Guild Wars 2

Not opposed to the idea.

What does it have to do with camera controls?

If by “1 day and 2 day” you’re saying you received 2 gold (currency) over the course of two days, then I know what happened.

Achievement rewards were added and you may be retroactively receiving your rewards for that.

You will recieve 1 reward per day until you reach your current Achievement Points (rewards are given for every 500.)

OTHERWISE, what everyone else is saying is correct and you got mystic coins.

Tom Gore.4035:

DarkWasp.7291:

The problem with revive orbs is they attract other people in your party to come revive you.

I always want to scream “GET AWAY!!!” because they usually lure AoEs or mobs on top of me that one shot me when I have the orb sickness still on.

Well why don’t you? You can still use chat and /say when you’re dead.

Because people always argue before acting. Unless I bind a macro that automatically pastes in text explaining exactly who I am talking to and why they should get away. They would probably ignore that too.

Palador.2170:

DarkWasp.7291:

Hmmm. Make story dungeons soloable?

That’s genius!

That would actually fix every problem related to story dungeons.

I’m not sure about every, but it would fix a fair portion of them.

And I don’t mean “Soloable in a few hours, with really good gear, lots of skill, and patience backed by a masochistic streak” like I used.

Yeah I exaggerated. :P

Obviously it should be soloable by someone appropriately leveled.

As a hardcore explorable dungeon runner, I still have way too many characters who can’t open way too many dungeons because I’m too lazy to party with a story group.

I like helping people, but it’s just all the LFG waiting, the scene watching, the people in level 12 gear and the heroes in tank armor who as the last man standing try to solo a boss that’s going to take them 45 minutes.

Buff PvE. Do not nerf builds.

It’s like we keep sending money to a tribe of sick people instead of medicine.

Hmmm. Make story dungeons soloable?

That’s genius!

That would actually fix every problem related to story dungeons.

The problem with revive orbs is they attract other people in your party to come revive you.

I always want to scream “GET AWAY!!!” because they usually lure AoEs or mobs on top of me that one shot me when I have the orb sickness still on.

Darkness.9732:

yes guys but please stay on the topic We are talking about F skills. Don’ t you think warrior F skills are 10000 times stronger than ranger F skills?^ XD
Please don’ t lie and don t make me mad ah ah

I think you’re missing the point of F skills.

Engis can use F skills to deal mass amounts of damage.

Eles can use F skills to apply boons, otherwise they mainly just switch attunments.

Mesmers utilizing shatter builds do most of their damage through F skills.

Some necros are built on doing damage while in death shroud (an F skill.)

Guardians apply support with their F skills.

Basically there’s no universal F skill rule. They are there to make every class unique.

I play ranger in sPvP and my pet gets me accused of hacking all the time, and I didn’t even have to press anything. It’s pretty random and rare, but I’ve seen my wolves do 11k pounces. That’s technically our “F skill” as all of our F functions are dedicated to pet management. The fact that the attacks are AI based is a burden we bear, it doesn’t mean that the warrior F skill should get a nerf.

HoT seems to be adding some REALLY nice scenery. It would be great to be able to screen-shot them in first person.

Remember: If necessary, first person zoom could snap out in combat or during movement. I’m not saying we need to have first person hang gliding (though I would not be opposed. :p)

Don’t be so rough on yourself.

When I first started playing I would pop some of the tankiest gear and still end up dead on the ground with my fellow comrades over and over. Several jumping puzzles would take me almost an hour to finish.

While yes, I’m in my mid twenties, the point still stands. You get better at the game the more you play it.

I would advise against ranger for dungeons as a starter class as you really need to focus on swapping your pet, and that’s a potential distraction. Warrior and Guardian are the easiest classes, and melee is generally easier than range in dungeon groups these days. It seems ironic, but ranged players cause chaos. If you get downed while in melee, there will be 4 people nearby to rez you up.

1. I think the point of no return comes when your guild is down to only 2-3 active members with the occasional log-on of another 3-5.

2. Gaming habits are a personal thing and are very hard to sway from the outside. Some people are stubborn while others are flaky. However, it’s more than likely that they are going to make the same decisions no matter what you say or do for them.

“Don’t delete that character, you have 4 other open slots.”

“Don’t uninstall that game, $700 says you’re downloading all 30gb again in a month.”

Then they do it and regret it.

Or more relevant to the point:

Them: I quit because they were ignoring Ranger.
You: Actually they buffed Ranger a lot recently.
Them: Really? That’s awesome!
You: So are you going to come check it out?
Them: I might just do that!

Then they don’t come back anyway.

3. You can try to respectfully “flirt” with your current and new members. I don’t mean “flirt” in the dating sense. Basically you want to give people a reason to stay and a reason to hesitate when thinking about leaving. You just have to make it seem like you’re presenting the opportunity to build a meaningful relationship. Give compliments often, go out of your way to do content with your guildies and don’t be afraid to suggest the randomest stuff.

“Who has the most intimidating main character guild contest in LA!”

Definitely make sure you are always commenting on people’s characters. If they think people are noticing their gear and features, they have more reason to make their looks a goal. Comment on people’s builds and skill so they have motivation to improve those things too.

As long as they give up with the un-disablable dust flying up in our faces, we should be fine.

^Theory, not proven fact.

Terrahero.9358:

Galphar.3901:

I just hope we can progress our Characters if we decide NOT to specialize into the new sub-class. I main Ranger and main reason for that is the archer archetype. I really don’t want to be a Druid throwing nature-magic around.

I think you are expecting waaaay to much from specializations.

Well it doesn’t take that much expectation.

We just want something else to be viable. We just want to know that we’re not going to pressing the same skills in the same order in the same situations for the rest of our GW2 careers.

For Ranger, the word “Druid” screams “Healing Power.” And we all know what that means.

So it’s a legitimate concern. Not that we have any solid info on it yet.

Here’s how money works for the casual community:

Do I have 500$ to go to the movies and eat out a bunch of times this quarter? I think I do. Do I have 30$ to buy a game/expansion that I’ll play for 100+ hours? No. No I do not.

Here’s how the online PC community works:

Can it be pirated? Not yet? Alright, then as far as I’m concerned it ain’t out yet.

Here’s how the modern 10 year old kid manages money:

Hey dad I HAVE to have this new Guild Wars 2 thing! [Easily obtains credit card / buys 20,000 gems / expansion not for sale yet / will bother dad again when it is / randomly gets new iPhone and a bunch of Minecraft swag for no reason]

And of course the avid forum goer:

30$? I don’t know ANet, might not be worth it. I still think you should give me my money back for the original GW2 because you did not fulfill X “promise” at Y time. I still want to play the game though. Hmm, 30$ is too rich for my blood. [Thinking inside: “Oh snap! I brought up money! They will totally listen to me now!”]

The WoW gamer:

Why don’t we have a sub fee yet?!

The adoring fan:

I have 20,000$ saved up just in case.

The PC master race guy:

I made a New Years resolution to only buy games that support DX12

The MLG-wannabe-Counter-Strike fellow:

It’s adding hang gliding which makes it an ArcheAge clone which makes it a WoW clone which makes it a COD clone IDONTWANTITGETITOUTOFMYFACE!

The grandma:

I bought Heart of Thorns and I bought Nightfall. My grandson says only Nightfall works. Why would they sell something that doesn’t work?

I for one can’t wait to visit the new zone in the expansion which will be filled with:

50% Tomed up Revenants wearing the random greens/exotics they got from level up rewards.

20% Tomed up Revenants who geared up but don’t know how to play the class.

30% of the rest of us not being about to get anything done for a month because of ^ ^

In addition, I will greatly enjoy reading the rage posts about how everything new is too hard.

No, none of this post is sarcasm. It’s all part of the new release experience, and I legitimately look forward to it. Ahh. That fresh new game smell.

Memories will be made!

So I found that the armor renders broken until you hit a loading screen. Culling may reset it too.

It seems as soon as you unrender→rerender someone with broken armor, it displays intact. No confirmation on culling though, just a theory. However, mapping out is confirmed to cause the bug.

I said to myself, “I should make another alt this weekend!”

I have all of the classes, but I didn’t have a charr female.

Made another ranger to support my PvP build.

Popped a level 20 scroll and 60 Tomes of Knowledge.

Guess I missed the point.

PVE

So Ele and Thief are difficult to play.
I have grouped with many Eles that have been a GREAT asset to the team and very few thieves that I have taken note of. However, I tried Thief for myself and it seems perfectly up to par for DPS and survivability.

Ranger, Necro and Engineer are easy to play but difficult to master.
Only thing is, you still see a few groups advertising “NO NECROS.” In the past we had a bunch of anti-Ranger groups, but that’s very rare now. People usually don’t complain about Engineers because they have no clue what to expect. All three of these classes are a burden when not properly built.

Warrior and Guardian are so easy that people seldom even try to master them.
Unlike the other classes, for these two the game by default drives you toward builds that are slightly decent for high tier PvE. Obviously, it still requires skill and smarts to be good at these classes. So if you want something that is going to require skill to master, you can leave these on the list along with all of the other classes in the game. However, Warrior requires the least micromanagement.

Finally, Mesmer is the most confusing.
A lot of Mesmers I have met have been good at their class. That’s because if they weren’t so into it, they’d be pulling their hair out. When I played it, I had to look up a guide to even get an idea of what I should be doing. If you go into it without a plan, you’re going to have trouble getting credit for simple events in the open world. It’s probably the greatest mastermind class. It’s probably the least fun if you enjoy the feel of cleaving mobs and dodging hammers.

About Me
All of the above is drawing from my personal experience.

I have all classes at 80. I run dungeons A LOT. I have been in top tier groups and I have been in first timer groups.

I’m sort of a “Friendly Elitist.” I like anyone who honestly tries to better themselves and their build, even when their build isn’t optimal. However, I will not hesitate to votekick anyone causing delays by ignoring party chat, randomly AFKing, arguing or being dead through 90% of fights.

I try to make sure I’m looking into the best gear and builds for my own characters.

Tom Gore.4035:

Thanatos.2691:

I never said it would have to release features of the expansion before release. I was talking about balancing adjustments in preparation for the release later. We have at least one specialization for each class and a brand new class coming in, so the idea of gradually easing the game into a new class balance rather than completely changing current class balance all at once is what I was talking about.

That could happen, yes. But it would still be pretty dumb to “balance” stuff in anticipation of something that is not in the game yet.

My guess is they will do big beta testing before the launch, probably on a (public) test server. Nevertheless, even a public beta test would not be enough to weed out all balance kinks so the balancing will inevitably continue after the launch, too.

Class balancing doesn’t have to be the only thing.

For example, they are obviously looking at guilds. While the Guild Halls may or may not require the expansion to visit, any UI improvements or other QoL fixes will be available to anyone. (Like retaining guild chat after switching characters.)

I’d personally give it a 70% chance they do at least a small feature patch before HoT.

We’re looking at a range somewhere around 5-10 months for release. That’s a long time to do nothing.

Hmm, I wonder if it’s chest specific or not.

I’ma go pop in SE by myself and die in that fire a buncha times for science.

Ah! So people DO take high quality pictures for these kinds of threads?

Great work, both of you.

Excellent cover letter. Exquisite.

I’m sure they want to hire someone who’s going to be an enemy of the current team.

Can we sticky this?

StinVec.3621:

There is a difference between ‘Damaged’ armor and ‘Broken’ armor. You will not see armor disappear and lose the stats for that armor until they are actually in the state of being ‘Broken’ and not just ‘Damaged’.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damaged
There are two stages that equipment can go through that require repairs: damaged and broken. Damaged armor has no direct negative effect, but if all equipped pieces of equipment are damaged, items will begin to become broken. Broken equipment provides no defense or attribute bonuses, but upgrade components continue to provide their normal effects.

I know about this and I can say with absolute certainty that damaged is not what I am referring to.

Red broken shield icon.

apheCS.7036:

Taken from the official post:

“Level up an existing character or explore a new race and profession with a new one. Either way, you’ll level up faster than ever.”

Explore a NEW race AND profession? OMG!!!!

Chooooooo Chooooooo!

“Meanwhile on Tyria, it’s a level up love-fest. Players who jump in and play Guild Wars 2 will get rewarded double XP and can purchase additional boosters for 15 percent off throughout the weekend. For anyone who wants to level up their current characters or explore a new race and profession, your time is now.”

More context.

Definitely referring to profs/races that are new to the individual, not to the game.

/Shuts one booster valve on the back of the hype train.
Not just yet people! 2 days!

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

reflections on terrain and sky makes a lot of difference. I do not see any real advantage in changing any of the other settings though…
running ultra and supersample.

We’re all a bit confused on that too.

The way the game is set up, changing most of the visual settings has very little affect on the FPS. Because of this, people think their GPU is fine and the game is so very “CPU bound.”

However, there is one major graphics setting that we can not touch. Particles. Wintersday 2013, the FPS is Lion’s Arch was lower than usual. I believe this had to do with the snow cloud effects flying in our faces at all times. It would also explain why the first 20-30 seconds of Frozen Maw have a much lower FPS than most other zerg events as it has serious snow blizzard effects. Karka doesn’t count because Southsun has performance issues on its own.

Clownmug.8357:

This is good news… for hackers.

Hackers gonna hack, not browse deals.

Conncept.7638:

Personally, I would be okay with seeing them removed from WvW, so they can at least be made useful in PvE.

For leveling, sure. As a PvE player I would not like seeing them become more useful after hitting 80. Not unless all races could go learn the other racial skills.

I DESPISE in other games where I pour everything onto one character and learn that there is one completely irreversible flaw that requires me to reroll entirely to reach peak effectiveness.

Chrispy.5641:

Doggie.3184:

Hrrm, I showed it to one of my friends I wanted to play and he said “id rather buy a rubber v*****.”

Why it so hard to get my friends to play this XD They better do something amazing during PAX…

Does your friend play other MMO’s? If so, there’s your problem.

I think his friend really just wants that rubber thing.

CureForLiving.5360:

Too bad I’m too lazy to own multiple accounts. It actually sounds pretty nice.

It’s not just a laziness thing. Some people (like me) don’t really enjoy playing characters who are separate from the account unlocks and such.

Brings me back to the good old days. Not but a week after release, me, my brother and my friend all playing human characters in WvW.

We camped out near the spider lady skillpoint and tonic’d into a bird, a leopard and a boar.

Suddenly 7 people from another server showed up. BAM return to human form! BAM Hounds of Balthazar! BAM 5 of them instantly downed! We split up to chase the other two while my brother finished off the 5.

Currently, getting rolled by mobs/laser walls/mines is a wee bit less fun than it used to be.

The first piece of armor you break does not render broken. Break a coat? Still see the coat.

I had a CoE group that was VERY… umm… “inexperienced”… and after about 6 wipes on Alpha, I did see the elementalist was without pants. So maybe that’s saying if you break enough stuff, you’ll start to see armor finally disappearing?

Another strange anomaly I noticed:

At the end of a rather great CM run, I attacked Frost maybe a little too hard and died right at the end of the fight. No big deal, my guildies only had to put up with missing 99% of their DPS (fiiiiinneee… 75%… 50%… 30… whatever!) for the last few seconds of the dungeon. Despite my arrogance, they are always kind enough to rez me back up. Alas! After months of not repairing my armor my coat was broke!

We left the instance and appeared back in Queensdale. They could see my extremely attractive and manly ranger shoulders in my party icon, but my coat was still on in the game. So I did what any good man-chest model would do, I popped a tonic and turned into a tree. When I realized I had no business being covered in bark, I returned to my human form and behold! Bare chestedness! For a split second! …For a split second… My coat reappeared. I hung my head low in defeat and continued my modest life.

Amiron.1067:

Beldin.5498:

Amiron.1067:

-Shadows: Pretty taxing. From “Ultra” to “High”, I gained 10-15 fps, depending on the area.

Is there any MMO where shadows are not one of things that eat the most FPS ?

At least i remember it from EQ2 and RIFT.

This is true. But I’d expect shadows to be more taxing than the water reflections. Other games can handle water reflections so much better than GW2 does.

I still believe the root of the problem is DirectX 9.

I’ve been seeing too many modern games using cubemaps instead of real reflections though.

Tao.5096:

Before being so happy over Windows 10, I suggest to read EULA first.

What EULAs mean to end users:
I own this product. I now own the company. I own the government. Freedom of speech everywhere HECK YEAH!

What EULAs mean to companies:
Oh that’s right, we had our law people whip something up didn’t we? As long as we aren’t going to end up in the news ya’ll customers should probably abide by that thing.

What EULAs really say:
You don’t own anything. In fact, we now have the rights to your shoes. If you click “I agree” you couldn’t sue us even if we took your first born. You DO have the right to your money back if our software doesn’t work, but since you’re using a computer (third party something or other) to run it you invalidate that right. We can take down the servers to our products (and your medical records) whenever we want.

^ Kind of hard to test unless you could import more than 30 of each group into a single map.

Two things:

1. There have been cases of good PCs experiencing drops. There is no clear fix on the user side. Obviously you can keep buying better and better stuff, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting what you’re putting in (in hardware.)

2. While it would be great to see optimizations in HoT, I don’t see how HoT would change anything. Unless they are making use of a higher budget in this regard, I’m pretty sure we are still going to see optimizations in the same way we have always been.

Xbon.9086:

Azrael.4960:

If we could get 2500 players each salvaging 2500 ectos, that would give us a much nice randomised sample set to make extrapolations from.

still subject to rng, all 2500 of these people could get 9 each time just because rng

I have been dropped 700,000 precursors so far. True story.

Khisanth.2948:

DarkWasp.7291:

I love it when Hunter’s Call does this lame cumulative 5k damage only to have my pet also hit for roughly 5k and cover it up so I have a hard time figuring out which was which.

So why are you refusing to use the combat log?

Because I’m in a dungeon/fractal and I need to use/see party chat.

In addition, digging through that log is not an easy task in the middle of a battle as it keeps updating.

Well there are 5 explanations for this “ban.” Based on the way the guy worded his Youtube comment, I’ve put them in order from most likely to least likely.

1. This was not the only mod he was using. If it was, there’s no guarantee that he was not also using a macro to improve his control experience.

2. He was “hacked,” had a “friend/brother,” or personally delved into botting.

3. He was not banned and lied.

4. He WAS banned, but this happened back at release when ArenaNet’s policy was pretty much “No third party apps AT ALL.” If I am remembering correctly, that’s how it was.

5. He WAS banned recently. In which case, I am still safe because I play on a stock install and use working-as-intended-1-1-1-1-ranger-sword-autopilot-off-a-fractal-cliff.

I love it when Hunter’s Call does this lame cumulative 5k damage only to have my pet also hit for roughly 5k and cover it up so I have a hard time figuring out which was which.

Yeah, it’s still happening for me.

Seera’s got the right idea.

Though one day I was doing SE P1 and all three of the golems dropped me exotic gear outside of their champ bags.

It all feeds into my illogical superstition that ArenaNet programmed a second line of RNG.

RNG Line 1 dictates drop rates, salvage rates and forge rates.

RNG Line 2 dictates individuals’ (or shards’) RNG Line 1 rates per day/hour.

It’s an RNGception!

The real reason we have RNG is so casuals have a chance to get dropped more precursors and hoards than hardcore veteran players.

Us no-life hardcores aren’t going to spread the word about GW2, we have no friends.

Meanwhile the casuals: “bro! gw2 keeps giving me l33t stuff! u gotto play this game lol”

Rising Dusk.2408:

As a general rule I agree; loot for the Triple Trouble Wurm event is abysmal and needs to be improved. The reason I keep doing it, anyway, is because I enjoy the difficulty and want to keep playing it to be that +1 on a statistic somewhere at ArenaNet that shows that players enjoy this type of content.

Meanwhile I’m a -1 in that statistic because it falls on an inconvenient time of day and requires me to brave the ebbs and flows of my ISP + their servers for nearly 2 hours while I sit around and no nothing but wait.

Someone call me when we finally figure out to do this on regular megaservers with a -10 minute prep time like Tequatl.

Hayashi.3416:

Hell, while there are unique recipes that every dungeon drops, the drop rate for those are so absurdly low that I only possess one, and most dungeon runners I know possess zero – and nobody takes that drop into account when deciding whether or not to run a dungeon since we can assume their rates to be zero.

I have the dungeon collections mostly done and what is this?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

DarkWasp.7291:

Evon Gnashblade

I doubt it. The style is completely different.

That’s because he’s a lot like Batman.

Rich fella Evon to the public. Heroic “E” in secret.

It’s official. GW2 is a social research experiment.

Game doesn’t need a sub fee because of government grant money.

Evon Gnashblade

1 time, 2 coats.

I am science.

The Thrasher fight at Vinewrath is suffering somewhat the same effect.

People are screaming at dead players for not having stacked in the anti-daze area. HOWEVER, those players are often dead from pustules long before that even appears.