Guild Wars 2

There were actually two of us for the one in ML, sometimes a few more show up for the CS drake but last time we did that I spent most of the fight just reviving stuff and running in circles. We did kill it in that case as its charges never took it far enough away, but I haven’t done it since because… well, it’s a waste of time and effort, whether it works or not.

While I agree the mechanics of it are horrendously myopic, we were killing the stupid thing, and honestly I’ve just come to expect horrible fight mechanics in this game. What really annoys me is that even though we would have got it eventually if we’d stayed and continued, with a mob that has:

-pathetic reward for effort
-huge hp pool
-very un-fun mechanics to fight, it’s basically just ‘kite the lizard of near-instant death around a rock until it dies’ or ‘try to do anything else to it and be charged over and over and over until every evade and heal is on c/d, every last bit of endurance is gone, and then die’.

there is simply no reason to ever complete the event, not with one person, not with a hundred people, it is a waste even of the energy it takes to press keys. We were basically wasting our time on this event either way, and they’ve somehow managed to make it even more of a waste than it is inherently. I can’t even really call it a bug, it’s just a combination of awful intentional things that result in something even worse.

Ayochak.8293:

Risen Plague Carriers do not generate red circles, however they do have an animation where they stop, stand straight and look up before exploding.
Of course in mass events they are difficult or even impossible (culling, spell effects) to see.

It isn’t just large events, I’ve actually fought these guys (veteran acolyte) one-on-one, with nobody else around (also off-peak, so the zone itself was pretty desolate), and for ages I kept getting bombed out of nowhere by ‘unknown’. All I’d seen this whole time were thralls (I think they’re called thralls anyway, the other guys he summons), until on my 3rd attempt I attacked him and all of a sudden I see these plague carriers… promptly avoid them, and kill the stupid acolyte easily. Afterwards it suddenly occurred to me that these might’ve been what kept killing me out of nowhere, so next time I saw one I let it hit me and sure enough, ‘unknown’ using explosion.

On a similar note: Risen Vigil Tactician

This has the body of a risen charr, and the attacks of a risen abomination, including their range. Those things hit well beyond their own bloody visual effects, but this guy is just hilarious. It can sit in one corner of my screen, swing, and hit someone length-ways across.

And if you thought the thrown club looked stupid and oversized on a risen abomination, this guy using it looks like a small asura throwing a cow thirty feet. It’s bigger than he is.

If you’re going to recycle every attribute of an abomination, at least give it the appropriate effects. Who ever decided on putting manual dodges in this game must not have really spoken to the people matching effects with visuals…

So at some point someone added a charge to these creatures, or at least the one in CS and the one in ML, and on top of just being generally annoying – the usual combination of extreme damage, almost no warning, CC and hitting well beyond what it visually connects with – it seems that it occurred to nobody that it can charge away from players and leash.

Not only is the event itself incredibly far from worthwhile, if you do waste your time whittling down its health for ages, it can just take off in a charge, leave combat, and reset its health entirely.

Something feels backwards about this event. Maybe we should be paying karma back to the universe to get rid of it?

Explode comes from orrian mines and risen plaguebearers. A fun little ‘perk’ is that plaguebearers can be summoned by some creatures, and either run to the player and fail to render in time, or simply appear and instantly explode on someone. Hard to tell which it is, since either way they’re invisible until you’re highly damaged or dead.

Normally it’d take more than one to put you in defeated rather than downed, but once you’ve been downed a certain number of times you are defeated instantly next time.

Damage is all warriors have in PVE. It just happens that damage is all that really works in PVE anyway, because PVE has awful design. Nerfing warrior damage won’t really help with that.

I don’t feel this really warrants 15 characters of explanation, it’s pretty obvious why I’m suggesting it: we can’t wear 2/3 of the non racial armours in this game on any given class, so it’s pretty annoying when you’re browsing the trade post for different potential armours for your character and 2/3 of the results are absolutely, totally irrelevant to you no matter what box you check or category you select.

DeadlySynz.3471:

This is a bit disconcerting… Tkitten que is ridiculously long and were ticking at over 600. The same was true last night as well. I think I spent about 90 min in the que and we were ticking close to 500 then.

However, last week, against SoR (aside from reset night), I don’t ever recall having a que. This I have to wonder.. both SoS and CD are doing great in this match up, but when SoR was in the equation, there were more fights overall to be had, as they were all over the map. So I’d think people would be que’ing for the opportunity for more fights.

I wonder, why exactly is the que so long when were ticking so high with less fights on the map? It almost seems like some of us are opportunists, that is unless they are running around for their traveler achievement. I dunno, it just seems kind of odd to me.

Qué?

I was put in a queue a few times last match, at least when I tried to get in during NA play hours. Of course I think it’s just a given that you’ll have more people show up when they’re threatened with boredom compared to frustration and futility, plus the map completion ones, and those who aren’t very experienced in WvW and suffer disproportionately when outnumbered.

sinthetix.8765:

To the guy that said the rest of the CD guilds should leave too…. why? CD has been doing great despite having lost a significant number of large WvW guilds over the past few months. We finished in first two weeks in a row. We hold our own and our morale has not been better.

If you took that from my post (which apparently got auto-deleted for containing that one guy’s deleted post in a quote, but said something along the lines of ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave’) all it was really suggesting was that bitterness and rage over abandonment issues only makes separation from someone like that seem like a pretty good idea. I don’t actually have anything against CD in general (or any server really – in fact the idea seems silly to me) and as far as who goes where, I only suggest everyone make those decisions in total ignorance of whoever would accuse them of disloyalty over what server they play a game on.

If not… then just ignore that, lol.

Ironically I had finally got my necro to 80 in the match preceding SoR/TC/SoS. Didn’t use it on them though; still need a tiny bit more gear.

I’m levelling a guardian now too, which I’m incredibly glad I’m doing after the necro, because the amount of guardians and elementalists I basically unplugged at the wall on just my upscaled necro with bad gear was amazing. Really don’t want to be unprepared for that!

Ghedoriah.4290:

Yeah, sadly when numbers are your strong point, it doesn’t encourage good play. Same issue we found in T4. Just lost Ogrewatch on EB. Sitting on one AC, had a good 20 bags piled up around me just before the gate dropped, but that didn’t stop the 40 folks behind them. Who needs good tactics when you could just drop a gate with PvDoor?

Bound to happen really, TC has a much larger population in general than it has a WvW population, and I guess when it slants too far in our favour a lot of totally inexperienced people show up hoping to capitalize on it.

Though the past few hours are usually pretty quiet on this server, I’ve seen like <10 people on EB now and again during the last match (the time before I was mostly on TCBL, and lately I’m levelling an alt). It’s funny because on the whole we can be steamrolling a server, then when I’m online we’re often outnumbered in turn, so I come in here and it’s like ‘what the hell are all these people talking about?! It’s nothing like that!’

Hm… I tried steel but it looks way too light to me for the background. Ebony even looks a bit light, although cocoa actually seemed nearer but not quite there. I was up to midnight yew and adobe but it was getting dark lol. There’s a few colours similar to pottery like old penny and adobe, but I’m not sure they’re any closer. For instance here is adobe/midnight yew and while the latter looks reasonable (in the dark anyway) adobe is a bit lighter (it’s also lighter than pottery).

Aieo.2815:

Uh from my experience in T1 SEA =/= Oceanic. SEA starts 3 hours later and ends 2 hours later than Oceanic. Hence why FA’s Oceanic is losing to DB’s SEA presence.

They overlap quite a lot around the later Oceanic and earlier SEA times: some timezones are shared, and generally it’s close enough that people’s varying sleep/play habits are enough to blend one into the other.

You’ve got to realize though that all of Oceania combined has a population that surpasses that of Canada alone by a mere ~2 million. There really aren’t many people in this part of the world (SEA on the other hand is pretty crowded).

I could be wrong but from the one or two times I actually used the feature, I believe that NPC is wearing town clothes. I wondered about that helmet once, but on noticing that I figured even if it did exist I’d have all of zero use for it anyway.

On a similar vein: what?

The trouble is when you get close enough it’s hard to say for sure, because even the lighting can throw it off. I’d look at my armour from the top with theirs in the side like the screenshot, and then rotate it to look at both from the side, but I could already see that the lights weren’t quite the same and it was making it harder to tell. Might need to just clip into them! :|

I don’t remember if I tried steel or not, but iirc it does have the brownish tint like ebony (but lighter I think) so it might be that. As for the orange-ish colour, I’m not convinced it’s pottery, but something along those lines does seem likely. That particular bit of metal seems to make dyes darker and perhaps also more saturated. I’m not really sure how or why that works, but throwing in anything which looked right in the palette or on other armour ended up waaay more intense than I expected, and as for ‘midnight’ anything – ‘tinted black’ comes to mind.

Brew Pinch.5731:

What’s particularly odd is that despite knowing of this issue even the new armours are being released without taking into account Charr tails…

‘Odd’ for sure. While it’s possible they could make additional changes before it’s really released, I’m not exactly optimistic at this point. I’d prefer to be, but I’m not going to just keep on hoping forever without them giving me a reason. It’s hard to imagine it happening, especially in a game so heavily about appearance, but the evidence seems to suggest they genuinely do not care about this at all.

It’s pretty discouraging for me when it comes to supporting this game, there’s certainly no way I’d spend money on skins that don’t even properly fit the character I’d want to put them on – much less considering they’re also one-time-use rather than the permanent unlocks I’ve bought for other games in the past. Even if they did design one or two for us occasionally, I’d probably still avoid it until they showed signs of being willing to correct existing skins and take it into account thereafter: I’m not going to encourage a company that decides if you choose x thing in the game you just have to accept getting less quality than everyone else. If they aren’t willing to support it, it simply should never have been there to begin with.

As for future games and expansions, I’m definitely going to make a point to investigate stuff like this before I buy anything, because early access and a few token items aren’t worth trusting cherry-picked video footage and head-on screenshots of character models, only to find out the majority of armour skins (and even a lot of weapons!) look utterly stupid on my character.

kurtosis.9526:

Have it come in the mail, soulbound but you can apply it to whichever character you want.

Why soulbound if you can apply it to any character anyway? Seems like account bound would be simpler, like the karma from dailies.

It must be complicated to introduce a grind in a system where the mobs can co-operate.

Evokerz.4952:

Great! I can hunt and kill all the Komies on battlefield and send them back to LA

…all of who now?

The hairless ones are usually the fire elementalist types aren’t they? I think it sort of explains itself. :P

Okay well I don’t think it’s midnight anything because that part of the armour really darkens stuff. ‘Copper’ and ‘hazel’ looked pretty close, but on my character the armour seems a bit shinier somehow, so idk.

edit: on second thought those are too saturated.

edit2: well this is ebony + pottery, which looked pretty close.

If they’re using a lot of ‘midnight’ colours there’s also a ‘fire’ and ‘gold’ iirc. I’ve been meaning to get a new skin for part of my warrior’s PTV set so I might test it out later, that character has a lot of dyes on it.

You avoid the rings if you deselect stuff before screencap btw. For whatever reason hiding the HUD doesn’t remove those.

JosieMach.3052:

It really gets annoying that my clones just stand there and do nothing while i’m fighting.

Maybe they have the same AI as necro minions. Sometimes they’ll just sit around for up to ~10s before attacking something, even if I’ve used the same skill/s that triggers them to attack almost every other time (hell by then I’ve used most of my skills).

I was just doing an event in Blazeridge, part of ‘The Ogre Assault’ at Behemian Grand Krall where a human (Lieutenant Fynn) and a charr (Kor the Warcaller) NPC are fighting a champion ogre – I forget what comes before this because I found it like that – and this ogre had a knockback skill it would use, which reset its health each time the knockback actually worked.

If I had stability up or dodged it nothing would happen; I could even move as far as it knocked me in any given direction and nothing would happen, but if it used that skill it would reset. Eventually I walked off to report it and a warrior started trying, so I went back. It kept happening and I pointed it out, but as we backed off the bridge it had been standing on and fought some adds, it kept fighting us and no longer reset when using this skill.

The strange thing is, I think it actually began on the bridge, as that’s where it was standing when I revived the NPCs and they attacked it. For whatever reason it just breaks there also…

Weindrasi.3805:

If you’re not willing to create clothing that accommodates a race, why would you include that race to begin with???

I’ve been wondering that ever since I bought this game. Some things they’ve decided to overlook I’m amazed would end up in a product for sale, much less go on to be ignored for almost a year.

Reminds me of playing Vanguard, back when they basically said the internals of the game were such a terrible shocking mess they’d be putting new content on hold indefinitely while they try to fix it.

Bweaty.9187:

I think Im remembering why I quit for a year…

Time travel?

I think saying we’ve had enough of it is pretty much redundant at this point. It’s not like there’s some little miscellaneous issue with it that’s difficult to catch, they’ve designed some things around it perfectly and let others rot; it’s obviously not a priority for them that we can use most armour in the game without looking stupid. Hell, they just don’t care. Cultural armour blatantly designed as though whoever made it didn’t even know it was exclusive to a race with tails pretty much gave that away long ago, and then there’s the CoF stuff that actually has a visual effect on the tail and still isn’t designed to fit around one.

Fenrir.3609:

Hit for 48k and 37k in the space of one second from an unkown source which was impossible to see due to culling at the Lyssa event.

Not great design.

There’s a veteran acolyte (I think it’s acolyte) which summons plague carriers, and I think a lot of the time these can run to you and explode before they render, or they just summon on you, because I often get nuked by them without ever seeing one even if it’s not for the event and nobody is around. Yours probably got scaled up, and boom, instant screw-you from the game.

Another thing – what in the nine hells is up with those champion wraiths? Even now they still deal idiotic damage. I was fighting one at one at an event outside a tunnel, shelter’s gate or something, and it would just lifesteal with no visible indicator of being hit besides ‘oh, my health is vanishing’. Literally the only reason I knew to move away was because I’d read on the forums about what they do.

And what do I get for knowing that? ‘Oh, I’ll just cast two wells on you simultaneously’. I started to dodge, fell into downed state, and died. Literally from the time I saw it and started dodging it dealt enough damage to kill me, a total of 26,689 from two wells appearing under me at the same time.

No event is worth this rubbish.

Apparently asuran hands(?!) also clip through them. I’m hoping they’ll yet fix it, but…

Lorelei.3918:

Protip: You can actually do jump shots and hit things that you couldn’t just standing there..

I’ve done that with my engineer before throwing grenades from a wall in WvW, I found it pretty amusing that actually worked (granted I also found it stupid a knee-high edge on the wall was blocking the demented things in the first place).

Clockradio.3257:

Haha! You must have been absent when tc has been rolling around with a 70 person group in EB the past two days….

To be fair that’s not hard to be, they often vanish after NA prime. Yesterday at one point I think there were literally 5-6 of us in EB all defending one tower from a SoS swarm. Luckily that was pretty much the lowest of the low points though and people started to trickle in afterwards, so we managed to hold the keep at least.

Are TYSM and TSYM related?

Well it’s not as noticeable since daggers are tiny, but since they end up gripping it half by the blade I figure it counts as stupider, haha.

Bjornen.5218:

I’ve noticed this too, it is annoying. My charr looks like it’s so stupid that he can’t wield a sword properly.

Well, not nearly as stupid as the ones holding a dagger, that’s top-tier stupid there.

I think the best part of all is that they wouldn’t even need to avoid it in cases where the bar is used and it’s not relevant. Having a few marks there simply makes no difference to a skill you’re not manually charging, and would only look like it was there to help you gauge its completion easier.

LilMcGinley.3890:

ANet has redefined their server population, there are now 6 Medium and 5 High Servers, as of yesterday.

Sure, you can say that SoS, SoR and TC are all “very high” servers, but they are all VERY different populations when it comes to WvW. SoR is currently the highest rating server, they have competed with the likes of BG, JQ etc for the better part of this year so any one who says “they have the same population” is delusional at best.

They fight a different fight than SoS or TC does, they fight on the battlefield AND in recruitment. SoS is happy where we were, just making the push into T3, but getting thrown in with the “big 6” after 2 straight weeks really sucks.

I’ve never actually guested to SoR (that I remember) so I’m not sure with them if it’s WvW population or population in general, but I think generally speaking the ones with lower in WvW also have lower overall (coverage aside). Of course that could be wrong, but if they were a bit more specific with their population grades I think allowing transfers to lower ones would still make balancing things out a lot easier.

As much as I like even battles (and less lag!) the way the prices are right now, even if I was on SoR and staring at the potential of some really slow weeks to come, there’s no way I’d pay the transfer fee. Which they’ll probably find is true for a lot of people, if they were hoping we’d just spread out naturally.

Sao.7146:

SoS, SoR and TC are all “very high” server if you look the server list.

lol, true, I think last I looked literally every single NA server was either high or very high. I think that may be their categories being very broad though, or at least if the pops are that close to even (PVE included) I have no idea where all the players on some servers are hiding.

I really think they should have allowed free transfers to lower pop servers tbh. I guess they’d rather hope for the money or something, but evening out coverage/pop is really the only way the system makes any kind of sense right now – they could address some of the difficulties faced by smaller groups vs larger ones, but that would still mean the larger groups get less fighting. Then again they raised the caps, maybe they’d prefer merges. Even in PVE huge areas of the game are often quite desolate, while the popular spots are in overflow. I’ve often wondered why there are so many servers if the population is going to be so focused that the result is overflow either way.

Frankly that door is stupidly designed. It should be common knowledge by now that people will gladly take an opportunity to prevent opposition from leaving spawn areas to play the game, regardless of what game it is.

On the plus side, the people outside it like 15 min ago made pretty decent loot themselves…

magikfox.9658:

LameFox.6349:

Hahaha, got danced on by some sylvari in [LeeT] after SoS zerged our tower where we had all of five people… probably on the entire EB… and they still lost numerous rams and catapults and took ages to knock the gate down. So sad.

“Lost numerous rams and catapults.” Sounds like you were using ACs. If I was that sylvari I would /sit /sit /sit /sit /sit /sit all day long over that take.

They lost the rams to ACs, they lost the catapults to a treb (and possibly other ACs but to me it was obscured from them).

But yeah, I’m sure you’re horribly offended when 5 people use siege to defend their base from your zerg, LOL. It must be so hard for you, trying not to get trampled to death by your team. D;

…and now apparently I’m looking for a group? lol. Guess that was why some random added me during the SoS’s failed zerg on our keep.

Hahaha, got danced on by some sylvari in [LeeT] after SoS zerged our tower where we had all of five people… probably on the entire EB… and they still lost numerous rams and catapults and took ages to knock the gate down. So sad.

All it would take to make this a million times more intuitive for any ‘charged’ weapons is a simple set of marks along the bar, so we can stop using environmental crap to judge our shots by. Why do we not have this so obvious of things?

Jeda.5209:

LameFox.6349:

Heh. So can you still get in from SoS? Or does it work for some people and not others? I haven’t tried today since I read it was down, but then apparently someone from Anet said on twitter it was an issue accessing WvW from some worlds.

WVW is down on SOS side as well.

Ah, too bad, would’ve been a funny way to catch up and get some WXP lol.

Heh. So can you still get in from SoS? Or does it work for some people and not others? I haven’t tried today since I read it was down, but then apparently someone from Anet said on twitter it was an issue accessing WvW from some worlds.

…though depending on how you sing, this may also have the opposite effect.

Adrenaline skill: throw your banner, spearing your enemy and pinning it to the ground for 5 seconds. >:P

Bows on any class_hit further than their range (actually melee seems to do this as well) so traited you can hit a little further than with a rifle. It’s just something about how the projectiles work. Though unless they finally updated it, the traited #1 has 10% less damage as they forgot about it when buffing it a while ago, or something.

edit: once again having to add underscores because of the world’s most pathetic word filter.

I’d only take one banner in WvW if I were you, unless you’re doing something very static like buffing defenders on a wall, or trying to hold a lord room. Then you can use the other two slots for shake it off or balanced stance, and maybe something like the signet of stamina (dodges and emergency condition purge are always nice to have). If you take more you risk leaving long c/d skills completely wasted someplace.