Guild Wars 2

fantasy.8395:

Time and time again i go from mmo to mmo and I find that devs feel the need to change something that was working or people enjoy

Well, a lot of people complained about it beforehand, so criticize them and not ANet, they just did what these people called for.

Phoebe Poison.4875:

Darx.9842:

ANET YOU RUINED THE BEST WEAPON IN THE GAME

Quoted for truth. This thing stinks, although all the time I believed ANet that the item wasn’t bugged and loved the rarity of it, right now it seems fishy. Especially like after all the time they tried so hard not to give any hints about the location, suddenly they’re handing it to everyone and their mother. Why would they do this, I’ve no idea, other than it was just bugged and that awesome hunt was an effect of coincidence. I’m so disappointed, not because I was looking in the wrong place, but because they basically said ‘Aight, we’re bored of it, the hunt is over, here take the weapon, it’s not gonna be rare anymore’. I feel like after Mass Effect 3 ending. I still love the skin and I’m gonna get it anyway but they just removed all the uniqueness from this staff for no reason whatsoever.

And at the same time they’re removing rare prestigous skin, they’re adding absurd grind for BiS items. WTF are you doing ANet. I feel like I’m getting really close to quitting this game for good.

It’s chance. And after the first world’s first drop was announced, probably tons of people rushed to that event, increasing the chances that somebody loots it a lot further. I doubt so many level 80s did the event before, I just went there because of exactly this (and because I had some spare time waiting for my dungeon party).

Btw., was the Jormag fight changed or did this also happen because of lag? In phase two, he didn’t spawn any ice crystal or veterans yesterday, he was just standing still for the whole duration until he was killed.

Westibone.3985:

EasymodeX.4062:

Now have Torch as a more attractive option. Condition buffed np. Don’t we all just love a good 7-8s burn, oh yes we do yes we do.

Not to mention you can hide your windup of Scepter #3 with the stealth from torch

Yep, that’s pretty cool. Feels way more fluid and satisfying to play that combo now.
Most annoying things for me now are that the scepter autoattack still doesn’t cause confusion as the tooltip says and that temporal curtain swiftness still doesn’t stack with anything. I’ve basically given up hope this will ever be fixed. Or any of the other trillion bugs known since release. If they fix one with every update (introducing two new ones), they’ll be done in 2020.

I’m still using a GS in dungeons instead of a staff, combined with a sword (instead of a scepter) and a focus. I’m glamour specced and equipped for condition damage/precision/toughness, still dealing enough damage through direct damage and bleeds and the CC works out fine too. Only when it comes to longer boss fights where several people stack up conditions, the dps drop significantly, which turns it into a completely flawed game mechanic ANet really has to fix.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Iruwen.3164/idiotlooser: dx11 could solve some of the problems, not all but it could help, and a 64bit client could allow them to cache more game data to ram, as well as giving a perf boost in general just from the nature of 64bit compiles.

Many people only have 4GB of RAM though, and a 64 bit client would also use more RAM, which may cause new problems.
DX11 does allow MSAA usage in defered renderers, yes, I don’t know of a good implementation though. In all DX11 games I know, it doesn’t really work well. Dropping FXAA and using the SMAA injector instead already works quite good, it only affects fonts and the UI too, I wish they’d switch from FXAA to SMAA internally. Forward+ rendering looks way more promising, but they cannot completely switch the engine of course. Ingame support for SMAA and/or SGSSAA instead of plain OGSSAA (supersampling) would already be sufficient (and more efficient).

spacecraft.4968:

DX11 DOES make better use of newer GPUs. Don’t act like it’s nothing because it can be pretty significant.
But yeah they really need to get the CPU usage fixed first.

Yes, it can be used to speed up some things, I didn’t say it couldn’t. I said it’s an advantage for some reasons, including this and the MSAA topic above. And I said it wouldn’t help at all as of now because we’re totally limited by CPU power, with a GTX 670 running at 30% utilization in larger battles, as you also said.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

did you all see…..they made major improvements to the game with the latest patch.
…
nice to see they are working hard on making the game run better…… pretty clear what anet are worried about……anything that will sell gems……to kitten with fixing the games perf, theres money to be made on gems!!!!

Yeah, because the core engine programmers clearly work on the gemshop and content at the same time, ANet only has 10 employees as we all know…

Capt Harlock.5483:

Iruwen.3164:

Lag is really bad since today (Drakkar Lake EU).

/e: won’t be able to complete my monthly because it’s unplayable, no way to complete a dungeon. Which sucks.

Are you having super lag in a Dungeon?
—Seeing how Dungeons are a closed event, not a world event where there could be 100+ people there. which is what this topic is about.

This might be happening because of your system not because of a game update. If you are running the game on high settings and don’t have the hardware to really support it. How is that Anet’s fault? If you have poor bandwidth and your playing over wireless. How is that Anet’s fault?

You’re making assumptions about other people’s systems and connections. Many players actually know a lot about computers.
Anyway, the current lag problem, at least as far as German players are concerned, is probably caused by the recurrence of routing/peering problems that had already been solved some time ago. I switched from DSL to UMTS (mobile tethering) and the problems were gone, most people I talked to were using DTAG/Swisscom connections. There’s already a long thread about this in the German forums:
https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Laggs-und-Disconnects-Telekom-Kunden/first
I didn’t have any problems thursday morning though, not sure if there’s a second problem caused by the latest patch.

Lag is really bad since today (Drakkar Lake EU).

/e: won’t be able to complete my monthly because it’s unplayable, no way to complete a dungeon. Which sucks.

loseridoit.2756:

spacecraft.4968:

I just wish they would give us some kind of an update. Something along the lines of “We are working on the performance issues. We hope to have DX11 patched in this year.” Even that would be enough.

DX11 is not a silver bullet.

I agree, DX11 wouldn’t really solve anything. That’s just uninformed claims, just like when people call for a 64 bit client. It would be nice to have for a few reasons, but far from being high priority.
I only wonder how they managed to build such an engine for a game that’s focused on epic scale battles. It should have come to their mind that maybe more than 10 people will be in one place in an MMORPG… didn’t those problems occur in the BWEs?

You’re talking about dungeons. In open world PvE, GS is superior again, especially for farming because everything’s easily killable and harmless there. It’s just quicker and on low CDs.

I just checked the requirements and I wonder how a guild with at least 10 active players actually manages not to be able to unlock art of war level 5.

RubiBayer.8134:

Drazzar, regarding the update notes, you can find them in our News and Announcements forum: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013/first#post1514186

I guess he meant there’s a lot of things missing from the changelog. Or it’s all bugs. Took us just two hours to find several obvious ones, greetings to your QA from the community. Seems like the one month update cycle didn’t work out this time. How about a public beta server finally?

Jesus, people always find a way to complain. Thank god I’m not a game developer, my customers are actually mature and grateful.

Nebilim.5127:

No changes to veggie pizza? that’s a 40% overall extra condition duration. It is more than any other trait other classes can ever achieve.

And still pure condition builds are inferior in PvE.

SallyStitches.4096:

I was so hoping for a better run speed ability. >_< Sigh…still tied down to the focus.

Me too If they’d just change Signet of Inspiration so it only applies Aegis/Swiftness/Vigor out of combat and if other sources of swiftness would finally stack with Temporal Curtain! That is so ultra annoying…

I’m happy with the changes, but there are still so many severe bugs that it instantly makes me feel sad about being a mesmer again

Funny, I never considered using it. After watching a video now, I’d better have I’m always too late before the nerfs come in

General Douchington.8497:

No big buff to Scepter? O-oh, well see you guys next month then.

If they change Confusing Images like The Prestige so it isn’t channeled any more, well… then I’d be really happy

Puandro.3245:

What is the new internal cooldown to life stealing foods? This change affects many builds that rely on it and it would be nice to know a # instead of just a mystery number you guys like to give out, thanks.

There are builds that rely on food?

I don’t care much about culling, but the performance in WvW is really something that has to be addressed by ANet because there’s simply not much you can do about it. Reducing settings or overclocking the CPU any further doesn’t really help when the client just cannot keep up. When GPU usage drops below 25% and FPS are at 15, there’s almost nothing you can do to react properly but just throw out AoE and smash buttons in hope you do something remotely useful and don’t die. Not much strategy there.
http://i.imgur.com/I1f1SC1.jpg

Mourningcry.9428:

Kind of unfortunate… this means it can no longer be used to free a “stuck” player that got caught in enviornmental objects. Could be used in combat, while simply way pointing out wasn’t always an option. Granted, this was a rare occurance, but I know i’ve used it this way more then a handful of times.

We need this regularly to free people who get stuck while building siege equipment.

/e: their statistical team probably came to the conclusion that not many people were using a torch because The Prestige felt so counterintuitive. I cancelled the effect countless times… still kept using it though, really happy with that change

Best thing about this patch: NO MESMER NERFS! YAY!

I doubt that. If this was the case, they could as well just completely remove it… you just made me really nervous -.-

/e: nah, that doesn’t make sense. It’ll only affect situations where something’s between you and the portal, not between portals. That wouldn’t make any sense.

Carighan.6758:

For GS/Staff Illusionary Elasticity is the trait, yes.

I’ve been using it with my GS power build, but since it doesn’t affect clones casting winds of chaos it’s not that important if the staff is your main weapon I guess.

It’s unlikely they’ll experience disconnects with a beta system near them. They also didn’t notice some problems caused by network delays, so I guess their testing platform is located inhouse.

Kraggy.4169:

I have a way of deriving a site’s password based on the name of the site and a small pool of 4-digit numbers which I combine with a special character is a deterministic way so I don’t have to remember it; I can derive it from first principles.

That is probably the easiest way to create passwords that are completely insecure. Many of the passwords discovered during the LinkedIn hack were discovered that way, tools like Hashcat offer simple mechanisms to do that automatically (not to mention advanced pattern recognition algorithms).
If you really want to be secure (as far as this is possible) use KeePass and passwords with more than 30 characters, you also don’t have to remember the passphrases that way.

PS: the only way to make GW2 really secure would be a requirement of at least 30 characters (the longest LinkedIn password hacked was a 29 character bible quote, the last.fm hack revealed over 30 variations of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”) and any form of two-factor authentication not based on e-mail.
With dictionaries of more than 500 million entries and our limited vocabulary, it gets increasingly unlikely that you’ll invent a shorter password which hasn’t been used before or can’t be created by an algorithm.

Three things I don’t like about the gs:
- Mind Stab is inferior
- Spatial Surge keeps you at distance while Mirror Blade has a limited bounce range on single targets, that’s pretty counterintuitive
- Illusionary Wave doesn’t work when it’s really needed, i.e. when the enemy already is close up

http://i.imgur.com/n22xNal.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/iCgwAfw.jpg
Seems the mines in the water kill the performance quite a lot

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Iruwen.3164:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You can’t “evade” damage from stacks, mostly. Since this isn’t an actual thing going on and I’m not in a position to run tests? I can’t say other than to speculate weakly. WvW is not a huge strength but I’ve seen Damage over Time effects with more unrestricted stacking rules cause problems in the past.

You can purge or transfer conditions though. Many people are simply incapable of monitoring conditions and acting accordingly instead of just watching those big direct damage numbers pop up, unfortunately.

Well of course you can get rid of the conditions, but you can’t get rid of them constantly/continuously over short periods of time. There is an upper limit on how often you can drop conditions off yourself, depending on your class. And race, if you think about it.

The same is true for direct damage, unless you found a way to constantly evade it I don’t know of.

PS: it’s already way too easy to escape a fight for many classes once you notice you’ll probably lose, even if a whole zerg is hunting you down, which is a problem with scouts in WvW. Active conditions at least have a chance of forcing people into downed state.

Redscope.6215:

As far as I know they can. I’ve watched my combat log with the fireblast proc and the damage seems to fluctuate between that of a normal hit and a critical.

According to the wiki, the damage varies but it doesn’t actually crit.

Redfeather.6401:

Burning = Add an effect similar to disease from GW1 (disease in GW1 spread to other targets when they got to close to each other).

I don’t think this would work out well with the huge WvW zergs…

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You can’t “evade” damage from stacks, mostly. Since this isn’t an actual thing going on and I’m not in a position to run tests? I can’t say other than to speculate weakly. WvW is not a huge strength but I’ve seen Damage over Time effects with more unrestricted stacking rules cause problems in the past.

You can purge or transfer conditions though. Many people are simply incapable of monitoring conditions and acting accordingly instead of just watching those big direct damage numbers pop up, unfortunately.

felivear.1536:

Evan Lesh.3295:

There are a lot of really cool things we could do with the combat log that would benefit the entire game. This could include making sure all combat events show up, color coding, and even skill links. This polish could be rolled into the death breakdown as well.

This is one of the things that highlights why Anet is beyond frustrating. We are now 7 months post-release and we are talking about ways to implement features that are in EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE LAST 10 YEARS. The only other game I can think of that didn’t have basic combat log features was SWTOR….that game did super well.

When it’s ready? If this is ready, then maybe my definition of ready is totally skewed.

Well there is a combat log and most people probably never use it at all, or if they do, the information given is sufficient for them (e.g. “wtf did just kill me”). There are surely way more important things that have to be fixed first instead of wasting resources on such a minor issue.

Air.6452:

Skale venom can only be consumed every 5 minutes

It lasts 10 minutes and isn’t removable, sense?

lekyii.9856:

So this is how loot works in GW2 the loot table in the mobs are all the same you can get every piece of gear in any ANY mob in the game and thats the problem, in other games that i´ve played(WoW Rift Tera Etc) the mobs have different loot tables some mobs give Z weapons/armor others mob gives you X weapon but in GW2 Every mob chest have the same loot table if anything is different is the % of the items for exemple in jumping puzzle chest you have 1% of getting a rare and 0.1% of a exotic on dragons chest you have 10% of getting a rare and 1% of a exotic piece in fractals you hace 15% of rares and 2% of exotic something like this, so this is why the loot is to Random(RNG) if you played WoW you know the chance of getting a rare mount from TK raid the exotics in here is almost the same, thats why the loot on this game is crap and thats why ppl say that MF dont work if you have 0.1% of getting a exotic from a mob with MF you have 0.2% whoa nice improve will be rich now… NOT

Ever heard of punctuation? I just wasted a minute trying to read this, shame on you. Anyway, as they said they have an analytics team, they’ll probably be able to check the loot too. Another indicator is the TP, have there been any relevant anomalies?

That somehow sounds like you misread something – can you take screenshots? As Jeffrey said, most people just miss the stairway that actually leads on top of the ship. And the quest text clearly says to go there, not jump off it.

I don’t see a lot of people. Just a few anecdotal reports with no statistical relevance. Like with every update.

I’m getting yellows for ectos from the dragons regularly, an exotic a few days ago. RNG likes me.

Everbody creating one of those threads is automatically flagged for bad loot. Forever. Sorry bro.

Ayanavi.1904:

“Out of the box”, Mesmer is wholly underwhelming, and at times can be confusing

I see what you did there…

;)

Is Ether Clone still not applying confusion? -.-

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Ideally scaling shouldn’t be terribly impactful; it’s designed to keep the difficultly feeling just right. Events can indeed scale up and down in response to player count. They scale in a number of ways, including:

• enemy stats can be increased
• enemies can gain new abilities
• new enemy types may appear, including veterans or even champion versions
• enemy count can be increased
• objective requirements may increase

Some of these methods have a latent effect on difficulty as an event scales down. For example, you don’t really notice stat changes since an enemy’s health bar is a percentage. But if we increased the enemy count, we don’t really have a good way (in a lot of cases) to make them simply vanish if the event is abandoned or otherwise reduced in scale. They won’t respawn unless the event gets scaled up again, however, so it should just be a matter of clearing them out of the event. You just might have to do it gradually.

Some official response once stated that events currently don’t scale beyond ten players, has this changed? With the way it currently works, some classes that lack AoE are having a hard time “tagging” event mobs so they qualify for loot. For most events, mobs die instantly, which is neither fun nor challenging but just stress. When I go back to low level areas, I can actually kill mobs so quickly that I’m ruining the fun for other players (as a mesmer, and we’re not even good at that). Their number increases, their health doesn’t seem to do so. I don’t think that’s working as intended.
Other events seem to scale too well – the Jormag fight for example. I’ve never seen that the champion giant was killed during phase two of the fight (and you don’t really have to because it’s no danger at all), it actually seems to have more health than the Claw itself. Even the wolf has insane amounts of health (and also is not a threat). Also people usually don’t get that they are supposed to destroy the crystals blocking the golems, even if you tell them to do so.
At the Shatterer on the other hand, the veterans attacking the artillery can be easily killed by a single player. Not that it really matters, the dragon can also be easily killed without the weapons… but the scaling seems to be off in a lot of places.

As a part time software tester, I have to admit that that’s really counterintuitive Changing it into -1 also wouldn’t be optimal though, as it may be confusing people about the current state.

While we’re on this topic – are there any nice models for staffs except the legendary one? Seems there’s a lot of named greatswords, but only a few (unspectacular) staffs.
ANet, y u no love staffs?

/e: http://dulfy.net/2012/11/13/gw2-staff-skin-gallery/
So the answer is no. Meh.

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

And who says they are hashed? Your making assumptions again. Until you can state for a fact that you know exectly how the passwords are or are not encrypted, all you are doing is speculating. I do security for a living, just what are your credentials?

I do security for a living. Any reversible encryption used in places where it doesn’t have to be used is insecure by defintion because it can be – guess what – reversed. The security tradeoff in a password storage scenario would be unjustifiable.

PS: of course I’m making assumptions. Because we don’t have that information (and we shouldn’t). It’s just a response to the legitimate worries of another customer. If there was a check for similar passwords, I don’t know of a way to do this safely. But I’m always willing to learn, I’m not a developer.

PPS: “you’re”

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

There is no reason to have a password list in plain text to compare it

Read again. To compare for similar, not identical, passwords you need it. Because this cannot be done with hashes.

If the passwords are not allowed, you could freely post them to all the world to see and give them to all of the hackers.

No. Because users use the same passwords for various services, no matter how often you tell them that they shouldn’t. So a leak of a plain text password blacklist would actually reveal a huge list of valid passwords to the hacker. And saying “we told you to use a unique password” doesn’t make this legal. Maybe in the US, seems you can regulate anything in EULAs there, German data protection acts are stricter.

Nothing, but the combined effort is pretty high I guess, so you could better save those 200g and get a legendary later. Expecially when they add other ways of getting a precursor. If this wasn’t the case, I’d go for volcanus now.

Null field + leap not only cleans conditions but also rips boons and gives chaos armor?

Only problem with Vision of the Mists is that it’ll be inferior once Ascended weapons are out, while legendaries’ stats will be adjusted.

VOLKON.1290:

Iruwen.3164:

VOLKON.1290:

OK, time to use some actual numbers, and may the gods forgive me for doing so. I’m going to use my mesmer as he’s set up right now with a relatively balanced build. Here’s the numbers:

Ascended Amulet: 126 power, 85 precision, 9% crit
Ruby-ori Berserk: 115 power, 79 precision, 8% crit
Base: 1867 power, 1684 precision, 35% crit

The Ascended amulet is replacing the Ruby Orichalcum amulet of the berserker. The base numbers are without an amulet equipped at all. The ascended amulet gives me an increase of 11 power, 6 precision and 1% critical damage. In other words, after changing amulets we see this:

Power: 1982 -> 1993
Precision: 1763 -> 1769
Crit dmg: 44% -> 45%

C’mon people… are you really stressing over numbers this marginal? You can practically change a gem and have a bigger impact.

Yeah, but what will happen when full Ascended Gear is available? 10% more crit for example definitely makes a difference.

It takes three weeks, including the monthly, to get the amulet alone. Three weeks, 30 laurels, then another three weeks to get the utility infusion if you choose that route. I can easily see the armor pieces, when introduced, taking notably longer, as they should be. Someone willing to dedicate a year or so towards getting an ascended full set for a handful of extra stat points (and who can still be defeated by someone in exotics) has, in my opinion, earned them. I’ll salute their corpse for their efforts in WvW.

So we agree that being unemployed or spending all of your spare time in GW2 gives you an advantage. Which wasn’t supposed to happen, even a legendary doesn’t do that. Plus it supports addictive behaviour.

Michael.4791:

The question is not “what is in the blacklist” but more “is it sufficiently protected”?

It boils down to what’s in it though, because if it’s secure in the first place, it can be stolen with no harm done. You can’t rule out human failure, like a database dump being stored in an insecure location.

Tellah.8073:

people lets keep it real. mainline pvpers are the loudest, whiniest, angriest, kitteniest, forum rantingist crowd in any mmo. they demand the devs make instant sweeping changes to anything that isnt in perfect harmony and if it doesnt happen by noon tomorrow they flood the forums with defeatist boohoo about how anet is garbage and the devs are idiots and that the entire game is unplayable.

just read the majority of childish kitten posts in the pvp section and maybe that will give you a hint as to why this aspect of the game is being relegated to the fringe.

furthermore there is no monthly fee so imo anet does nothing but win as the rabid tearspewing pvp crowd diminishes, cause it allows them to better focus on the sane portion of players who arent trying compensate for their lack of masculinity by being overly-competitive in a video game.

and also im a pvper

I agree. PvPers tend to take things way too serious, including and expecially themselves. Time to realize sPvP is a niche and PvPers aren’t some kind of MMO masterrace.

Sure bet they aren’t using MD5 because it’s insecure (not considering HMACs). And a rainbow table (not lable, it’s simply a table that contains all relevant password->hash combinations) aren’t relevant any more because all storage space existing on earth combined wouldn’t be sufficient to hold it. Simple example using the following assumptions:
- simple MD5 (16 bytes)
- 8 character password (8 bytes)
- password may contain all 77 printable ASCII-characters
This results in 1.24×10^15 (77^8) possible permutations, at the 24 bytes per row given,this requires ~29.7 petabytes of storage (29,700 terabytes).
Now good luck doing that for 50 character passwords and SHA-2 with 512 bit hashes, which results in a total data volume of 1.19×10^79 exabytes – estimated total storage capacity on earth was 500 exabytes in 2011 iirc.
Any brute forcing attempt with a HPC grid is far more likely to be successful. That would just be the “figuring out the password for a given hash” part though, which requires access to the password database in the first place. As ANet’s password database is safe (hopefully), all passwords used are not found in any password dictionary, and ANet locks you on too many authentication attempts, all accounts can be considered safe unless somebody gains access to their internal authentication systems – or your computer, intercepting the password in the first place. Which is very likely, and which is why you should always use two-factor authentication with an external component (like the authenticator, not mail).

PS: correct me if I miscalculated something, I sometimes mix up those SI prefixes.

/e: Narholt.9023 actually raised a valid question. If they’re actually checking for similar passwords (as opposed to previously used ones), this isn’t possible with a proper hash, no matter how insecure. Which would mean their blacklist contains all passwords in plain text form – which means that if ANet is ever hacked, that’s probably one of the largest password dictionaries in existence, containing both known weak passwords as well as unknown and safe (until then) passwords. That would freak me out too.