Guild Wars 2

Allaraina.8614:

Just to clarify so that people don’t take it lightly (not that I think you are, but in case others do) in my experience company decisions are made based off of politics and the interpretation of current revenue data.

Fair enough. I suppose me shortening it as I did doesn’t help. I updated that post and link it to your others.

So I’m guessing that changing something that DID take a lot of work to code, design, implement, etc was not a flip decision. Companies do NOT like wasting money. Maybe the guess is that they can generate more revenue by changing over where they focus their finite resources.

Agreed. That’s part of why this choice doesn’t make a lot sense to me. And when I say that, I mean “over less invasive and/or less work-heavy alternatives.” Trying to shift towards a more profitable setup is understandable, but this is not a new minefield they’ve wandered into. It has happened before with the Flamekissed controversy. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that messing with an entire category of cash shop items is going to spark a fire. No pun intended.

nGumball.1283:

Oh my, you are really good with finding typos. If you are this good, you should probably read it to understand that forcing Anet into refunds isn’t a legal option.

I don’t think anyone here expects to “force” a refund. This is about customers getting enraged by a problem and making their rage known. This is in line with “go to customer support or their superiors.”

In general, enraging customers does not end well, and we are seeing that process unfold.

Otherwise, if you really think games should not eveolve because some want those old features, then you have to try checking Wiki too, you will find some informative pages about MMOs.

This has nothing to do with evolution of design. In truth, gw2 can evolve further with town clothes and it would result in less issues, not more.

Wasbunny.6531:

Just to clear this up on the technical side, all armor/clothing is ‘weight painted’ or ‘skinned’ to the character making it move with any animations triggered. So once this is done the item will accept any form of animation. Short answer: no extra work.

I know. I was just pointing out that if they really wanted to keep some clothes outside of battle, they didn’t have to turn them into tonics.

Eskarina Tigress.3785:

You forget one thing. You had to buy 2 sets of armor AND use transmutation stones to get the desired effect, in the new system you only need the transmutation stones since you’ve already unlocked that, and other, armors for every toon.

Not really. In my case, after the first purchase, I’d still have those skins on that alt available for future use. It’s not so different than the proposed change, just requires an inventory slot unless I make the change right away. The difference being, of course, that it costs 3 times as much.

Having a skin unlocked in the Wardrobe really only benefits with either really expensive skins or sharing one skin across multiple characters.

notebene.3190:

2. If the issue is truly about spending time and money on getting combat animations for those specific pieces of clothing (which were some how mysteriously more difficult to do than other items), why spend any time at all on the ones you selected to make the cut?

I’m not sure. Given that the game already performs a similar check, I wouldn’t think creating a “cannot be used in combat” flag would be that hard compared to what they did.

3. Why spend all that time and money converting them to a mechanic (the tonic) that is inconvenient and clearly unacceptable?

I’m not sure here either. The best theory I’ve seen is Allaraina’s which boils down to “seemed like a good idea at the time….” is mentioned here and elaborated upon later.

Liraz.8062:

Town clothes were more beloved than I think any of us really knew.

Actually, I don’t use them at all. I’ve played quite a few mmos and have seen different ways to approach this issue. Some of them almost a decade old by now. It’s clear to me how bad a solution this is. Especially after seeing so many people post screenshots.

Nerelith.7360:

Maybe I Misunderstand the system, My understanding is, Once an item is unlocked, you get unlimited uses of it, for the price of a transmutation charge. so the only fee i can see is… the first time he transmutes the item. I may be wrong.

That isn’t how it works. Putting a skin into the wardrobe is free. Getting it out of the wardrobe costs a charge. Every time he wants to get that hood, it will cost a charge.

Bonefield.9813:

That’s not entirely true.

It’s moot point though. They could have said, “town clothes can now be used in battle. The wardrobe will support this like armor skins.” That would have made town clothes more valuable without taking anything away from them. They could even just share the hats and be ok.

In other words, they did not have to mix clothing and armor at all. The town clothing changes are completely anet’s decision now and not the consequence of past choices.

Prophet.6257:

Have they announced if their will be a way to gain the wardrobe charges in game at a reasonable rate?

Short of farming a bunch of stones from map completion before the patch? No. We know little about how we’re getting these charges.

Allaraina.8614:

1. pressure from accounting + finite resources
2. It seemed like a good idea during the conference call. A bit different, but having worked a bit in publishing in the marketing department, I can say that occasionally what seemed like a ‘great’ idea in the board room ended up giving customers a heart attack because you know… theory vs. reality. But I wasn’t the one making those decisions, just listening to all the people (including the employees that had to implement the changes and face customer wrath) freak out later. Ah, the joys of having a board of directors!

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was something like this. Quite a few reactions could be described as “customers having a heart attack.”

Prophet.6257:

I…

I’m not even sure what to say…

Not a happy realization; that’s for sure.

Prophet.6257:

So to change your entire outfit will cost you 35 gold each time. O_O
My math has to be wrong…

Looks right for Stones. For Crystals, it’s about 4g per charge. For Splitters, it’s about 5.6g per charge.

Edit: No, your math is wrong, just not on the per item. 35/7 is 5. There are 6 slots. It’s actually 42 gold to switch an entire set (ignoring backpiece, 49 gold then).

Edit 2: Without backpiece, it will cost 24 to 42 gold through converting pre-existing transmutation items. With backpiece, it will cost 30 to 49 gold through the same process.

Phadde.7362:

Ah, do you mean that you can’t mix & match with pieces of full outfits? That’s a bit of a shame, but perhaps you can still mix & match if you keep them as Town Clothes, just like before?

We don’t have a choice in the matter. The odds of any town clothing being unaffected by this patch in some form is next to 0.

Any way, it’s still a change that probably most Town Clothing-enthusiasts will love, though.

Not really.

Phadde.7362:

… You’ll still be able to do exactly as much as you could before, and then a lot more!
You should be happy that you’ve been given the additional and really grand option to use your town clothes (which you mixed and matched so dearly) as actual combat armor as well.

Wrong. Town clothing is getting hit as a result.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Sorry about the mix-and-match. Converting things to be armor and combat compatible did come with some trade-offs.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

There has to be a reason for it. Some logical explanation. They must have known about this back in December when they took them out of the store. Something made this difficult, whether it was clipping, or something else.

The problem is the only official response we got is rather vague. It looks like it was an issue like clipping. I don’t think it holds much water given preexisting and recently released armors have clipping issues. There are human hairstyles that have clipping issues too. Neither of them are getting downgraded significantly as a result of that clipping.

Devildoc.6721:

if you buy a gem store armor skin set.. do you have to pay for transmutation charges in order to use your new skin set?

To the best of my knowledge, no.

displacedTitan.6897:

I think I will just post this to people’s complaints about this patch. There has to be some psychological syndrome that describes this phenomenon. It happens with everything, even if everyone wins as long as someone else has won more there are certain people out there who will feel cheated. You cant change human nature I guess.

Loosing two thirds of the transmutation stones I was saving for alts for a system I never wanted and can only save me a couple gold for those alts does not fit into any definition of “winning” I have ever heard of.

Some of the complaints being raised are valid. Even if you disagree with them.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Converting things to be armor and combat compatible did come with some trade-offs.

Clipping and the like I assume. It seems to me that people would rather have the problems initially and then slowly fixed and improved than to deal with the anet’s chosen solutions.

Awbee.8405:

The weird thing is, isn’t it even more effort for them to convert them into these weird tonics? Why don’t they just treat them the same way they do the sunglasses etc? It makes no sense at all.

More or less, yes. As to why they don’t, I honestly have no idea. It makes no sense to me.

Cyanchiv.2583:

It’s cheaper because now we can use those useless 79 and lower transmutation crystals on any stat item (Of which many of us have collected quite a bit of). Personally, with the stones and crystals I’ve collected I’ll be able to make about 5 wardrobe changes on a single character. I don’t plan on changing outfits that often though, and even if I did, during that time I’ll have collected more charges.

It really isn’t. For starters, there are a fair number of people that still want to use stones for lv79 and under characters. If we’re lucky, they current stones may be usable for that purpose, but we don’t know that. Even ignoring that, we don’t know if either stones or crystals will be available to people who join after the patch. If they aren’t available, we don’t know if there is any alternative means to access this system without gems.

Donari.5237:

As a corollary, should I be binding all the skins I have in my bank now, to save on charges, or won’t that matter?

My understanding is charges are not needed to get skins into the wardrobe. They’re needed to get them out of the wardrobe.

nGumball.1283:

Also, let’s be realistic, none really cared about the stones, most players have +100 of thems cause none will really waste stones on transmuting lower gear when you can reach 80 in a week.

Not everyone power levels their alts to lv80 upon making them. The stone conversion rate is an issue for anyone who does not.

This is a pretty weak setup compared to what I’ve seen in other mmos. It’s fairly weak compared to their own currently existing setup. I’m not entirely sure why they can’t just remove the code that toggles appearance settings back to armor and then make sure weapons work in either mode.

It seems like this is more work for a weaker setup. I don’t understand why.

Aisina.4963:

and maybe finish my pizza ^.^

Never let good pizza go to waste. 0:)

There is no one answer to how people react. People come at these things from different perspectives.

For me personally, the wardrobe changes were never something I wanted. As such, I’m worried my non-80 characters are going to be hurt by something I never wanted.

My biggest concerns is how this’ll work with low level characters. The 3:1 conversion rate on stones is rather problematic if changing low level looks costs the same as level 80 characters.

Agreed. They said they tried to cover “almost every build” so a 30%+ rune is quite possible. I’m not sure 30% is the upper bounds, but that pretty much depends upon if they added additional bonuses to those runes (stuff like strength’s might when hit or damage with might).

Falassion.8031:

Are you sure you cannot use 2/2/2 runes? Or they are gonna change stat for a lot of runes, but i read this …

For the most part, it’s the later. Monk runes are going from 15% boon duration to 5% boon duration for the 2nd stat. The trend seems to be moving most of a rune’s power to the later bonuses. That said, it may not be a big deal. I think we only know about 4 rune sets or so. We’ll have to see what all is there.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Mmmmmmm, So what would say a 6k hit become if you had 3,000Toughness which would be about 4,000Armor.

Oh woops, I knew I was forgetting something. That’s suppose to be armor, not toughness. I’ll do the math later though if no one picks it up.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

How much Toughness would someone need to make Crit hits hit like normal damage?

The actual answer is that it will vary depending upon the enemy’s build and attack skill. Using ozii’s backstab numbers, around 7.2k armor. Good luck with that…

I guess since my build is conjurer, I’ll add in a few notes.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

The 3rd utility can actually be anything.

You might want to stay away from mist form. It will cancel any held conjure. Arcane Shield is what I tend to use there. If you do use mist form, just plan around picking up a conjure or fight normally until you can recast.

D/D or D/F or staff, depending on utility/temporary roaming capabilities.

First thing I noticed about your build was that actually. It’s currently very melee focused. Having a staff on hand would be a good idea. The alternative is switching to frost bow/flame axe on occasion. I’ve used them to create sorta a mini-ac setup which works ok if normal acs aren’t available.

On the other hand, having daggers would be helpful to keep fighting in melee if someone swipes your ground conjures. That tends to happen a lot especially for hammer and bow.

Geomancers freedom, melandru and lemongrass for the near condition immunity.

That’s what I use.

Nageth.5648:

Do we have confirmation that the trait will work with bundles/conjures while you’re sitting in earth attunement? Just making sure we’re not assuming something (like how some people assumed the thief heal would work on critters).

100% confirmation? No. However, traits like the current fire grandmaster traits do work with conjures. Same with traits like Piercing Shards. It’d be rather odd if Stone Heart didn’t work.

Jabberwock.9014:

Would you use obsidian flesh and mist form at the same time? No, that would be stupid because one already reduces damage by 100%, making the other reduce damage by 100% of 0% of original damage… in other words 0%. The same applies for lesser values:

Not really, no. The reason why it’s stupid to stack both obsidian and mist is they cannot create a bigger effect together than apart. Protection and Stone Heart do not have that same restriction. I’d rather get hit with 39% of a critical hit than 58% or 67% of the same damage.

1000 * 1.7 = 1700 * 1 = 1700 (full damage)
1000 * 1.7 = 1700 * 0.67 = 1139 (protection only)
1000 * 1 = 1000 * 1 = 1000 (stone heart only)
1000 * 1 = 1000 * 0.67 = 670 (both)

It’s not ideal, but it’s far from stacking two invulnerability skills together.

Dolores.5471:

Are we sure that the blinding from 30 fire will be aoe?

Honestly? No. I’m wondering that myself as what Karl McLain said that it’d help “skirmish with one or possibly more enemies at a time.” He doesn’t really elaborate on that. They mention burning speed/retreat will provide “some cover,” and that’s it.

Columbo.5924:

Lightning Rod: What other trait does this trait synergize with? What other traits are there that are improved by this or that would create a condition that would trigger lightning rod?

Bolt to the Heart (assuming it’s damage qualifies), Aeromancer’s Alacrity (Shocking Aura, Updraft), Geomancer’s Alacrity (Earthquake), Elemental Contingency (triggered by damage, weaken softens that). Also, the devs mentioned Static Field while talking about this. I know using Burning Speed into a Aetherblade’s Static Field would interrupt me. The same principle should work on leap skills too, but I haven’t tested it.

Stone heart: No matter how hard i tried, I couldn’t figure out a single trait that would benefit from it. On a side note: It even excludes a trait, the water recieve regenration on crit trait.

Fair enough on the side note. But, that can be used to our advantage as that allows greater control over Soothing Wave. It also isn’t exactly a new thing as Invulnerability and block will do the same thing to traits that trigger when one gets hit.

Also, while no other traits may not benefit, they do stack. Protection + Stone Heart will reduce damage further than either alone.

So all it can do is change the way you play.

That’s kinda the point though. The traits are intended to either provide new options or to open up new builds.

Have fun trying to tag an enemy when your doing nothing else but heal.

If Soothing Mist triggers this trait, why would anyone be spending all their time doing nothing but healing? Beyond that, I see no way for an ele to be spending all their time healing. Options like Cone of Cold and blasting have damage components to them. Most of the others have long cools; longer than switching attunements.

That said, I’m not sure how many people will like this trait. We’re in agreement on that.

Elemental Contingency: As others have pointed out – this trait is simply too bad to ever cut it against Evasive Arcana. That aside, it is again a trait that does not really profit from any other trait. As it requires you to get hit, it is even detriemental to dodge, block (fire shield), destroy or deflect projectiles (swiling wind, magnetic aura) or use any other mechanic that prevents getting hit. That seems very counter intuitive to the way eles are meant to be played. It also requires a condition that you don’t really control – your enemy has to fulfil that condition. On top of that, the boon durations are awfully short as well. When you’re in grandmaster arcana, there is a good chance that you have already selected better sources for those boons.

It’s in the same vein as protection traits (which this one is too). No matter what build we run, we’ll get hit eventually. Since it’s triggered by getting hit, any skill/trait which helps lessen that damage helps this trait. In addition, it should stack with similar effects (like fire shield, soothing wave, etc). Finally, we have 1 source of retaliation, and that’s a rune set that I don’t think anyone uses. This is the first source we have outside of gear.

As an aside, Fire Shield does not block. I’m assuming you meant Arcane Shield.

Alekt.5803:

Will that blind be linked to the target or to the Elementalist? I mean, does it mean that the Elementalist can only blind 1 target every 5 seconds? If so, you could easily hit a necro minion with a AOE that will burn and waste it.
Or, am I wrong?

We don’t know. They didn’t say anything about that.

I assume it works with lingering, but they didn’t say one way or the other.

The Great Al.2546:

What does ‘when you are stuck’ mean? Is that supposed to say ‘struck’?

Yes.

DiogoSilva.7089:

For 30 fire, the synergy with burning precision is going to be overpowered. I assume the adept trait will be rebalanced. This will also make focus fire worth using for, with a blinding flamewall and a blinding fire shield. The best candidate for the master tier will be cleansing fire, or the pyromancer’s alacrity so you can use drake’s breath more often. Drake Breath itself will be very strong in any game mode.

Burning precision is the first thing that came to my mind. Kinda useless if one is in dagger or scepter fire, but elsewhere, it can help. It’s better setup than it first appears. Burning Rage goes along with Burning Ashes by virtue of being the grandmaster minor trait.

I have a cooldown listed for this one: 5 seconds. Reducing drake’s breath’s cooldown is pointless as it has the same cooldown.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Does Lightning Rod even have a ICD?

I have 5s listed on my notes, but I think that’s duration, not cooldown. I’m not sure if we were told how it’s cooldown was setup.

Conjure Fiery Greatsword is no longer disabled while underwater. It works about as well as to be expected. The sword gets embeded in a wall somewhere and can’t be picked up. The sword the ele is suppose to get never appears. Despite that, the ele still has the buffs from the sword.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Easy fix. Dead for 60 seconds without waypointing, or not moving or doing anything for 2 minutes? You lose all event credit. Raise the DPS requirement for credit for the timed bosses as well.

Easy fix? Given the situation where I revived that player, she would not have been revived by the npcs in a minute’s time. The npcs either never responded or were half way across the room or more. In addition, the holo fight flat out tells people they may not be able to come back. A dead player isn’t going to wp back after seeing that message. So loose credit because of bad positioning, bad timing or lag at the start? Not good.

Neural.1824:

The lasers can be really annoying in their abundance, but the one bit that I think is over the top, immersion breaking, and just lame, is when they shoot into a cave area. Such as into the sewer area near Traders Forum waypoint.

Yeah. Pretty much. It doesn’t help these are newer faster ones that got added for no apparent reason. I guess to reuse the marionette death ray animation. It also makes the lone remaining red one stick out like a sore thumb on top of the annoyances.

And if one doesn’t believe it can target the sewers, here’s proof.

Their apparent solution to holo afkers was to place a fast laser that could scratch the dynamic holo’s backside and another laser that made it a constant struggle to revive someone at the very start of the fight. Given that, I’m not sure I want them to fix this issue. I suspect it’ll be worse than the problem it’s trying to solve!

Randulf.7614:

Blue is full healing again

(Gunnars Hold server)

Are people coming from the waterway south of that knight? That’s the only mender in the area now beyond maybe the ones behind a building. o.O;;

Photoloss.4817:

But we don’t know X and Y. And the players that truly are that uninformed won’t rethink their ways when getting smacked with a hammer in the middle of 50+ fire effects, they’ll cry for a rez.

And that’s what I’m getting at. A gear locker and trait sets will not really change much if a large enough chunk of the population doesn’t care.

Onza.7165:

I was just wondering, does the Ultimate Citizen’s Rescue Bag also contain the Gas Mask skin? Can anybody confirm they’ve got one?

The wiki lists the Gas Mask as an available drop. I’ve gotten the Air-Filtration Device so I know some stuff like that does show up.

Photoloss.4817:

So basic m.o. is to replace Feedback with Mantra of Concentration or whichever condi clear you aren’t running already.

You make a good point up until this point. Josh makes it sound like those players won’t even go this far. He mentions this group immediately after those that don’t know about trait points.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/madness/Well-I-defended-these-new-events-at-first/page/5#post3559127

We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges.

Ohoni.6057:

If, however, builds are intended to be something you swap out relatively casually, then the game does not support that well. If that is the goal of traits and such, then they need to have a way to “memorize” several trait builds in the system, allowing you to swap between them at a button press, rather than having to remember the combination of points and major traits that gets you there. There should also be gear storage lockers built into the UI that would allow you to swap out a Rabid set for a Zerkers set at a button press if you owned both.

It’s interesting to note that we can look and see what they originally intended to be a build. Utility skills are actually least likely to be part of a build. No matter the build, it’s impossible to use all 4 utility skills of a given category. The player was likely expected to swap these around as the situation changes. Given how consistent per profession this is, I’d say it’s completely intentional.

Next up is major traits. They’re swappable just like utility skills, but unlike utilities, players do not have free access to swap major traits. By “free access,” I mean that it’s impossible to put a Fire trait in a Water slot or a Radiance trait in a Zeal slot and so on. It’s still limited by where one places trait points.

And finally gear and trait points, with minor traits by extension, are the heaviest parts of the build. Pretty straightforward as trait points are limited to a max of 70 and gear is not necessarily easy to get or deal with. Even if we ignore tp buying for exotic stats, there’s still sigil/runes to deal with as well as ascended and legendary gear.

However, there is a problem. How many people bother to swap around utility slots? I don’t know. Anet has an idea. And it seems to bother them as Josh Foreman mentioned it in a thread about the marionette, but he didn’t list numbers. If the % is high, then it’s doubtful that gear lockers and multiple trait sets will see much use. I know I personally don’t actually swap utilities that much. At best, I only switch around 1 slot or the elite unless it’s something big. And even then, it’s more of a canned choice. I already know what to switch to where.

I think there’s a glitch in your code. We can do a successful failure.

Fenrina.2954:

A guildy reported that the achivement “One Step Closer…” didn’t work after killing the Holo. About all I know for sure is that he started the fight late. I can’t test it since I already have it so can anyone else confirm?

Follow up on this. He did get the achievement on a second run. This time, he was there for the start.

A guildy reported that the achivement “One Step Closer…” didn’t work after killing the Holo. About all I know for sure is that he started the fight late. I can’t test it since I already have it so can anyone else confirm?

Let’s just say it’s been a long, tiring week.