Guild Wars 2

It’s been 1 year since the game was released. What is your most favorite and least favorite additions to the game? Please try and keep to the following format:

Most favorite: currency wallet

• I freed up a nice amount of space and all my money and tokens are now viewable by all my characters.

Least favorite: Southsun Island

• It’s not as large or as deep as I was hoping for in an explorable area. In fact, when I hear the label “explorable area” I expected a fully explorable area, with vistas, renown hearts, a multitude of dynamic events, etc. However, I guess when you are on a short schedule such as the Living Story, it’s understandable that something like that might not appear.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Linguistically Inept.6583:

Elbegast.6970:

What are you rambling on about?

logic

Counter-question:

How do we know the Order of Whispers isn’t aware of her background? All we know is they haven’t acted yet . . . which can be handled with two reasons (mutually exclusive):

snip

This. This times a thousand. It seems at least to me that the order would be keeping tabs and watching carefully. Or, they could have been fooled by Scarlet. I would assume that the developers would reveal this information as time goes on. The fact that we are introduced to Scarlet properly (instead of being hinted at by a dredge or mentioned in name only by Mai) means more is going to happen as the weeks go by.

Considering the dragons didn’t wake up one right after the other but took decades between each awakening, I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be dealing with another dragon for some time.

My initial reaction: better than flame and frost. But only time can tell.

Well, at least it’s not as bad as the zodiac warhorn. It looks like you’re going to be blowing air up a chicken’s butt!

Recently, while running around and fully exploring Divinity’s Reach for the umpteenth time, I ran into an odd pipe.

At the ground level, there was a group of Serph investigating a murder and I had never seen or noticed this before. Could this be hints at future content?

Warning, lots of pictures!

Phantasm Mesmer

0/20/0/25/25

Almost all berserkers (minus rings and backpiece).

Greatsword/Scepter+Focus

Not going to bother with light up the darkness unless we get a really fancy title.

Bovinity.8610:

The hard to see circles are an indicator of WHERE the shadowfall is coming, they are not an indicator of WHEN the shadowfall is coming. The only way you can know when they are coming is by cheaply dying a bunch of times.

It’s not like it varies, or is some hidden secret. You see it one time, you know the timing of it.

Well, maybe not the first time. For most, I would assume after quite a few attempts. However, my constant highlighting of the AoE indicators assumes that a player that can properly see the AoE field means they will avoid it. I know it’s a logical fallacy, but I just want to be able to see the enemy AoE fields without having to squint hard at the floor.

nekretaal.6485:

In pretty much every video that I have seen where somebody beat the boss, at some point the player was caught inside the shadowfall, couldn’t get out, and had to dodge.

However, there is no visual or audio tell for when the shadowfall is coming. The only way to know when to dodge is to memorize the timing by dying so many times that you know the timing. This is cheap design. It is not skill, it is just twitch gameplay combined with memorization.

Or, and I’m just making a suggestion based on this post and am in no way trying to sound snide, they could change the AoE indicators so that it’s much more apparent than using a thin red outline that blends in with the arena floor. Seriously, I wouldn’t mind seeing the indicators have some sort of extra effect so that the area inside the AoE circles are more easily seen.

Bovinity.8610:

That’s a lot of pressure elements and while you guys (dev team) might laugh or smirk at my assumptions (most players only see the tip of the iceberg here folks), I think that the so called “challenge” is the ability to manage all of the pressure that you are under.

What is it about the gaming community that makes them always feel the need to re-define what “challenge” or “skill” means, anyway? Has to be one of the most annoying things about any discussion.

One hit knock outs aren’t challenging, they’re frustrating and feel cheap.

Then ask ANet to remove the dodge system or do something else with it. In a game where, “Avoid ALL the damage!” is actually a pretty reasonable goal, about the only way to make encounters threatening is to make the damage completely overwhelming when it does manage to land.

To answer your first part, challenge is based on an individual’s preferences. That’s why people redefine it—because there are so many different views that some want to be heard. However, in regards to my statement, I’m not trying to redefine it, but rather, I was trying to point out that it seemed to me that the developers intended for the fight’s difficulty to stem from managing so much pressure (that’s why I listed all those things).

About your second part, incredibly threatening attacks aren’t the only option. Undesirable status effects (not conditions) that punish the player and rapidly builds up over time with each mistake is also a possible route. Incredibly punishing attacks that are one hit knockouts aren’t the only route and I was attempting to point out (rather badly now that I’ve reread my original post for the 5th time) that there are alternatives.

Kapina.9012:

Í’ve read a lot of comments about this boss and for the first time I have to disagree with people. In all honesty for the first time I’m getting somewhat sick of people complaining about this.

Lots of people say that it’s luck based and that it’s cheap to 1 shot kill you. After spending 80 tickets on just normal kill and another 100+ tickets on Light up the darkness achievement, I can safely say that it is NOT luck based fight.

If you are only after the kill, it’s quite simple. First phase is ridiculously easy once you learn the pattern, you can finish it in 30 seconds. Second phase you just run around the circle and 9 times out of 10 you’ll be in a safe spot if you just keep moving.

It’s not about luck, it’s about endurance, dedication and awareness. Eventually you’ll get so used to the fight, that you automatically do every ability right and evade all 1 shot moves. Just keep at it.

PS. The timer is around 4.30-5.00 minutes, not 2 minutes.

Edit: The timer should be 10-30 secs longer though to make it easier for non-zerg players though. With that I agree.

I don’t remember mentioning anything on my post about RNGs. I did mention that one shots do feel cheap which you mentioned.

As for the increased timer, where was this information conveyed? I was operating under the assumption that all matches were two minutes and if I knew that I had more time, I would have made a lot less mistakes.

Ok, after beating Liadri, I thought I’d point out some issues I’ve come across when fighting her.

AoE rings blend in really well with the floor.
I mean they blend in really, really, REALLY well with the floor. As other topics have said, it’s incredibly difficult to see them. To be honest, this seems more like an inherent flaw with the ground targeting “artwork” that has been made much more apparent. Why aren’t there any colors that can make the red, thin AoE outlines stand out? Why not make the AoE rings into an actual AoE field with a repeating pattern that rises from the floor to show where an AoE attack is about to hit?

Pressure. Lots of it:

1. Time – you have two minutes
2. Grasping claws – constantly firing off
3. Insta-kill shadowfall
4. Insta-kill clones
5. Kill cosmic rifts before they pull you

That’s a lot of pressure elements and while you guys (dev team) might laugh or smirk at my assumptions (most players only see the tip of the iceberg here folks), I think that the so called “challenge” is the ability to manage all of the pressure that you are under.

If you ask me, that is frustrating. Just off the top of my head, the most memorable one-on-one fights I’ve ever experienced happened in Devil May Cry 3. The fights against Virgil were truly challenging and I honestly was hoping for the Queen’s Gauntlet fights to be similar to those fights.

If I had to be specific about what I’m talking about for those fights, I’m talking about the “tell” of his attacks, his counter attacks, the amount of times you can actually hit him before he performs a counter, how he can CC you, the frequency of his attacks, and his various counters.

One hit knock outs aren’t challenging, they’re frustrating and feel cheap.
The point of being challenging is to push players to the brink of their skill. If you have fights that combine past mechanics, that’s fine. But when you have a fight that combines past mechanics and introduces more than one new mechanic, then things are no longer going to feel challenging (at least for me).

Frustrating gauntlet mechanics seem to bring the worse out in people.
I’ve been in situations where people don’t even bother to rez you since that would somehow take away their precious time in the arenas. It doesn’t help that you die outside instead of appearing back alive.

It seems to me that this was intended to be a gold/consumable sink what with the high amount of deaths that a player is likely to face. I don’t know about other players, but I burned through all my achievement chest rez orbs (selfish people), more than 2/3rds of my repair canisters, and a medley of consumables.

Various other issues

1. Targeting is crap.
2. Camera zoom inside close quarters (near walls/solid objects).

“A Light Shining in the Darkness” sounds much nicer to me.

GWAMM is the only title I would display not because it sounds arrogant, but because I spent a hell of a lot of time getting it back in GW1 and I’m going to get my game times worth out of it.

Is it just me, or does it look like one of those souvenir booths where you drop a coin in, turn the crank, and watch as the coin gets molded into a little token with an image on it?

BobbyStein.2315:

Eleri Tezhme.3048:

I’m still in love with the guy who was the Subdirector Blingg. (CITIZENS!)

That’s Jon St. John. He’s really awesome to work with.

Wait… Duke Nukem is also Subdirector Blingg???

Why is it that we only have a right click option to invite someone when forming a party, but we don’t have a right click option for joining a party? Wouldn’t it make a bit more sense and improve usability/quality of life if players had the option to right click on someone’s name/portrait to join their party (assuming a party has already been formed)??

For some odd reason, my level 80 mesmer is dealing 2 digit damage to enemies during the ossuary of unquiet dead personal quest. This is a character that has exotic and ascended equipment fighting a regular level 76 risen farmer by the way.

I always viewed the ghastly staff to be a very nice staff. As for every other staff, well, they’re not so nice compared to it.

This month’s content is something that I was hoping to be permanent—and I don’t mean just specific parts, but the a majority of it, such as the pavilion. All that work by the dev team just to see something get pushed to be a monthly release instead of a permanent addition makes me sad.

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

Parisalchuk.9230:

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

You need to chill, the OP was saying that if the reward comes only for completion, and not killing the bosses and mobs, then people will skip them all together. This topic has nothing to do with not caring about the story or lore, just maintaining the dungeons play-ability from those who are overly greedy and would thus chose to skip to the end. I believe this is a likely variable, and should be considered.

Except basically every dungeon requires you kill the boss in order to advance. Its not like you can literally walk to the end of the dungeon and be like… ‘Done!’

In AC you can skip the troll and lieutenant

I’m all for skipping a troll who has unreflectable bouncing projectiles and likes to pop out in narrow spaces.

As for Lieutenant Kholer, he’s not so bad once you get his attack timing down (immobilizing him helps too).

Im Mudbone.1437:

Stormcrow.7513:

While GW2 is CPU bound it is also CPU limited. The client does not use multithreading or use more than 3 heavy threads during operation. Thus, the game is limited as a previous poster mentioned to a tri-core CPU with 5-6ghz being the sweet spot. Anet’s implementation of an engine with high CPU draw with no room for ever advancing beyond 2007 standards is apparent in the design. The game’s predominantly relies on high amounts of users on the same map which of course the engine and servers cannot handle. Using an old API does not help but is not the main factor.
Try doing a T1 WvW zerg and toss all the settings down to their lowest. You will not see much of a difference in FPS at all. This is due to the server on Anet’s side not being able to handle the information it is sending and receiving.
TL,DR= It is both the client and serverside causing issues atm. Since client is apparently out of the question we, as a group can only hope that the issues be rectified serverside.

They are using the same outdated servers that GW1 is on and I heard word that they also moved AION to those same servers.

That sounds a bit dodgy to me. I’m not calling you a liar, but claiming to have heard a rumor makes me question the credibility of the source.

Crowd chant: E-VON – E-VON – E-VON – E-VON – E-VON!

Lets push Evon past Kiel folks!

Zacchary.6183:

Lucky.9421:

Buy the perma-rep button off the trading post.

Problem solved.

PS – Buy the Evon one

fixed*

Fixed your spelling mistake.

On a serious note, I strongly suggest activating your rep button halfway through whatever you’re doing. It guarantees you’ll never miss completing the tasks while under the buff effects.

Zorby.8236:

Pure Heart.1456:

The mechanically moving (animated) blade on the Aetherblade sword is the most ridiculous and ineffective-looking weapon I have ever seen. Thumbs down on design.

Right? WERE! IS! MY! RAPIER?!
(required caps, and I held down the shift as well, so you know I’m vexed)

I suspect that since they aren’t event rewards (someone would have found one by now), the rapier will be a unique gem store item similar to Brahm’s mace or Rox’s bow. My guess is that it’ll be named something like “Aetherized Rapier,” or “Scarlet’s Rapier,” or even “Mai Trin’s Rapier.” If it really were released as a gem store item, we can have a very good guess for the price: 800 gems.

Praise the random number god(s)! My luck has always been crap when it comes to precursors.

What times of the day are you logging in? On SBI, logging in around 7-9 PM (eastern time), you’ll see a lot of players online.

I think the reason why it’s a major trait is because of the potential for constantly maintained vigor. I remember the pre-nerf days of this trait when my staff ele would, on average, maintain 30-45 seconds worth of vigor against a champion, 20-30 seconds while fighting a veteran, and 10-20 seconds against critters.

Add in boon duration and suddenly you get a tremendous amount of vigor duration that makes managing stamina almost an afterthought. Even post nerf, with the 5 second cooldown, it is still very useful for near permanent vigor throughout a fight for me.

Also, evasive arcana could also be a reason why this trait is in the major ranking.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the return of some of the classic 15k/Obsidian armor sets from GW1. However, that would be incredibly time consuming to make a set for each race.

There’s also the ever present floating pauldron (shoulder armor) syndrome: regardless of what armor type and what race, there will always be floating shoulder armor.

realloc.5846:

ProxyDamage.9826:

Warhorn. Ranger is the only class that does any damage with it, so the only class that can even complete that weapon master, and it’s one attack every 25 seconds.

False.

Necro’s Locust Swarm does aoe damage enough to kill a pack of white critters.

So, necro with warhorn 5 autoattacking + idea incubation lab = epic win

Have you done this? Because if it’s true, then wow, you’d end up making a lot of ’chievo hunters really happy.

10/10 troll post. Would read again.

The part where you highlight D/D, superior mobility, then talk about a staff (which isn’t that mobile) skill really made me, a primary ele, laugh. Also, the whole 13k-20k damage sounds like you’re the type of player to purposely run under a falling meteor.

I’m incredibly skeptical that the celestial armor will provide relatively decent stat bonuses. Assuming that the stat patterns of the armor are similar to the celestial trinkets, I think we can expect all the points to be less than half of the more specialized gear.

While the total stat points are definitely higher than a specialized stat pattern, I find it incredibly difficult to believe it can provide any sort of major benefit.

Also, before anyone goes ahead and say divinity runes are very useful, I’d like to say this: the total critical damage bonus is the highest unconditional critical damage bonus for a rune set. That’s why it’s useful. Unless the celestial armor has a much higher critical damage bonus, I doubt we’ll see much use of the celestial stat type.

As it stands, the air staff skills are very lackluster in terms of damage and utility. While gust can knock down in a line, it’s hampered by its ridiculous cooldown and projectile speed.

Static field is a mixed bag: it’s useful when catching enemies unaware and at the start of a fight in pve, but it doesn’t do anything to enemies inside of the field and it’s not as useful mid-battle as it is during the beginning. The short 4 second duration doesn’t help at all either. I wouldn’t mind if it lasted just 1 more second (5 second total), that makes a noticable difference when being attacked or attacking.

As for lightning surge, well, it’s cast time is too long for what it’s supposed to do: apply AoE blind. The cast time needs to be reduced by about .5 – .75 seconds to make it much more responsive.

Chain lightning is a doozy: It was great during the betas, but for the retail release, it became crap. While I understand the viewpoint of the devs to hit chain lightning, I don’t think hitting chain lightning that hard was called for. In fact, the damage it deals is relatively low against single targets and the bounce is unreliable. If I could do anything to chain lightning, it would be to remove the ability for it to bounce between two targets and boost the damage coefficient higher than .65 (somewhere around .75 – .80).

Windborne speed seems to be well balanced to me, but how often do other elementalists remember to use it to clear cripple, frozen, and immobilize? For me, I always forget about its condition removal and primarily use it as a mid-combat/out of combat speed boost.

The other elements have issues of their own, but air is my least used element so I would love to see focus on that as an area for improvement.

Before release and before even the betas, when the devs mentioned the conjured weapons, I always envisioned that the skills would do what the corresponding element couldn’t do. Example: conjure flame would have been about crowd control, or conjure earth causing lots of single target damage.

Kain Francois.4328:

Starcakes are not pay to win because the boost they give sucks and the materials are overpriced.

Kralkachocolate on the other hand is pretty cool.

Pfft, everyone knows that it’s the candied dragon rolls that are the clear winners here!

I’m going to assume english isn’t your first language which is why you’re post is written like that.

Now, before the update, meteor shower’s animation made it drop more meteors than it really did. That means that some meteors did damage while others were there to make it look like it was going to hit something.

Anet changed the animation so that it will only show the meteors that will cause damage and they also increased the area of effect from 90 to a currently unknown number. Personally, I’m guessing it was increased to 120 but there has been no proof. Again, that is a guess based on the many times I’ve used meteor shower since the buff.

Also, no, the damage was not reduced or else people would have posted about this by now and there would have been many responses.

How did Dane (Cobiah’s son) get to eat an omnombarry tart if omnombarries can only be found in Orr?

I’m pretty sure the skins can be found from one of the wvw vendors. Some cost about 45 badges total, but others cost up to 45 badges for a single piece.

Don’t forget, it seems that immobilize doesn’t last its full duration on Mai. I’ve used shockwave on my ele several times and each time it hit, I noticed the duration was a about half or a third of the normal duration.

After 11 tries, my team gave up and we left. It was getting too irritating and time consuming to even bother with Frizz.

On the third wave, my group failed 11 times fighting this guy. The golems were invincible too much of the time imo.

I hate to break it to you, but the medium armor has a special note that says the chestpiece will block out shoulder armor.

Light armor chestpiece will have a special note that says it blocks off the leg piece.

Welp, after 10 months: 1 gift of mastery.

In any case, I plan on slowly getting the gift of might because I’m trying to balance out between getting a legendary and getting a set of full ascended accessories on all 5 of my lv 80s and raising my last two characters to lv 80. Currently, my thief and ele have full ascended accessories.

I know that there are players that have a thousand gold or more, but the vast majority of us doesn’t have anywhere close to that amount. I also believe that the reason why platinum isn’t part of the game is because it’s standard for the copper, silver, gold currency system to be in western style RPGs; it’s rare to have currency go into platinum or be some sort of material that is worth more than a gold piece/coin.

That being said, I’m writing this post because earlier today, while completing a personal quest for my daily, I read a specific letter involving ransom, and the letter asked for a thousand platinum. Now, players from GW1 will recognize the word platinum because back then, a platinum piece was equal to a thousand gold.

Later, when I was in the black lion trading center, I overheard the oft-repeated “It’s 20 gold for a centaur spearhead” line. I realized that 20 gold can be a lot of money to a lot of players.

This had me wondering: Are we, the players, considered poor in terms of official lore? If so, does this notion, in some ways, cast us in the “poor adventurer” trope?

Floating pauldrons. Floating pauldrons everywhere.

Also, the light heritage gloves clip through the human female hands.

Bringing back armor is more difficult because the artists would have to adapt the artwork to charr and asura body types. This takes time and costs resources that could also be spent making new items and content.

That’s not to say I don’t want Obsidian armor art making a return. In fact, I would love to have the armor back, especially the elementalist and mesmer armor.

The book is a nice touch, though I wouldn’t mind being able to open it similar to the dungeon books back in GW1. Something along the lines of being able to select a cutscene to watch would be nice.

Also, Charizard and Pikachu on the cover? (I’m sure it’s not the case, but to me, it looks like the two are on the cover.)

Well it’s about time meteor shower got buffed! Aside from that, movement trait buffs? I honestly thought those were going to be replaced or combined with other traits.

That… That is brilliant. You sir, get a +1 from me.