Guild Wars 2

As stated in the blog, this patch will be in 2 weeks, on the 26th.

“Good news—today I’m going to tell you all the big additions in our first major seasonal update: the Guild Wars 2 Winter 2016 update, which will be arriving on January 26!”

Selkirk.4218:

this line is particularly ominous ‘One of our goals for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ was for it to be the last time we would focus on this type of broad development and experimentation and to reach a point where we could focus more on depth.’

and begs a simple question: why? players actually like broad development(new races, new maps). who knew hot was going to be the last time they made new maps or new content?

I don’t think this means no new maps or content. I think they mean they have their core systems in place (masteries, elites, adventures, collections) and will use those going forward without major changes to the game structure.

In fact, direct quote from Colin on last Friday’s live stream: “I want our teams to focus on the systems we’ve built and lets just polish those, and add a lot more content to them.” https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/No-more-living-story/first#post5907207

I think an ANet person posted that the drinks achieve is the only one you can work on after the event ends.

A rule of thumb I use is to increase the head size for shorter characters, decrease it a bit for taller ones. The reason is that the height slider is really a whole figure scaler, but human head sizes tend to remain fairly constant through the whole normal range of body sizes. I make the head narrower for slender characters, wider for stout ones.

To get your alts matching your aesthetics, you might want to make the alt, screenshot all the sliders (and face choice plus skin/hair/eye color choices too), go into game. Run around in circles a little, zoom in and out, decide if there’s anything you want to change. Note that down, then delete and remake using the screenshots as reference for sliders then tweak the sliders, screenshot the changes, and go in game again. Rinse and repeat until you are happy.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Very interesting QoL changes, but a bit light on content (except for shatterer revamp). I hope April’s seasonal update brings more content.

One question:

Now that gliding is available everywhere, will we be able to unlock it with experience obtained in Pact Tyria?

“If you’ve trained the Glider Basics Mastery in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, your glider will let you glide a bit further…all the way back to Central Tyria.”

As I read it, it remains a HoT mastery that you must train in HoT. But that is an interesting question, is it possible to make mastery xp earning more global?

Gliding! Shatterer gets the Tequatl treatment! Fractal level resets in the lobby! Support gets event credit (if tagging targets a wee bit)! Squad and camera improvements! Squee! Lunar New Year, yay, I actually enjoy Dragon Ball and I’m interested in the “new rewards,” so long as they don’t involve eating 10,000 spring rolls.

Brew of the month looks low key fun and almost exactly like the WoW version.

As to the longer term stuff, I am eager to see the new fractals. For the new raid wing … sadly I have yet to even beat Vale Guardian, never having been in a full 10 man raid. I think I may never get to see all the raid stuff. But it’s awesome that those who are doing the raids get more of them. And hopefully the WvW changes will please those who WvW.

I have already done them but would be willing to assist even though I loathe that centaur battle most vigorously.

This Wednesday and Thursday I should be available, afternoons/evenings eastern time. I’m on NA.

Although I don’t WvW much, or these days at all really, I’ve always liked Tarnished Coast’s esprit d’corps. It may have changed by now, especially in these mega server days and as people have moved to TC just because it was high ranked in WvW, but it originated with mostly roleplayers. As usual with RPer dominated PvP areas, the RPers kicked butt! Even though common wisdom is that an RPer can’t possibly be any good in a “real” fight, in actuality those RPers that enjoy PvP tend to be intelligent about it and committed longer term to the game so they have time to learn the nuances. And then they take time for RP-walking the dolyak escorts, or having parades of themed tonics on the way to taking keeps

This doesn’t mean non-RPers are bad at it, dumb, or immature, or that all RPers are shining beacons of rationality and intelligence, I’m not saying that at all. Just if you want a lot of friendly team spirit, odds are the RPers will offer it without in any way diminishing their capability in the field.

(Not long before I joined my RP guild of many years in WoW, for instance, two guild orcs were getting married in Thunder Bluff. The guild was there in RP garments, not their high end armor. Alliance folks decided then was a fine time to attack the city. The wedding turned into a battle, no one changed to their armor, and the Alliance was soundly beaten. Best Orc wedding ever).

You can open the wintersday gifts any time. You can even get more, either by a home instance tree courtesy of the Grawnk quest or by buying them on the trading post (though perhaps that will cost a lot especially once they are no longer in copious supply but remain the only source of booze for the shoulders). They will probably contain the same loot tables as right now, until next year’s Wintersday begins and the tables are revised.

Revealing as Tyrian clothing can be, that particular look doesn’t fit the aesthetic or the game rating.

Transmutations don’t change the underlying nature of the item. For instance, HOPE skinned onto a level 1 white pistol won’t suddenly give you a legendary to salvage.

You might want to submit a ticket to see if Support can move the weapon over to the correct alt. Such things really ought to be account bound, soulbound on equip. It could take a few days for them to get anything done for you, so weight that against a second purchase.

WvW got a lot of mention in Colin’s 10 minutes on Guild Chat last Friday. This blog, titled “Profession Balance Goals for the Winter 2016 Update,” talks about how each profession is getting changed. It’s not about any game mode, just how the individual professions are to be affected regardless of mode.

One might as well complain that WvW wasn’t addressed in the lore blog about the Itzel and Nuhoch. It’s simply not part of the article’s subject.

They said they want to do these balance updates every three months or so, ie roughly once a quarter. A week from tomorrow will be just shy of three months since launch. Thus my prediction that the first quarter update will be next week.

Thaladred.1406:

This the Tuesday update?

I doubt it since they aren’t giving us detailed info until Friday’s Guild Chat. I’ll wager on the following Tuesday.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/profession-balance-goals-for-the-winter-2016-update/

This is a very general overview. Details come on Friday on Guild Chat.
(Someone else posted about it already but as they focused in on Ele Scepter I thought a more general thread for discussion might be handy).

All the upgrade does is unlock the content for you. Your account remains exactly as it is now, with access added to the HoT areas. When you get the upgrade you receive a serial key which you then go to the registration page to apply. Tell it to apply to your current account (because if you tell it new account, you will be making a new account and starting it from scratch) and voila, you will have your characters in HoT.

Also, pssst, it’s Heart of Thorns. Like spiky bits on jungle plants. Not thrones like you sit on.

With Win7 (and presumably later versions) you can go to the Accessibility controls and activate the mouse control by keypad option. Then the num pad + is a double click.

That does mean one key press = two mouse clicks, but I can’t imagine them sanctioning you for using that to consume stacks of holiday food without ruining your hand tendons and mouse button. You still have to actively press it and it gives zero game advantage over anyone else. Unless you, with your still functional hands and mouse, can then trounce the aching players that did it the regular way?

I gave up early on that part (mostly due to the JP requirement, partly due to having just finished Nightfury and not wanting another big project right away). But the Sweet Tooth seemed doable so I chomped all my candy canes and lots of my mint foods. As of last night I still needed over 1K … so I bought the rest (hint: you will save a good hunk of change if you put in bids on the mint rolls, I got those at 1s 69c each instead of the over 2s per candy cane).

Thank you, Win7, for having the Accessibility controls. I turned the num-pad-equals-mouse function long enough to just have to tap the + key a lot to eat the food stacks.

Time to go farm up a lot of gifts to sell booze and food to recoup some of those costs!

Given that you can sell the booze for a nice hunk of change, at least while people are still working on the shoulders, I’ve been very happy to get it in the gifts. Do some relaxing activities, do my dailies, make a few gold without stress. I like this.

If I were talented at making gifs, though, I’d so do a cute one because of your typo

I’m sorry it bores you. I’ve enjoyed every run, even the time I had to help kill a boss 4 times because the zerg fell apart and pods kept respawning. I love flying around the islands and rushing for pods afterwards (mostly because there is a pod heaven in the northwest). I like the banter in Map. The lanes are different enough to give variety if I want it.

Eye of the beholder, hmm?

(Now, Tangled Depths is a bit more annoying to me because it has large dead spots in the schedule and I can’t seem to get to all the events in a chain even if I start at the very beginning. Curse you, feed the young beetles, why can’t I find you?).

Darn, I just left game for a dinner break. I’ll be back in .. an hour? Depends on what I cook and how caught up in my book I get.

There are one or two minor exceptions. I’m using my thief to make HOPE (well, just in the very first part so far). My engie is my huntsman. It turned out the Huntsman had to go loot the alchemy cache in the Tears of Itlaocol because it gave a recipe directly to him. But for all else so far I’ve roamed around on the thief, dropped recipes in the bank, and swapped to the Huntsman to learn and use the recipes.

Try this method:

Pick up the bacon.
CTRL-right click your 6 skill.
Watch.

Doing that auto starts the bacon nibbling, and auto-attack auto-fires the heal the moment it’s off CD.

If it doesn’t work for you that way, then press 6, give it a few beats of health drop, then CTRL-right click the 6 to start the auto-heal a little later.

I have managed it the manual way (I have good latency), the full auto-heal way (but there was a Chronomancer there at the time dropping alacrity so I don’t know for sure it worked on auto), and since then I’ve had adrenal mastery. Still, I twigged to the auto-heal method after someone from Australia mentioned it as the only way to beat a high ping in this HP. Apparently it worked for that person.

Locuz.2651:

RubiBayer.8134:

OK I like teasing content and stuff as much as anyone, but it would be too cruel to just … show that off on the dev client all “Haha look what we can do in the office and you will never have it muahaha!”

I would never, ever do that, I swear.

Can u play black dessert in your office? That would make me jealous :-/

I bet some of the cupcakes Reddit sent were dark chocolate. That’s an almost black dessert. Be jealous!

Mostly Power, I’d say, but it offers a lot of Blind through utilities like “Golden Reflections” and Daze through “Speech of Thanks.”

When you are considering gem store purchases that have no timer, it is wise to always assume they will be gone as of the coming Tuesday unless they have already been around for months. Then you can decide whether you want them badly enough to spend the resources right away or if you’ll be “oh, well, missed it” if they vanish.

I would expect all the seasonal stuff to be gone as of Tuesday’s patch and thus best purchased by Monday evening if you really want it. It seems likely to me that the BL weapons will also switch away from the Timekeeper ones. If you haven’t gotten any of the seasonal items or Timekeeper skins yet, and it’s not because you simply can’t afford any of them, maybe you don’t really want them that much and won’t be sad a month from now that you avoided buying them? (That’s my litmus test when shopping for things that I’m not sure I can get later at will: “will I regret not buying this tomorrow? Next week? Month? Year?” And then I balance how long I think I’ll be kicking myself versus how much the thing will cost and make my decision. I’m still so very sad about the gorgeous peridot net necklace I passed up for a while at an antiques center until it was gone, even though at the time $300 was a fortune to me).

Emiko.3217:

Methods.4023:

One thing NON INSTANCE HOUSING……… please and thank you

….so you wouldn’t be upset if someone enters your house without permission?

Permissions will cover that. The real reason to be upset is that you can’t get a house at all because the first 1,000 players to log in at just the right moment ran and grabbed all the real estate. There isn’t room in the world for every single player to have a personal spot in it.

I hope not to wait all the way to the next expansion for personal housing, but I would rather wait and have a fun, flexible, accessible system than something that causes blood feuds in the player base or costs too much for anyone to make it look nice without a 500 man guild helping them.

Those can be a pita. I think you still have your utility skills, right? Depending on your profession, equip useful things there for the run. Thief stealth heal/shadow refuge, Guardian Retreat, protection, Save Yourselves, etc. Condi cleansers are good.

If you’re around tomorrow afternoon/evening (eastern) give me a holler. I’d be glad to go in with you and help lead the jumps. Warning, once you get up past the tendrils on the ledges there is a much harder part that needs you to use all 3 abilities to the utmost, including hitting the 2 skill while gliding at the end.

Did you close the game and log in on a different alt? The one time this happened to me (it was when I logged in at the exact second of reset) that cured it.

You won’t lose your daily login chain, however, even if you can’t do today’s daily. It pauses, it doesn’t reset. If you are on day 13 and then go away for two weeks, you’ll be on day 14 of the cycle the next time you log in.

The cool thing was, if I remember correctly, it kept happening each time I glided. Until I zoned, then my glider showed itself again. But that’s why I was able to set up a few screens of it.

You mean like this? (Sorry about the composition, this was back in October and I didn’t have advanced gliding yet so I couldn’t keep my UI off for long when this bug hit).

I was expecting a thread about stuff in chat that is irrelevant to the game. Everything you posted might be annoying if you disagree with it, might even be flat out wrong, but it’s hardly worth complaining about so publicly. Just sigh, facepalm, and carry on.

That sounds … shady? If you want to spend RL money on gems ANet has their own direct sale of them via the TP (use PayPal, a credit card, or a third option I haven’t memorized) or you can buy gem cards from places like Amazon. If this mol place sells gem cards the cards should still work.

Ok .. googled it. I won’t go to their site. From the google squibs it looks like they sell various game currencies in exchange for their own currency. I would assume you have to pay more to MOL than you would to buy the things directly or they wouldn’t make any profit.

Why not just buy straight from ANet?

Over 10K, you can trade it in for favor (which is how my guild got a number of upgrades even though we haven’t done a single mission in a very long time, since well before HoT — we’re stalled now, though, until we can get enough people on at once for that). Under 10K you can trade it in at the mine for faster aetherium mining (not much, like one or two seconds faster per minute, for around 10 minutes) but that’s only handy if you keep having upgrades to spend aetherium on.

Please speak for yourself, Liewec. I have had a ton of fun with HoT, there are things in it I have yet to experience despite many hours played, I don’t feel stupid for having bought the Ultimate Edition, and unless my life goes very poorly by the time the next expansion hits I’m sure I’ll be buying the biggest version of that.

Your “us” and “we” should be “me” and “I.”

Are you sure it did nothing? We had a guildie with an old influence item — I found out because the guild log noted her giving influence to us.

I don’t know if our banked influence actually increased, though, my memory of how much we have is “less than 10,000.” Since her donation didn’t take it to “over 10,000,” it could have counted or not for all I know.

I’d love to see them use Shriketalon’s LS ideas as inspiration for telling a more world-wide complex story.

As far as specific game things to include, I think some of what you are asking for is stuff they could deliver for free in the current expansion via patches and would rather that happen than wait another 1 to 2 years for it. Weapons, armor, more elites, new raids (which Colin specifically mentioned on Guild Chat were coming this year), new fractals and guild halls, all those can come as additions in HoT, with even more variations included in an expansion as a natural part of one.

A new continent? Now that would be an expansion! Especially if it has the scope of Pact Tyria.

Player housing. I really hope it comes out in the current game, but as it would need some substantial changes from the guild hall system to be viable and fun it might warrant an expansion treatment. Sad though I’d be to wait that long to give my alts their various apartments, mansions, labs, holdings, or back alley crates to live in …

Laurie, are you NA? I think I have a crystal on one of my alts that I was saving until someone needed the vendor. I’d be happy to come in game and use it on your behalf.

(If I didn’t already use it. My memory is hazy on that).

That’s even better than That-Shaman’s clip!

All right, rewatching Colin’s comments (and running them over and over again to transcribe, I’m no stenographer), he says starting around 10 minutes in to http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/34296922

“This year our focus is really to find a balance in development … We want to be able to have more frequent game updates for everybody, and we want to be able to continue to work on the next expansion simultaneously. So that’s a lot of what you’re going to see this year, is a combination of more frequent game updates, more regularly, and more balance across different parts of the game. We really want to treat PvP, PvE, WvW as all of them as our core game modes for GW2 and frequently update each of them. And within them, continue to update the core content pieces that make up those. We want to have updates to fractals, updates to Living World, have updates to World vs World, and PvP. All of those are things that we’ll be focusing on. New raids. As we kinda balance development across this year, we’re also working towards the next expansion as well.

So that’s really kinda what balanced development means to us and what you’re going to see in 2016 is a much more balanced strategy, development wise."

He goes on to discuss the experimental nature of GW2 development and says “3 years in, we’re really at the point where we need to focus on depth instead of breadth.” “I want our teams to focus on the systems we’ve built and lets just polish those, and add a lot more content to them.” He makes an exception for WvW, saying it needs more than just polish. “It’s the one part of the game where we still have a lot of core, fundamental things that we need to do.” Then he goes back to the other game areas and repeats the desire to polish it and “keep adding game content to those areas.”

Tuesday’s blog will outline what we can expect in the next three months and give an overview of plans for the year.

So not only did they not say they are ditching LS, Colin specifically mentioned it as an area getting equal dev time.

Heh, DaShi is referencing another current conversation with that line.

About your request for cheaper decorations: Yes, please. Except I’d almost rather they keep the current costs if they need the mats sink but convert the Storage to a wardrobe skin system so you only have to make one chair and then you can put as many down as you want up to the hall item limit. Maybe have some basic cost akin to transmutation charges for placement, and guild members can donate charges to the hall or else need to spend their personal charge stash to decorate. But not this ridiculous, ludicrous overspending per item.

My fervent hope is that if/when we get personal housing it uses a skin system instead of ruinous costs per each thing of a type made.

edit: For guilds that already made a zillion expensive things, there should be some sort of compensation if the system changes, much as there was for players with multiple sets of the same town clothes when the Wardrobe system was deployed.

Lumpy.8760:

this has NOTHING to do with whatever that website is. this was all expressed in an official arenanet stream!!!!

/laughs

If you go to “whatever that website is” the OP linked, you will see it is Dulfy’s summary of the official stream and includes a video of the stream.

So it has everything to do with it.

Khisanth.2948:

It is also possible to jump into the lab.

That doesn’t help people that need the full event to run to open the vendor, though.

They want to shake the meta up every three months via balance patches. They don’t need an expansion for that. Still elite lines seem very likely things to be included in expansions though not necessarily only released in expansions.

I believe the problem with this is that this would mean the TP has to match everything against your account each time you load it and users shan’t be overjoyed to wait a few minutes for each transaction.

But I could be wrong. I thought the work to give us core world gliding would be too extensive .. and look what’s coming.

So I will agree! I would love a “locked skins and dyes” filter, if it can happen without adversely impacting current data access speeds.

You should be able to put any other weapon sigil in except another accuracy one. Equip the GS, have the new sigil in inventory, double click the sigil. You get a pop up window with the accuracy sigil in one slot and the other slot empty. Click on the other slot and/or drag the sigil to it. Another popup will ask for confirmation, at least if you’re overwriting an existing sigil. That should get it installed (if somehow it wants to overwrite the accuracy sigil, tell it No).

It could be an honest to goodness glitch. Or maybe (this is a stretch, depends on how eagle eyed you are in watching your progress), maybe each time you finished the xp for a tier you didn’t notice it for long enough that the game had to pick somewhere else to dump the excess xp and it was in Pact Commander? And this happened enough times to max a tier there?

I have not, but then I just hopped into Choir Bell for a round of music and profitable gifts. As soon as the scoreboard popped up I had the daily done.

You can go there if Southsun Survival is failing to proc the daily for some reason.

In Map chat just now someone suggested off of Rata Sum. Heck yes.

I’m sure it means something HoT-like. Twitch chat got very excited when he casually mentioned that in a sentence talking about balancing development focus.

Remember all the discussion about the price model for HoT, and the people that felt it was wrong to “give new players more because the core game is included for them?” Pretty early in that ANet flat out said “this is our new model, you’ll have to buy expansions but all earlier versions will be included so no one ever has to buy multiple games at once just to play.” This made future expansions rather less hypothetical.

The interesting take away from Colin’s comments is that they will be working on the next expansion this year alongside delivery of deeper content for existing systems, not waiting a year to even start. Presumably there will be more information regarding this on Tuesday in Colin’s promised blog.

You should listen to Colin’s comments yourself, Dulfy includes the video and it’s only 10 minutes at the start of the stream (plus a few seconds at the end). The rest is well worth watching if you have any interest in the process of composing game music but won’t tell you anything about coming game content.

edit @ Obtena: Actually, he specifically said that LS would be one of the things coming during the year.