Guild Wars 2

I like the Marionette fight and its nifty mechanics overall, but I think there are several (common) problems with it which could have been addressed with some tweaks.

I’ve done this boss 5 or 6 times, and every time it was in an overflow (even if I wped straight after the wurm fight), and every time we weren’t even close to succeeding. And the reason was the RNG in arena party grouping. There’s been several times when we finished our circle with 30 seconds to go while the other circles were all dead people. Some of you write of cheering words in the chat – but I’ve seen quite the contrary in the chat, with people accusing noobs [of failing the work others had done]. I never write such things, but still it’s right what I think at the moment. The fix? I see several fixes out there:

1. A sandbox, like for 10-15 seconds, where players are put before the fight, and then evenly sorted among the platforms according to their player levels, played time and/or achievement points. AP may not be an ideal representation of player skills, but at least it ensures that we don’t get a group of 5 veterans on one circle and a group of 5 passer-bys on the other which will result in a chain fail.
2. A portal/an automatic teleport/energy field paths to other platforms which appear once a platform has succeeded. This highly encourages team play, as you know that the faster you kill your boss the more chances you’ll have to help other platforms which weren’t that lucky. And on the other hand, it relieves that uneasy feeling of standing on an empty platform and looking at the last dead body dropping on the next platform and knowing that they’ve failed it.

So, I think that putting pure luck as a core component of an open-world raid content was not a good design choice. Taking all the overflow problems into consideration, I’m pretty sure that many players won’t even kill the marionette once because they’ll either be turning up in overflows or come later when most skilled players will get their achievements and forget that boss (like with the Tower of Nightmares which got unzergable at the end). “Fix” to this? It’s camping and afking the map, forcing other players to fill the overflows. I really feel bad about doing it, but I’ll be doing it soon as otherwise nothing will change. Unless, of course, the devs tweak the platform mechanics in the above way;)

A couple more notes on the boss:

• “Go through the gate” thing and the actual invisible teleport are logically misleading. I’ve done it myself at the first run and I’ve seen many people doing it: just running through the gate and facing a stone wall, and then again and again. Firstly, in such a pandemonium it’s easy to overlook the teleport thingie, and secondly, this thing looks exactly like a gate which you should run THROUGH. Putting a mesmer’s portal or another type of ground portal and removing the green (passable!) curtain would’ve worked so much better.
• The marionette’s face. Yeah, it’s certainly a trifle, but the expression is dumb Some mischievousness and technology in it would’ve made it so much cooler

Overall, thanks for a fun boss to do. I hope one day I’ll manage to get onto my home server and finish it.

I’d say making them exactly match the current ascended armor apart from the additional effect makes perfect sense. Just like those achievement gloves and mantles and toxic gloves and mantles, but instead of being mix’n’match, they just match straight away.

(That doesn’t however mean that I like the current design of ascended armor – I transmute each new piece to sylvari cultural mix as soon as I craft them, and even for a human twink I’ll go for something different.)

Godzilla.7629:

Why wasnt the healing tree nerfed? I understand none of us want this but i am curious as it is a consumable which summons quite a large tree with much more graphics than a turret or mortar (please dont nerf it, just merely curious)

Unlike sylvari or mortars the healing tree has no AI:) Thus server performance-wise it is pretty much a coordinate with an AoE tied to it. No targeting, no skill usage, no projectiles with trajectories. As for the charrzooka, that was most probably an oversight.

Malediktus.9250:

Maybe just invest in better/more servers then. You made a fortune with the gemshop already looking at the ncsoft finance reports.

And now tell me which scenario you’d prefer once the servers are upgraded:

• A population cap increase from 100 people to 120 for every map. More people finally get a chance to fight Tequatl and map-specific release content on their own servers without turning up in random overflows.
• The same 100 people population cap, but once a week some random guild you know nothing of on a random map can pop up 100 elementals. Same overflows and a complete waste of resources for 99% of time.

Thank you for a detailed answer Anthony!

Maybe such a workaround could work: the cooldown starts on the pet’s death; if the pet was still alive by the end of his 5 minute timeout, he can be summoned again instantly. Even makes more sense from the logical point of view.

ChaosKirin.1328:

I’d actually be happy to get an ember mini that does nothing in exchange for giving up all my powders.

I know this doesn’t solve everyone’s problems, but for those of us who RP, it would be a start.

I’d even buy it from the gem store.

Maybe a Mystic Forge recipe then? Like, 500 elemental powder consumables, 100 bloodstone brick, 5 Philosopher’s Stones, 1 Mystic Forge Stone.

MassDelusion.9130:

A lot of over sensitive people here.

Kain Francois.4328:

Hello Bill. I’m part of the minority of players thanking you for the Ogre Whistle/Fire Elemental nerf. So thank you!

You know, I can totally live with the consumables nerf, but that’s actually not the subject of this thread anymore.

The subject is faith and respect between players committed to the game and developers who rule it. Just read the following:

Items that summon pets now have a 30-minute cooldown. These items were designed to be of pure entertainment purpose but resulted in an unintended combat disbalance as content difficulty is tailored for completion without extra abilities. Furthermore, in large-scale dynamic events excessive use of summon items is also causing server-side performance issues. We apologize to those of you who might have stacked a considerable amount of summon items for regular use.

Now compare it to “mitigating unidentified performance issues” and “ever existing is just blatantly a bug” and feel the difference.

People can eat anything, but they need to see good intent in your actions and trust your experience. That’s common sense of ruling anyone public relations, which just don’t go with the “cheesy purple mesmers” giggles and “blatant bugs”.

Wookie.4726:

IAnd yes, there are a tremendous drain on resources especially when you have a large guild group of about 100 doing world events and 50-70 players pop an ember. I have to put my graphics on the lowest setting every day for post reset activities.

But a right fix to this client-side performance issue (if it was the issue) would be to hardcap the amount of high-poly models for summons in the code and show low-poly non-animated models for others. Like LOD and characters models. sliders for which exist in game settings.

BillFreist.1527:

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

Sorry, but no. These are not players with 10+ skills syncing with the server, those are mobs with mob AI which sync at most the player’s position and the player’s target and act just the same as spawned ads in all the other regards.

…or open world PvP box/banner similar to Box of Fun:)

Do you know that guy who purchased 10 character expansion slots?
Turns out he just wanted to post “LOL” on the forum.

MrSilver.5269:

You know that even after the nerf there is another way to get near 100% up-time on vigor, and more importantly vigor on demand.

Like sigils of energy and stamina? While other classes will stack damage sigils to compensate for the zerg nerf because they don’t rely on vigor?

Or runes? Oh wait, we’re already using speed runes, which we have to use to achieve what other classes can, again, do naturally.

Or food, doubloons, forced traiting and a signet which have to replace all other skills and features?

Zanshin.5379:

I’ve never had a single charged quartz since. Only regulars. So even if it’s true, the drop rate is very low.

It’s true, had a charged dropped after the nerf. But yes, it’s pretty rare.

The answer to ascended material disbalance is pretty simple and has been suggested countless times: an MF recipe to convert from one type to another type at a discounted rate. This makes it still time consuming as intended but doesn’t force people to farm activities they dislike (like dungeons in my case).

What did the Risen Noble say when an adventurer stole Deep Glacial Sky Dye from him?
“Return. Dye.”

If you want to stick with this class for a long time, you could go through the main page of Mesmer subforum and probably reconsider your choice of class. TLDR: this class’s mechanics are considered too abnormal and “cheesy” (whatever that means) by developers, so mesmers get nerfed a lot and their bugs get rarely fixed, resulting in an undiversified and unrewarding gameplay.

I’ve been suggesting speed improvements for mesmers here and there, especially with regards to the bugged temporal curtain, and I second this idea. Signet of speed is one of the best and balanced solutions IMO. Others may be:

• a new rune (or 2 runes) which are actually universally useful for power mesmers and condition mesmers with +25% movement speed increase
• replacement of +33% daze duration in Runes Of Mesmer with a +25% movement speed increase; now yes, at this moment I’m sure some lockdown mesmers start yelling at me, so maybe a buff of 6th effect with speed or a separate similar rune (previous option) is a better idea
• a separate trait that can give us a movement speed increase (what about replacing Compounding Celerity with a +25% speed buff?)
• as a lighter option to the above one, a trait which increases only out of combat speed which balances it with profession mechanics used to evade in combat

I’m playing a GS mesmer with PVT+zerg gear not because I like it that way, but because with the current balance viable options for PvE are very limited. That doesn’t negate your point (it seconds it instead), but please don’t think of all GS mesmers as lazy people:) Many of us just want to be efficient and play a rewarding game, that’s all.

Crossplay.2067:

One that everyone and there momma have stated ever since the initial nerf. I’m an amateur programmer and I could have fixed this easily so it boggles my mind why professionals haven’t done so already.

I think the solution lies in the payment system of the game: things like Living Story is something very clear and appealing to new players who are looking for a new game to buy, while bugs become annoying once you master your profession only (which is, of course, once you’ve already bought the game and probably some extras). So naturally, priority goes to things which give more money.

I started playing as a tough staff condition mesmer as I wanted mobs to melt away from conditions and shatters. It felt more fun than standing next to a mob and hitting it with a sword, and that’s why I chose this profession. It also felt nice to know that you’re not running the only “true” GS build everyone’s talking about.

However it was so slow and so unrewarding in dynamic events that I had to respec into a GS power build, just like everyone else. And it’s not that interesting, but makes much more sense. So, build diversity in PvE? No, haven’t heard of it.

Arganthium.5638:

On the other hand, mesmers can participate in very effective active defense through various skills, traits, and builds using their clones.

Fixed: Mesmers have to participate in very effective active defense through various skills, traits, and builds using their clones.

Evasion and deception are the core part of the class (just like stated in this thread), and removing it from mesmers is similar to removing regeneration from guardians (which will get better scaling with healing power instead). (Normal) mesmers are not supposed to facetank enemies, they’re supposed to click a lot of buttons to constantly move around while holding the enemy in a circle of distracting illusions.

Illusionary defense has to be traited – it’s 10 points in Chaos which need to be removed from other lines, such as Domination, and you really have to have all 3 illusions up and not killed already. Illusionary Defender and Blink take up utility slots. All in all, it’s a piano play which deals so little damage that in doesn’t make sense. I started playing a tough staff condi mesmer, but after yet another fail with graveling burrows, I switched my traits (and exotic armor and trinkets) to pure power and GS to finally see a sense in this class in PvE. However it seems that developers are more interested in PvP, and as it looks too OP there, they just nerf it everywhere.

^
Third viable solution.

alanis.6094:

and Guardians don’t get stealth. The nerf is fine, and warranted.

And stealth is really helpful versus Mai Trin’s bazookas, dredge weaponry testing and molten bosses’ AOEs and shock waves. Nerfing vigor is another step to make player’s skills less important than player’s stats.

Ok I know what you did last summer understand the situation now. I don’t really care for PvP/WvW, but as I can see, mesmers are hated just like thieves for their “abnormal” abilities that irritate people too much.

But the thing is… I chose this class for exactly that specific reason: weird mechanics. And as long as the class is present in the game, it should be fully supported by the developer’s team. Impenetrable bunkers may be just as irritating, but as long as it is naturally “normal” and a human mind can cope with it, that’s ok, right? If everyone hates mesmers in the development team, than it’s high time they hired someone to love them:) Just a bit more, I know you can handle it!..

Should’ve made ele my main instead. At least their spells are looking extra cool (:

Arganthium.5638:

I think that the nerf is deserved due to the precedent set by other vigor nerfs; it only makes sense to nerf Mesmer’s vigor as well. The same goes for Guardian.

Let’s be objective here guys- the nerf was deserved.

Yeaaah right. Because objectively, squishy mesmers with light armor and dolyaky regenerating heavy armor guardians rely on dodges to survive in exactly the same way.

Pyroatheist.9031:

This is not a new thing, and the mechanic is well understood. Back in the betas, you could walk back and forth over the line to get infinite swiftness easily. To prevent that, they made the line not apply swiftness if you already have the buff.

It’s a band-aid fix, but here in GW2 band-aid fixes are permanent

Your sigil gives you might on crit. But to ensure you don’t get too much might, you won’t get it at all if you already have might.

No. It can’t be. It’s just… wrong on so many levels.

Assign a unique ID to each temporal curtain. Make it an array and fill it with IDs of players who trigger it. Run an if-else statement to check whether to give swiftness (player not in array) or not (player already in array). Fixed!

Give the skill a cooldown of the same duration as the skill uptime with mechanics similar to sigils (tied to players). Half-fixed!

That said… Getting multiple stacks of swiftness through going back and forth makes perfect sense. It will be of limited usability to players because of its requirements; the swiftness duration cap is still there; the pulsing symbol of swiftness does it, so why naturally slow mesmers’ temporal curtain shouldn’t?

I’ve noticed it some time ago and that’s been a problem for me ever since: the swiftness from focus’s temporal curtain NEVER stacks with other swiftnesses, even with itself!

That’s a major nuisance when roaming with a group of people and it’s even documented in the wiki. For example, I received swiftness from signet of swiftness, and once I see that is almost over, I cast a temporal curtain. However, even though I ran over it, I got no swiftness increase, and I have to GO BACK and run over it again once my previous swiftness is over only… So, to get somewhere faster, you should first go back (sounds so Lewis Carrollish to me)!

There obviously is a stacking mechanism with swiftness duration, and the stacking cap is obviously not the case here, so the only other answer to this is that it’s a bug. The broken swiftness is especially annoying because the only source of it for mesmers is focus which (to many people) leaves no other options for that slot. Many professions have speed signets for free, while mesmers have only a trait which increases speed for each active illusion – which automatically means being in combat with reduced speed. Many professions have analogues of Blink, so that’s not a limiting factor either. Many professions use runes with specific features (and damage modifiers which wouldn’t transfer to illusions) while mesmers have to spam their slots with speed runes if they want to roam. So as I see it, such a limit to the exclusive and limited swiftness we get is just too much.

Yes, please. A Signet of Speed was what I’ve always wanted. It’s so not nice to always be the last one in the dungeon catching all the aggroed mobs. And to have a low swiftness that does NOT stack, AND requires a constant irreplaceable offhand focus.

And no, blink is not much. And no, I do NOT want to ruin a whole 6 slots of runes just for the speed when other classes have it constantly on with regular sigils.

And a problem with sigils to add up.

While most some zerkers with 2-hand weapons can put a +5% damage sigil next to Bloodlust now to get an overall -5% damage nerf instead of -10%, mesmers will be left out with illusions yet again not inhereting damage stats. If we’re talking about 3 phantasms up, our +5% damage sigil is actually a 0.25*5%=1,25% damage increase because our mechanics are supposed to have the overall damage split between the player and illusions.

Velimere.7685:

But that would give good players actual incentive to use Greatsword!

I haven’t played for that long so I couldn’t decide whether that was sarcasm or not. Depends on the Pv? variable, I guess.

Iavra.8510:

They would need to nerf mesmer even harder to make up for an actual buff. Better not even try.

Ele got a burst finisher. Rangers got combo fields on all traps. And we got nerfed twice, with “too much” dodging globally and shatter builds particularly, so why not?

Goodbye the only things which made me feel valuable as a mesmer: solo-finishing Thaumanova boss and solo-finishing Molten Fractal boss :’(

I suggest adding a blast combo finisher to GS’s 3rd skill, Mind Stab. With just 1 boon removed and a static casting it feels a bit underpowered IMO.

After all, looking at the skill animation, it makes sense)

Agreed. When I went to watch the stream, I thought I was going to see serious people who are determined in what they’re doing. Like, if it’s a developer’s stream, they’ll be talking like people who have mastered software development to people who are deeply interested in how things work. I’m being harsh now, but at that moment an idea “that explains a lot” hit my head. Which was weird, because I always liked how clean and neatly the news on releases were put (except for the always “incredible!!!” slogans standing next to trivial things), and I even always liked the Living Story stuff which is the thing widely disliked.

The reality put me off. It was too personal. It felt like a stereotypic shut-in gamer to a stereotypic shut-in gamer talk, not a pro developer to a thoughtful gamer. Probably the advanced technical part with the overlay and the slideshow background made it look even more contrasting – a simple round table with snacks and gamer stuff would’ve worked better if the team was striving to deliver the friendly message. But as such, those things didn’t match.

And the worst thing that really made me feel uneasy was the chat. Are we playing the same game? Why don’t we see such things in the game chat? Most people I come upon in the game are what I’d call a successful interaction, and that’s what makes me stay. And reading the chat it actually felt like all those kids who get banned and ignored on forums and who have problems writing (and reading) in complete sentences came there to show off in front of “the big guys”.

1) Dueling makes both players hostile (red) so that they can be attacked by monsters and other players to calm them down if in an inappropriate place.
2) Players who lose do not enter downed state, they just turn green and regenerate health, like skillpoint NPCs.
3) Option to always decline dueling in settings (with a system message in chat panel on duel declination).

And I’m in. No tweaking, no balance, just friendly dueling during waiting or in desolate places of maps.

Or as an other method, it can simply be triggered in the same way as costume brawl works – with a dueling box/banner which makes any player who touches it attackable. And it involves far less code than costume brawl, in fact.

Never thought that an idea which was supposed to make infusion slots (which are widely considered as mostly harmless useless) more worthy wouldn’t find any backing. So be it, then.

Mimizu.7340:

Mungrul.9358:

Particularly in GW2, higher power gear makes content easier, meaning those who want better gear are admitting they can’t play the game without the crutch of increased stats.
Those who have top-end gear want to feel superior than those without it, even though technically they’re not playing at the same skill-level.

In a nutshell.

Elitists are the worst players in the game.

I’m grinding for the BiS item because I like to have a goal in the game, and it’s pretty much endgame unless I have one. Does that +4.7% difference in stat really make me an elitist?..

…and I looked at the title and thought it was an idea about animal NPC interaction…

:D

“Where do all exotics I put into the Mystic Forge go?”
“They all flow into the same sewer system, and that all goes out to sea…

A remark on the cutscenes only: you can always write in a LFG party description something like (“Story mode, first run, want to watch movies”), and after some time people like you join you and you have the fun of seeing the story. Worked for me:)

Overall, I feel that with a current pay-once-play-forever model ANet focuses on the Personal Story and Story Mode dungeons to keep people new to MMOs feeling comfortable. It looks like an offline game a lot, and there’s enough of this content not to make people think they’ve wasted money, so like any other offline game, they focus more on attracting new players rather than keeping old players busy. Which is, in turn, the source of everlasting skill bugs, dungeon exploits, zerg disbalance and not very impressive Living Story updates.

Not that I dislike this idea, but all I can see people doing is swapping EVERY available stat for Power/Prec/Crit…

With such a time brake, I really expect lots of bug fixes, nerfs/buffs and MF recipes for ascended items and dusts/ores. Which definitely isn’t something that could be shown in a promo video:)

Now I’ve been browsing the Wiki and noticed that back item recipes were put under the bag category, which drove me to an idea.

The back item is a thing naturally associated with backpacks, but it never had any storage functions, which actually felt illogical when I first started playing GW2.

I suggest adding 2 infusions which would expand the bag capacity but will be able to hold only nourishments (similar to amulet utility infusions). The basic infusions (bought from laurel vendors) can hold up to, say, 4 (or only 2, maybe) items, while the fine infusion can hold up to 8 and is only crafted in Mystic Forge. And the recipe for that infusion will require… you guessed it, piles of putrid essence!

Though actual movement of nourishments to the hero equipment panel and implementing food stacking would be nice, I doubt that would ever be implemented as there are too many QoL issues that need to be fixed before it. On the other hand, coding such an infusion into the game would be easier, as it will appear as yet another bag in the inventory. The tricky thing is limiting this infusion to the back item without implementing a separate infusion slot type which would break many existing things, but I believe there should be a simple way just to hardcode that infusion to act as a, say, “Versatile Back Item Infusion”.

Can’t agree, I actually just love the looks of sylvari. With the lack of elves that was actually the only choice for me.

I was going to try all races for different classes after I finish BiSing my 1st character, but at the moment I feel like I’d go for several more colourful sylvaris instead

Not being a hardcore MMO player, when I created a character I actually missed the capital city (Grove) and a large part of the introductionary personal story along with its rewards because I didn’t see the large green arrows you’re talking about in time and I walked in the wrong direction

So I should disagree, there probably may not be even enough arrows for first-timers. AFAIK, these only appears for the first quests, and once you finish them, you won’t be bothered anymore.

Would be happy to be able to convert hoards of bloodstone into empyrial/empyreal fragments, even at a bad rate through Mystic Forge skillpoint recipes. I don’t really like those “stack-here-and-burst-them” dungeons, and though I’m doing fractals instead, the reward for those is the same despite being longer.

Oh, turns out this has been posted at least twice already:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mini-Map-Rubberbanding
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mini-map-1

+1. It’s been several weeks since I wanted to start exactly the same thread

There a couple of ways to “fix” this in my opinion:

• Put an option in the settings “Disable minimap auto-centering”.
• Change the behaviour in a way that it pans to the hero only if he is moving at the moment.
• Combined (preferable): put a dropdown list in settings with the following options:
  • never auto-center the minimap
  • auto-center the minimap only when character’s moving
  • default (cool-down timer for character’s movement)