Guild Wars 2

On the twitter comments one poster said “A bouquet of bears for me?! Honey, you shouldn’t have!” and I lol’d.

Here’s the image for people who haven’t seen it yet:

Kaiden Valor.7163:

[img]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CMn2D1RUkAApy2Q.jpg[/img]

No idea if this is how you post images… If this turns out wrong could someone tell me how it’s done :P

Save the image to your computer. Start a post. Click the More Options at the bottom. Click the Browse button. Select the saved image. Hit reply (or Preview to make sure the image loaded). Voila.

And looking at it more closely — that’s a torch made of animal heads. Balth hounds maybe?

Woo! I’m happy they were just later than usual today. I did not want an info-light week

Though my warriors are my least played alts. They’d be even with my eles except I’m leveling an ele just now. Still … maybe the warrior elite will turn them into something I enjoy.

notebene.3190:

Donari.5237:

It’s one of the new settings. You can toggle it off in your Options if you wish. I don’t recall the exact name but the designed behavior is to have your camera adjust like eyes do when moving between light levels.

The other new setting is ambient occlusion, I think that has something to do with light coming past edges of things.

And my ambient is off.

Did they happen to mention, like they did with all the other camera settings when they introduced those, what they should be set to so it behaves as it used to?

Edit: I guess I’ll just reverse them and see what happens:

Ambient: On
Light Ad: Off

They were in the July 28 patch notes:
“We’ve added new graphics options for players with higher-end machines.

Tune the look of your scene with ambient occlusion or light adaptation.
Choose between two extra antialiasing options: SMAA Low and SMAA High."

I could swear I saw a more detailed post somewhere explaining them, but I’ve checked the news blogs from that time frame and it’s not in there that I can see.

Here is a thread where people discuss the effects a bit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/OMG-finally-SMAA-and-ambient-occlusion

Maybe I just saw the details by mousing over them in the Options window?

It’s one of the new settings. You can toggle it off in your Options if you wish. I don’t recall the exact name but the designed behavior is to have your camera adjust like eyes do when moving between light levels.

The other new setting is ambient occlusion, I think that has something to do with light coming past edges of things.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Fairly certain all class reveals had an image up by this point. I think it is pretty safe to say we aren’t getting on this week.

Agreed. We won’t get challenging group content, either, since they’re saving that to announce two Saturdays from now. Other than that, what’s left of substance for us to learn?

They could reveal a whole new system they hadn’t hinted at, or give us a look at the new guild interface, I suppose. But sans challenge or elites, it seems more likely to be an info-light week.

Egad, 15 stacks of salvage kits? You can turn that into 1, or at most 2, via salvage-o-matics.

I think you are the first person I’ve seen who min-maxes to the point of situation-specific sigils, too. More power to you, I have a lot of respect for people with that kind of attention to detail, but I suspect you are vastly in the minority. Even though it would be cool to be able to combine stats and then toggle them as you ask (if you make it extend to adding as many stats as you want per piece, then it is heading for Legendary armor), I think it is a solution to a problem that the majority of players never experience.

To clarify, not only did you have access to the elite specs through your Build tab on your Hero Panel, you started with the elite spec equipped by default and with the elite weapon equipped.

The time consuming part lay in reading through all the skill and trait tool tips, selecting that which seemed most of interest, deciding what stats would matter most and picking those stats on each piece of armor and weapon from the first box, remembering one needed runes and sigils and opening that box and picking out good ones …. and then, if you were me, putting together a look from the wardrobe and dyeing it nicely. That was at least 20 minutes for each of the four slots for me. Then I ran around the starter area testing the skill and utility cast times and effects and then I could head off to the story. (Oh, and of course I spent some time before all that just designing the alt’s appearance in creation).

Anyway, hopefully you’ll have more time in BWE2. But as long as you make a profession with a testable elite, you should be automatically in that elite at the start.

I am surprised by the empty maps you encountered. I spent most of my weekend in Verdant Brink and there were people everywhere. Thanks to bugged events I never even saw the Itzel get fed, let alone the rest of the chain heading to the wyvern, and only got one shot at each side of the southern chain going to the wurm. I also only ever found one operational activity, the salvage pit, and managed to do it exactly once. But I wasn’t alone at anything I did, even nighttime soldier escorts attracted others to help.

I hope it stays huge! Then we can all pretend to be Rangers … or circus tamers, as I note the outfit my guy is in tonight.

Here’s mine in Errol Flynn mode:

1 — There is a deep sea dragon eating all the ships.

2 — No one in Tyria knows, because there is a deep sea dragon eating all the ships.

I also always want more space but I can see some things in your bags that you could deal with very quickly, to wit the crafting mats and a set of green gear you could salvage (or, if you are keeping it as a costume set, keep it in the bank as it’s nothing you’ll need quickly for combat). Black Lion chests can also go in the bank, you won’t get keys nearly often enough to need to keep the chests handy. The junk items you have don’t sell for enough copper to be worth holding onto if you’re hurting for space, so you can ditch those on the fly as needed. I’m not sure what the 236 items in the lower left are but if those are lunar festival tickets they may never be needed and meanwhile can go to the bank.

You’ve collapsed two bags and more are hidden by the scroll bar being at the top, so I don’t know what else you have that isn’t vital to haul around.

If you don’t have room in your mats storage for the leather, you can expand your storage up to 1500 in a stack, then sell anything beyond that to the TP.

NapTooN.6283:

Donari.5237:

I’m a bit confused by the two auto-attacks. Does the game detect your range and pick which one to use? Or do you have to toggle skill 1 or skill 2 based on your moment to moment preference?

You decide which one will be autocast by the game by “setting it up” as your Autoattack with Shift(?)+RMB.

Ok, so just like now when you can pick any skill 1 – 0 to autocast, except that in this case the number 2 also has no cooldown and is low cost? But you can’t seamlessly swap between them since you have to do the CTRL right click (pretty sure it is CTRL not SHIFT).

That seems less innovative than the stream made it sound.

Embrace The Bold.7619:

The double source does add credibility but if you remember before launch we had a lot of devs being inconstant with each other so staying skeptical never hurts.

Healthy skepticism is a fine thing. I agree you should not blindly believe, caveats should be applied, so forth, so on.

But they are not being inconsistent here. Devs said in live Twitch interviews HoT would launch this year, they said it clearly and with emphasis and repeated it to make sure the message was heard. Then they followed up with the tween as quoted in this article:

http://massivelyop.com/2015/08/06/gamescom-2015-guild-wars-2-confirms-2015-expansion-launch/

So barring disaster, we’ll have HoT this year. ANet has no reason to lie. Unforeseen circumstance (say, a nuclear reactor meltdown forcing a Seattle area mass evacuation?) could intervene but for now they are on track — keep in mind that they historically keep silent when they are unsure of a release, they don’t give a time frame and then ditch it. (The precursor crafting thing being the one exception, but even then I wouldn’t say they were lying about their plans).

As to the thread topic, hmm. I’d love them to double up on reveals, or even triple up. However I think they are going to stick with a full week per elite, so no, we can’t see all the elites before PAX. Alas.

I think what will slow it down is that they most likely would have to release an equal amount of elites for all professions. So they can’t just give us the next Guardian one when it’s ready, they have to deploy multiples of nine at once. With the amount of work that goes into each elite spec, that turns any elite release into a massive game update.

Given the time it’s taken them to work on the current set plus revenant, getting new ones even every six months seems optimistic. I hope they surprise me, but I think it will be more of an annual thing at best.

Oreithyia.3064:

- perhaps some 15th century clothing for humans? (with hosen for the guys and really long dresses with loads of folds and high waists for the girls).

What if the women want hosen too?

What I want is something with a proper landsknecht hat. A guildie of mine who is an amazing artist sketched this first meeting of her and my mains meeting, back in the forum RP days before we had beta weekends or knew exactly what our mains would look like or what garments would be available (her name is Mudora and you should all find and support her work! The sketch below is hers, she retains all rights). Just look at this hat …

I’m a bit confused by the two auto-attacks. Does the game detect your range and pick which one to use? Or do you have to toggle skill 1 or skill 2 based on your moment to moment preference?

Coulter.2315:

Tyloric.7520:

Teon.5168:

Walhalla.5473:

Can someone remove the 25 Stacks of Confusion I got after reading OP’s Post.

LOL! At least you only got 25 stacks of confusion. I got that, plus 20 stacks of bewilderment after reading the initial post in this thread.

I’m stunned without any stability skills equipped. Send help.

Try Blinking.

That doesn’t help the people staring with wide-eyed befuddlement. They can’t Blink!

So they aren’t doing a global survey of HoTBWE1 participants? Ah well. There are other means of giving feedback, and surveys often leave me wanting an essay section with each question anyway because the pre-set answers are seldom right on target.

While I wouldn’t say AA players should not be invited to GW2, I do think that anyone who stuck with AA this long since launch would really not fit in to GW2’s community. That game and its forums were an utter cesspit in the time before and after launch. Anyone who thrives on ganking, scamming, griefing, trash talking, and bigotry just isn’t suited to GW2.

Thanks, I’ll check Dulfy once I’m back from the vet.

1 — You do need all of them to max out GWAMM so far as I know. I only have 4 HoM points myself but I did buy all of them so I could have my guildies haul me around in GW1. Alas the one organizing things there had a baby and has other things on her plate now.

2 — It absolutely should stay. The whole point of the new design was to allow people to play/replay the story whenever they want. It makes money for ANet. It’s the story that leads into the HoT story so people need to play it to understand it. When ANet is able to, they’ll reintroduce LS1 story as well (though that’s a huge undertaking and won’t be soon). Why on earth would they remove LS2?

3 — Can’t help you, I’ve never used free camera.

Darn it, I have to take my cat to the vet smack dab in the middle of the PoI today. What’s the easiest way to find the recording after the show? I know that Twitch has a replay of recent shows but have not figured out how to locate those, and even a day later my googling never turns up the YouTube; I have to have someone else give me the link.

You do realize that you can only slot one elite at a time, right? You will always have to have two cores with any one elite. ANet intends that the elites change up a profession without making it more powerful — they may have to work on the balance over time to make that closer to a reality, but so far the reason to take an elite is “oh shiny new!” rather than “no one without an elite can beat me.”

But as you believe ANet is full of cheating liars, and don’t understand that we are not paying again for the core game, you will probably continue to view anything ANet does in the most negative light possible. Have fun in your dark view of the world.

Huh, I had noticed that behavior but thought it was just a glitch on a node or two. It’s like the F prompt isn’t returning as fast as it used to.

They are revamping guild chat for HoT, including letting us see 5 guild chat channels at once. Perhaps account names will be an option then?

Meanwhile if you mouse over the name in chat you will see the account name.

Not a great shot but I made this guy as a throwaway to test Shiro and didn’t focus on getting pics of him. In game shots with his ambrite hammer are far too zoomed out. He did look nicely glinting gold metal in game; I used Brass or Bronze for the dye, with Shadow Abyss for the cloth areas and … Flare? for the glowing parts.

I have no problem with the price, I paid it happily and have no regrets. I expect to get full value for my money; I’ve already gotten hours of beta fun for the price of a moderately nice dinner out with my husband.

I’m chiming in because of the current sway of the discussion towards pricing it lower for people who bought earlier. I disagree with this idea, but in the bizarre hypothetical world where it might be implemented, I suggest that it should be based on hours played, not date of purchase. Again, I disagree with charging less for people who’ve already had more fun, but it’s just not right to call someone a veteran because they bought the game at launch, played a week, and skarkered off. Want to give preferential treatment? Give it to those who’ve been an active part of the community and kept the game feeling lively for others playing.

I never lower my settings for anything other than removing post-processing on the rare occasions I don’t like sepia tones. I don’t do Teq very often, generally just when Sparkfly Events are the daily, but I get through it fine on max settings.

I do tend to fight north defense rather than in the zerg, though. That might make a difference. I did have one Teq crash in the last few months. I can’t remember if that was on my usual computer or on the old junker I took to my mom’s for a month.

Anyway, no, I don’t lower my settings. So not everyone does.

What also puzzles me is I decided to consolidate boosters with powder after the patch and before reading about this change. I pulled a bunch out of my bank and started clicking powder. It zeroed in on the karma boosters first out of all the random things in my bags. Maybe the karma boosters were in the first position in the backpack?

I would have thought it would go for the 1:1 ones first as being more reasonable to convert. I confess noobishness on this, probably I should have paid more attention to the ratios. Still, if it turns out that karma is vital in the expansion I’ll be sad my 50 boosters are gone into thin air. They mostly came from black lion chests opened with keys bought with gems bought with RL cash, too.

At least I have around 4 million karma banked. As long as I don’t go crazy on T3 cultural weapons I should have enough for any reasonable needs.

Keep in mind that if you do the gift, your friend will have HoT and you won’t. Maybe s/he will like the game enough to return the favor and gift you the upgrade later

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Can’t you just get one for each toon?

You can … when that specific toon turns two years old. So an alt you made last month has a long wait.

I don’t mind them being soulbound, myself. I don’t use them except for silly fun but at least all my 2 year olds have one. If it was account bound it would be more like the Queen Jennah mini, an eye-roll at having yet another (that wouldn’t even stack), and would feel much less like a marker for the alt.

We should name the forum bug something silly it wants to change so it won’t show its face.

ForBu.1111 maybe?

SaintSnow.6593:

Just one question, looking at you with the odd/ridiculous display names that beg for a change. Why did you input that name to begin with?

I think the answers in this thread to that have been that they didn’t realize it would be publicly visible and they just wanted to put something in quickly so they could continue with their registration.

Ah, I stand corrected! In that case there may be a connection.

Jorvych.3064:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Over the last week we have seen an increased fraud purchase attempt rate for our Heart of Thorns Ultimate edition. Because of this increased fraudulent attempt rate, gem delivery for Heart of Thorns Ultimate may be delayed up to 72 hours after purchase.

I remember last night when I tried to buy the Ultimate edition in-game it failed, like, 3 times. could this have something to do with this fraudulent purchase attempts?

p.s. it worked on the site, though. how odd.

You can’t buy the Ultimate in game, then you’d be buying gems with gems. That’s been there from the beginning, so it’s unrelated to the frauds.

Support is actually quite helpful in this game so I think the odds are in your favor on the refund.

For future reference — bit of a barn door closed too late on this — you can buy bank and bag tab unlocks directly in your interface. For bags click on the padlocked bag tab, for the bank scroll to the bottom to find the padlock. You’ll get a popup offering to sell you the unlock for X gems. If you’ve maxed out, there will be no more padlocked tabs.

The bank tab is account wide, the bag tab is for that specific character.

I’m curious how “two auto attacks” work (for the underwater spear). Do you still have to select one of them that auto-fires?

You should add your voice to https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/And-poof-There-go-my-Karma-boosts/first

That’s up to you. You likely don’t have time to make one (unless you have a lot of gold) between now and HoT anyway. What you might want to do is gather the components that are universal to all the legendaries and sit on those until you know what the initial three HoT legendaries will be, in case one of them catches your fancy in a big way. Plus in HoT you’ll have a guaranteed way of getting your desired precursor.

Me, I’ve never bothered making even one legendary and I’ve played since early-access launch. It’s been more long term concentrated effort and resource dedication than I really wanted. So I’m quite comfortable with advising people to wait

Menadena.7482:

Is it one outfit or two since some couples will not want to wear the ‘default’? For example, at our wedding both my wife and myself wore pantsuits. We would have balked if the only option was wedding dresses.

It’s one, with a look varied by gender. You can check by previewing the item code in game.

Side note — the female Sylvari one takes on a lot more life with a deeper dye, and the flowers change their color dramatically depending on the paired dye choice that goes into them.

I’d give screenies but I don’t want to get in trouble for providing unreleased content.

Tyloric.7520:

Most major releases are on Thursdays (at least NA) for most publishers. Unless you’re Nintendo, who are special snowflakes. They like Sundays.

Anyway, I believe those dates are coincidence. I’m questioning if it’s even this year.

ANet devs made several comments at GamesCom that HoT is launching this year. Given their extreme reluctance to ever commit to any release until they’re very sure of themselves, I don’t anticipate a delay to 2016 barring major catastrophe.

It’s clear now, however, that it won’t release for the anniversary. They aren’t even revealing the challenging group content until after the anniversary date and they still have four more elite weeks on tap.

I never had the problem but I always made sure to stand dead center on the mushroom before hitting F. I also had the impression (likely erroneous) that I could steer during the jump, so I pressed forward when going up to the Pale Reaver rifle butte. That may have saved me once when I landed on the very edge, I’m not sure.

There was a thread speculating on what happens to the Elite spec weapon when you swap to the core specs. I tested with my Reaper:

With GS in first weapon set, staff in second, I changed from Reaper spec to a core spec. The GS went into my backpack (another poster said when the inventory is full it goes into one of those “your bags are full, grab this later” popups). All my Reaper utilities vanished, leaving empty boxes.

I assigned some utilities. My memory is a little hazy on what I did weapon wise. I do recall that somewhere in this process, the UI decided my second weapon set was my main one.

Then I went back to the Reaper spec. My utilities remained the core ones I’d just assigned. My traits had to be selected again. I had anticipated the latter and had memorized my 313 pattern for that, since we don’t have templates. If I hadn’t done so, I’d have had to mouse over the traits to remember what did what and choose them again. I had to move the GS back into the weapon slot.

This all is a) clumsy and time consuming and b) risks losing a valuable weapon if one has full bags and logs out without collecting the excess item(s) from the popup.

The early comments on Elite specs said that we would be able to change from Elite to Core any time out of combat as easily as we retrait now. This is not the case with the current design.

I have seen a few suggestions on how to handle the loss of the ability to use the Elite weapon. The easiest seeming one, coding wise, is to grey out the weapon in its slot and blank the weapon 1-5 skills until we manually swap something else in. That at least avoids inventory management issues. Another is to add a third weapon pair slot to the Hero Panel (maybe down and to the right?) in which we store the Elite weapon when not in the correct spec.

I’m not sure how well that will work as more weapons get added with future Elites, though. But if we can stick whatever weapon we want in there (perhaps limited to Elite weapons only), then it would be up to us to choose what gets cycled when we swap.

As to the utilities, the game already knows how to swap them out when we go between land and swimming. Could a similar trigger be put in place for Elite/Core swaps? Bonus, do this for underwater as well, so the game checks “On land and in Elite, this set; on land and in Core, this; in water and Elite, this other set; in water and Core, this final one.”

If these QoL issues aren’t addressed, people will need a few minutes to swap out to meet different situations, minutes they won’t always have if there’s a go-go-go event chain or dungeon run or a zerg is bearing down on them in WvW. Sometimes you want to get out of combat just long enough to swap a thing or two then run back in to help your friends. That’s just not feasible with the complete utility redo and the weapon getting jammed in the first open space in your bags, if you have any open.

Thanks for the gallery! I’ve settled on dagger and axe as my top picks of the set, mostly because the hammer, rifle, sword, and shield look cool but don’t gibe well with any of my alts and I only have two tickets. My female human necro looks perfect with the axe and dagger, though.

Well oops. I decided to consolidate my boosters and guess which ones got nabbed by the powder first today? My 50 karma boosters.

Not that I ever used them anyway. Karma just keeps piling up. Though with the coming “old recipes for karma” thing … maybe it would have been nice to have the boosts after all ><

I’m east coast US, here. I didn’t catch any international nuance to the wait period but I’m not sure I read the blog with scrupulous attention to detail.

So I can’t say that non-US folks can sign up for SMS without the invite, but east coast US people sure can this very moment.

It’s over now, Palador. I signed up for the SMS but accidentally put in my home number. It instantly called me and started reciting the code. There was a “not the right number” option so I was able to swap it to my cell phone and again, the text was instant. But it did give me a voice call even though I had “Text Message” selected since my land line is not an SMS device.