Guild Wars 2

Nusku.3941:

Is this still a thing?

No.

The Southsun one is Skipping Stones. And while it’s “covered” by a lot of people, it never seems to be covered when folks want it (i.e. outside of when it’s the daily).

Still Dark Reverie (in Caledon) is a good choice for saving the day. Goemm’s and Spekk’s are also less popular (and the latter is needed for a bunch of collections).

I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the story-telling separated from more of the combat. The amount of exposition that goes on (and on and on and on) has seemingly increased over time. I don’t notice just how bad it is the first or even second time I go through the story, but it’s really obvious if you repeat the story on different characters.

Try talking to him after a patch (I think there’s one coming out on Tuesday). There will be a new instance coming out, so if there’s a bug, it won’t have had time to prevent you from getting your friendship bracelet.

Glad to hear someone senior is involved. At the very least, it ensures that your ticket will get a different level of attention.

With regards to trying stuff that doesn’t quite make sense:
There’s a surprising number of software (and hardware) bugs that get resolved when making no assumptions about the cause or the workaround. For example, I had an issue with GW2 crashing on my old machine that could be prevented by shaking the monitor (turned out: I had a melted data cable inside the computer — moving the monitor adjusted the cable just so, and it would work until the next time the plastic cooled and ‘unseated’ itself).

So in effect, the reason for trying something that “should not” work is that the entire reason your progress stopped… well it “should not” have happened, so maybe you can work around it by doing something unexpected, unlikely, or unpredictable.

Don’t get me wrong: I doubt any of my suggestions above are going to work. But since you’ve tried everything that makes sense, why not do something that doesn’t make sense and is still easy to try. If it doesn’t work, you’re no worse off (save for a little time); if it does, great, one less thing for you to worry about.

Regardless, good luck and thanks for keeping us posted.

Nearly all the pets are ‘useful’. The issue is that if one pet is more useful than the others for meta builds or meta comps, it will get used much more often. That’s the same reason revenants suffer today — they dish out decent buffs & damage, but lack the potential of the meta. Consequently, revs aren’t used as often — that’s not the same as being useless.

So before asking for more pets to be useful, you have to identify what is it about current setup that makes people want to choose 5-6 pets over all the others. What could those other pets offer (fitting their theme) that would make them more competitive?

And then ANet would have to be very careful when buffing/changing not to make the new versions too good, lest the formerly useful pets be overtaken by a new meta.

tl;dr if balancing skills (and pets) was easy, ANet would release balance patches every month.

You get spirit shards for post-L80 XP in two circumstances:

• In core Tyria, after completing core Tyria masteries.
• In all other maps (HoT + LS3 maps), after completing all HoT masteries, including Raid masteries.

(There area also lots of other sources of spirit shards, so it’s ultimately not that important to most people.)

Opening the raid track has no effect on core Tyria acquisition-via-XP; it has no effect on acquisition in the HoT maps. The only requirement is that you complete ALL masteries that cover the relevant part of the game.

There are only three reasons to choose to make a legendary:

• For the prefix-choice.
• Because you like/love the way it looks.
• Because you can.

However, forging a legendary involves a ton of effort, so I recommend you be certain that one or more of the above is important to you. You might enjoying running a few miles every week, but you wouldn’t commit to a marathon unless you were really determined to manage 26+ miles.

Why should it?

The current system is that you gain one personal level each time you do a fractal at your personal level or better. The intent is that you only unlock L100 after completing at least 100 fractals.

Many would argue that is unnecessary — anyone can get someone to open an instance for them (and then leave), so it only serves as an annoyance. In which case, the thing to do would be to eliminate the restriction entirely (i.e. let anyone open any instance) or simplify it to 3 unlocks, one for each tier.

In other words, if there’s something wrong with the current system, why not change it entirely?

They have in-house testers, scripted testing, and a bunch of volunteers (bound by NDA) who do playtesting.

The main reason many studios don’t have a public test server: it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Unsurprisingly, when provided with early access to new content, many fans simply …zoom through the content. Which means the most enthusiastic among us will be ready for something new by the time the rest of us get to play; that’s bad for the community overall. And while some bugs will get discovered, many of them won’t be.

All of that might be worth doing, if it weren’t so much of a headache to manage.

That’s why GW2 Original only did a small number of public BETA tests, under very limited and controlled circumstances. HoT BETA was similarly restricted.

That said, if you are having trouble with that particular JP, I know someone who has parked their mesmer there and can help. Let me know if you’re stuck.

Mitern.1563:

Also, quick question. Is using the under map shortcut to the Not So Secret JP against Terms of Service or is it considered the same as asking a Mesmer for a port?

It’s not the same. Using the shortcut is exploiting a map glitch; taking a mesmer portal is using the game as the developers intended.

Will ANet suspend or ban anyone for doing it? Probably not if the person does it once to unlock the mastery; it’s not worth their time to worry about it. But if that person then uses it to start charge others (via portals or however), then ANet would likely take action.

In both cases, the question to ask is: is it worth losing your account to find out how strict ANet is about this? Especially knowing that they can (and will) still suspend people months or years later, depending on the circumstances.

That makes sense, Delta.

I think it would be fine to include your interpretation on the wiki, citing yourself as a source. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, you could just post your notes on the discussion/talk page and leave it for the wiki frequent editors to decide what they want to put in the article.

Based on what the above, if I were editing, I’d probably update damage to say:

There are three types of damage that a player can encounter

• Direct
• Indirect, including any damage applied via boons, conditions, and health siphoning (e.g. vampiric skills, health transfer foods)
• Falling damage, which is treated as direct damage, with the exception that it can cause a character to become defeated, bypassing the downed state.

I’d also include a note about the jargon the engine uses to distinguish Direct & Indirect, which are the wiki’s jargon for that part of MMO combat mechanics.

And I’d add an anomaly note to Endure Pain and the like, which says that other types of indirect damage will bypass it, not just condi (as it’s described).

Needless to say, your mileage might vary — the OP would probably want to phrase it differently, for example. And of course, it’s up to you if you want to bother with the wiki — you already do plenty for the game.

It would be great if everyone in a party could add marks; I don’t think there’s a specific reason to make it require a commander.

I disagree about /kick — the game used to make it possible for the minority to /kick and that never turned out well.
I also don’t agree that /block is necessary — I don’t think it’s an issue often enough for enough people. (It would be better, however, if ANet could act more quickly on reports of someone abusing LFG.)

I recommend that you ask for your ticket to be escalated. Re-open an old ticket if easy for you. (or at least include the old ticket number(s) otherwise). If the primary person on your ticket can’t resolve it, they’ll need to look for someone else who can. There’s almost no chance that a dev is going to see this thread (out of all others) and decide to comment on it (out of all others).

There’s nothing specific about HoT that “should” have affected you alone, not without affecting lots of others.

Here’s a couple of other things worth trying, while you wait for support. (Although you’ve probably tried many of these before, worth trying again, if only so you can report to Support that you have done these recently.)

• Repair your client.
• Run a higher level fractal on 1-2 different toons, ideally one that you’ve created more recently or one that you’ve never brought to fractals.
• Run a fractal that you haven’t checked off yet.
• Gamble ecto with Tarrktun (this won’t do anything — the pain of losing will just distract you from the pain of suffering a unique bug, like hitting your finger with a hammer to take your mind off a broken toe).

Among the possibilities are that your personal level is actually greater than 66 and it’s only the display that is bugged. The easiest way to test is to try to open a tier 4, when you’re the only member of the party. (You’ve shown that the higher numbers are grayed out; it’s not clear that you’ve tried to select them.) Another test is to look at how much karma you gain. If you’re really at L66, you won’t gain karma for 67 & beyond.

I’m sorry you’re having trouble with this and I wish there was something easy for you to try or an easier way to get help. Whatever is going on is weird and likely to stump anyone taking a look.

Be patient and gracious with support, even as you insist (patiently & graciously) for them to escalate your issue until it reaches someone who can champion it.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

^I’m confused (must be old age). What’s the difference between “non-craftable” and “can’t be crafted”?

Sorry, I’m not much into builds and such.

Oops. Change my mind about the order of presentation, but forgot to change one of the negations. Fixed.
(Thanks for pointing it out.)

ArchonWing.9480:

Except exotics being the ceiling was not really a thing for long. Ascended was introduced within a few months of release. It was due to complaints that exotic was too easy

Astralporing.1957:

The complains were about lack of content, not about exotic gear being too easy. It’s just that Anet didn’t have any content to give, so they panicked and attempted to “do something quick”.

There were all sorts of complaints at launch, including that exotic was too easy to acquire. There were some people saying there wasn’t enough content, but not nearly as many and they were mostly people who raced through the personal story. (So it was less saying “lack of content” and more saying “not enough content for how they played” — legit complaint, but not shared by many.)

Regardless, the point is that ascended was introduced so that there was some gear progress, some sinks for various mats, and some profit for crafting. It was not introduced primarily as “something to do for people who ran out of things to do.”

Don’t ask me. I think the free-to-GW1-players Fiery Dragon Sword looks legendary.

Short answer: no, not in the specific example.

Inscriptions aren’t ‘upgrades’, which are guaranteed to drop using a BLSK (and only probably to drop using a mystic kit).

Inscriptions & insignias are crafting components. And there are two conditions:

• They drop randomly — I think there’s an 80% chance using BLSK.
• Craftable never drop; only the ones that can’t be crafted do. So Knight’s Inscriptions won’t drop, but Magi’s ones will.

I didn’t see the information on the wiki either, not at Salvage Kits or Salvage. The inscriptions article and the insignia article mention the restriction, but without specifying which are affected.
(In addition, Insignia phrases it as if it’s only discoverable recipes that don’t drop, whereas I’m pretty sure that the only ones that drop don’t have any recipe, purchasable nor discoverable.

MorganOneNine.1025:

Is anyone else seeing a bug with not getting the Wurm’s Element? I just successfully killed it, and the stone collection is active, but no Element was awarded nor item checked off the collection list. (Every other boss has dropped its related element, and I ran around trying to manually look the wurm as well, to no avail.)

(edit) Just did wurm again, still no element. None in the wiggle chest, and there was no physical chest on the ground anywhere. What am I not doing right here?

I believe the ground chest (‘ancient’) only spawns once per day (not sure if per character or per account). Try again today after reset.

Max Durak.1358:

A little reminder: this game is almost 5 years old. So why does it take more than a week already to fix generic event?

What does the age of the game have to do with fixing bugs? If anything, some bugs are harder to address with older software because the ‘obvious’ solution can affect other systems. With complex software, fixes usually aren’t trivial, so the QA team has to prioritize based on how many people affected, how easy to troubleshoot + fix, how easy to test, and how important it is. In addition, the priority can be affected by whether there’s something related already in progress (easier to group the fixes together) or a future change that would render the ‘solution’ moot.

In short, it takes time to fix any bug, regardless of the game’s age.

Vesuvius.9874:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Vesuvius.9874:

Draconis Mons is …map that I …spent the most time on because I found it the most interesting.

Let’s see, a user named Vesuvius favors the map with the biggest and most volcanic mountain in the game.

Wow… uhhh… that never occurred to me… I’m questioning my very existence right now…

Naw, sometimes a coincidence is just remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.

Amaimon.7823:

yea, after a long while the event failed, and the wurm spawned..

Glad to hear it

Amaimon.7823:

not sure if I enjoyed the ordeal, but I got the Element of the Wurm

Yeah. It’s good that it always progresses; it’s not good that it takes so long.

One of the reasons I liked GW1’s Prophecies over Factions or Nightfall is that there were very few exploration restrictions. You could go anywhere (with 3-4 exceptions that required finishing a story mission first). Nearly everything in the second two campaigns was gated by story.

GW1 also lacks the restriction for the core game… although it’s much, much harder, because you stop being able to hurt foes and they start seeking you out, if they are 11+ levels above you.

That makes for a different sort of fun challenge.

I’m not against the OP’s proposal. I just don’t think it’s worth the huge effort it would take to make it happen. Plus leveling is relatively quick in this game, so it’s not as if the current ‘level restrictions’ are all that burdensome, as they are in many other games.

From the Curated Issue Tracker

• Achievements: Players are unable to unlock signature moves in Belcher’s Bluff, thus blocking the achievement “You’ve Got the Moves”
• Status: Investigating = we are aware of the issue, but haven’t yet found a fix for it.

Fivona.5061:

Seems people not insterested on this.

Or maybe we just didn’t notice the thread.

Hitman.5829:

New patch today 5/10/17 and the bug has not been fixed yet. There has been at least 10+ game builds since the new content and the bug is still not fixed, this is beyond shameful, it is disgraceful.

Things like this reinforce the notion that hardcore bugs will never get fixed. It is an indication that the game is dying and that Anet does not give a kitten about it. Perhaps they are working on a new game.

It’s meaningless how many patches there have been (today’s didn’t even change any code at all). It’s neither shameful or disgraceful — not every bug gets fixed quickly because not every bug is equally important nor equally easy to resolve.

Neither is it an indication that the game is dying, since there were bugs when the game launched, too, when the game was at its peak of concurrency.

If you want this fixed, just say so. There’s no advantage in trying to argue that some higher moral principle is involved. It’s a bug.

Vesuvius.9874:

Draconis Mons is …map that I …spent the most time on because I found it the most interesting.

Let’s see, a user named Vesuvius favors the map with the biggest and most volcanic mountain in the game.

OriOri.8724:

@Illconceived – I don’t pretend that we will reach a perfect equilibrium, but that doesn’t mean we should accept that leather is an order of magnitude more expensive than other T6 mats, for no reason other than the devs refuse to admit they just messed up when changing recipes with HoT.

Leather prices aren’t high because the devs refuse to admit a mistake; they are high because the community prefers to buy from the TP rather than farm our own.

Our options are:

• Accept that leather is going to be an order of magnitude more expensive for a while and choose to use the leather farm for our personal needs (or not & continue to use the TP).
• Keep posting about it, with the same result of ANet choosing not to do much about it.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that they went overboard by increasing requirements for sections→squares and squares→patches. But it took a long time for leather prices to surpass cloth, let alone get bent out of shape — again, at the time, the pitchforks were raised against cloth being far too high in both absolute and relative terms.

It’s possible for ANet to change the requirements again (and I’d support that), but that’s going to have a lot of trickle down effects on other markets; it’s not just going to affect leather. At which point, we’ll find another thing that bugs us about price.

I don’t really care if ANet says they made a mistake or says they made a good choice at the time. I’m more interested in why they think the status quo is better for overall player satisfaction than any of 273 things they could do to adjust supply (besides add a tedious & repetitive farm that encourages people to watch a movie while they collect loot).

ANet has several options

• Leave things alone and let only the most dedicated completionists finish this chieve.
• Spend effort to add a lot more (non-undead) giants into the game.
• Reclassify undead giants (which would also make them not undead for the purposes of slaying potions and weapons).
• Retire the achievement so it’s no longer staring folks in the face.

Which do you think is best for the community as a whole?

zealex.9410:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

mtpelion.4562:

You should never be salvaging rares at the same time as masterworks and lower.

“You should never be salvaging rares at the same time as masterworks & lower” if you want to be economically efficient. "

The OP has stated clearly that they are willing to trade more convenience for less coin.

I wouldn’t do what the OP does and, as I said above, I don’t think ANet should prioritize this over other UI improvements. However, I’m not willing to state categorically that the OP is wrong for wanting to do this; it’s their preference, regardless of whether it makes sense (or cents) to me.

still why should they change that is perfectly fine as it is. Just because he needs to move his mouse some pixels more?

Um, I agree with you. And I’ve said so.

I’m just defending the OP’s laziness: it’s their choice if they want to forgo coin to speed things up.

deltaconnected.4058:

From what I know after many many hours of reverse engineering, the engine doesn’t have a notion of direct vs indirect vs falling. It looks more like ‘strike’ and not ‘strike’. ‘Missile’ refers to it’s own object (eg. can have ’effect’s applied to it like combo finishers or legendary effects), others look to be part of the skill’s animation. I agree though, it’d be nice to have some kind of authoritative source for this instead of guesswork.

Don’t you qualify as “some kind of authoritative source”? Although you don’t speak “officially,” you do have special knowledge about the underlying mechanics.

So while you couldn’t say whether ANet intended health stealing or health siphoning to bypass Endure Pain, you might be able to confirm for the wiki (a player-written guide, hosted by ANet) about whether it is otherwise more consistent with what the game calls direct damage versus what the game calls condition damage.

Even if not, you could update the wiki so it doesn’t mislead people about “falling” damage being a separate ‘type’.

Separately, thanks for confirming my long-held theory that any attack can be flagged as a projectile — for the game’s purposes, a projectile is whatever the game defines to be a projectile, regardless of whether it would qualify as “an object projected or propelled forward”.

I decided I wanted a second stabilizer, so I restarted the quest on another toon. I didn’t have any trouble progressing it by following the wiki’s advice. At the time, I didn’t think I got particularly lucky, but the bottleneck for me was getting the rift to appear in the first map.

Any time the ‘build’ changes, we download a new copy of the client to match it. So today’s ~80MB possibly constitutes the smallest possible update.

It’s both technical & design reasons — hair is animated (as well as some hats), and there are many styles. So ANet decided before the game launched that it would be better to offer more hats-creating-baldness (& also more hair styles) more often than it would be to offer fewer non-bald hats (and fewer hair styles).

Changing that original decision is costly: to have even one hat (e.g. celebration cap) show hair, they’d have to redesign the system and redo the artwork/animation for all existing hats/hairstyles to work with that new system.

Also be nice if it showed effects and offered lighting similar to what we see in game.

See also:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/button-to-cancel-orders-fast/6581991

Vegeta.2563:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

But imagine how many people accidentally lost an order by misclicking.

If you are even putting your mouse near the cancel button .. how can you misclick .. you either hit cancel, or you stumble upon fast cancel. If you don’t hit the cancel button you bring up the buy/sell window. It’s a pretty big space to avoid the cancel button.

Removing this feature is dumb.

If wasn’t a feature; it was a bug. (ANet confirmed this.)

Second, there was no obvious way to see that you could do this, so yes, if you click to the right, your owner was cancelled and there was no way to bring it back (or even know what you cancelled).

I liked the option, even though I misclicked more than once; in the long run, it saved me far more time than it cost. Nevertheless, I think ANet did the right thing when they fixed it: better to inconvenience a few power traders than to frustrate those who use the TP more sparingly.

mtpelion.4562:

You should never be salvaging rares at the same time as masterworks and lower.

“You should never be salvaging rares at the same time as masterworks & lower” if you want to be economically efficient. "

The OP has stated clearly that they are willing to trade more convenience for less coin.

I wouldn’t do what the OP does and, as I said above, I don’t think ANet should prioritize this over other UI improvements. However, I’m not willing to state categorically that the OP is wrong for wanting to do this; it’s their preference, regardless of whether it makes sense (or cents) to me.

OriOri.8724:

Yea but they won’t even acknowledge that a lot of players are still not happy with the state of leather. Can we not even get an acknowledgement about this? Even if it was just them saying “We think leather is fine” at least that would mean it was acknowledged

I think you’d have to agree that this wouldn’t satisfy anyone.

Remember, we got into this mess because we complained about leather being vendor trash. Some (but not all) of the people upset about leather today called upon ANet to do something about the high cost of cloth.

Fast forward to today, and T5 cloth is cheap, T6 is just above vendor, and it’s leather that’s too pricey.

As I keep saying, I’m not against ANet increasing sources or (better, in my opinion) reducing requirements so that demand drops. But let’s not pretend that it’s going to result in the perfect equilibrium that would please everyone.

Vayne.8563:

There simply aren’t enough players in this region to justify the costs.

There aren’t enough potential new players in the affected areas to justify the costs.
(Fixed that for you )

Adding a new data center is a huge undertaking. You need to vet the options, set up long term contracts, and pay for additional staff. Adding more capacity to NA or EU is cheaper.

Giobonello.2530:

Thanks everyone for taking the time to respond. One other question I have is scribe crafting. My new guild has a terrific guild hall and I would like to contribute. Was wondering if there is any profit in doing that as well.

Short story: it’s not significantly different from the other crafts, as far as personal profit.

Scribe costs around 350 gold to max. If you want some of your training to benefit the guild, the cost will be a bit more (and worth it, since in effect, your training costs also become a donation to the guild).

Scribe, like the other crafts, also has profitable niches. But, like the other crafts, anyone can make them. So the competition is strong.

That said, a knowledgeable scribe can save the guild a lot, especially when it comes to building WvW buffs, some decorations, and the like.

Zackie.8923:

not everybody has mystic salvage kits or care to use it though. gw2 loads me with so much junk that i rather have one button to clear them all.

I think you’re probably among a small minority willing to lose 5-7 silver worth of value per rare to save themselves from a second pair of clicks. I’ve nothing against the idea, except that there are a lot of other UI changes I’d prefer to see the devs work on.

It was a bug and it was fixed. Many of us are sad about it, because we found it useful. But imagine how many people accidentally lost an order by misclicking.

I would be happy if ANet added an option to remove the confirmation step. However, there are plenty of other changes to the interface I’d prefer to see them work on.

The worm always spawns; only the pre-event is bugged. Mind you, it’s not really convenient. Still, all you have to do is wait it out.

The pre-event spawns fine sometimes and bugs out every time on some instances. So there’s definitely an issue; there’s also a decent work-around.

Are you confusing chance to hit critcally versus the bonus damage? You can have more than 100% bonus.

Hitman.5829:

If that is not an exploitable game play then what is it?

It’s players figuring out how to get the most out of their skills, just like players have done since the first game.

But you’ve missed my point: what difference does it make what you or I call it? All you have to do is point out the issue and ask ANet to change it. Arguing with other players about whether something is a bug or an exploit isn’t going to get ANet to act more quickly (and there’s a good chance it will slow them down, since they have to read between the lines to figure out what’s at stake).

You’ve got a couple of posts up where you’ve pointed out an interesting discrepancy & keep tying the thread into knots trying to convince other players that the issue is dire or violates some fundamental principle of the Generally Accepted Rules of Fairness of MMOs (which, as you probably know, doesn’t exist).

So again, I recommend that you stick with stating the issue simply, without hyperbole: you want traps to go on cooldown after being triggered, rather than after being set. That would prevent three profs from getting double-use out of the skill type during initial contact with enemy players.

To me, that seems like a reasonable idea and I might support it. As it’s phrased above, it’s hard to agree because of the insistence for others to agree it’s a bug.

There are all sorts of fast travel alternatives for thieves. One easy one is to use Superior Runes of Speed, which grants a perma speed boost plus gives longer duration on Swiftness. Plus triple dodges, shadow stepping, a signet, and using your F1 strategically to leap to foes.

Alternatively, you can use my method: do anything else in the game besides farming materials. Sell or salvage & sell everything you don’t need for Bifrost and use the funds to buy the mats you need. For me, that’s both faster and more fun — even when I’m in the mood, I can’t spend more than 15 minutes just gathering.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

PopeUrban.2578:

My personal opinion is that challenging content should be rewarded with more impressive loot than less challenging content.

The people who begged Anet for challenging content claimed that it was the challenge itself they wanted, so therefore the challenge is the better reward.

(those people were lying, of course, as seen by their reactions in topics like this. They don’t care about the challenge, they just want something they can lord over the “unwashed masses”)

First, there are lots of different types of people raiding, including many that were against raiding originally. Lots of people care more about the challenge than the rewards; the shinies are just an excuse to keep going sometimes.

Regardless, it wasn’t raiders who decided to put gate all GW2 legendary armor behind raids; that’s entirely on ANet. Now that it’s there, ANet doesn’t have all that many alternatives.

• Keep things the way they are and hope critics become less cranky over time.
• Add non-raiding alternatives to getting L-Armor, and create an entire new group of cranky people over the fact that they removed a significant & unique reward from raids.
• Add the non-raiding alternatives and invent a new significant & unique reward for raiders. That, too, will generate crankiness plus it’s a heckuva lot of work.

I think they were foolish to think that making L-Armor raid exclusive was going to go over well with non-raiders, a group they knew would be the majority of players. But having made that decision, I don’t really see that it’s easy for them to go back and change it and leave the community better off than we are now.

Ah ok, fair enough. We were using “margin” differently, with the same tl;dr: you can make money from it, if you’re willing to do the research.

They aren’t going to use luck to replace anything that would cause people to rush maxing MF. So it’s not going to be used for boosters, mystic coins, or as a substitute for either.

Luck is designed to be something that people can gain passively without worrying about it, with an option for people who need to finish maxing ASAP. Turn luck into something ‘valuable’ and it becomes something that many, many people will feel is mandatory.