Guild Wars 2

I think you’re missing my point. I want the Alt key to show ally names. I don’t want it to show MY name, which it never did before. Showing ally names is very helpful for me for wvw positioning, targeting, and ally assistance.

Anyone else notice that now when you hold down Alt (“Show Ally Names”) that it shows your own nameplate above your character? This is additional distracting visual clutter in battle, there is no reason I need to see my own name and guild tag! Please revert this change.

So I logged on to one character and viewed/read the Season 1 recaps (a good stopgap, IMO), and when it finished I got the usual mission complete splashes and then the cool little reward – a “Scarlet’s Secret Stash.”

Then I logged on to another character to get her reward too, but when I finished the cinematic, I got the “Complete” popups, but did not get the reward. The UI for the story journal shows a closed/open chest depending on the status, which would indicate there should have been a reward, right?

Is this an intentional “once per account” thing? If so, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. No other Personal/Living story reward is account based. Granted, you don’t have to do much to get this one, but the reward isn’t that big – some silver, a few sprockets, a couple greens, and a chance at a rarer item. It would be nice to be able to get a shot at those rare rune recipes for each character we have!

This has been happening since the last patch. From the testing I did, if you volunteer on the losing side you get the win credit.

Potentially worse are the bugs where enemy players spawn on the wrong side. I usually see this happen on Legacy of the Foefire, where it’s potentially the most impactful due to giving that player immediate access to the enemy lord. On that same map its possible to spawn inside of terrain so you can’t move and have to spectate/rejoin.

That’s always been the case. The only additional benefit of the 3 skill is the knockback.

The bugs with flame rams atm are:

1. Sometimes the skills get locked up, and even though you press them and they seem to go off and go on cooldown, the ram doesn’t swing and the gate takes no damage. This seems to happen most often when pressing 3 too quickly after 2. It takes a couple of “cycles” to fix itself, which can be an eternity when you’re on a defended objective.

2. You cannot use anything but the 1 skill on the ram that Seigerazer/crusher drops for breakout events.

Ahh, I see now. I searched for “staff” but that point subs the skill type (“marks”)

Cool. Wish they would have put that in the patch notes!

Did they remove the Staff Mastery trait (previously Death Magic V) in the new build schema? I can’t seem to find it by itself or combined with anything else. Am I blind or is there a big nerf to staff necro here?

Like many others, I’m a veteran player who was holding off purchase as a silent vote in the desire for a positive response to the issues the community has brought up. I think the response is pretty fair, wish they would have thrown in a little something more for the upper editions but I still bought Ultimate.

While there still seems to be a fair amount of misunderstanding about the new policy, at least in this thread, I guess that’s to be expected. What’s a bit more surprising to me is the way people are boiling this down into some kind of algebraic problem to solve for the value of HoT. Maybe it’s how used to entertainment being “free” people have gotten, and maybe those people don’t play much and it really may not be worth it to them. But as someone who’s had thousands of hours of enjoyment from this game, the cost per hour is laughably low regardless.

If you enjoy the game, and appreciate the way that Living Story and frequent updates feed you content year-round, you will understand and appreciate that HoT (or any expansion) gives them a platform to continue providing that content by paying their people and keeping their investors happy. To me it’s bizarre to think that for someone there’s a magical alchemy, number of bullet points in the release notes that will “make” the expansion worth $50 as opposed to $40.

So yeah, no one can tell you how to spend your money, but if you derive even a couple of hours of fun from the game each week I can’t see how $50 every few years is not more than worth it. If you need more complicated math than that, then you either don’t really like the game, have a budget so limited that games in general may not be a good use of funds, or you just enjoy being dramatic and getting worked up over minutia.

The changes to guilds and especially guild missions sound really good, at least to the vague extent they were talked about in the recent post, so good on that!

However, the part about the new currency, “Favor,” and its relation to upgrades and influence was (intentionally?) severely lacking in detail. I’m wondering if these mechanics will be available in any of the betas, or if we’ll get more information about Favor before release?

The reason I ask is that, without knowing more it’s possible that Favor will be very hard to come by for very small guilds, if it only comes from missions and missions still require numbers to complete. In that case, it may be better for us to sink gold into influence now to finish our upgrade tiers. Or, on the other hand, maybe upgrades will be irrelevant and it would be a huge waste of money.

This would be a bad thing to have just drop on us at launch, don’t you think?

NTDK: That’s a cool idea. I will bring that up with my guilds!

Danikat: That’s pretty cool that your guild still does the bounties that way. You are in a decided minority though – I always attempt to find other bounties first before my guildies get Trillia and the other maps are completely empty, while Trillia has a megazerg on her at all times. And it is boring.

Sariel: I don’t know how prevalent this is, but my guilds with missions have had max merits at all times since shortly after finishing all the unlocks, and easily replenish their weekly usage from rush, challenge, and puzzle. They always sounded like a fun thing to try (without a guide at least, but then you run into the crazy restrictive time limit).

At this point, Trillia has to seriously be questioning her decision to attack those merchants, given the endless harassment it’s resulted in, right? She gets arrested constantly every Saturday!

Joking aside, I can’t believe ANet is happy with the way some of the guild missions have turned out. As it stands right now, the only bounty that ever gets done is Trillia. Fields of Ruin is a sea of tags on reset on Saturday, and all the other bounties are ignored. You can’t blame the players – they take the path of least resistance, and she’s easy to find and easy to beat and there is no reward incentive to do any more than that. Rare is the T3 bounty that doesn’t get Trillia, and if not her then her comrade in sorrow Poobadoo.

(Meanwhile, as an aside that I am sure displays the perils of assumptions based on small sample size, over the course of around 50 Guild Bounty Trainings I’ve run for the influence, I always get Komali, Bookworm, Yonanka, Tricksy, and other incredibly difficult to find and kill with a small team bounties -_-;)

Do we think (or know) that there will be improvements to guild missions in HoT? Rush and puzzle are in a pretty good place (aside from everyone hating Crab Scuttle due to the event interference and camera problems). But as for the rest:

1. Bounties are very disproportionate in difficulty to find and difficulty to beat across maps. With the extremely limited amount of time to complete, unless you’ve got enough people to prescout or get lucky with map chat the it’s tough to finish a higher level bounty or finish with a small team. There’s no incentive to do anything more than kill the easiest to find of your set. There’s little or no in-game guidance to figure out the mechanics for some of the harder bounties like Komali or Bookworm if you’re there without a zerg.

2. No one does Guild Trek. Period. There’s no reward, so it is utterly abandoned.

3. Challenge is not in too bad of a place, except for the disparity in time to complete. A well-coordinated guild can finish the crystals challenge in a couple of minutes, while the dreaded Save our Supplies takes forever and is very hard for a small guild to complete with its poor scaling.

And aside from the issues, I think everyone can agree that simply having some new things to do would be nice!

Yes, it was very widely known and discussed on TC when this player was given a two-week suspension for his behavior directly in front of a GM. Proheals mentions it on page 1 of this thread:

“Gus suspended the account. I believe it was for two weeks. They were caught placing irrelevant siege to block placement of legitimate siege. We also saw their placement of 50 or so siege as well as ‘stacking’ interact objects (plates of food, for example).

If they violate again the accounts held by them will be terminated."

Note that last sentence. He has been ever more boldly violating again since his return… so we’re waiting for the promised follow-through.

Edit: Sorry, misread you. No, it’s not that a GM refused to act when it happened in front of them. It’s that when he is on, doing his thing, we have all of our players on reporting as botting as directed to get a GM there to see and stop him, and no one shows up, and he continues his behavior, and is there again day after day after day.

It’s very demoralizing to be outmanned and outresourced and have someone on your “side” that you can do absolutely nothing to or about and have them sabotaging what few resources you have.

He Who Shall Not Be Named is now as brazen as ever in his activities to ruin the WvW experience for every other player on TC. Today during a prolongued JQ seige of our EB keep, he was there throwing out trash seige (his beloved ballistas), wasting precious supply on repairing walls being trebbed, sitting on and not using defensive seige, etc.

I understand that you “take seriously” the banning of accounts – what about taking seriously the game experience of HUNDREDS of other players who are impacted by the malicious behavior of this person? This isn’t one person’s vendetta or a small group of people complaining about someone. This is an entire server’s consistent observation of the blatant and obvious troll behavior of this one person, and for some reason his “rights” trump ours?

What more evidence do you need? You have had a GM catch him in the act. You have at this point what must be thousands of reports of his behavior. His guild name refers to his trolling activities!

Please find a way to be more proactive about this issue!

Edit: Thanks Sinbold. Although I can’t see how it’s either of those things, as the person is well-known and is quite proud of what he does.

I understand the need for RNG in games, but sometime their RNG decisions just seem arbitrary and silly. I have been waiting for the SAB minis to come back for awhile, since I want the Super Bee Dog. They were 500 gems for the 3 pack originally. I was all ready to break out the wallet when they popped back up.

I could understand adding them to the BLC if they were tradeable. I could even understand adding them if they were selectable and you got to pick the one you want. But as it is, with only a rare chance to get a mini, and then just a chance for it to be the one I want, there is no way I could spend a reasonable amount of money on keys and be likely to get the dog, so I’m out. I have to imagine many other people are in this boat as well. Are there really enough people who will put themselves into the RNG grist for this to make up for all the people they’re turning off?

Make them tradeable, or make them selectable, but the current system is just a huge turnoff.

With the introduction of much more “verticality” into the maps, was thought put into limiting the number of areas where fall death is a danger?

This is one of the most frustrating parts about EotM, the omnipresent danger of falling to your death on 75% of the map due to the narrow, open sided paths and myriad random holes, cracks, and cliffs. One misstep or poorly targeted leap and you are running for a looong time.

Worse still is that it creates some great imbalances for certain skills (e.g. fear). Troll necros are omnipresent in EotM, where they can fear an entire zerg to their deaths with one fear wall.

I can appreciate if there are points where its a strategic key – you know it’s a danger and you have to think of ways to counter it. I would hate to have another map where you need a twitchy finger on your stab key and an eagle eye on your target every time you leap.

Surprised this isn’t creating a bigger stir. I noticed it immediately, as that’s the first thing I do after a patch. It really should be a permanent, visible option, but regardless was one of the best additions to the new trading post. Really hope this was unintentional and gets fixed ASAP!

Any word on whether a Dragonite-consuming item (e.g. something like Mawdrey II or the Star of Generosity) is coming down the pipe in the near future? After running the Silverwastes for awhile, I am positively drowning in the stuff but I don’t want to delete it if it’ll be useful soon.

One of the fractal dailys is to do a single fractal (1 shard) of any difficulty. You can find games designed to specifically meet the daily and run the fastest fractal (swamp). With a good team you will finish it in 10 minutes or so.

Another question – the Patch notes say they are affected by “account magic find” but the items and wiki descriptions just say “magic find.” So is it by character or account? (Meaning, do we need to stack our magic find buffs before opening, or it doesn’t matter?)

Expanded thoughts on issues and improvements, to avoid tl/dr on my first post:

Kegbrawl languished with a lot of nasty bugs for a long time, and though many were fixed as of a few patches ago, there still remain issues:

1. The ice fields don’t show up anymore. This is new and extremely frustrating. They were hard enough to see before, but now they just don’t render.

2. Similarly, the kegs don’t render during many transitions anymore. You can’t follow the flight path of a lob, it just disappears when it leaves a character’s hand and appears on the ground later. When someone puts a keg down or it ends up on the ground other ways, it takes a couple of seconds to show up.

3. As was pointed out earlier, there’s a longstanding issue with occasional crazy, crippling lag that I just don’t see in other game modes.

4. One of my other longtime peeves is that switching targets or detargeting is very unresponsive. If I swap targets and dash quickly, it will ALWAYS charge me at my original target, despite showing the new target in the UI. Same with detargeting, it will charge me at my last target.

5. The #3 skill when you don’t have a keg needs to have the evade added as described in the tooltip. As it is it can be interrupted and ice fields will still hit you.

6. Still occasional issues with passes shooting in the complete opposite direction intended. (Although this is always funny when it happens to lobbers.)

And if we want to talk general improvements:

1. I’ve learned to peacefully coexist with achievement farmers. I don’t understand farming most things (e.g. steals), because you will get them organically by playing enough for the assists and wins, but I’ve found it’s better to just let them do their thing and be polite and they will either play normally after finishing or leave. But recoveries is really out of whack. If you are playing “correctly,” (that is, skilled play) you will almost never get them. I had 50 of them by the time I had finished everything else just playing normally. With the requirement of 500, playing once a week, you HAVE to farm them for the title. That’s bad design and removes people from play. Worse, it removes an unbalanced number of people (you need 3 to farm this)

2. Which brings me to the power of unbalanced teams. One of the things I like about KB is that it’s an activity where the teams are small enough to where your personal skill matters a lot and can singlehandedly turn the game (unlike, say, Snowball Mayhem), but not so overpowering that a single skilled player can dominate and troll everyone else (unlike, say, Crab Toss). There are counters to almost everything. But it’s still a team game, and to that end, two halfway decent players who can pass can easily beat a highly skilled player stuck on an island. The matchup engine is actually pretty decent about splitting up the good players, though sometimes it seems to get stuck and pair the same couple for a long chain of wins. The worse problem comes with uneven teams. Because the red team ALWAYS fills first, and because a lot of the time games aren’t full, and because people tend to bail on the losing side or teamstack winning side, there is an inherent advantage to red. It’s most pronounced with smaller teams (1v2 is basically impossible if the 2 have any clue), but even 4v5 carries enough power to where it will shift a win, prevent a good comeback, or turn a good game into a blowout. I’m not sure what the solution is – new players always added to lower score side first? Buff giving you reduced cooldowns when you’re outmanned?

3. Too many kegs. As I’ve gotten better, I’ve really come to wholeheartedly adopt the PUNT ethos of playing with fewer kegs. In fact, I prefer just 1, with everyone working together with skill to advance/stop the keg, and no minibattles or random cheap scores. Sometimes the game just decides, you’re getting kegs, and just rains them down and unless others are likeminded, the game just devolves to who can lob better/faster. I’m not even talking about that, though. I’m talking about even the normal pace where three kegs get shot. If you’re not right on top to kick the extras out, a little luck can turn a fun, hard-fought game into a laugher in a few seconds.

4. Lobbing. All skilled players hate lobbing. I have only encountered one other player who I consider a true shot specialist, who can hit with the 2 skill anywhere on the field. Unskilled players just use the 2 to chuck it ahead, which is easy to deal with with 1 keg, but with a bunch can ruin the game. Slightly more skilled players know the max range of the 2 skill and fire scores from there. There are counters to this – I LOVE the reactions when I intercept a long lob over an ice field, and if they aren’t accurate kickouts are very effective. But they are much harder to do than making the shot. Lobbing kills good games.

I’d like to chime in with a slightly different perspective. I was a latecomer to KB – I tried it out at launch but found the controls clunky (and also wasn’t a very good player at all yet, because, launch) and didn’t go back for a long time. Thanks to the Daily Activity achievements, I started giving it a shot on Sat/Sun, and began to find I liked it, at least enough to try to get the activity achievements.

I guess maybe I had the perfect onboarding to the game, because through the weeks I went up against a lot of different skilled players, each of whom seemed to specialize in a different tactic. It was like Megaman, I was able to absorb their unique powers, so to speak, by studying and playing them, and over time got better at the game. I found myself wanting to complete the Kegmaster achievement to actually show pride in a game mode I liked, not to just tick a box. To this day, every time I start to get kitteny and think I am super awesome I come across players who are better than me at some aspect or do something slightly different that I can learn from, which is humbling and fun.

When I was doing the achievements, I certainly found it very frustrating that the game was only available once a week. I liked playing and wanted to keep progressing, and even playing a ton on that one day it was slow for some of them. Selfishly, now that I’m done with grinding, I kind of like that KB is a weekly event, just because I like doing lots of stuff in GW2, and LOVE Keg Brawl, so having a day when I can say “this is my Keg Brawl day” knowing I’m not gonna get much else done is helpful to my sanity. I have a feeling that a good number of the other top players feel the same way, mentally marking out that time block for KB, and we’d see less coverage of skilled players if it were available more often.

That said, I also think there’s room for a private mode of the game available at any time, so interested parties could coordinate tournaments or practice sessions. It would be even better if in the private instance you could choose teams a la hotjoin to get balanced matchups. I also agree that activities as a whole are poorly managed overall, and could be a MUCH bigger part of the longevity of the game if they were given more attention.

+1. Don’t forget about troll claims on objectives to prevent buffs from being activated.

I have a lot of trouble effectively using trebs and mortars. Other than (maybe) getting numbers when you hit an enemy wall or gate, you have no way to know if you’re hitting or even close to your intended target. In the heat of an attack, unless you’re the only one there you need a skilled person on the seige and can’t afford to “learn on the job,” and during lulls you have no target to gauge.

Therefore I propose a new trick that will do some or all of the following:

1. Used on a mortar or treb, it provides a buff of some duration (5 mins? 10 mins?) to that seige.

2. When interacting with this seige, you get a subtle AOE overlay of concentric rings indicating 3-4 general distance zones to help target

3. Shots you fire ping on the mini map

4. Used on the ground out in the field, creates a mark for you to aim at that gives direct feedback. At the very least, a “Hit!” popup when a shot touches it, but could be enhanced to include some general positioning guidance (arrows to indicate left/right and more/less power adjustment).

I think this would be a very useful addition that would not create imbalance and help players learn to use these seige better.

Anyone else notice that after the last patch, the WvW abilities tab was rearranged?

I don’t mind rearranging on principle, there were some opportunities for improvement in the old list, but the new one makes NO sense at all. There is no rhyme or reason to it, it looks like they hit shuffle!

If I could make a suggestion, I would say to do something like this:

Siege Abilities
————————————-
Seige Master
Seige Bunker
Arrow Cart
Ballista
Cannon
Mortar
Burning Oil
Catapult
Flame Ram
Seige Golem
Trebuchet

Supply Abilities
—————————————
Repair Master
Build Master
Supply Master
Supply Capacity

NPC Abilities
—————————————
Guard Killer
Defense Against Guards
Mercenary’s Bane

I don’t think this is as widespread as Lunatic Inquisition, and it may be a hack, not a bug, but I saw a Guardian today in Snowball Madness who had all of his skills, and was abusing Reatreat! and Save Yourselves! for swiftness and Aegis in the activity.

I reported the player (for “scamming,” because two years into launch there’s still no option for reporting hacking or bug abuse.) But it lead to complete domination by his teams because they always got the gifts first and needed 2 hits to be stopped.

I’m not a “complain about ANet” kind of player, but I am really scratching my head over this one. How is it possible that they would attach now TWO collection achievements to an event that never happens? One that players pointed out a YEAR ago didn’t work and which has never been fixed, even now months after collections were released?

In fact, as far as I can tell, all three broken events needed for treasure hunter (Dobbs, Scholar Riagan, and Scholar Breandan) are ALL still broken.They have to know about it at this point, right? I’ve reported all three myself after every release.

I know there is always more going on behind the scenes than we players are aware of to fixing any issue, and I hesitate to get all indignant for that reason. But this one seems just indefensible at this point.

This is exactly what I was thinking, and clearly we’re not alone (there are many threads about this, wasn’t even sure which to reply to!)

Here, ANet has designed a map which requires large group coordination to do the content, and, even worse, a set of achievements that require the same (I loathe acheivements that aren’t related to your personal effort. You can try as hard as you want but you’re not getting the map to breach on your own, or defeating any of the bosses.) And then, they proceed to attach almost no rewards to defeating those bosses.

Instead, what should be a throwaway activity (shovels and chests) is made fantastically rewarding on an effort vs. reward scale and it’s all people do. I’m not sure if people even make organized SW maps for anything but farming chests, I haven’t seen them in the LFG or zoned into one – basically if you didn’t get the achievements and shoulderguard components the first couple of days, you’re SOL. So if, like me, you took the time to play the story first before diving into the map meta, too bad. Unless the subsequent releases change things this map will be far too dead to allow anyone arriving later to the party to do anything.

If nothing else, the timer to take down the bosses after breach needs to go. Change it to a system like Queen’s Gauntlet, where you are rewarded for winning faster, but allow people the chance to learn the mechanics for the bosses and eventually take them down rather than for 5 minutes an hour trying to herd all the cats on the map to do the right thing.

Don’t know if it’s still broken from last year or newly broken, but it’s stuck now, and this is tied to getting traitline 5, trait X.

(along with a bunch of events needed for Treasure Hunter, but that’s another post).

Probably all of these are already mentioned, but more voices means a better chance of being heard, right?

The new TP did bring many needed improvements, but the sell interface is frustrating me a little more every day.

1. I really hate that the default quantity is 1 instead of max. How many times have I listed 1 of a stack I wanted to sell all of?! It seems to me in UX design you want to default to the most common usage, which I have to assume is to sell all of a stack.

2. I do not like that you cannot see/match your lowest listing anymore. I have already done my homework and decided the price point I think something should go for once. I don’t want to do it every time. It was incredibly convenient to just add small quantites of a common item to my existing listing as I obtained them.

3. I don’t like that the total shown is qty x list price. That is useless to me. I want to see what I will make. The old system was bad because it only showed net of 1 of the 2 taxes. This one shows none – not an improvement. Yeah, I can do the mental math with the taxes listed, but math is what computers were created for! Use them!

4. I REALLY don’t like that the Current Sellers list is so short. For highly volatile items you sometimes had to go pretty far down to find a good price wall. Now you have to just guess without using an external resource (which you have to use every. Single. Time. Because again, it won’t just show you your last listing to add to.)

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for the accurate categories and new drill-down options, but these selling issues are really frustrating and I hope they will be addressed.

I don’t think you have thought through the impact the elementalist elite changes will have in WvW. There will now be NO useful elite skills for this area of the game. Tornado has a long cooldown so it’s not like you can do it constantly – you need to be able to pick the right moment to transform for maximum impact. And while I get that FGS needed to be fixed for PvE, it has the unintentional effect of removing its use as the only truly impactful PvD ability. Minion summons will get vaporized in any fight, FGS will be useless except for mobility, and Tornado’s only useful aspect was strategic power boost. The skills are completely useless.

Our sustain is already so low, the useful thing we could bring to the table was strategic DPS burst. Seems like our role now is going to be further limited to support/water and not much else.

Thanks for the latest comments. What I’m gathering from this now is perhaps to be a bit more flexible with switching out more things situationally (e.g. the heal, or some traits).

Byron, your build doesn’t really fit the spirit of the thread, as it is a fundamentally different setup and removes the things I enjoy about staff ele. Maybe others will find it something to try, I’m really looking to optimize/tweak keeping the 6 in arcane and shooting for damage.

So the Berserker gear and Knight’s/Cavaliers/Celestial trinkets are a good mix? What would people suggest for a back item (since it’s comparatively expensive to change that at ascended quality)? I’ve seen some builds run full celestial, but that seems less appealing with the introduction of ferocity. Anyone care to comment?

Thanks for the feedback!

I see your point on Pyromancer’s Puissance, now that I think about it. I stay in Fire Attunement far less in WvW. What would be better? Looks to me like Blinding Ashes, Persisting Flames, or Burning Fire could be useful.

I have tried Blasting Staff, and I know everyone says it’s mandatory, but I did not find it that useful. It doesn’t affect Meteor Shower, and everything else with the speed of moving zergs and AOE target cap I find that with good placement I hit the max number right away or not at all. I’d much rather be able to cast Arcane Wave more often.

Aeromancer’s Alacrity I don’t see the benefit of – really the only staff Air skill that it helps is Static Field, as it doesn’t affect the 1 skill, I already have permaswiftness, and the other two skills are basically useless. I don’t often find my static is on cooldown at a time when I rotate back to it and it would be useful to throw one down.

Aquamancer’s Alacrity looks useful, but requires 4 points. I feel like the tradeoff loss of power and quicker cooldown on Meteor Shower if I take points from fire is not worth it.

I should mention that I am on a T1 server mostly playing NA prime, so I’m typically in a group of 50-ish fighting groups of similar or greater size.

I had stacking weapons before the patch, and got rid of them before finding out that there was still a way to utilize them. But since one of ANet’s goals with the sigil rework was specifically to stop the practice of using stacking weapons, I would bet on them nerfing the water weapon workaround sooner rather than later, so I’ve been hesitant to build around that.

This is the build I have been running for PvE/WvW forever, typically just swapping utilities and stats on my Bifrost to Berserker’s for PvE or Sentinel’s for WvW. I survive very well with good commanders, and hold my own in dungeons, but I’m sure my cobbling here could be optimized, especially after the rune changes (my poor Divinity runes ;_; ). Maybe even the things I love about the build could be done better another way? I have tried a few of the other popular staff builds but just don’t find the mechanics as fun.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFEQFAWhUMaZW5wwBr0AEAS4ARWIqU5tfLD-TFSBwA3U/prSCY7PUWpAXlZSUCy4CAA4BBAA-w

I put in the calculator exactly as I am currently equipped, as I had been hesitant to commit to ascended armor and backpiece until the new rune meta shook out some.

Things I like about the build:

• Having Arcane Wave as a tagging/burst damage skill for zergfights and as a blast finisher. With the quick recharge from Arcane 1, I use it constantly. Most of the staff skills are not fast enough in laggy fights to make sure I get those needed tags, so I really depend on it.

• Permaswiftness for myself and yaks when I walk them, which is only possible with the Air attunement boon from Arcane VIII. The other attunement boons are nice as well, but the swiftness one I use most strategically.

• The dodge roll procs. I don’t have a lot of self-condi clear, so water is very helpful. And the blast finisher and AOE blind are useful as well.

• Moves to PvE just fine without a bunch of gear switching.

• Damage focus. I don’t want to be just a walking water field, I want to hit stuff!

So, any feedback is welcome. Some things I’m specifically looking to figure out:

• What is the optimal gear mix now with Ferocity?

• How is my crit/crit dmg/power triangle looking here?

• What runes and sigils would help me most now?

• Is there a better mix of traits that would allow me to keep all the Arcane ones I love, still hit hard, and get more sustain?

A guildie just informed me that he was able to get double monthly reward – he had done 2/2 PVE achievements pre-patch, then 2 more after and got the reward again.

So, since I had 5 monthlies done before the patch, I get squat for playing more?

Would have thought ANet would have foreseen and closed this kind of loophole after all the similar problems with it previous times that they changed the achievement behavior. Monthly reward is very substantial – the laurels alone are ~10g. So handing out an extra 10g to some players and not to others who’ve done the same achievements seems like something they should address.

Ooh, another ability I just thought of:

- “Protect Supply” Stop supply drain for X amount of time, or at a certain threshold (Maybe could be tied to your guild claiming the structure). Also, could be used to stop camp drain when trying to upgrade.

To go along with that:

- “Declaim Structure” to prevent people from claiming something and not applying any buffs.

I’ve had some thoughts percolating for awhile now for some things that would make WvW Commanders better, and it’s really come to a head with all the issues we’ve seen on TC with seige griefing lately. I didn’t see these exact ideas already posted in the CDI thread summary from December, so here goes:

The big idea: Commander ranks.

There was much discussion over the fact that 100g is not a great gateway to being a commander, but I don’t think the previously proposed solutions (wvw rank, etc.) are helpful. I think an “entry fee” is fine, and after that you prove your skills as a commander to gain commander levels and access to more powerful features. There don’t have to be too many – 3-5 I’d say. As far as how you move up, some ideas I thought of were:

- Net score gain from maps you’re commanding, or better, an advanced stat like PER in basketball.

- Popular vote. People who run with you can “vouch” for your tag, and can devouch if they want to remove their support.

- Total number of X (where X is "Successful defenses, keeps taken, etc.)

Higher levels get a distinct icon, so you can quickly see whether a commander on the map is experienced. This helps prevent tag trolling as well, as experienced tags would be unlikely to step on each other and the experienced tag would be easy to spot. If you switch servers, your tag rank resets to baseline. Abilities you could gain along the way could include:

- Ability to set tag priority – e.g. “Defense,” “Havoc,” “Main Commander,” “Bloodlust,” “Map Hopper”
- Ability to move friendly seige (i.e. it can’t be destroyed but can be shifted within X yards)
- Ability to remove friendly seige
- Ability to dequeue upgrades (money goes back to the person who queued it)
- A PBAoE “presence” that prevents seige deployment by other players within X yards of the commander

Obviously most of these are very powerful and should only be available to the highest rank of commanders. But given sufficient requirements for the ranks, I think you could ensure that those who attain it are very dedicated to their server and after many hundreds of hours of leading, umpteen objectives taken, tens of thousands of ppt gained, etc. they would be unlikely to turn heel and start trolling with them. If they did, losing “vouches” alone should quickly drop them out, but otherwise there would have to be some kind of report system.

Full disclosure, I am not a commander, so this is mostly my conjecture on what would make a commander’s life easier. I tried to say away from “game changing” new abilities or features that would make an even greater disadvantage to a map without an experienced commander (or any commander at all), but simply provide tools to address common griefing problems and commander quality-of-life issues. Bottom line is, we need to have some way to address the very real griefing problems in WvW without causing a problem of equal-and-opposite magnitude. So rather than have to rely on an ineffective report-and-ban system, better to allow the communities to fix the problems themselves, and put the tools in the hands of people who have proven their investment in the server’s success by their time and their victories.

I’m interested to hear what other people, especially commanders, would add to this framework. What criteria would you use for the ranks? What other abilities would be useful?

Zaxares describes the exact situation I have witnessed. The same player, a guardian, exits after every match, and is back in the next one. I am the only other holdover, generally. I see him pretty much every time Crab Toss is up. I do not see this with any other classes – when people want to keep playing, they just stay. It’s really clear when guardians are abusing this bug.

Thanks for the fuller explanation of how long the Aegis lasts, that explains why I see it pop over and over at the beginning of matches but not later. I don’t play guard so didn’t understand the mechanic.

It’s unfortunate they’ve let it persist this long. I know a lot of people see the activities as a daily chore, but for those of us who enjoy them I think we deserve blatant imbalances like this to be fixed. I can’t get a fair match, and although he’s cheating I don’t want to waste my time sitting there trolling him with the fishing pole (been on the other side of that and it sucks).

This is still an issue. Guardians can bring Aegis with them into Crab Toss and get a huge advantage by blocking the first couple of attacks and making sure they get the crab first. There is one player in particular that I have seen (don’t know if it’s ok to name names) who is quite good at crab toss. He leaves after every match to pop Aegis and come back, and he’s nearly impossible to beat because of it.

Sorry for the necropost, but I figured it was better than making a new thread for an issue that people have brought up many times.

+1 to any idea that gets us more Keg Brawl (even if it’s as simple as just rotating the four games directly). It’s my favorite game, and as it stands right now it’ll be nearly impossible to get Kegmaster with it only being playable once per week. The standards for the achievements are significantly above the other activities already, especially keg recoveries. I don’t think that the intention for this achievement was really “get three friends who have nothing else to do with their weekend, find a time slot where few people are playing, and farm recoveries for hours.” As lame and unlikely as that is, it’s currently the only way you can get this achievement in your lifetime.

Autumn Frazee.3158:

We are currently working on the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights; I realize that sometimes its hard to get a full overflow or that there are non peak hours where server populations will be lighter. Hopefully with the difficulty changes, it will also make it easier for a good server to get ‘Six Minutes to Knightfall’.

What about the fact that even when you do meet the success criteria for this achievement, it doesn’t get awarded?

Like many others who have reported, I was part of several TTS runs that succeeded in beating the 6 minute timeframe and did not receive the achievement. Is this fixed with the new patch? The notes don’t say so…

skepticck.9714:

Nice, how about the ‘No More Tricks, Scarlet’ achievement where if you are downed by ANYTHING at ANY POINT during the fight you cannot get that achievement.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/No-More-Tricks-Scarlet-achievement-bugged

Or, for that same achievement, the already-noted issue where the damage field lingers a few seconds after the graphic disappears, so you’re either again incentivized to not move and help, or likely to get a completely unavoidable fail by moving over a field that looks gone but isn’t.

It’s the scaling. Those early runs, people were probably scattered everywhere, not focused on any one thing, just exploring the map and messing around, so the miasma events stayed at a manageable level – there were enough people around to do them, but not so many they became unmanageable. Now that it’s phased into the achievement hunting mode, either there are huge blobs at each miasma for people trying to get their Triple Threat, or there’s absolutely no one there because one of the tricky escorts is up/will be up soon.

No one said anything about autoattacking. You can’t do that in this event no matter what, you have to be actively maneuvering and using all your skills just to survive. The problem is that the event doesn’t scale intuitively. I have done the event with a small group of 5-10, and with all the damage incoming we couldn’t spend enough time attacking to get enough mobs down and still sustain. Progress maybe 20%. I’ve also done it in a large zerg, and while progress was better, maybe 60-80%, it still wasn’t close to finishing in time.

Again, you can’t tell people to stay away, they’re going to show up. And again, for this map, there’s no real way to coordinate a group for an event with subtle mechanics. So once the event scales past a certain point you will not be able to draw aggro or target a single enemy like a protector in the middle of the mess in order to push them out (And likely your push skill will hit something else on the way instead). And you can keep getting the other mobs out all you want, but the champ/elite protectors will follow you too.

You did make some interesting points at the end – first off, the way you describe it, the event is designed as waves, but that is not how the event UI reads. The defend events are waves, and display as such. Miasma is a progress bar, meaning you just need to kill anything and everything to move the bar down. If you are right and the event functions as waves for progress, they should change this so success criteria is clear. Also, if, as you seem to be saying, trash mobs that don’t count for wave clear respawn endlessly, the ones that must be killed should get a clear icon over their heads indicating that they are required and still remaining. This would be an easy way to help players cooperate to strategize on targets like protectors.

The event is just flawed design right now – you can’t set up an effectively skilled group to do it in a map of random players. You can see that it’s flawed just in the fact that it is the miasma event that consistently fails every time. In large group temporary content like this where you’re SUPPOSED to help, it’s gotta scale to where completion is possible with that many people.

I am also finding Triple Threat to be a problem because of the Molten miasma. The problem, as I see it, is:

1. With the cyclical entry/exit you have a random map of people every time. You’re not likely to be able to coordinate, even on the main map, because you don’t know which commanders/guilds/parties will make it in, and once you’re in the clock is ticking, you gotta just do

2. Therefore, no communication is really feasible except map chat.

3. To get the achievement, you have to participate in a miasma event, however, if too many people participate, the event will fail because of the scaling. This is counterintuitive, and applies most glaringly to molten.

4. You can’t make people go/stay away from an event, so aside from having a hidden condition for success (max group threshold) you have no way to visualize or control it.

5. The mechanics of the event are extremely difficult. Protectors in particular are drastically overpowered – their circles are large, especially from Champions, they last a long time, and the elite/champion protectors can’t be pushed or pulled from them. There is so much AOE on the ground – the portals and shamans and aetherblade cannons blanket the ground with fire constantly – it’s hard to see the protector circles or even find positioning, so you can’t effectively kite out of the circles, not to mention the constant damage you’re taking.

6. So if you’re in a small group you don’t have the synergy of the combo fields and can’t keep your health up or stop dodging/running/kiting long enough to kill enough things for the requirement, and if you’re in a big group it scales past the ability to succeed.

In conclusion, I think Molten miasma needs some tweaking. Right now, you’re deincentivized to help because of the scaling, there is a mystical sweet spot of people that can succeed at the event that is impossible to gauge or deploy in a randomized map of players, and the combo of enemy skills of AOE invulnerability, constant AOE damage, and buffs from the Effigies are too strong.

It wouldn’t even matter if not for the achievement, as people would just let molten fail and that’s that, but even in the spirit of the achievement it fails. The idea is that you helped make sure that none of the canisters were deployed. Say you go to Toxic or Aether (which are both challenging but regularly complete) and your event succeeds. Logically you would then WP and go to help the molten event to get the win, but you can’t in this case, because more people helping hurts the chance for success!

1. Elementalist (staff!)
2. Ranger
3. ? (Maybe Necro)

Thanks for this post, I wanted to buy this item for that specific skill as well, but thought I’d look around and make sure of what we get. If it’s not big like a persisting version of the mystery box or growth tonic, it’s not worth it to me.

If they update the item based on your thread I will buy, but not otherwise. :/

I was also expecting the gift exchange vendors to stick around for a couple of weeks like last year. I saved all my “unwanted gifts” throughout the season to trade them all in at once at the end, as it’s tedious to trade just a few at a time, and now I’ve got many stacks of them in stash. Hopefully you can bring them back for a couple weeks, or add a tab to Sonder.

Just got Daily Portal closer on my first map today (5 portals closed) with 30:38 left on the timer, and still no Swift Closer achievement! Can we get an update on whether this will be fixed?

Also have been unable to complete this achievement. I have tried 6 times now every which way I can think – in overflow, in my home map, first 15 minutes, not waypointing, only participating in Twisted events, different characters, doing more than 5, nothing works. I’m getting medals, but never this achievement.