking directly out of the cave and to the big bonfire sequence.

• Snowblind: The bonfire locations around the Source are difficult to see due to lighting, which results in many first-time players not realizing they are there and even experienced players having to reference the surrounding buildings rather than the bonfires themselves.

• Snowblind: The forest sequence is pointless as everyone just runs through it as fast as possible.

• Thaumnova: The heat room is not doable by all professions without extreme skill, and some players are unable to do it at all, resulting in the possibility of an entire group being unable to progress.

• Thaumnova: The pull exerted by the portals serves mostly to knock people off the catwalks, which is in general just annoying as they are forced to repeatedly walk back up. It only makes it actually challenging when it succeeds in pulling you into the summoned monsters.

• Molten Furnace: The tunnel drilling segment is pointless and serves only to add unnecessary length to the fractal, especially due to the enforced slow movement. The same could be accomplished by simply hacving a sequence where the wall has an entry blown directly to the next part after the ambush.

• Molten Boss: If you join this fight after the Berserker is dead, you will spawn at the edge of the boss platform and immediately be thrown off by the sound ring that forms for the second half of the fight, becoming unrevivable.

• Solid Ocean: Except when doing the achievement, the entire map is simply run through at top speed without fighting, making it pointless.

• Solid Ocean: It is too easy to accidentally start the timer for the Jade Maw achievement.

• Mai Trin: The entire boss fight is too long and depends too much mechanics that are not entirely under the control of the players.

If it’s so hard to do that someone needs to show you a special trick, that indicates that it is badly designed and shouldn’t be made a requirement for something like a mastery point. The diving point is supposed to be one of the easy ones for people to get, but this one jump ruins it. Just remove it and make it a separate achieve (probably without MP) like the jumps in HoT.

Leaa.2943:

Boogiepop Void.6473:

I’m just saying they need to put in something that has XP matter after max level and Masteries. Nothing is more discouraging than seeing numbers popping up all the time and knowing they mean exactly nothing.

XP is not everything in this game. You also get BL keys, transmutation charges, gift of explorations, crafting materials and sometimes exoticts.

With the exception of the gifts of exploration, most of those aren’t worth the time investment needed to do map completion when they can be obtained more easily elsewhere. Not at the quantities provided by map completion, and certainly not when you are doing hearts for the 7th time and just want them to shut up about the termites already.

I’m just saying they need to put in something that has XP matter after max level and Masteries. Nothing is more discouraging than seeing numbers popping up all the time and knowing they mean exactly nothing.

OriOri.8724:

Only if this is disabled for PvP. 40 weapon skills is plenty already, they don’t need to be running around with 80 in PvP.

I specifically specified for out of combat. This is just to simplify things between encounters. Other classes don’t have to futz in the menu so much because switching between 2 is generally all you need. The Ele just gets annoying because it’s so manual.

Cannot complete the Triple Trouble Wurm Attractant (Amber Escort) achievement for mastery point because the cloud of attractant is not spawning.