Guild Wars 2

Same here,

I will switch servers if necessary but it would be much better if ANet just moved the NPC to LA (or somewhere else) until they finally fix their god kitten bugging events.

Is your server struggling in WvW?
Are you not living up to your full potential?
Are you simply lacking numbers to sustain your efforts?

There’s a simple solution to your problems!

Liberate the Temple of Balthazaar (in the Straits of Devastation), announce it on the forums, and receive dozens…possibly even hundreds of new players on your server for at least a week.

These people will fight for you…die for you….and some may even decide to stay.

So you yourself and your server a service today and Liberate your Temple of Balthazaar!

Currently there is an extremely high demand for T6 Crafting Materials due to almost all Ascended items as well as Legendaries and rare exotics requiring 250 of some sort of T6 Material.

Regular Dungeons on the other hand aren’t all that attractive compared to the new FotM.

So what if we could use the Badges we get from these Dungeons to buy specific T6 Materials? Maybe at a rate of say…10 to 1.

So 10 AC tokens might buy you 1 Vicious Claw while 10 HotW tokens might buy 1 T6 scale.

Not only would this mitigate the ever increasing prices for T6 Mats it would also give people a reason to continue doing these dungeons.

Well I use a 90 second CD Elite most of the time and the effect doesn’t trigger quite often. I’d wager it fails to trigger about 20% of the time while other times it won’t trigger until the end of the Elite skill.

Allow me to preface this by defining what I mean with grinding:

Grinding is repeating the same activity over and over again, not because you enjoy doing it but because the rewards bring you closer to whatever goal you’ve set for yourself. Ergo, the goal/reward is what drives you, not the activity itself.

Now I’ve played my fair share of MMOs ranging from DAOC over WoW to WAR, SWTOR and finally Guild Wars 2. All had their merits and all had their flaws.

I’ve never been drawn into the idea of having multiple characters so I tend to be very focused on endgame in every MMO I play.

And yet in the 3 months I have played Guild Wars 2, I think I have grinded more than I have every grinded in any of the aforementioned games.

I’m not hating it or anything, but for a game that sold itself on the idea of being grindless…that’s a pretty hefty fault.

While what you say isn’t wrong, bear in mind that the new content is exciting because…well it’s new. Of course it’s getting a lot of attention.

The new Island too is competing for player attention although in my opinion it really doesn’t have much to offer.

Cursed Shore is still the vastly superior zone for Karma grinding and still the most profitable zone for solo-play. The Cove simply lacks Dynamic Event density and wave-spawn events with lots of AoE.

It will regain popularity over time, just wait.

lim.6953:

still uncontesed now at blackgate, come n join

I’d prefer a EU server so I can still group with my guild/friends during my week of absence.

Thanks for the heads up though.

Looking for an uncontested EU server.

I too actually enjoy the nature of framing at times. It takes no commitment, nor mental or social and it’s a way of progressing to towards a goal entirely in your own terms.

But with the nerfed drop rate people are now resorting to Dungeons for farming money/loot. AC and FZ are rewarding 50 – 80 Silver for 20 minute runs and have a fair chance of dropping loot. HotW drops a lot of loot too.

The open world is seemingly unattractive in comparison.

Please provide more details. I was about to switch servers to find myself a Temple of Bathazaar.

I mean I’d love if they moved them to a different NPC….but outright removing the Karma version would just be outrageous.

While I agree about the Jellyfish fight being a tad tedious (because boring) I think there’s a fight mechanic where you can damage him using the sparking cages. That might help with DPSing him down faster.

As for the Dolphin/Luminous Plant phase. I’ve done it like 3 or 4 times…..and haven’t died once. I really don’t know what’s supposed to kill you. Even the Dolphins phase can just swim past most enemies and spam 2.

Imo it’s by far one of the easiest Fractals.

As for the Swap…well that relies heavily on coordination and team setup. As ususal, a Mesmer makes this very easy while other setups have to work harder. But I found that once you reminded people to make use of their mobility traits and abilities that it was very doable.

Now we’re sitting in the main city spaming LFG so we can instantly teleport to the one and only endgame dungeon.

Sound vaguely familiar to anyone?

You should consider the fact that currently WvW isn’t getting much attention due to all the new PvE content.

I myself who I’d consider a frequent WvWer haven’t stepped into WvW since the patch.

Things will probably normalize in a few weeks when everyone has gotten tired of grinding the Fractals Dungeon.

But honestly, without WvW being more rewarding, be it by dropping T6 Materials or something to put towards Ascended Gear, I don’t see it becoming the main endgame any longer.

This obviously addresses none of your issues. All I can really say is that the ranking system should ensure you always have an overall equal opponent, even if you’re out-manned at times.

If there has been one lesson WoW has taught every MMO developer to date then it’s that players go where the loot is.

Don’t forget about Withdraw for healing.

I don’t think interest in WvW has been all that high over this weekend with all the new content being released.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see things shift dramatically throughout the week despite Abaddon’s impressive head start.

Well first off, most people were busy doing the new Fractals Dungeons and the one-time events this weekend.

Not that much time was spent farming. So naturally there was less influx of yellows even if the new dungeon drops them occasionally.

Second, rare drop rates were nerfed for regular mobs in Orr. The times I have farmed since the patch I barely got 1 an hour. I’m not noticing the increased drop-rate on veterans either.

Until people find a reliable source of rares, prices are going to continue to climb.

I agree that the Gem store is very lacklustre.

Considering how crucial it is to GW2’s longevity I’d have thought they’d invest a little more thought and passion into it.

I mean as someone who doesn’t care for mini-pets and has kind of settled on a specific look there’s really nothing of interest worth buying.

qazqazqaz.2098:

Dee Jay.2460:

Yeah, since they didn’t allow us to progress beyond a certain point I too am stuck with them. I’ll hold on to them for a week and then just delete them.

What do you mean they didn’t allow? Both investigation lines ended.

Yeah but they fixed Noll in the same patch they disabled progressing into Phase 2.

A quick recap of the events thus far from my POV.

1. Friday morning – patch loads and installs with most less than stellar profession changes.

2. Friday evening – Invasion of Lion’s Arch begins (about 20 minutes late iirc). Server is drowned in lag. People are unable to do anything for the first 15 minutes of the event. After server crashes and various disconnects, things eventually stabilize a little. Commence shooting Karkras for 20 minutes until event suddenly ends. Nobody’s quite sure what happened.

3. Saturday Midday – Find out about the new Investigation questline thanks to Dulfy.net. Quickly realize that a crucial NPC (Noll) is bugged and that I can’t progress the quest. ANet disables progression of that quest line in the same patch they fix Noll. /facepalm

4. Saturday Evening – Everyone is hanging out in LA waiting for the 2nd one-time event. But it never launches on the overflow server. Nothing happens for 60 minutes until suddenly the sailing ship symbol appears and we can enter the new zone.

We conquer the island in a big Dynamic Event Chain and explore the island, do the new jumping puzzle etc. That part was quite enjoyable to be honest.

5. Sunday Evening – Final part of the event-chain begins with the opening of the cave. Despite 50+ players participating the players zerg gets repeatedly wiped by massive waves of spawning Karkras. Kind of fun though, despite hefty lag and low FPS.

But the event drags on and on for over 2 hours…as we kill wave upon wave of Karkras reinforcements. Very few of these mobs drop loot too, which makes it feel very unrewarding.

That is until the last phase of the event when we slay the Ancient Karkra and she drops a massive loot chest rewarding players with 3 exotics and 2 rare items. The market is suddenly flooded with Precursor weapons of all kind. Other players get away with barely 3 Gold worth of items.

The aftermaths can be observed here on the forums.

I’m kind of on the same boat as the OP.

While I appreciate the Precursors being made more abundant, the fact that large portions of the players base will suddenly become significantly richer for what all others have to spend 50+ hours farming just seems unfair.

I mean with single, isolated drops it’s a different matter. That’s just pure RNG that can strike anywhere at any time.

But why have so many people rewarded with drops that are 100 times more valuable than others? Especially such wide-spread?

I mean it turned from congratulating the winner of a Precursor for his good fortune to feeling jealous because you weren’t one of the many “real winners”.

And that’s ignoring the many people who were disconnected or couldn’t participate.

ANet really has a lot to learn about player psychology.

Yeah, since they didn’t allow us to progress beyond a certain point I too am stuck with them. I’ll hold on to them for a week and then just delete them.

Pistol/Dagger is far more powerful than any Backstab build. Sure, you don’t have the burst for quick kills but you can easily pull off 2v1 or even 3v1 with such a build.

Carrion gear also happens to supplement the build perfectly.

I would play it myself if Condition Damage didn’t suck so much in PvE.

Farm Instances. In the Ice Bear instance every trash-mob seems to drop at least a blue item. Wearing MF will ensure at least a few rare drops.

Yes, there is a certain hypocrisy to that quote.

To be honest, when I read it the first time I already saw dozens of flaws with that logic.

Because essentially a night-cappers time is more valuable than a day-cappers, because he has way more impact on the overall score.

Pointing our ANets flaws in logic and reasoning though is like taking ice-cream from a 5 year old. Really not that challenging…

Well after yesterday’s event I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that Precursors now are cheaper and more abundant than they are going to be for a while.

So it would make sense to purchase one now.

T6 Mats on the other hand are a little speculative. The price might go up because a lot more people will now start completing their Legendaries or it might go down because Blood drops in the Fractals and Lost Shores more frequently than it did in Orr.

Anyway, my advice would be to sell your T6 Mats and buy the Precursor now.

It is very difficult to make money with crafting since there is so much competition.

It’s often more profitable to sell the raw materials than a final product. But there is potential for money making, just not a lot.

So no, it’s not worth leveling a crafting profession unless you want to make your own items.

Precursor prices have plummeted following the final event chest of the Lost Shores Event. The Market was flooded with dozens and dozens of Precursors of all kind.

Many of the less popular ones are being traded for less than 100 Gold, while the more popular ones go for more.

This seems like the best time to grab one of those weapons if you can.

Precursors….. Precursors everywhere….

I thought it was fairly fun overall (it’s actually still going on my server) after the lag wared off.

It does get a bit tedious towards the end, killing the same mobs over and over again but ok, that was to be expected.

My problem was though, that it was completely unrewarding.

You got to do like….3 events….roughly 1000 Karma…in 2 hours and practially no loot whatsoever.

15 minutes of Plixing was more rewarding than this.

Just in time for the new one-time event, the servers are hit by a massive lag spike. I wouldn’t even call it lag anymore, being frozen in place for minutes at a time.

But honestly, based on how the events went thus far I’m anything but surprised.

Can this please be the last of these incredibly stupid one-time events?

Yeah…because the other one-time events were such a kicker.

The First one on Friday Night was drowned in lag, crashes and disconnects. It was extremely crowded and the servers obviously couldn’t handle it. It got better about half way through but then ended rather abruptly without any clue as to what or why.

The second event last night, didn’t even start, or at least not on the overflow server I was stuck on. The ship to the new island just appeared suddenly at around 10 PM CET, after everyone had wasted an hour waiting for something to happen.

As for tonight, when the big lazer blasts open the cave on the lost Shore….I can’t say.

It should be better than the Lion Arch events because it won’t be in such am overloaded area but don’t expect it to be more than 60 minutes of monster bashing.

Wouldn’t surprise me,

the time I did do Shelter’s Gate after the patch there were significantly less mobs attacking the base. Maybe a random fluke but we know how ANet likes to nerf profitable things.

I’d like to engage in a discussion about the Mesmers Portal ability.

In my book it is the single most powerful and useful ability in this game, by a long shot.

A Mesmer is by far my favourite profession to have in any group. Not only because the Mesmer itself is a really powerful profession but because the Portal ability trivializes content that would otherwise require coordination.

Let’s just see what the Portal enables:

WvW
-Portal bombing in WvW is a completely unique tactic only made possible thanks to this skill.
-Rapidly transporting Alpha Siege Golems across the map.
-Porting entire armies into a keep should the Mesmer manage to remain undetcted inside.
-Porting people up the jumping puzzle because you’re nice
-Servings as a fall-back option when you’re ganking the Jumping Puzzle because you’re a kitten.

Jumping Puzzles
-Almost every Jumping Puzzle is trivialized as long as the Mesmer is patient enough to wait for the cooldown.
-Porting people through parts/entire Jumping Puzzles

PvP
-Various Portal tricks to quickly jump between contested points.
-Probably more tricks I don’t know about.

Dungeons
-Transporting the lights in Arah Expl. is incredibly easy with a Mesmer.
-Any content can be skipped as long as the Mesmer gets through.

Fractals
-Swamp Fractal becomes so much easier with a Mesmer
-In all Fractals a Mesmer Portal can help carry players through content (jumping stuff) they can’t manage by themselves.

There’s probably dozens of other bullet points you could add to the list of tricks and tactics that evolve around the Mesmer Portal.

Now most of the time it’s great for you because it works in your favour. Who wants to bother with tactics when you have and “easy mode” available?

In a way, using the Mesmer Portal feels a lot like cheating. Yeah, sometimes it’s nice, especially if you’ve done content dozens of times before, but it also cheapens the whole experience.

And that’s ignoring the balance implications where the Portal is just dozens of times more useful than any other utility or skill any other profession could ever bring to the table.

Reminded me a bit of the Mad King’s clock Tower….just less infuriating.

It felt relatively fair although being a Mesmer always feels like cheating.

Honestly I wouldn’t even know these quest chains exist if it weren’t for dulfy.net

But by the time you get around to reading and doing the quest it’s either bugged or over.

I’m just shaking my head at this.

The same patch that fixed the bugged NPC required to finish Phase 1 of the Scavenger Hunt also deactivated access to Phase 2 of the Scavenger Hunt.

Do I have to point out how incredibly stupid this is?

Not only do you give players barely enough time to figure out what the hell is going on and what quests were actually added, they then bug out half the time and you still deny people progression…because?

Really…because what?

Why can’t you just give people the whole weekend to do the quest-chain? What’s this uncanny obsession with 24 hour time-sets? It’s bad and it doesn’t make sense.

I really doubt there’s a voice of reason in ANet currently. None of the stuff you pulled off this weekend makes any sense.

Well the swamp requires people to drop off 3 Wisps within 30 seconds. Now I’d like to say this requires at least 3 people…..but some nifty person (a Mesmer) might figure out a way to do it with less.

Fort Marriner still hasn’t triggered the event Phase 2 in Lion’s Arch.

People complained about the Backstab Combo prior to the patch and rightly so.

Yet somehow ANet deemed it appropriate to nerf it in the least effective way.

That’s why I never wanted to play a Condition Build in PvE. Not only is your DPS subar but you also have a hard time “tagging” mobs during events.

However I don’t think Dynamic Event encounters should really be used as a benchmark for Condition Damage performance. Dungeons encounters should however and I expect the differences there are less extreme than the OP implies.

Dots have one advantage over DD in that they still deal damage when the target is not currently selected.

I’d like to see a comparison between Condition Damage and Direct Damage in an encounter that only allows for 80% Direct Damage uptime and isn’t limited by the Bleed Stack limit.

That said, the Bleed limit needs to go, no question about it.

Sebyos.4089:

The list to add to the OP’s list is awful long…

I focused on the most frequent and intense debates topics on these forums. Of course there are other issues but the aforementioned were the most crucial.

I’ve certainly noticed a lack of rare drops during Cursed Shore Dynamic Events farming since the patch.

Maybe this was compensated with the apparent improved drops from Veterans/Champions/Chests but I haven’t really noticed it.

It could all just be bad luck though….time will tell.

I’m surprised they didn’t do this sooner. FPS like Battlefield got rid of the “wave spawning” because it really didn’t do anything to encourage team-play…which it was meant to.

Individual respawn timers are better and less frustrating as they take away the randomness of wave spawn timers.

Ok, I’ve observed a number of minor bugs on the Thief since the patch.

1. Mobs in Orr will interrupt a Daggerstorm with their pull, despite the ability granting stability.

2. The odd Cluster Bomb will explode without doing any damage to surrounding targets. It just explodes….for nothing. No damage, no Dots..not nada. It happens quite frequently. I’d guess about 10% of all Cluster Bombs simply don’t register.

3. Occasionally the game does not render my character invisible despite being invisible and having the appropriate debuff active too. This is really irritating although it doesn’t occur all that frequently.

I resolved this issue for my by lowering the sound quality from high to medium

Haven’t encountered the bug since.

Very cool video. Nice to see what places you can reach with Infiltrator’s Arrow.

Infiltrator’s Strike is in fact Sword #2, something you might just want to edit.

Well ideally it shouldn’t really be necessary. I mean we don’t really have cutting edge PvE content in GW2 (even with the new FotM), especially not competitive PvE, so perfect profession balance isn’t really required for that aspect of the game.

I believe it should be possible to balance a game primarily around PvP without impairing PvE too much.

But ANet has already given up on that stance by making abilities function differently in both environments. As noted however, the only outliner is WvW which is currently still considered a PvE environment.

The biggest joke is that the vast majority of these changes don’t affect WvW.

Like most players I was really looking forward to those patch notes set to be released with the patch. I was expecting the first major game-play revision since launch.

What I later read though looked more like a random assortment of changes rather than anything based of the feedback provided through these forums over the past months. In fact, a lot of the changes still leave me perplexed and I have a hard time making sense of ANets reasoning.

Let’s just re-cap some of the most heated balance issues that were discussed on these forums over the past weeks/months.

The top balance issues were
1. Thief Backstab burst in PvP and WvW
2. Guardian Bunker builds in PvP
3. Elementalist Bunker builds in PvP
4. Poor state of Rangers
5. Mesmers potency in PvP and WvW
6. The general power of Quickness

So let’s just see how each of the issues was tackled, if at all.

1. Undoubtedly the most discussed balance issue was Thief Backstab Burst caused by the Steal+Mug > C&D > Backstab combo.

How was this addressed?

Well Cloak and Dagger Damage was reduced by 33% in PvP. Yet not only was C&D the least problematic part of the Backstab combo it also doesn’t apply to WvW, where a lot of the complaints originated from.

Essentially Thief Backstab burst remains unchanged for WvW players and wasn’t nerfed much in sPvP either. Not only that, with C&D nerfed it also made a few of the less popular builds less attractive (S/D, P/D).

The fact that Mug, a Tier 2 Trait can still crit for up to 6000 or being able to Steal during C&D was not addressed.

2. Followed by the Thieves debate was the issue with Bunker Guardians and their impact on tPvP games.

How was this addressed?

With the changes to some of the Boon-Runes and changes to some of the Guardian’s boon durations their survivability should be somewhat lower. Especially the nerf to Selfless Daring should be noticeable.

But on a grander scale of things…I seriously doubt this will be enough to change the current tPvP meta game. Not only that, this still makes Bunker Guardians virtually unkillable 1v1 in WvW and probably PvP too.

Considering how big of an issue Guardians were…these changes just aren’t going to be enough to seriously impair Bunker Guardians. It’s odd considering that Elementalist Bunker builds did get a significant nerf.

3. Elementalists were the second popular Bunker build.

How was this addressed?

While the functionality of most skills remains unchanged, the changes to the Boon duration coupled with changes to Evasive Arcana should make Elementalist Bunker builds slightly less problematic than they were before.

4. While balance issues with other professions were discussed too, most people agreed that Rangers performed rather poorly in PvP.

How was this addressed?

While Rangers did receive a number of changes and buffs to specific abilities no change will lead me to believe that Rangers now will be any better than they were before. In fact the patch didn’t address nearly as many issues as Ranger players were lead to believe.

5. Mesmer discussions were less unanimous although they are generally perceived as a very powerful profession. Issues evolved particularly around the use of Portals both in PvP and WvW.

How was this addressed?

This is one of the most baffling changes I read in the patch notes: “The cooldown of portal is now 90 seconds, up from 60”. Now maybe there was a very explicit tactic that was supposed to be limited by this change but other than that, it changes absolutely nothing about the skill.

I mean the fact that they changed it at all implies that something was wrong about it. And yet the change they made seems to be the most ineffectual one they could have come up with. It has zero effect on portal bombing, on fights against Mesmers or on PvP portal tactics.

It just seems completely useless.

6. Quickness, the 100% speed increase caused by a few abilities was genrally considered problematic in the grand scale of things, especially compared to other DPS increasing abilities.

How was this addressed?

Now there is always the possibility that ANet didn’t consider this as much as an issue as the community. Maybe that’s why nothing changed. Quickness still stands out as the only 100% DPS increase in game.

Now what bugs me most about these changes is not that a specific ability or skill was not buffed or nerfed. It’s the fact that, as an avid forum poster, I feel all the feedback and discussion we had here on these forums was completely ineffectual.
Very few of the changes address concrete issues discussed here on these boards or even consider the many pages of insightful discussions that were had.

I ask why bother having an online forum if you’re going to ignore most of the feedback and discussion anyway?

It just seems so pointless.

Thief if you like killing people.

Guardian if you don’t like dying.