Guild Wars 2

Keep in mind that some professions are harder to master than others. I believe Necro is the hardest, opinions may vary, but just keep this in mind. No we arent ignoring Necro, but once people start mastering DS, I’m afraid of how strong Necro will be. Give it some time for the average player to learn these things. For example early on in LOL master yi was dominant until people learned how to counter him.

Perfect! Thanks. We will sticky this and star hitting these. Reminder bugs take time to fix and about a week to test. I’ll look into us recently breaking heart seeker functionality again.

Jon

This is a fine place for this. I’ll get it stickied like the others. Thanks for your patience, these fixes will take some time to do, and about a week to test. They won’t all happen at once as we try to push through fixes ASAP.

Jon

Thank you. Great to see the initiative on these bug threads. I’ll get this stickied as well. Remember fixes take some time and generally about a week of testing.

Jon

Thanks, we will try and monitor this. Once again a reminder that fixes take time to make and test.

Jon

Thanks for this. Keep em coming, this is one of our top priorities right now. Please remember that these fixes take a few days and testing them takes about a week.

Jon

Thanks again. Like I told Necro players this is very helpful. There are 600 traits and about 800 skills, some are bound to break. We will look at this stuff ASAP. Reminder, fixes take a few days, then we need to test them for a week or so.

Jon

This is a phenomenal thread. There are so many moving pieces in this game that this is a great way for you help us track issues. I will sticky this thread and get working on fixes for these right away. It might be a week or so before you see these changes in game. I would encourage other profession forums to do the same thing so that we can iron out all of the kinks in skills & traits so that we can more easily figure out which aspects require balance updates and which are just a matter of bugs.

Thanks,

Jon

milo.6942:

tl;dr: “Play now” button needs to strongly prioritize servers with player imbalances (very possible it does this already) and be put in a super obvious place like stuck to the side of the screen when in the heart of the mists. Keep everything else the same. Problem = largely solved.

Great suggestion. Promise I’m not just saying that because we’re already working on it.

Jon

I just wanted to write a quick post to address our overall balance philosophy. I see threads inside every single profession sub forum talking about how that profession is either overpowered, underpowered, or both. In the past we made balance updates fairly frequently. While we will continue to be responsive to serious issues, we also want to make sure that we let the basic meta-game stabilize before making too many changes.

If you see something that is really strong please try and find counters to it before assuming it is overpowered. We have put a lot of hours into the game already and there are still many things we are learning about the depth of the combat and the balance. There are also finally enough players consistently playing that we can actually gather metrics on skills and make some more informed decisions about what is too weak/strong.

Please don’t hesitate to point out builds that look like they could use some balance work. We are constantly striving to make Guild Wars 2 the most balanced game it can be and appreciate all of your feedback. Try to keep your feedback focused and specific so we can know the context of your issues. PvE, WvW, and sPvP balance are all equally important and we will address them all with the same amount of weight and thought. Remember, as well that when we want to make a change it takes time for us to decide what to do, how to do it, and then to test it and make sure that it isn’t going to create any unwanted results. Our hope is that our turnaround can be quick, but implore you to be patient, as well thought out changes will be better for the health of the game than knee-jerk reactions.

Thanks again for your feedback, your time, and your passion.

Jon

Remember that you can join a tournament with a partial roster and it will match you with the players necessary to fill your team while still allowing you to play on the same team as your friends.

Jon

Hey, thanks for the report, we are looking at this now.

nerva.7940:

great, but can you also look into real problems like poor DE scaling, DE’s being bugged out, and us not seeing the other half of DE content because none of them ever fail?

We are looking into all of these issues as well.

These skills are intended to cover the tutorial as people have said. They were very low impact on the development of the game, taking less than an hour total to create. Their benefit (new thief players having more skills in the tutorial) is certainly worth that small investment in our opinion.

We have a fix for this behavior that we are testing now and hopefully can push live soon.

Orionlight.1073:

I want to que up with friends and do a few battle Grounds. Why wont it let us? It really needs to be fixed. Yes i know SPVP but we are just wanting to relax and have fun. This needs to be fixed!

You can play with your friends via tournaments. We will continue as well to improve the ability to play with friends in pickup games, but it will always be somewhat limited because we do not want large groups of guilds pub stomping the pick up games.

This is something we want to fix as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing it some attention. If it was simple we would have done it already, but we are working on it.

Jon

We are working on getting Whirlpool working in PvE so that Elementalists have an underwater Elite skill. I’m not sure what the problem is but am looking into it.

Thanks,

Jon

UPDATE NOTES 09.09.12

Skills & Traits

Mesmer

• The Prestige – Fixed a bug so that Burning duration no longer amplifies when additional enemies are present.

Ranger

• Beastmastery Trait: Instinctual Bond – Now grants 5 seconds of quickness to the player’s pet and can only occur once every 50 seconds.
• Pets can no longer be revived using the “F” prompt. This is because you can either use F4 to swap pets which will bring that pet back alive or you can wait until you are out of combat at which point you pet will revive automatically. We felt it was doing a disservice to Ranger players to incentivize them to spend a long time reviving their pet when it was a very inefficient thing to do and happened after combat anyway. This will also help clear up “F” to interact functionality.

Guardian

• Tome of Wrath – Removed Stability, added Retaliation; increased the health of the transform
  * Zealot’s Fervor – Players can now move while casting this skill; increased cast time to 2 seconds; reduced maximum targets to 5
  * Judgment – Knockdown is now 3 seconds
• Tome of Courage – Removed Stability, added Protection
  * Heal Area – Base heal increased by 33%
  * Pacifism – Reduced maximum targets to 5; increased cast time to 2 seconds; reduced daze duration to 2 seconds
• Shield of Absorption. The second half of this skill will now unlock in PvE.

Story

• “Bad Blood” – Exiting the conversation will no longer arbitrarily lock the player into a choice
• “Mirror, Mirror” – Adjusted difficulty.
• “The Hatchery” You can no longer do the final step before doing the intermediate steps.
• “Dredging up the Past” – Fixed blocking bug during the first step.

General

• Fixes for various blocked events and skill challenges.
• PvP games played/won will not increment in activities.
• Fixes for various map bugs that allowed players to get out of the map.
• Interact “F” should use the following priority:
  1) Your current selection
  2) Loot
  3) Revive/Stomp
  4) Anything else
• Updated the recipe for Superior Rune of the Ranger to match the rarity of other Superior runes.

Hey everyone,

Please bear with us as we iron out our process for update notes. Here are the notes that we have compiled from the last 3 nights. I will try and post a daily update here as long as we are doing daily builds. As the build cycle begins to slow down a bit we will be able to create and maintain a more consistent form of update notes.

Thanks,

Jon

UPDATE NOTES – 09.08.12
Traits
Engineer
· Updated the Engineer’s Firearms trait – Juggernaut. New text for the trait: You gain 200 Toughness while wielding a Flamethrower. In addition, gain might for 15 seconds every 3 seconds, as long as you remain in this weapon kit
· Fixed a bug with Go For The Eyes. It can now only trigger once every 10 seconds.

Skills
Mesmer
· Fixed a bug with Signet of Illusions. It now give phantasms 50% more health instead of 300% more.

General
· Fixed a bug that should help resolve almost all of the broken skill challenges players have been running into.
· Ranger pet swap recharge is now the same in and out of combat. This closes an exploit with swapping ranger pets to generate very long buffs.
· Ranger pets should now immediately use their F2 skills when told instead of first performing an auto-attack.
· We discovered a bug in Monthly achievements that was causing some players to complete in August while others did not. We ae forcing completion on all players who are currently at 100% to even out this bug for those players who have completed their monthly achievement. In the future, monthly achievements will turn over on the first of the month at midnight UTC. Daily achievements also roll over for all players at midnight UTC.
· Fixed numerous events and event chains that were blocked.

PvP
· Max Glory cap per PvP match is set to 350. You now receive an achievement for reaching this cap in a given match. This closes an exploit that was letting players farm hundreds of glory per match by trading wins.

Story
· Fixed a blocking issue in “Forging the Pact.”

Crafting
· Players can now do the production portion of crafting without having to pull the resources from their bank. Note: Discovery still requires use of the bank. This is something we would like to change but decided that getting part of the way there was better than making players wait for the entire fix.
· Fixed a bug with the recipe for Ginger Pear Tarts that excluded Dough from the recipe.
· Increased the karma costs of all Bulk Cooking Materials.
· Increased the refinement costs of all Wood Planks from 2 logs to 3 logs.
· Yellow Dye recipes now include Onions instead of Celery.
· Adjusted the ingredient costs on Dye recipes.
· The following Cooking Materials are no longer sold for Karma and are now acquired through drops, gathering nodes, or loot bags: Butter, Chocolate, Vanilla, Chili Peppers, Thyme, Black Peppercorns, Cinnamon, Bay Leaves, Walnuts, and Oranges.