Guild Wars 2

Living Story could replace an expansion, yes, if ANet chose to use it that way. But they probably won’t, because free is free. You get what you pay for.

Could barely do Claw of Jormag yesterday, everyone kept getting disconnected by the server because the hardware couldn’t handle it.

The Claw died while in the wrong phase and left ice spikes everywhere. Nobody could really figure out that it was done besides the chest. The server had just become so lagged to heck that the players were completely out of sync.

And you know what? Its been happening since I joined the game. Yet despite clear evidence since day one that the servers cannot handle so many players in one place, they continue to add more and more and more zerg content.

Its mind boggling…

Map caps need to be significantly lowered. On top of that, encounters need to be designed less like Tequatl and more like Twisted Marionette, where players are encouraged to separate themselves and reduce the lag.

Honsetly, I would prefer they change the system to be consistent with lore. Currently, waypoints are far too easy to use, and map travel would be much more interesting if you had to use an existing waypoint to travel to another waypoint.

Palador.2170:

Grok Krog.9581:

You don’t pick your stats, the level up shows your base stats increase so you have that feeling of getting something. Also it appears you get minor armor/weapon upgrade components for leveling up. Nothing special

So, as far as stats go, it just makes a big show out of giving you what you’re getting right now?

Its just placebo. A band-aid to avoid actually rewarding the player.

You make it sound like ANet didn’t plan this, or account for it.

Between the cheap Commander tags and all of the gem store sales, Hundreds of thousands of gold just got dumped into a huge void.

Once its all over, the econemy will be far more stable.

You will mostly find RP in cities and towns out in the open world. Just yesterday I encountered roleplayers at some backwater town in Brisban.

If you join a guild that specializes in RP, it helps alot.

BrunoBRS.5178:

Hannelore.8153:

BrunoBRS.5178:

ANet is effectively making their early game worse. no story to give big exp boosts as well as direction, no downed state, no weapon skills (?!?!?), no utilities, no traits. they’ll be lucky to retain uninformed people through the first 10 levels, especially now that it’ll be much slower.

instead of making the game easier for new players to get in, they’re scaring new players away by hiding all the features that make GW2 unique and not, you know, a generic MMO where you press 1 to kill monsters until your fingers fall off.

GW2 was never anything more than “press 1 to kill monsters”.

Most of the other features only come into play during group play, and generally only in dungeons or fractals since most world bosses bypass the downed state with insane damage instantly defeating you anyway.

Utilities and traits are only used in specific encounters and most people in open world just run full signet builds, traits with movement speed and the like.

Until PvE is improved, they’re just hiding useless cruft.

wow, playing GW2 must be really boring for you if you don’t play with your skills/traits on normal PvE encounters. sure, you can just press 1 to kill most normal enemies in open world PvE, but it’s still really, really boring.

plus, the whole point of unlocking weapon skills one at a time was so that you could go “oh, new skill, let me see what it does” for each single skill on each weapon. it was a process that could use some speeding up, but now they just changed it to an even slower process, where you need a level threshold to be able to use the skill, while at the same time creating a new problem that when you get a brand new weapon set, you have 5 skills to work with at once, not one, then two, then three, and so on.

Right now my WvW Guardian has the following skills slotted:
Healing Breeze
Wall of Reflection
Hallowed Ground
Sanctuary
Tome of Courage

And guess how effective she is in PvE? Next to none, outside of a few dungeon/fractal bosses who are specifically countered by those skills.

My PvE Guardian instead has Signet of Resolve, Battle Roar, Bane Signet, Signet of Judgement and Warband Support.And how effective is she In PvE? She can farm and farm for hours, and helps players alot more than my WvW Guardian, because usually hitting something is always more effective.

You could argue that I can kill mobs faster using my 2-5 skills, but anyone who knows anything about DPS knows that the autoattack usually has the highest DPS and that interrupting it, while more fun, is less efficient.

I wish this game wasn’t about damage and 111 spam, and that all that other stuff was actually useful on a day to day basis in open world PvE, but its not.

BrunoBRS.5178:

ANet is effectively making their early game worse. no story to give big exp boosts as well as direction, no downed state, no weapon skills (?!?!?), no utilities, no traits. they’ll be lucky to retain uninformed people through the first 10 levels, especially now that it’ll be much slower.

instead of making the game easier for new players to get in, they’re scaring new players away by hiding all the features that make GW2 unique and not, you know, a generic MMO where you press 1 to kill monsters until your fingers fall off.

GW2 was never anything more than “press 1 to kill monsters”.

Most of the other features only come into play during group play, and generally only in dungeons or fractals since most world bosses bypass the downed state with insane damage instantly defeating you anyway.

Utilities and traits are only used in specific encounters and most people in open world just run full signet builds, traits with movement speed and the like.

Until PvE is improved, they’re just hiding useless cruft.

Relshdan.6854:

each death should break one piece of gear immediately….they need to remove the “damaged” step…..this would be more effective than the current system in making life/death more meaningful…without alienating casual players.

This would completely destroy runes. I agree that this kind of penalty is needed, however it must not disable the #6 on runes after just one death.

Its very clear from recent updates that ANet is mostly interested in improving the game for newer players, which I am completely fine with, don’t get me wrong. Like any veteran I wish they would add more end-game content, but I still have friends who join this game and I like them getting a better experience.

The problem is I still cannot play with my friends because when I go to low level zones, even on the weakest of gear and builds, I completely destroy everything.

Now, one of the original promised goals of the game would be that all players would be able to play together regardless of their level; this is the whole point of the downlevelling system, but this system does not work. When you are downlevelled, it does not properly compensate for improved gear quality (e.g Exotics), and full traits, so you end up being just as overpowered as you do in any MMO.

Is there really a big difference if I can go to the starter zone and take on 20 mobs at one time instead of the 200 of other games? I don’t think so. Its still too much.

After the mobs were weakened in the trait update, this became even worse.

Please reconsider the downlevelling system design; I would love to be able to play with my friends and other low level players once again without just one-shotting everything that they attack before they can even target it. And world bosses in these zones should not be dying in a mere 30 seconds, either.

Would you guys quit hounding him, you didn’t read his posts at all because it is very clear that he is asking old content to be designed as new content. And where is all the complaints about the new content? Oh right, people are saying its too easy.

So let me ask you, if people are whining that new content is too easy, what do you think that makes of old content? Where you can go anywhere in open world PvE on a full zerk damage build and kill any mob in one or two hits?

PvE is facerolling easy, the new updates have helped, but those kinds of improvements need to be backported to the rest of Tyria. The OP talked almost nothing about roles but just that the current PvE implementation does not allow “play how you want”, it forces all characters into DPS because nothing else is effective.

Yes, you can play how you want, but it does not change the results significantly unless you are on a full zerker damage or damage/support build.

I have never seen something so deliberately misinterpreted.

Mostly just a new class and new skills. Builds in this game are boring, there is pretty much only a few distinct ways to play each class. While there are other builds, they are largely not viable due to being borderline ineffective in combat.

And we need a new class because the lack of three Soldier professions leads to spamming of Warriors and Guardians, so much that if you look around in a city at least half of the players will be W/G instead of the other professions. This is because Heavies are easy to play, and that will never change because they are designed to be that way intentionally, so we need more Heavy diversity.

New zones are very nice, but we are already getting those (slowly).

For the most part, I like LS2 more. Certain highlights of LS1 – Like Twisted Marionette and The Battle for Lion’s Arch, were great. But for the most part, the open world content was just a mindless zergfest with lag and no tactics.

Season 2 may not seem inviting now, but a year from now when your new friend is joining the game you’ll get to repeat the story with them. This is why the format of LS2 is needed, because otherwise you cannot repeat the story with your friends down the road and it lowers the game’s overall replay value. The last thing you ever want to do is sacrifice long term viablity for a temporary kick.

Besides, they recently tried mixing it up the way LS1 was and it was an epic failure because bugs, zergs and other issues pervented people from continuing. So for now open world content is a no-go until ANet fixes some issues with it.

Ettanin.8271:

Block unwanted followers if you think they stalk you. (This will remove them from the follower list). Your online status is hidden to people you block as well.

Since when? Last I checked, block players can still contact you in many channels such as party and guild chat and see what map you are on. They don’t need to see your “online status” if they can just watch for changing map names.

And currently, that is useless, because it shows “Unknown” for offline players under the map name field so they can always tell that you are online anyway thanks to this bug introduced during recent updates.

@Danikat.8537
He complained about the dividers being “straight lines”. Well not complain, but suggested that it be covered up/obfuscated when merging.

There are many ways to get alot of the information.
1) Watch gameplay videos on YouTube. Players recorded everything from cinematics to actual in-game footage of The Twisted Marionette, etc. Generaly, putting the “episode” name from the wiki into YouTube will yield many resources.
2) Play Fractals. There’s some with Scarlet, Aetherblades, Rox & Bram, etc.
3) Twilight Arbor Aetherpath also has some degree of content, in particular it lets you get a feel of who Scarlet Briar was and what her goals were.
4) Talk to open world NPCs, such as those in Kessex Hills that were put there after the Tower of Nightmares. These NPCs give insight into the events that occured within those areas (Lornar’s Pass, Kessex, Lion’s Arch, etc.). Many revamped Heart quests and similar events also reflect the changes to the environment.
5) You can watch videos of unaltered areas (pre-LS) on YouTube. In particular, Lion’s Arch was competely different before being destroyed.

Taimi is a recent character and most of her exposition has been in season 2 so you don’t really need much backstory on her. She had barely any content in the first season as she was excluded from The Battle of Lion’s Arch.

Although her initial meeting with Braham and Logan is a must-watch.

Keep in mind that some LS content has spoilers for Personal Story. This is because Living Story takes place chronologically after Personal Story.

LS season 2 doesn’t use temporary content.

You do not need full Celestial gear or any combnation that gives “Celestial alike” stats for your Elementalist, and I’ll explain why in this post. First I will cover my build and its benefits and then I will speak a bit on alternative roles.

(These are experiences from someone who has run full, 100% Cele gear.)

-

My exact build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFQQFAWhMMqe20wsBdUBEACpkhDEZxoZiKV6NA-TRCBAB3p0wKlB2pj4KlY1Z+DgLIAO7Pq/4qSwAeQAkBwfMA-e
Maximum damage output is 187% (360% on crit) if I use a proper slaying sigil instead of Sigil of Force in the Staff and combine it with a potion.

You need only five Charged Quartz Crystals and Artificer 400* to create this setup, as you only have to create the single Staff and optionally, Trident. Use Ascended Laurel merchant trinkets and a Spinal Blades or Quiver of a Thousand Arrows/Yakkington’s backpiece (these are crafted in the Mystic Forge and require farming only a single VIal of Mists Essence in Fractal which only take a few hours) or another backpiece with selectable stats which will usually offer Celestial (e.g Mawdrey).

• For D/D you need an extra 5 crystals for creating two weapons instead of one.

Most of your stat selection comes from weapons and trinkets, not armor. So you want your armor to remain Berserker because your defensive stats won’t hurt too much since they have low contribution in comparison.

Celestial backpiece in particular has the highest stat allocation of any BP.

-

Damage:
For damage I use mixed Cele and Berserker. You get very nice stats with Berserker armor, Flame Legion runes (17% damage against Burning when you have it traited), Celestial Trinkets/Staff and using the bog-standard Fire DPS damage build of 6/2/2/2/2 that maximises your percent scaling.

This is considered a “hybrid” setup because the Celestial gear still offers some Healing Power, Condition Damage, Toughness and Vitality. So you don’t die instantly like you do on full Berserker, it takes about 60% longer for you to die.

Yet I still do 3k autohits on bosses with this gear (5-6k when buffed) if I have an appropriate slaying sigil and slaying potion equipped.

You can also generally kill players in WvW with Ice bow #4 on this setup. And I don’t mean “kill them after using it a few times”. I mean you immoblize them with Earth atunement, push the ice bow key, and hit 4, and they’re defeated.

Support:
As I mentioned i still use full Celestial for support, but Clerics or Magi will do as well, since support on Elementalist is mostly about healing (they’re the de facto healer class). This is because they can reach 147% healing with Monk runes, giving about 450/tick on Regeneration, 220/Tick on Soothing Mist and 1k from Staff-Water autohits, which is a total of about 45k HP in the same cooldown as most healing skills (30sec).

You can play other support builds on Ele, such as spamming Lava Fonts for Fire fields, and having all recharge traits so you can spam CC. But they are less viable than either going full Fire or Water, as the Elementalist doesn’t have enough good utility skills to supplement their weaknesses like other professions.

So if you want to go support, do not use Celestial. I did, and I regret that I lack the Healing Power to min/max my Elementalist in that area now.

Condition Damage:
Full Dire. The Air trait line and Fire Signet provide more than enough crit rate to proc on-crit sigils and traits to stack conditions on your opponent. This leaves you without Healing Power, but if you’re on conditions then you are likely D/D or D/S+F which do not have strong healing capabilities anyway.

I don’t understand people that have immersion problems just because the maps are square. Its like they’ve never played any game before, ever.

This is how maps have always been in games, and for good reason.

The only solution I could come up with was to use a compacting staff. I use the Ley Line staff on my Elementalist and it works great with Wind Catcher.

Diversity is a good thing, not a bad thing.

It can be done, its just very difficult. You have to rely less on armor skimpiness and more on your ears, hairstyle and general appearance.

Though, I guess that would be correct with lore. :P

I would prefer that the finish Tyria (the continent) first. Its mostly finsihed, but there’s a few big holes in it- specifically the two missing Tengu maps, and the area around Timberline Falls on the left side (next to Sparkfly Fen).

But if I had a second choise I would chose a woodland area such as Woodland Cascades (the Centaur homeland I think) or Magus Falls.

BrotherBelial.3094:

I don’t see how an open world dungeon would work. You could just walk into it with a zurg, melt the boss in seconds. Also people would just use the quickest rout to the boss, and all other areas of the dungon would be abandond. There are open world dungons already they are called mini dungeons. The only one I know I’ve done, is the one I. Gandara fields. West of Vigil keep.

I quote:
“I don’t see how an open world dungeon would work. You could just walk into it with a zurg, melt the boss in seconds. Also people would just use the quickest rout to the boss, and all other areas of the dungon would be abandond. "

You seem to be under the impression that dungeons work differently in their current implementation in the game. Yes, sometimes you do get a PUG run that actually wants to do the whole dungeon content, but the large majority just want to skip everything that isn’t blocking progress and get right to the end.

Oh, and they melt the boss in seconds anyway. The only way to get a real challenge out of dungeons right now is to do it with less than five people.

That said, I’m in favor of more instanced content, not less. The open world has just become too much of a lagfest for many players and things like world bosses really need to be moved into 10-25 man instances. They should require enough players to play how you want (less toxicity) but not too many to create lag.

What I don’t like is requiring five people to avoid failing a dungeon or fractal. It absolutely sucks when progress becomes blocked and you have to abort.

This is because temple defense events are dumb and should not exist.

Events should never disable content, only expand it.

I recommend a Staff Guardian because they are always useful due to their strong support builds so you don’t need to worry about being a “good player” or not, most of the time you can just spam alies with boons, And the staff attack hits everything in an arc in front of you so you don’t have to select any enemy players or do anything besides just bind the #1 skill to a button near your WASD.

https://twitter.com/Cougardc

Multiple datacenter issues.

DeusAnimo.1876:

Hannelore.8153:

Its fake. And you’re giving them attention by linking to it.

NCSoft is actually having datacenter issues, which you could see if you would follow the various twitter accounts of developers and operators.

DDoSers do not cause “hardware failures”.

that explanation makes no sense there is evidence that various servers are going down as they anounce it. You obviously haven’t looked into this more if you think its fake

You think that this is the only group who claims to be doing this? There is probably half a dozen groups that have claimed to be responsible.

These threads are getting into serious tinfoil hat territory.

Its fake. And you’re giving them attention by linking to it.

NCSoft is actually having datacenter issues, which you could see if you would follow the various twitter accounts of developers and operators.

DDoSers do not cause “hardware failures”.

It should cost exponentially higher amounts to transfer to a high tier server.

Support already has a strong role in the game.

As for healing, the game already has alot of healing and after recent updates to traits, runes and sigils it is possible for Ele to be a dedicated healer, due to now receiving percentage-based bonuses to healing on the level of some damage builds. WIth Sigil of Benevolence, Aquatic Benevolence and the overhauled Monk runes, they can now reach up to 800 HPS (compared to average 100-300 from regenerations and ~320 from Warrior’s Healing Surge) on their Water auto-attack on staff.

I don’t think that other classes really need to have a stronger healing role because most of them are already pretty good at it to begin with (e.g Warrior’s regen banners) plus water fields are fairly common in any battle.

The issue is more that there is no need for healing in most situations. Due to everything being one hit instead of a constant pressure – which needs to be adjusted.

Condition Damage, however, is still in desparate need of an overhaul.

He’s dead because he opened up the box of fun and it was full of bugs.

Trixie.7614:

I don’t think it’s worth the effort to redo all the current weapons with the available colors, so I woudn’t hold my breath.

Dye systems just use grayscale textures and then apply the color in a vertex shader. Basically, its all white and then gets tinted the color during gameplay.

It actually requires less effort from the developer, not more. But it would complicate the fact that ANet likes to re-use skins with multiple color schemes (for example, the CM weapons are golden cultural weapons) as rewards.

Redoing all the old weapons would only be an effort because they likely didn’t separate the textures into layers when making them, and/or don’t have the original layered source files such as PSD/XCF etc. anymore. Lack of foresight, basically.

Its a shame to see this now-common feature lacking only in this game while almost every other game on the market since its release has had it.

You should read up on Skinner’s Box, a.k.a, “Progression”.

Originally GW2 was not supposed to be like this, the content was separated into the casual and hardcore (dungeons and fractals). Unfortunately with the ascended armor update it all began to spiral out of control, now almost everything you do in the game is a grind for one thing or another. I’m not neccessarily talking about ascended or legendary gear, even that one backpiece that you really want sometimes ends up as a terrible grind.

Honestly, it’s become a fashion show sweat shop. I really wish they would go back and revise all of the merchants and rewards, so you can at least spend the money that you do have on more interesting things without grinding all week just to buy that one item from another player. Of course, everyone would prefer the really good rewards to come from quests, but ANet has shown zero interest in that.

This is where all MMOs end up, and anyone who believes otherwise does not undersatnd how profit is made or how a business model is laid out.

Arctinus.7824:

Male Asura wearing panties. xD

When wearing this skirt the panties show constantly when using the riding broom :P

I hope they don’t change it, its the only good skirt for Asura females. Even though it has the unfortunate crossdressing implications on males…

Making a legendary is all that people have left to do after they spent an entire year champ-training to lv80, skipping vistas, speedrunning dungeons, no-lifeing fractals, zerging WvW, and rushing through the LS every two weeks.

When you spend your entire game from start to finish burning through all content as fast as possible, the only content left is that which is so insurmountable that you can’t burn through it quickly enough. and even then, some people still manage to get 5-6 legendaries within the two years that the game has been live.

SPOILERS

Believe it or not, we were actaully able to defeat Zhaitan because of the efforts of Kudu and the Inquest, not just the good guys. As explained in Crucible of Eternity, the Inquest were experimenting with dragon energies, to the point of creating their own dragon champions, and Zojja was able to use this information to build the MEGA-LIT cannon and various other weaponry seen in the Ruins of Arah story.

We know that it worked because we were able to kill every single thing before that, and the elder dragons aren’t some supernatural entities like the lore suggests, they are just embodiments of magic (for example, Zhaitan is a necromancer, not Undead). Think of them like the greatest of all wizards, being able to consume, control, and leak magic on a level comparable to forces of nature.

Most of this has been explained in dungeons and LS season 1. It is currently unknown why the dragons just went to sleep when the ancient races fought them, but remember they only had access to magic, not technology, unlike the Asura and Charr. Alot changes in thousand of years due to technological advancement.

ArenaNet has confirmed that Zhaitan met the reaper, so to speak.

SPECULATION:

However, it has been speculated by the fan-base that this is a BAD thing, and that we were not supposed to do this and that the ancient races actually could’ve killed the elder dragons but decided to let them live of some reason that we don’t know. In other words, many theories believe we just messed things up.

More to be revealed in the coming LS season.

The Mac version is a Wine bottle and thus runs several times slower than the native PC version by comparison, so I doubt you can record smoothly on it.

I’m suprised WvW is even playable (its not in Linux, which has the same setup).

Draknar.5748:

Kibazuka.1390:

Draknar.5748:

If you actually stick with the zerg you will have perma-speed buff pretty much, I know my Mesmer is always speed buffed as long as I stick in the main zerg. If you straggle behind that’s on you.

Who do you think you have to thank for that?

Well obviously lol. My point still stands about sticking with the zerg if you have no passive speed buff though.

Mesmer has it worse than anyone. At least Guardian can pretty much perma-speed buff. Mesmer can what, Blink and maybe do the staff #2 trick? It’s terrible if you aren’t near someone that can aoe speed buff.

Centaur runes + mirror = 83% swiftness uptime on mesmer. They’re also power based, and extend swfitness buffs you get from others as well.

Using this build you don’t need to run with focus.

I agree with many of your points, but I just can’t take you seriously after you refered to the Thief as “challenging” and went on about Ferocity change…

Here’s the two biggest reasons PvP & WvW suck in my opinion.

• Zergs (this is affecting PvE too).
• Stealth.

Why stealth?

Because even though its easy to overcome stealth with L2P, it is still extremely frustrating to keep losing your selection every few seconds over and over and over and over and over again while some Thief or Mesmer keeps stealth-stomping all of your allies and your “select nearest target” picks a neutral moa instead.

Play something less braindead and I could actually care about your complaints.

You report them, put them on ignore and never hear from or see them again.

Its the Internet, they can’t come through your computer. And if you’re sharing real life information online for any reason at all, stop that.

If you think what they have introduced in the last 1.5 years is “amazing” you must not’ve played any other game with an expansion, ever.

The standard MMO fare is to add an entire new continent each year. For reference, there is only a single continent in GW2 so far – Tyria, so adding another continent would be virtually doubling the game’s PvE content.

They’ve done almost nothing besides waste large amounts of time and resources on temporary content that new players don’t know about and can never play.

Guild Wars 2 is a good game, it always will be, because it has an excellent core design (besides the obvious issues from the Berserker meta and zerg mechanics). But to be honest its like… stuck in groundhog day or something.

pupi.2465:

darkwombat.3695:

Please give us more weapon options.
Flails, two handed axes, bow Guardian, etc, etc…

Bow Guardian? This is as ridiculous as warriors having staves! -_-

We indeed need more options, but pls, lets keep the sense for roles.

You do realize that Guardians summon a greatsword, hammer, shield and longbow?

Only the last one isn’t useable as an equipped weapon.

Its already in the game as a developer feature, they just disable it for users.

southbeatz.2780:

The problem here is that in many other MMOs I’ve played you get 1 or 2 weapons and then simply many variations of the same weapon so the skills are more universal and can easily be moved around on a skill bar. I don’t really see the problem with the current bindings though.

I use 1,2,3,4,5 for my weapons then Q to heal, Tab for a utility skill, E for elite and mouse button 4,5 on my mouse for the first 2 utility skills. F to interact, T to call target, U to take target etc etc. It’s all quite simple really, just change some bindings and get used to them.

If your brain cannot remember key bindings then I really don’t know what else to say right now.

And how many classes do you play regularly? Because they are all quite different. Even on the same class, the skills can change dramatically (e.g Engi with 2+ kits).

So you remember keybinds for every single weapon, and every single kit, and every single summoned item on every single class that you play?

Because that is the topic of the thread.

Way too much RNG in this game. Everything should be obtainainable with some kind of currency such as tokens no longer how long it takes, because then it would all at least be a reachable goal instead of “he got lucky and I didn’t”.

Save them, you can make exotic backpieces with any stat combination forever. No more wasting guild commendations or karma on mediocre stats. :P

The hammer from the Tower of Nightmares update looks like a 2H axe.

Drakent.9605:

@Hannelore.8153

1) We are talking about outhealing not selfhealing

2) we are talking about pve not pvp

3) Sound like you got lose a fight 1vs1, I don’t pvp much but even I know that all classes on this game have a 30 sec cd that fully heals them , is call there " Oh kitten button" this has nothing to do with spell healing power or class or gear. I think any one will agree with me that if you take longer then 30 sec to down another player he out matches you

4) IF out healing was out of control like you say then anet wouldn’t had buff it this patch like they did by adding, rune of the monk changes, water sigil changes and sigil of the benevolence

I was talking about Healing Power , and why it cannot be buffed because of the current state of self healing. This in turn affects all healing, because it can’t be buffed.

If self healing and combo finisher healing was nerfed so that people couldn’t run around in full Berserker and be just as effective as all other healers, then there would be room for Healing Power to be buffed and full support roles to come into play.

That is my point, nothing more.

And why are you always so confronting of others for seemingly no reason?

This is just fear mongering.

ANet recently officially stated that there are no outstanding security issues, and that most of these hacked accounts have had major problems, such as using the exact same password for the account and email, or sharing the account.

Its also been statistically proven that most people use very simple passwords, share the same passwords on every account that they own and bypass security features for the sake of convenience, such as disabling secondary authentication.

Even if only 10% are this dumb, that’s thousands of hacked accounts.

Don’t take someone’s word for it when they say they were legit. People lie out of shame and fear that they won’t get it restored if they admit to getting themselves hacked by buying from a gold seller or some other mistake…

Do not use bots or any other kind of cheat tool (these are hacks 99% of the time).
Do not buy from gold sellers.
Do not use weak passwords.
Do not use the same password for the game and your email.
Do not click any link in an email you receive from “ArenaNet” or “Guild Wars 2”.
Do not disable secondary (email or phone) authentication.
Do not share the computer with others.
If you share the computer, use an encrypted, password protected user account.
Do not give others access to your game account.
Do not give others access to your email.
Do not give others access to your phone.
Do not use out-of-date or unpatched versions of Windows.
Do not use Internet Explorer.
Install NoScript, Ghostery and HTTPS Everywhere in your browser.

We need:

• One new race
• One new profession (Heavy/Soldier)
• Additional weapons for existing professions (hammer for Engi and LB for Guard)
• Better weapon swapping system / equip more weapons at once.
• New elite skills for all professions

I would also like to see:

• New tactical heal skills (high cooldown risk/reward for slot #6)
• More tactical slot skills (high cooldown risk/reward for slots #7-9)