Guild Wars 2

You need to train the elite spec before you can use it, just like you have to train other specialization lines.

Go to the training tab of the Hero panel. Elite specs are at the bottom of the list. You only need the bare minimum to unlock the Shield for use, but you’ll need to fully train it if you want all the traits and utilities as well.

Once you train it, you also need to equip it. In the Build panel, you have to slot Chronomancer into the bottom your 3 chosen trait trees (elite specs can ONLY go in the bottom).

If you don’t have a Sylvari, you can also get it by joining a group with a player who is Sylvari and having them start the mission.

Its not at all a BAD trait, but the other 2 traits in the line are just so much better. Of particular note is Invigorating Torrents, since that basically directly competes with Tempestuous Aria since almost all shouts also have auras attached to them. So its basically an alternative shout trait, with similar uses (weakness and regen / vigor are both handy in staying alive better). But it has the advantage of also working with no less than 1 other skill on every weaponset, more on some, and some other traits as well. Where Aria is 100% shout-based and nothing else.

They probably should have ditched Latent Stamina, put Tempestuous Aria at the Adept level, and came up with something more unique for a Master level trait. TA would be a lot more competitive there.

I’ll agree 100% that Wyverns are borked, however I will correct you on one point. The DPS isn’t there either, paper or no. Wyverns are still on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to DPS even if they do connect all of their attacks. They fall below some of the tank / utility pets like Moas even in terms of DPS, which is a huge issue.

About the only thing they have going for them at this point is that all of their attacks are AoE. But drakes have that as well and are actually decent on top of that, so… yah, completely outclassed in basically every way.

They need significant changes before they become useable. The obvious one being a huge speed increase to all their attacks. I’d also advocate for a Blast finisher on Wing Buffet. And some F2 tweaks particularly to the Electric Wyvern. Make the lightning field actually do something (damage, debuff enemies, buff allies, something), and make it a linear field in the vein of stuff like Burning Retreat instead of just plopping it down at the end, where its really awkward to use it.

I’m not holding my breath, though. Sadly, almost all of the HoT pets seem rather haphazardly thrown together (there’s literally not a single finisher on any of them, despite hugely obvious candidates… no projectile finishers on the Bristleback when its literally shooting physical projectiles? No Leap finisher on the Tiger’s F2 even though other cats have similar F2’s that are leaps?), and despite me bringing up a number of issues during beta, a grand total of basically none of it was addressed for launch. The only changes that have been applied to pets seems to be “nerf the Smokescale”.

Rukiichan.4315:

I met someone with 100+ a week ago and asked him where he farmed for the HoT masteries. He wouldn’t tell because apparently his friends were still farming that spot and he didn’t want people crowding it. So its probably a place like cof p1 but in open world?

I’m seeing an awful lot of LFG requests for “VB spider mastery farm” lately. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Dunno what exactly it is, but if I had to guess, perhaps all the veteran spiders in the treetops near the Jaka Itzel?

Behellagh.1468:

Electro.4173:

By design to slow down hackers’ attempts at selling off a hacked players inventory.

If you’re getting it “every time you use the TP” then you’re building up too much stuff between rounds of sales. Try to sell stuff more frequently so you don’t have such a high volume to get rid of.

No, John Smith confirmed it was for technical reasons and not as an anti-bot measure.

Hmm. Must have missed that. Not that its hard to miss stuff with devs posting all over on various different social media.

Thanks for the heads-up.

hardy.7469:

It doesn’t help that if you are on a low pop map, and are asked to go to another, that transferring to the new map wipes all participation to 0 for your character. It gives zero incentive for people to even bother doing metas.

I mean who’s genius idea was it to have participation linked to the MAP and not the character.
Not many problems arise from that aside from the game forcing you to another map, crashes, disconnects, mega servers not working and more completely wiping all participation.
GENIUS!

Yah, I’m not a big fan of the participation being tied to maps. Considering just how long it takes to hit the max level of participation, its a punch to the groin when you build it up in a non-meta map only to LFG and end up back at 0 to try and get into a good map. Especially since finding a map that does the day AND night meta seems quite difficult. Usually the LFGs are just for the night phase.

It was fine in the Silverwastes because you could max your participation buff in a matter of minutes. But here, where it basically requires the full day / night cycle… its hugely punishing to switch maps to try and find a good one, but at the same time if you don’t do that you won’t hit T4 anyway so it won’t even matter. Darned if you do, darned if you don’t.

Technically, there’s 4 for each mode. PvP and WvW are quite different and are treated as such by the devs, even if both involve battling other players.

That said, I’d be all in favor of increasing the number of dailies across the board. 6/6/6, 8/8/8, whatever. More options is always nice.

Definitely should not reduce the current numbers at all.

Yah, I believe there might be something up with the damage output from the Itzel archers as well.

I run a heavy Beastmastery / defensive build on my Ranger, which means most pets (other than the glass cannon ones like cats) are immensely tanky and can usually take multiple shots from just about anything besides obvious high-damage AoE fields. But those frog archers can devastate even my tankiest pets with no trouble whatsoever. Even the basic ones, not even elites or anything.

And its not the AoE field either. My pet actually CAN tank the AoE field just fine. Its one of their other attacks. I want to say its the one where they jump and fire arrows, but I’m not 100% sure on that, I just know its one of the more basic looking attacks and not the poison field.

Maybe its intentional to promote dodges or such, but I’m not too keen on attacks that (seemingly) ignore any and all defensive stats, certainly not from basic mobs. And if it is intentional, I think there needs to be a more obvious tell that its such a powerful attack, which isn’t the case with the Itzel.

The Mordrem Snipers at least have a huge obvious fire trail and the targeting reticule on your character prior to the shot, so I’m not too bothered by those. But the Itzel… I dunno.

The tools have been account-bound for quite some time, them becoming account-bound isn’t part of HoT, but there was a time a long while ago (more than a year back, IIRC) where they were soulbound.

If you do still have one of the soulbound ones, you can get it exchanged for an accountbound version by unequipping the item from your character and then talking to a Black Lion Weaponsmith. There should be a new option available for you to choose that lets you exchange it.

7 proper characters (that is, characters I actually level up and play beyond just grabbing home instance stuff or whatever with them). Ranger, Mesmer, Ele, Engi, Necro, Guardian, Revenant.

Don’t have a main. I try to play all of them equally. Though my Ranger has the largest percentage of world completion and is typically the first character I use for new content, so I suppose if I have a main then that would be it.

Even when he’s dead he’s OP. He died near a ledge at the instant I activated my leap skill and without a target I lept off the ledge to my death.

Definitely needz nerfs. A dead boss shouldn’t be able to kill you!

I don’t know enough about the markets to speculate for sure about ToT bags. Could go either way, from my perspective.

As for the forum search… the built-in search is completely and utterly useless. Don’t bother with it. Anet themselves are aware that its broken but say it’d be too much effort to bother fixing it.

There is, however, a sticky on the General Discussion forum which gives you an alternative. I’d check that.

Giver’s armor is crap anyway. The boon duration you pick up from it is completely awful for the stat cost associated with it, and for some reason even though there are now other armors with Concentration (which is to say, boon duration under a different name) they kept Giver’s the same as it always was.

Get Minstrel’s if you want boon duration and healing. You don’t lose nearly as much for it.

I got mine from a single random smokescale in the ruins of Verdant Brink.

I happened to get both the shadowscale claw and the saurian’s breath items from the same mob as well.

That was my good luck for the rest of the year, I guess.

I love the Asura auto chain animation. A nice mystical staff twirl all telekinetic-like is awesome. Don’t you change mah animations, I will rage<

I’ve never once had to login just to view the forum. Heck of a strange bug, I guess.

They haven’t said, and given they haven’t said until now they probably don’t intend to.

My best guess is that it may end on Tuesday, simply because every single Halloween item in the Gem Store is set to end then. Just conjecture, mind you, but if there’s something you absolutely have to get done before Halloween ends I’d suggest getting it done ASAP just in case.

Yah, what could possibly be broken about relatively damaging AoE attacks with party buffs making the user completely invulnerable for 4 seconds… and what could possibly be broken about a player having access to 4 seconds of invulnerability every 5 seconds…

Really now, c’mon. Asking for overload buffs is one thing, but this is just ridiculous.

If there WERE a variant of the Smokescale, 99% chance it wouldn’t just swap one of the active and passive skills of the pet. Would be out of line with every other pet in the game. Instead, what we’d likely get is one that still has Smoke Field as a passive ability, and then loses Smoke Assault for something else altogether.

Unless they removed Smoke Field from the passive abilities, gave both pets a new passive family ability, and gave Smoke Field as the F2 for a new pet.

Either way, someone is going to lose something in the process if they keep the pets in line with all other families in the game.

By design to slow down hackers’ attempts at selling off a hacked players inventory.

If you’re getting it “every time you use the TP” then you’re building up too much stuff between rounds of sales. Try to sell stuff more frequently so you don’t have such a high volume to get rid of.

An option would be fine, but I will riot if it just gets removed altogether. I loooove the glow.

I would love a nice variety of gliders earnable in-game.

However, with the current spread the way it is (which is to say, 100% of the non-basic gliders are gem-store items) I expect Gliders are the next Outfit in terms of availability. There may be the very rare occasional in-game one, but the great majority of them will be gem store only.

I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

I haven’t seen anyone mention most of the standalone skins. Perhaps they’re some of the “new recipes in the mystic forge” that the HoT patch notes mentioned, but people aren’t really experimenting with new forge recipes yet due to all the other stuff in HoT (and the debacle with the bat shoulders).

EDIT: Actually, after I posted I decided to go looking on Reddit and found this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3r4y0z/lets_try_and_find_the_new_skins/

Mikal Dynath.6195:

For some reason there’s always those that must be ‘First!’ … I usually give them the benefit of the doubt the first time and explain the process. Tell that the zerg scales up the doors and everyone (including them) get more loot. Since the time it takes to do a solo opened door and a zerg opened door are dramatically different, most times that’s good enough to stop someone. Very few continue doing it just to troll.

As for opening The Skeleton/Mummy door at the same time as the Count … that’s me. The Vet will absolutely help take down the Count. This is usually more noticeable if I’m on a smaller map, and the group is small, as a zerg doesn’t really need the help.

My best Lab story is when the Horror spawned NW and 3 of us kited him to the Count. The Horror ATE HIM ALIVE … we tagged from a distance so as not to aggro him and then cleaned up the half health Horror when their fight was finished. Again, not that big of a deal when the zerg is large, but there’s definitely a logic for some times.

Wait, the horror and the viscount can actually damage each other?! That sounds awesome. Every time I’ve ever had the Horror come over during a viscount battle, the strategy is “kite the horror away so we can kill him without being bombed by the viscount’s knockbacks”. You mean to tell me those people are depriving me of an awesome giant monster battle?

I now NEED to have the horror and viscount battle each other. I can’t live without witnessing that.

I believe that vendor was only around last year during Halloween.

Nick Lentz.6982:

Wanderer.3248:

Zerg doesn’t own the map. If people want to solo doors they’re allowed to.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of doors in the lab.

Probably the very same person who opened the doors. They nerfed the Time it takes for doors to open. so lol no shortage. A person who opens it solo is just an kitten or a troll. There is literally no reason to open by yourself. You also get less loots, as less mobs will spawn. The whole point of the labyrinth for what its worth, is team effort.

Less mobs spawn with a solo door, true. But not everyone has an uber AoE / DPS build that can get maximum lootz from zerg events. Some players will get more loot despite less mobs because they actually get a chance to tag all of them as opposed to a few.

The only times I see people intentionally ignore dead players is during events where the player either can’t afford to waste 30 seconds rezzing a player (time limit) or events where they’re likely to get killed themselves trying to rez others. Any other time, I almost never see someone ignore dead players (much less multiple people doing so).

And in those particular situations, I think it perfectly justified not to rez others until the event is finished or an opportunity to rez presents itself.

“Incentivizing” rezzes is a dangerous line to cross, because with extra rewards comes people who are willing to abuse that system to get the rewards. And THOSE people would be much, much worse than the “kittens” who aren’t rezzing you, as they’d be actively hurting the event just to help themselves.

I don’t think Anet has actually stated an official end-date for Halloween yet. But I do know they specifically said they would not extend it, stating that there are “other exciting things coming and that extending Halloween is not possible because of that”.

Why do you need them?

If its for the collection that requires the exotic trinket drop, you can actually get those from smokescales. I just happened to get one last night from a random smokescale in Verdant Brink.

GameStop and BestBuy have been the two that have always had Gem Cards in my area.

Target and WalMart carried them during the first year and a half or so, then phased them out. They recently started carrying them again, though (probably because of HoT).

Of course, different stores and different locations may vary.

If all else fails and you can’t find physical gem cards, you could always buy an Amazon gift card (pretty much anyplace sells those) and use said Amazon card to purchase Gem Cards.

There are only 9 elite specs but 17 weapons (I believe? Maybe one or two off) in the game. So there are definitely going to be some weapons that aren’t used for one, at least while we’re sitting at the current number of specs. Its not just rifle and shortbow.

Once we get more elite specs, like 3 per profession or something, if there still isn’t anything related to certain weapons, THEN its something to worry about.

There are other blocks that trigger on ranged hit as well. But all of those (like the Mesmer’s Sword4 and Scepter2) have a ranged attack to them, so you get the counterattack on the enemy at least.

I do agree that Protector’s Strike needs to be changed in some way. Blocking a ranged hit and then just swinging your weapon around uselessly is surely disappointing. But I think just letting it continue channeling through melee would be boring. Personally, what I’d like to see is to have it change the projectile into a ball of light with a small AoE blast radius (approximately the size of the melee counterattack) and launch it back at the enemy. A bit like Druid’s Staff5 where it converts the enemy projectile into a different projectile, except here you’d launch the return one back at the opponent.

jcbroe.4329:

Something small, but I just realized, that with traited glyphs, you proc Grace of the Land with the bloom.

That’s neat, but likely a bug stemming from the fact that the bloom is originally a celestial avatar skill.

Expect them to fix it at some point.

Man. I never even got to USE this trait before it got nerfed into the ground. Its the next one on my learn bar that I need 10 more points for, and it was the one I was most excited for going into the live launch. Guess I should have grinded faster.

Like, having never used the trait before, it did seem perhaps a little too good on paper. But 4x the cooldown? Jeez, that’s excessive.

I don’t think this would be an overall improvement, honestly.

Sure, you’d have an easier time following allies running around to try and heal them perhaps. But it would come at the cost of putting yourself in more danger. Right now, I can, say, pop the tablet over to an ally in melee range why staying safe myself, healing them without getting in the line of fire personally. Or if an ally is standing in a harmful AoE, same thing, I can throw the tablet over there to help them freely. Or as maybe a more complicated example, lets say I’m fighting an enemy that uses projectiles and puts down AoE fields and I’m trying to use the tablet to block projectiles for an ally. There’s an AoE field between the ally and the enemy. Right now, no problem. Just throw the tablet into position, pop the reflect, boom. If I was the tablet, though, then I have to put myself into bad situations to attempt to help allies.

The difference between the Raven and the White Raven confuses me. I was under the impression both of those pets were identical except for appearance.

Confirms my initial feelings that I had during beta on the Wyverns being completely and utterly terrible, though. Purely damage-oriented pets that have lower DPS than ranged / support pets, ugh. ‘dat godawful attack speed. Since I haven’t actually gotten either of them since the official launch I was hoping they’d have given them a speed boost or something, but I knew in the back of my mind it probably didn’t happen based on the utter lack of changes to any of the other pets.

I was looking for something like this too. In my rush to use trainers as vendors, I’ve managed to grab 2 crafting disciplines on one of my characters I have no intention of ever crafting anything on. Would rather just ditch them. Seems like its not something there’s any way of accomplishing in the current system, though.

I’d definitely like them to add an option to do so, assuming it wouldn’t be too much work. Not really worth a whole lot of effort, but it seems like it’d be a pretty easy thing to implement.

Basically every single back item that I’ve seen people suggest become a glider are way too small to be gliders. Its probably the entire reason the black / white wings and bat wings are so insanely large as back items. That is, because they need to be that large to work as gliders.

Some also wouldn’t make a lick of sense as gliders. Spinal Blades are too open to catch an updraft, not to mention the fact that they aren’t really wings anyway. Same with the Shatterer wings, though I suppose if those can carry a giant dragon they may as well carry a person. Jetpacks and gliders are not similar in the slightest. Daydreamer wings are more solid blocks shaped like wings than actual wings and wouldn’t really function as a glider.

They could make bigger versions of them I suppose. And hopefully that would only apply to the glider and not the back item, as I will riot if my spinal bladepack and holo dragon wings suddenly becomes the size of a house just to turn it into a glider. I hate oversized back items. Might look awkard when you transition from one to the other if they aren’t the same size, though.

Has anyone looked into crafting them via Scribe? It wouldn’t really fit with the other class sigils, but with Scribe being the new crafting profession in HoT and Revenant being new as well, I could see it happening.

Not only on Reddit. They also posted it here on the official forum a few days ago.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/A-note-about-Flax-Seeds/first#post5650766

Curious about this too. I know they said 2 weeks, but does that mean exactly 2 weeks (meaning they end next Friday) despite the fact that patches usually don’t happen on Fridays and it was a special case just for HoT, or does that mean on the normal patch day (Tuesday) after a 2 week period, meaning it’d actually be 2 weeks and 3 days.

Ugh. Seriously guys, stop derailing every thread by complaining about the location. Yes, its a bad setup for a pet location, but leave the criticism in the threads about that.

As for the lightning field, it should definitely do something. Its one of a number of critiques I brought up about the new pets during the BWE, but sadly not many people seem to have given much feedback on pets and they made it to live basically unchanged.

Its really lame that the field literally does nothing besides being a field for the sake of being a field. It needs to do damage, boons on allies, conditions on enemies, something. The attack is already pretty lackluster anyway (low damage with a very short CC), and the field doing nothing doesn’t help that matter any.

My personal vote would be pulsing damage on enemies + vulnerability. That seems to fit with the running theme for electric attacks in the game and would make the attack much more impressive and useful.

I’d also like to see the field drop in a line over the entire length of the charge rather than just a circle at the end. Would make a lot more sense and make it a lot easier to hit with, since in its current incarnation the pet often charges through enemies and puts the field where the enemies aren’t standing anyway as a result.

Oh, and it should be a leap finisher as well. It definitely fits the skill. It wouldn’t combo with itself, but that way the pet could charge through another field and trigger a leap while also leaving an electric field in its wake. It’d act much like the Necromancer’s Trident #3.

Gene Archer.8560:

If you guys want fun and lighthearted festivals, you are playing the wrong MMO.

I’m serious. If you want fun and lighthearted festival stuff, where you just do some cute little quests or run some events a max of like, 20 times to collect festival currency, play FF14.

Their most recent Halloween event grants everyone who does the little quest line an “outfit” (quotations because it’s actually a set of themed gear pieces), a cute little pumpkin pet, and a broom mount.

And it’s just a set of cute little quests, no major hassle. Just a little something to have fun with. None of this grinding forever and spending thousands of gold stuff just to discover where an item is.

Stop trying to find fun in ANet’s holiday event set ups. You’ll just be disappointed.

There’s plenty of easy-to-get stuff in GW2’s Halloween as well. Getting enough Candy Corn for most of the vendor items is perfectly reasonable (everything except Gwenefryd), and the new weapons and minis can be grabbed off the TP for a reasonable price if they’re not gotten via RNG drops. None of the achievements are overly grindy except for pumpkin carving.

If people are going to get hung up solely on the handful of expensive items, then so be it. But its not like everything is like that.

All the weapons only come with 3 stat combos (two old ones and one new one, though different types depending on which elite spec it is). So yes, I assume its intentional that the shoulders are the same.

Unlocking your off-hand isn’t the same as unlocking your weapon swap. Offhand gives you access to the 4 and 5 skills (well, 4 skill first, then 5 a couple levels later IIRC) by equipping a second weapon in your other hand for 1H weapon types.

Weapon swap lets you equip a second set of weapons and swap between the two in combat.

As Serval said, weapon swapping doesn’t unlock until level 10. At that point, assuming your not playing as an Engineer or an Elementalist, you’ll get a second section in your equipment screen to equip your second chosen weapon.

Since they specifically pointed out that a major reason for the change wasn’t because they personally felt it was too high, but because they didn’t properly communicate that it would be high to players before the fact…

I expect the next batch of E-specs to be as hard if not harder than this one, but with plenty of warning to people that you won’t be getting this day 1.

Did you kill the mushroom with your Dragonhunter / Guardian? Perhaps, like the stealth gliding mastery, it requires you to do something specifically with the class that the collection is for.

That’d be my only guess as to the cause, anyway. And if that is indeed the case, it may be intentional and just left out of the collection tooltips.

If not, though… yah, sounds like a bug perhaps.

Its just the way turret overcharge skills work.

Hitting an overload on a turret doesn’t make it immediately use that skill. Rather, it ques up the overload attack so that it’ll be used the next time the turret attacks normally.

Or in the case of Healing Turret, it’ll make Cleansing Burst trigger the next time the turret releases a healing mist.

As Bart said, if you hit 6 fast enough after putting down the turret, you can get it to use it on the first mist it uses. If you aren’t fast enough activating the skill, you have to wait until the next time it “attacks”.

While greater build variety and synergy is all well and good, I am and will remain very much opposed to regen charging AF simply because its far too passive. Toss regen on a group and then run off to let your AF passively build up from 30+ seconds of regen you can put out on everyone. No thanks. May as well just have AF regen automatically at a slow rate in combat and cut out the boon “middleman” if you’re going to do that. After all, that would open up even more build options, so if that’s the only goal, then…