Guild Wars 2

I totally agree, Chrono. Basically, I can run with the new content alongside everyone else, or I can go knock myself out on Halloween stuff I’ve done multiple times before, and then hope that enough people are still slogging through the lower reaches of the new content to help me along comfortably. Well – I run lots of alts, so at minimum the candy corn is always useful to kit them all out with bigger bags – but in all honesty I doubt that’s what I’ll do. Not least – that also means lots of alts that, potentially, I’m likely to want to “level up” (or whatever the accurate term is, in context) through the new content. On the face of it, it seems an unfortunate choice of dates. (Although, just maybe, enough people will go do Halloween stuff first, that the new content will stay healthy and active for longer. I guess we’ll see soon enough.)

Oh, and it may seem perverse, but apart from rolling one revenant on ethe first one and playing for about 20 minutes I deliberately haven’t taken part in the beta weekends. That feels too much like spoilers; I want to start on the new content from scratch. Another reason, probably, to pass on the Mad King this year.

The 3D versions of the Personal and Living Story stars (i.e the one in the open world that I have to approach to trigger the story) on my screen are currently randomly absent (e.g in a session with friends last night, when we were replaying LS episodes for achievements, I couldn’t see the “Entaglement” purple star near Concordia, whereas my friends could. On a relog, there it was.) It’s not crippling, because I can always flai around the rough area until I get close enough, but it’s annoying.

JanHermann.2436:

Hello,
I’ve downloaded the client yesterday after a 6-month hiatus and noticed that of my three completed characters only the oldest one has the Personal Story marked as complete in the journal (all chapters incl. Victory or Death).
The other two were done with it a while ago (8-14 months ago) and now are stuck on chapters 6 and 7 respectively. I can’t play or replay anything concerning the Personal Story with them since there isn’t anything “clickable” in the journal or the content guide. The game seems to remember them finishing it but doesn’t display it as such.
First two characters have 100% map completion.
Customer service has referred me to the forums and this thread seems to fit the issue.

Story Journal reporting has been up the creek for some characters ever since the patch in which the “greatest fear” episodes were restored (there was a similar problem when the missions were swapped out, that took some time to get corrected). In my case, at least 6 of my characters are currently being reported incorrectly; it’s frustrating, but ultimately trivial, because it hasn’t affected what they’ve actually been able to do. I keep a record of my characters’ progress on the PS and LS, and post patch, affected characters who hadn’t completed the PS were all still showing the correct PS episode at top right, and (where I’ve tried), have all been able to progress through the PS correctly, even if their Story Journals still don’t reflect that. So unless you’re finding that you’re able to do content you don’t think that you should, or unable to do content that you think you should be able to, you’re probably simply suffering the same (hopefully temporary) misreporting as am I and others.

shadow.6174:

O.o when did it start? Are those shouting with your char’s voice or some “random” voice? I’m afraid that an old bug has came back. A few months ago there was a bug where our chars would shout stuff from other races and professions. It was scary hearing my female sylvari yelling like a male charr O.o

Can’t honestly say when it started; I started noticing it a few days ago. And the shouts are all valid, and in the correct voice; just too frequent to be comfortable.

My level 31 Charr mesmer uses Signet of Inspiration and Signet of the Ether. Both have passive effects that trigger every ten seconds. Which is great, except that ANet in its wisdom has decided that such effects should sometimes be accompanied by vocal effects. OK, I understand why – add a little colour.

Except that, right now, “sometimes” is “about every second time”. So, every session I play is punctuated every 20 seconds or so by my socially-incompetent mesmer shouting something random (“Swiftly!”; “Might makes Right!”; “Retaliation Incoming!”; “Healthy and Hale!”; “Armoured Up!”; “Anger Rising!”; and God knows how many others – most from Signet of Inspiration, it has to be said) – and it got old VERY fast. She’s like some elderly drunk sitting in a corner of the bar, having a very loud argument with an invisible drinking companion. It’s not only not remotely adding value, it’s seriously spoiling my enjoyment.

I don’t remember previous mesmers being like this, and I’ve levelled several – so I’m assuming that something has changed for the worse recently. Or maybe it’s just the Charr. Either way, it’s a bug; I shouldn’t need to change my skills or my sound settings just to get around something unpleasantly annoying that has been built (I have no doubt unintentionally) into the game.

Please take a look at it. PLEASE. Not least, I think my ears are beginning to bleed.

Vydahr.4285:

Just switch the “Flesh of the Master” trait in Death Magic, and that will instantly kill all of them and start their cooldowns. You can set the trait back immediately after turning it off

That wasn’kitten but thanks – I’ll file that one. Any others, anyone?

Edit – Apparently, if I place the word “it” after the normal contraction for “was not”, even with a space the embedded similarity to a member of a family of common or garden European birds is too offensive to show on a family forum. What a load of spheroids.

I have a vague (and possibly false) memory of someone showing me a quick and simple way to “dismiss” necro pets (other than getting into/out of water, which isn’t always possible). But if so, I’ve forgotten what it was. Can anyone help me? (It’s one of those things I find I want to do more than you’d expect.)

Same experience here. Did “the Steel Tide”, found myself looking at “Against the Corruption” again. I’d already previously completed that, “Cathedral of Silence” and “The Source of Orr”. And my personal story says I’m on “Forging the Pact”. No big deal to me to do the episodes again, but it’s still a bug.

Kriknav.9268:

Doghouse, I have really mixed emotions about you right now. While I love you for finding the answer, you’ve also made me feel like the biggest idiot. Problem solved.

Aw, you’re making me blush… :-)

Glad I could help.

Yeah, I got back to near cache #4 today for the first time in weeks, and promptly hit this. It’s pretty obvious what you need to do now, though.

In keeping with the posts so far in this thread, I won’t post a spoiler per se. But here’s a screen shot from the top; don’t click the thumbnail if you don’t want to get a fairly big clue.

Before you embark on a repair (or anything dramatic), though…

Check that your status isn’t set to “Invisible”.
(“Contacts and LFG [Y]”, top tab, pull-down at top left beside your account name.)

You can’t talk in Guild Chat when you’re invisible, and that’s the error message you get when you try.

(If you’re in multiple guilds, and you’re like me, you may occasionally deliberately set your status to invisible, so that you can enjoy a little quiet, undisturbed play. Or, you may simply set your status accidentally while in the LFG tool. Whatever – if you set it, that’s one of the things that happens. As I found out the first time that I forgot I’d done it. And, yes, in my book it’s undeniably a bug, albeit a modest one – the message text is not merely misleading but definitively incorrect, and should reflect the actual cause.)

Yes, I’ve been getting this too. I first noticed it on Monday last (3rd August), when I did a number of PS episodes with a group of friends. Typically what is missing seems to be the first section of speech by a particular NPC when a cut scene changes to them (Almorra in particular seems prone to it). We were on voice at the time and discussing it, so I can confirm that all of us were having the same problem, and that it appeared to be the same sections of speech that we were missing.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

PS Rhendak isn’t really the big deal, here. The acquisition of Sam is much more problematic, since the actual event (farmed or otherwise) often isn’t available due to a bug in its pre-event chain.

This. I farmed the Signet; I haven’t even tried to start on getting Sam.

Dinks.2478:

Tamasan.6457:

It’s DR. And it was not intended for you to be able to park a character at the end of a mini-dungeon just to skip over everything but the end and get loot, so be careful what you ask for. Probably the easiest way for Arenanet to fix the issue is to port you out of the area if you logout inside of it.

If they don’t want people parking there they should have though about that before making an achievement for getting his ring that rarely drops and takes long enough to get even when parking a character there.

Come off it; it’s no big deal. As my previous post indicates, I farmed the Signet over a total of a couple of hundred attempts, and frankly going off, doing an event, then getting back to Rhendak is hardly the most demanding thing in the world. There’s almost always an event running at or near Butcher’s Block, whilst you can usually get a friendly mesmer to portal you straight back in. And on the few occasions when you can’t, if the Font of Rhand is open (as it mostly is), getting to the last door takes maybe 5 minutes to do solo. After which, a quick shout in chat will invariably get someone back to open the door. OK – it’s more effort than just logging in and looting a chest, but he’s a boss at (supposedly) the end of a mini-dungeon. Anyone who wants the signet should be prepared to put at least a little effort into it – not just log in, go AFK until the boss spawns, hit him a couple of times and then loot.

Ohoni.6057:

This isn’t a bug, it’s intended behavior. The specific mechanic is Diminished Returns. It’s to prevent people (or bots) from repeating the same content over and over again.

They’ve said that Diminishing Returns almost never happens, so I don’t think that’s the case here. Also, it’s character by character, I do plenty of things on other characters in between, it’s just this one I leave in the temple. Also, it’s kinda random. I’ve gone weeks doing nothing with this character but Rhendak and not seen this glitch, but then some weeks it’s like every other day.

It’s the way things are. As far as anyone knows, it’s deliberate. Go do an event in PvE.

I kept stats on this for ages (until Rhendak’s signet finally dropped for me), over multiple characters. Yes, it’s rather random – possibly suspiciously so, on fact, because I found a near-perfect 33% chance of failing to get a chest next time if I simply logged out at the boss after a drop (53 fails in 157 samples). Whereas I had only 4 fails in 97 samples when I did a PvE event before logging out (and not only that, but all 4 of those were after a single patch, which was then immediately repatched the next evening, so I’m extremely suspicious that they weren’t representative anyway).

Oh, and my chance of a further fail, just logging out and hoping it would clear, rose to 50%. But I don’t have a huge number of samples on that (8 fails out of 16).

(I tried a whole pile of things to try to prevent it happening; I can’t comment on the efficacy of the “WvW event requiring something killed” option – my notes aren’t good enough – but a simple WvW event certainly wasn’t good enough. PvE event was the only thing I tracked that was (near-?) certain.)

This isn’t going to solve your problem, but.

Just to add to the confusion – there’s a bug that means that, since the “biggest fear” story steps were put back in, the PS journal entries are flaky anyway. As you’ll see from my first attached screen shot, for instance, one of my characters is currently showing the same final PS as you, but is actually on “Further into Orr”. But in her case, it also shows at the top that she’s on her PS. (I could show you a pile more that aren’t correct, too. But none of them are actually stuck.)

On the other hand – your screen shot is actually consistent with that of a character of mine who has recently finished her PS (see my second shot). In her case, I ran the “Victory or Death” episode after the Specializations patch.

Any idea what story step you think that you ought to be on?

This has been around for a while. They’ve just fixed it. Which is a pity, because knowing that the autobalance timer is running, and how long it has left to go, can be very useful if you’re looking to swap into the larger/“winning” team. Personally, I’d rather they’d fixed the wording for everyone else, but left it visible.

It’s not often I’d say this, but – ANet has just fixed a bug that I believe was adding value to the game, and personally I’d like to see it, or a variant, put back.

In sPvP, when autobalance kicks in because one team is rather larger than the other, a prompt pops asking members of the larger team whether they’d like to volunteer to change teams. 20 seconds later, rebalance happens.

For some weeks, that message has “incorrectly” been visible to all players, not just those on the larger team. Which is undoubtedly not what was intended to happen – but has been absolutely invaluable.

If you’re spectating, trying to get into the larger team, and autobalance pops, with the alert popping as designed you have no choice but to sit there spamming clicks on the “join team” button of your choice for up to 30 seconds, in hopes that you’ll just happen to be the first person to click once the timer expires (no choice because if you don’t, you simply won’t get in, so everyone’s doing the same). Which is both tiring and unhealthy.

With the “bug”, we still had to spam clicks – but we had a convenient count-down timer on the autobalance, so it was merely necessary to click for the last second or so of the timer’s run. Much less stressful, much less chance of inducing RSI. The only thing actually “wrong” was that everyone got a clickable button, whereas only the players on the larger team were actually being asked to click.

I’m not personally aware of any undesirable side-effect of the bug – so how about accepting the happy accident and putting it back? Maybe change the prompt for the players not on the largest team, to remove the button itself?

Shootsfoot.9276:

So, just to be clear. You changed your mind probably due to lack of research and can’t change it back so the system is “broken” (just love that word).

No, it’s a valid complaint (and not because I’ll need to do it myself – that’s unlikely).

GW2’s a game, and it needs new blood if it’s to thrive. Sure, it’s great if new players manage to do adequate research right up front – but that’s not how it usually works with games (at least, not for me, and certainly not, by observation, for most of the guys I play with). More likely they dive right in with at most a basic level of knowledge to get the feel of things – and if they like the initial experience, they stick around and slowly dig deeper. So the last thing ANets needs is something making the early experience unnecessarily worse than it need be, and doing anything to discourage new players from sticking around.

And, let’s be clear, this is an early-game-experience issue – it becomes less painful as characters hit mid-level, and more seasoned players are likely to know more of what they plan to do ahead of time anyway. So, given that just about all the changes ANet have made along the line to the Trait system at different times have clearly been intended (amongst other things) to make it harder for new players to spray their points far and wide into truly awful builds, and ruin that initial experience, it’s counter-intuitive and counter-productive to lock them into decisions they’ll be unhappy with – even if the true effects aren’t really all that disastrous – at precisely the point that they’re making up their minds about the game.

Lady Celtaine.3760:

New character has unlocked one trait line slot, I want to switch to another trait line but can’t because used up hero points in the useless trait line by accident but cannot reset to get back limited hero points. This is a broken system, please Fix it ASAP.

It’s a pain, but it’s not honestly a deal breaker. Firstly, you actually get HP pretty quickly just from levelling (and you can get more quickly by going and running the Challenges in the various low-level areas); just sit on them until you have the points to spend, and don’t go splurging them on something else. Secondly, let’s be honest – the most important thing in levelling (especially at low levels) is probably just keeping your equipment up to date.

But – I’ve levelled a character to 80 since the patch, and I agree that getting it “wrong” up front is too easy under the new system. (FWIW, I posted my experiences and observations in another thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/New-levelling-observations/5231868)

A route down that, so far at least, hasn’t ever killed me, with the fall reduction trait specced at least, is as follows. (And I’m trying to be as unambiguous as possible – but I know from experience that that’s always a lot harder to do than you think…):

- Spec for reduced damage
- Between two of the upper “teeth” on the right-hand side is a gap, with another “tooth” sticking out between but somewhat below the other two. That lower tooth is where I start from (depending on how you count, it’s either the third or fourth “tooth” from right). Edge forward onto it from above.
- Using the right mouse button, look a bit downwards, and line your direction up so that the edge of the rock wall immediately below you is running straight across the screen. As a reference point, there’s a stalactite hanging from the ceiling on the right, further down. The bottom of that should be directly in line with your head.
- Using the W key, edge slowly forwards. You should initially drop a few inches onto the rock face. Check that the reference stalactite is still in line with your head, then tap the W key and await developments. You should start falling, bounce a few times, and end up at a stalagmite part way down.
- Depending upon precisely where you were standing, how you were facing, and what you hit on the way down, you may have quite a bit of health left or just a sliver – but you should still be alive. Heal fully up before progressing.
- Using the right mouse button, change your view until you’re looking across the rock face to the left. Use the W key to move forward and start falling again. (Depending on precisely where you ended up after the first drop, you may need to just tap the space bar as well, to turn the move into a short jump to get past the stalagmite).
- Similarly, depending on exactly where you previously landed and so on, you may land on further ledges of stalagmites below. If so, just make a further short jump in the same direction each time, to carry on down.
- At some point, you should clear any final obstacles and drop to the pool at the bottom. You can try to steer at this point, if you like, but it doesn’t seem to be neccesary; whilst it’s looked several times to me as though I was in danger of hitting the ground beside the pool, in practice, that never actually happened.

(I tried the above about a dozen times whilst trying to describe precisely what I was doing. And I tried it on Charr, Norn and Asuran characters, in case character size or the Charr posture made a difference. It seems to work on all.)

Kal Spiro.9745:

I don’t know what you people are talking about. I just line myself up on the second tooth from left and jump straight into the mouth. It’s a clear line to water, no damage.

I tried that. Succeeded the first time; did “exactly the same” a second time and died.

The problem is that there are rocks on the way down that you CAN hit that will kill you if you should, and the difference between hitting or missing is a matter of a mere few degrees at most.

So – if you’ve managed to perfect the technique, great. But what’s needed, when you’re doing this for the karka achievement is a reliable, safe route down that can be accurately described to someone else in text, and that they’ll be able to repeat successfully first time. And “straight into the mouth”, unfortunately, isn’t quite specific enough. (Nor, to be truthful, am I entirely sure which – in this post or the other describing the dev’s solution – is supposed to be the “second tooth from left”. At far left there’s one “tooth” directly above another. Is the upper one the “second” one in question? Or the one to its right immediate? Because, depending on how I choose to look at things, the description fits both.)

I understand why some people who’d already completed it might have wanted it to stay the way it was – but “Victory or Death” is part of the PS, and it needed to become soloable. Look back in the early forums, and you’ll find any number of people seriously upset that it wasn’t. And the biggest, most frequent plaint was simple:
“This has been MY story all the way through – and now you’re telling me I MUST team up with, worst case, four complete strangers to finish it? That is NOT going to happen. I’d rather leave it unfinished.”
And no amount of trying to convince people – that, say, it wasn’t really THEIR story, but that of Trahearne, or Destiny’s Edge, or the Alliance – was going to change that feeling of having been robbed of the right to finish it themselves.

(I was one of those. To let the stats speak for themselves – I have 22 level 80s right now. Of those, before the change, no less than 13 had completed their PS – except for “Victory or Death”. And I’d run the story on 2 more – both times grouped with, and only with, RL friends. Sure, I might just have gotten around at some point to asking a friendly guildy or four to help me complete my PS on the odd extra one. But – PuG the rest? Not remotely interested. Whereas, now, I’ll pick them off one at a time, when I have the time and feel the inclination – and get a sense of satisfaction each time I do so.)

Whether ANet made a good job of the change or not is another question. My own reaction is that it’s not bad, but could be better. I’ve done it once since the change, and I agree that the ending is rather anti-climactic – especially compared to earlier parts of the episode. I had MUCH more trouble at a couple of points than with Zhaitan. But on the other hand, I’d have been SERIOUSLY pee’d off if, having spent a good two hours getting to the final fight, I’d then found it so hard that I couldn’t beat it (or if it had bugged, come to that – which at one point I thought it had!). It would undoubtedly have been a while before I summoned up the enthusiasm to try again.

So – I’d personally say that some rebalance is desirable. Some of the earlier bits need making just a fraction less challenging, whilst the fight with Zhaitan itself needs upgrading a bit and to feel a bit more like YOUR fight. kitten it – I’m supposed to be the Commander – let me command. Maybe give me a couple of alternative tasks I can entrust to Destiny’s Edge, and make me step in when they’re struggling to complete them (noticeably, I mean – I know that DE was running around all over the place at various times, and I probably did exactly that at points – but frankly, if so, I was too absorbed trying to do my own stuff to actually notice). And add some sort of checkpoint mechanism to let you skip the stuff you’ve already completed, should you fail, or get DC’d, or the episode bug – because it’s simply too long as it stands to oblige people to go back to the beginning and try again. (I’d suggest splitting it into multiple episodes, but I can understand that ANet probably want the last episode to feel of epic proportions, even if you’re the only one doing it, so it seems unlikely that there’s any chance of that.)

rhapsody.3615:

No, just one trait if you’re having trouble with the slide. Rearrange, maybe, if you’re not using the same trait line. But I don’t think clicking a few buttons to get through something is that vile. It makes it more interesting IMO to have to decide how you want to proceed through something.

Kind of reminds me of another game. “Guild Wars”, I think it was called. Although that was way worse in that regard. Sometimes you’d end up running around for a couple of hours just trying to pick up exactly the right Elite skill to get you through a tricky section. Which was fine – just different.

(Then you’d try to use it to advance your story, fail dismally three times in a row, and hit the browser to find out what else you could try. Rinse, repeat. Eventually you’d succeed. And, oh, the sense of achievement.)

Neural.1824:

The least they could do would be to teleport you back to the top of the puzzle when you die.
It used to do this.

Now they expect us to re-arrange our traits just to do a jumping puzzle? What next? Require an entirely different armor set?

You don’t need to rearrange your traits. As I said in my post above, I managed it yesterday, on a level 40 without the reduction trait, at the first attempt (and despite missing one of my jumps and falling quite a bit further than I’d meant it to). It just helps give you a little more leeway in case you get things a little more wrong than perhaps you’d wish.

I have to say – the puzzle feels much the same to me as the first time I did it. But then, until this last week, I hadn’t done it for quite a while.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

About 4: If you die you loose the rifle, so no Karka-hunting for you. But you could always find a nice Mesmer who does the slide for you. ^^

Indeed. Good point. I wasn’t thinking in context of the achievement, just the JP.

You also lose the gun if you change maps (so if, say, you accept a prompt to leave a low-population copy of LA, as I did).

And also (weird one!) you can lose it if you’re transformed and go swimming.
(Monday evening, a friend of mine somehow got stuck with the April 1st “airplane arms” transformation. He lost his gun half a dozen times before we figured out what was happening and got him to swap to another character. We never did work out for sure how he’d become transformed in the first place – he thought he’d clicked on a fun box, but wasn’t certain – or, having been transformed, how to get him out of it, either. For all I know, that character is still stuck with its arms out. He could keep the gun on land; but we could swim with it, and he couldn’t.)

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Is there a trick to entering this place because it honestly seems like surviving the entrance is random and it infuriates me.

No trick; just basic GW2 jumping principles and common sense. It’s always been a challenge, and I’m hearing it’s been made even harder in the patch. But I’ve done it twice since then, first time both times. I went in yesterday on a level 40+ Ranger. As others have said:

1) Spec your damage reduction trait (if you’ve bought it; yesterday I hadn’t, and couldn’t).

2) You can try to do it in one shot, which may be possible but will be hard, or you can try to do it in stages (which is what I did). Look for rocks and ledges below you that you can use as stopping points, and hope you’ll still be alive after you’ve hit them. I aimed at rocks on the right, and survived (just); then I went for some to the left, and missed – but survived anyway.

3) Steer/move when you jump. The game physics are not those of the real world. Look down when you jump, and to try to move to miss obstacles you look likely to hit. And remember that you can strafe (Q/E).

4) Other than that, use the community. Pick a peak time when other people are also likely to be in there. Then hope that some kind soul will rezz you if you should be unlucky enough as to die.

5) Keep trying. It’s eminently doable.

Rauderi.8706:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero_point

There’s a chart on the page (click Show on the blue field)…

Darn it, I’d looked at that page, and completely missed the small text saying “show” in blue on a blue background. I wonder how? Anyway – thanks to everyone that pointed it out.

(" It’s the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it."
- Douglas Adams, HHGTTG)

TheDaiBish.9735:

You get enough HP by level 80 to unlock all of the core skills and traits (though you can do the challenges to unlock stuff sooner).

Yes, i knew that. It’s the detail I’m after.

Struggling to find this info, and the wiki entry on level rewards hasn’t caught up yet.

Do we have info yet on precisely how many HPs are awarded by levelling, at which levels? I have a feeling I’ve seen something long those lines, but I’m darned if I can find anything now that I actually want to know…

Nemitri.8172:

Every time I want to change a spec line I have trouble distinguishing them one from the other, could you please make them more noticeable please? Like adding an icon with borders and lines and cool icons please?

I’d have to agree. Basically, they’re (a) tiny, and (b) monochrome. OK, small means they fit into the spiffy new Specializations graphic; monochrome makes them easy to highlight. Unfortunately, neither of those are exactly calculated to make it easy for players to actually identify individual icons – which is, when you get down to it, their fundamental purpose. En masse, they’re pretty much just a confused jumble of similar black-on-yellow blurs.

I’m sure the ANet graphics designers put a lot of fine work into developing the icons within those constraints – but please, please, revisit them and make them more distinctive. We shouldn’t need to squint and scratch our heads.

serialkicker.5274:

How can people still complain about this? Every proffesion has way more options now to make a good build. If you can’t make yourself a decent build now, then idk what to say to you.

I don’t think you understand the concept of “way more options”. This isn’t about finding “a” decent build, it’s about choice and the freedoms to experiment and to be unconventional.

Under the old system, I make it that there were 138 MILLION distinct possible ways to allocate a full spread of 14 trait points (it’s possible I made a slip or two in calculating that – but the order of magnitude, at the very least, is most definitely correct).

Now? 270.

And, sure, the vast majority of the old ones were undoubtedly ineffective rubbish, and most of the new ones are pretty reasonable. But if you’re seriously saying that you think the GW2 community was previously incapable of finding more than 270 decent builds in that vast ocean of possibilities? I’d have to say that – to put it politely – you’re living in a different universe to me.

What’s changed is that it’s harder now to make a really bad build. And that’s OK, up to a point, especially for raw beginners – but only to a point, because experienced players deserve more latitude to fail. And if you follow the concept of preventing “bad” builds to its logical conclusion (reductio ad absurdum), you simply get the devs to find one spec that pretty much works, then give it to everyone – and I doubt anyone would argue that that’s a good idea.

Edit: Corrected the old total; was using the incorrect number of Master-level traits.

Not a thread of great import, but I started a new character when the patch hit, and I thought I’d share my experiences of levelling her to date (Asuran Ranger, currently level 41; no great reason on the choice of race/profession other than that I didn’t have that combination yet).

Within the confines of the new system, they’re (cautiously) positive. In fact, in one way, I think it’s possibly even a little too easy.

I’ve levelled my character this far via PvE and sPvP: map completions, PvE events,Tomes of Knowledge from doing my dailies in sPvP. I’ve been running her PS as episodes became available.

My biggest concern, before I started, was that I’d be struggling to decide where to spend precious Hero Points in order to get the Skills and Traits that I wanted (the more so because the Utility and Elite Skills I planned to spec were all in different Skill lines).

I made a point of picking up every map HP in Metrica Province, completed the map, then moved on to a couple more of the starting zones and got the HP from those as well. I don’t think it was actually essential.

One thing I hadn’t appreciated was that I would start with a few “racial” skills available, at no cost. They weren’t exactly mind-bending, but they weren’t to be sniffed at either, and they at least gave me something to work with. So I sat on my hard-earned HPs for a while as my utility skill slots started unlocking. I finally splashed out when I had 28HP or so, buying Signet of the Wild (2nd skill on the Signet line), which brought me Signet of the Hunt as well. Equipped both (SoH as useful to have).

Now we get to the bit which I think is almost too easy/good. Because by the time I unlocked my first Specialization at level 21, I still had 50HP+ in hand – enough to buy my full chosen Specialization, bar the last two GM traits. And the new system takes what I’d term a “horizontal” approach to traits compared to the “vertical” one of the old system. There’s no restriction on Traits according to character level. Within the Specializations you can have active, you can spec any Trait that you’ve already bought, up to and including GM. So – Bam! Level 20, no Traits. Level 21, a full Specialization. That is one BIG change. In lower-level zones, at least, suddenly I’m one-shotting half the stuff (hmm; that’s fun in its own way – but maybe not ideal). OK – as it happened, the Grandmaster trait I actually wanted was the first I couldn’t immediately afford, so the supply of HP did briefly constrain me a little; but it didn’t take much running around before I had the points to buy it And character progression is jerky now – nothing much for ages, then huge jumps forward at each of levels 21, 45 and 71. (Would I take the same approach again in future? Almost certainly. It seems to me that having a full Specialization will outweigh having precisely the right bar skills, in PvE at least, 99 times out of 100.)

And that was pretty much the end of any real HP bottle-neck – if there ever was one. Initially I carried on eking out my HPs with a view to buying my full next Specialization when it unlocks at level 45, but I had the points for that levels ago, and have already bought all the Traits I plan on using then. I’ve also bought and equipped my chosen Elite Skill, an alternate Healing Skill, and one of my two remaining, planned Utility Skills. I’m currently 8HP short of buying that last one – but that’s only because it’s deep in yet another Skill line; a penalty of my chosen build. When my second Specialization unlocks at level 45, I’ll be as fully specced on my planned Traits and Skills as the game permits. And when the third one unlocks at level 71, unless I radically change my plans it’s absolutely certain that I’ll be able to fill out that part of my build there and then.

I’d have to say that, if I hadn’t had a build in mind from the start, it would have been quite easy to spread HP far and wide with nothing greatly coherent to show for it initially; I had a build I was aiming at, and that most definitely helped.

But I can’t help feeling that there’s a diminishing returns effect on random spend anyway. With enough points to buy everything with points over by 80, it’s hard to imagine I wouldn’t be able to find something fairly usable at mid-to-higher levels, whatever I’d done.

Edit: I was indeed fully specced on my skills and first two Specializations when the second Specialization became available at 45. I actually completed all purchases for my full intended spec by level 51. So from that point onwards it’s all about such flexibility and choice as I feel the need for.

Yes, the restore of the PS back to its original sequence has borked the record of what at least some characters have done, in a very similar way to that in which the China release patch did. I noticed it when I ran the PS version of the final story for the first time last night – after which my character’s log shows nothing beyond the start of chapter 7. I have plenty of other characters in suspect states as well, but no records to hand, as I type, of what they ought to be showing. I have at least one now showing “A Light in the Darkness”, though, which seems rather suspicious in context. But I suspect things will get sorted out in a patch or two.

Update
I’ve now been through my characters, and checked against my records (I’m an alt-alholic, and I have a spreadsheet with quite a lot of that sort of information accumulated, to help me, for example, take alternate paths through the PS). Because of the “dungeon” nature of the final PS episode in the past, I had quite a few parked at the “Victory or Death” episode (“VoD”). I also had two who had completed it (sessions with RL friends – I wasn’t interested in PUGging it, which is why so few of my other characters have completed it). Anyway – for the benefit of any dev who may find the information useful, I see the following in their respective Story Journals:

- Most of the VoD ones are correctly showing VoD (10 in total). One Complete is similarly correct.

- One VoD and one Complete are showing “The Steel Tide” (an episode that both did indeed do). They have in common the fact that, following the China release patch, they missed out on the sequence “Against the Corruption” through to “The Source of Orr” (my only two characters who did). I would strongly suggest that that may be significant.

- One VoD is showing “Cathedral of Silence”; I’d guess from the sequence in which my characters were created that she may well have been in the middle of that sequence when that patch struck (it’s certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually on that precise episode) – but I can’t confirm that for sure; I have records of what character did what, but not when.

- One character on “What the Eye Beholds” is showing “Forging the Pact”.

- As reported above, a character who was on VoD, and completed the PS after the most recent main patch, is showing “Forging the Pact”.

The last two above were both created post-China patch, albeit on different accounts.

(The character I mentioned above showing as being on “A Light in the Darkness”, is indeed on that episode. Sheer coincidence that I chose to examine her.)

Other characters, all post China and on earlier PS episodes (including one on “Retribution”, which I think is in the grey area flagged up ahead of the recent patch as one to watch), are all currently showing the correct episodes.

ASP.8093:

You’re forgetting:
1. Weapon choices
2. Stats from gear
3. Rune pick (possibly picks, though you basically always want all 6 to be the same)
4. Sigil picks for weapons
5. Food and similar buffs (outside SPvP)

All this stuff can totally make or break a build, and not just in the trivial ways (look at how many builds are relying on very specific sigils to do some heavy lifting for them).

I’m not forgetting it, because it’s not what we’re discussing. I entirely agree that there are further dimensions to an overall spec, and that they’re still available for people to explore. Indeed, they’ve become even more important now, given that trait choice has been hacked back in such a ruthless manner. My point, on the trait component of a potential build, stands.

Kal Spiro.9745:

1) Considering that this is the same problem Rangers have with pet names, I’m going to say they don’t care, and deal with it.

Maybe I’m wrong and one day they’ll actually implement a build memory system, I’m just saying don’t hold your breath.

Well, it;s not entirely the same thing, because they already remember separate specs for PvE, PvP and WvW. It may be that whatever they do there is easily extensible. And they’ve had the code open recently, too, so someone will be familiar enough with it to be able to say very quickly that it’s doable if it is. But I know what you mean.

Edit
(There’s also quite a difference between saving something entirely cosmetic and something which is very much functional.)

Kal Spiro.9745:

2) Wait… I don’t have to click my way through those dumb circles? I can just pick the last one and buy them all at once? Ugh! That would have been nice to know two days ago…

Yup. Doing it by accident on the first character I looked at was what drew it to my attention (and why I thought it worth flagging). Once I knew I could do it, it took me literally under 20 seconds in the Training UI, per character, to fill out everything on each of the rest of my level 80s. Sorry.

I don’t feel it’s disastrous, but it most definitely lacks the scope for creativity and subtlety that the previous system had. By a HUGE margin.

Under the old system, I make it that there were no less than 30258000 different variations on allocating points on a 6/6/2 spread alone for players to choose from. (Yes, that really does say “Over 30 million”. And, yes, that’s combinations, not permutations, for anyone who thinks that I may have forgotten such things.) And that’s only one of many ways I could have chosen to spread my points out.

One pattern among many; 30 million variations. I’m not going to put the effort to work out the actual answer, because whilst the maths is trivial it’s also tedious, and I’d rather be playing; I only worked out the first number because I’m a maths nerd at heart. But the message is clear, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the final total were well over half a billion.

And, sure, most of those specs were probably obvious rubbish. And lots of good ones were near-identical. But what it meant was that there was a HUGE specification space out there for inventive, creative players to explore for something that suited their play style. That has now gone.

What are we left with? 270 distinct builds (27 different permutations of major trait per Core Specialization; 10 possible combinations of 3 Core Specializations. That’s yer lot).

270 versus maybe half a billion. In any profession, excluding incomplete builds, there are now exactly 270 different ways to fully spec your traits. That’s it. Probability that your “clever” new build is actually simply a carbon copy of lots of others running around out there – 100%. Room for creativity? Pretty much none. We’re going to be running cookie-cutter builds now, whether we want to or not. And, while I don’t dislike the new system per se – that’s a real shame.

(I’m sure that ANet are relying on HoT putting a little bit of variety back in. Undoubtedly it could, to some degree – but not to anything remotely resembling the scope we had before.)

Edit: OK, I revisited this and plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet, and that first number is wrong – I factored in the wrong number of Master traits, for a start. At a recalculate, I make 6/6/2 to have 22 million distinct variations. And a full, 14 trait point spec seems to work out at 138.6 million distinct variations across all such patterns in total (138640290 is the exact number I get) – not quite the half-billion I guessed. But the scale of change remains of the same order of magnitude.

OK – after playing a bit, it seems to me that there are two things definitely needed in the new trait/skill UI.

1) [Traits only – and not sure whether this is a bug or not, tbh; if I were testing the code, I’d flag it as one.]
In the Build tab, if I change to a Specialization I don’t currently have active, then change my mind and swap back, the game “forgets” what my previous choices were. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, extremely annoying. Give me back what I had before, please – I don’t want to spend all my time with pieces of paper writing things down, or trying to decide yet again what to go with on this particular character, simply because the game won’t remember on my behalf.

2) [Both Skills and Traits.]
In the Training tab, if within a line I click on a trait or skill that isn’t the next in order, the purchase sequence is identical except for the difference in price displayed. PLEASE add a visual clue to draw attention either to everything that’s being bought, or at the very least to the fact that multiple items are being bought. When a single item can cost, say, 2HP, and another 22HP once intervening items are added in (a coincidence that almost cost me dearly when I clicked on an icon by accident), levelling players need every chance to be sure that we’re genuinely buying what we think we are. Especially given that Hero Points, once spent, can’t be unspent.

(Edited to clarify
OK, multi-buying by accident didn’t actually cost me, because as it happened I was filling out a level 80 and had plenty of points. But I didn’t realise at the time that it was even a possibility (and as Kal Spiro’s response below shows, I’m not the only one). And on a levelling character, it could have been a nasty mistake to make.

Echo.3175:

It’s a lot of clicking, being at level 80 you have all the skill/Hero Points anyway to unlock all the skills and re-assign them under the Build menu without any further investment. I imagine they did this to unify both old trait systems?

Edit – kitten , you people are fast

I thought maybe TOO fast – but it literally takes seconds to train all the missing stuff on a level 80.

You can click on the final icon in an incomplete Skill/Specialization line, then hit “Train” to do the whole line at once. No thought involved. It takes 20-30 clicks to max out your training. Knowing that you have enough points to buy everything helps considerably, mind.

(Actually checking the spec’s is going to take me a while longer, though!)

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

One thing I forgot to mention in my posts is that Anet is ok giving refunds to those who bought the game for a meager 10$ and at the same time they forgot who bought the game for almost 5 TIMES that price 3 years ago.

The difference being that the people they’re offering refunds to are the ones who can legitimately claim that they were misled by ANet into buying a copy of the game that they didn’t need to buy, and wouldn’t have bought if ANet had told us up front about their intent to release a full bundle (instead of explicitly saying the exact opposite).

I have such an account. I bought because of what ANet said, and I was utterly furious that they were going back on that. The amount, large or small, was utterly irrelevant. They misled me; I’m pleased they’ve realised they need to make good.

I also have an account from launch day. I’ve had two years’ good play from it, and spent far, far less on doing so than I would have on, say, playing WoW over the same period. I can question their pricing of the HoT bundle. And in common with others I would have preferred to see a separately-purchasable expansion. But both are business decisions, and we’re perfectly at liberty not to take our custom elsewhere. I don’t see that ANet owe me, you or anyone else a single penny of money we spent before HoT.

Gaile Gray.6029:

As we mentioned in several posts on the forums and in various other media, we have been reading and gathering your feedback about the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns pre-purchase.

Please see this blog post for new information on the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns pre-purchase.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts!

Thanks for that, Gaile. ANet got it way wrong initially, and this is the correct response. Well done for getting it right in the end, guys.

“Moral duty” is shorthand for “Shafting your existing customer base is bad business.” Anyway – it would seem that someone at ANet understands the concept and has taken notice of us. Good for them.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pre-purchase-community-address/

Tachyon.5897:

£35 for an expansion featuring a much vaunted new class. A class that you can’t actually play unless you hand them another £10 on top of the expansion’s £35.

Including a character slot isn’t that much to ask. is it?

Yeah, it’s parsimonious cheap kittenrdly money-grabbing. Five slots if you’re a new player; none if you’re not. Good gracious, it’s almost as if they want us to have to buy a new slot… But then again, most of us won’t actually pay for a new one. And we all know that, unless you’re a very casual player, you don’t need to. Earn gold, buy gems, buy slot. Rinse, repeat.

(Run Silverwastes. Run Fractals. Run dungeons. Sell loot. Or any one of half a dozen other ways of earning money. But they all need a little investment of effort.)

((Creasing myself here at the censoring software apparently trying to stop me saying that ANet are being cheapskates. Shuffles off singing “Only a Ginga can call another Ginga ‘Ginga’…”))

Ardid.7203:

The problem is not the content or the price. The problem is trust.
Should Anet say the expansion costs 80 bucks, that could be overpriced, but is a fair offer. You can take it or not, but is clear and honest.

My own feeling exactly.

If people want to whinge about the price point, I have little sympathy. ANet is ultimately free to try to sell its products at any price it wants. I’m free to make my own judgement, and either buy or not. As is everyone else.

Telling me ahead of time that I would need a copy of the base game, though (resulting in me spending money on the second account I’d been considering, in preparation for the expansion), then changing that without warning – and not only not acknowledging the fact, but trying to pretend that’s not what they were doing at all – that’s another thing entirely. I’ve put in a request for a full or partial refund – there’s a post on Reddit indicating that they may be open to things along those lines here). I shall be interested to see how they respond.

(I’ve worked in marketing in a multinational, and worked with the corporate guys quite a bit in other roles too. I’ve seen decisions like this many times. They usually happen last minute, when the marketing guys can’t make the numbers balance to squeeze as much money out of the release as they want. In this case, I’m sure, it was about trying to find a price as an expansion that would both get enough money from existing players and not put off new players who had to buy the base game as well. Ad they couldn’t agree one. So some bright spark had the idea of just bundling everything together from day one, upping the price point to something between the two extremes, and spinning the bundling as “a free bonus”. And either they didn’t realise just how big a lead balloon THAT would be amongst existing customers, or they decided the actual number of lost players would be acceptable.)

Bainos.1643:

There was a red post on Reddit where they announced that they would “help anyone out who just bought the core game and would like to make the change to a HoT pre-purchase”.

It won’t be automatic and I don’t know to what extent they will offer that help, but I guess that if you specifically bought the game to be able to get the extension you have some chances of getting it.

Source : https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3a46s4/preorders_for_heart_of_thorns_are_now_live/cs96lfu

I guess I’ll try following that up. I’m sanguine about how successful I’m likely to be, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Go to your GW2 account and add the key there. (If you’re a new player, you create the account first, download the base game and, presumably, start playing that now, if you’re so inclined.) Then I guess you wait for the new content to download once it’s released.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

To clarify: $50 is the price of the expansion. We included the core game as a free bonus to make it easier for new players to get into it.

To clarify your clarification – that’s BS. And I should add that I spent a good year or two in corporate marketing, so I know precisely what that smells like.

Your claim is obvious and disingenuous spin. The fact is that, however you want to try to describe your decision in order to attempt to justify it (you’ve not succeeded, by the way), what you’re selling is a full, playable package consisting of the game to date plus new content. And you’re spinning it the way you are in order to “justify” not offering existing players an upgrade to the new content at a lower price than that full package.

Will you normally be releasing the update in future on its own (i.e. minus the so-called “free bonus”)? Unlikely.

Will you continue selling the base game for some extended period without HoT alongside the "expansion? Improbable.

In which case, the base game simply and demonstrably isn’t a “free bonus”. It’s a core component of the package. I can’t envisage any independent observer seeing it differently – however ANet try to spin things.

Yes, I was on line with two friends last night. All running new characters, so inevitably we were going low on health quite often, and every one of us was suffering from this. It seems to clear at times, but we weren’t able to entirely pin down when. Although, yes, going to character select or, say, the PVP lobby clears it, whereas just (say) pulling up the map doesn’t. I guess it’s a question of precisely what gets redrawn, how. Whatever, it’s seriously annoying.

Engi kits sort-of work the same, indeed, but they don’t blank out the whole of the rest of the bar. Whatever – in the end, I just needed to look harder. Thanks.