Guild Wars 2

It makes a pew pew noise. It’s a bit weak, sounds a bit like compressed air.

While although I can’t locate it, some several months ago an arena-net member posted that Carrion would be added in the ‘next round of ascended’.

(For those of you who don’t know, Carrion is Primary: Condition, Secondary: Power, Vitality)

Well, here we several months down the road, and many many months from the initial release of ascended gear, and yet still no carrion gear.

This is quite a large dissapointment. It would take no more than 10 minutes of development time to add these to the game. I don’t even care if they use an existing icon, just throw out some gear in the already existing format with those stats.

From my understanding when I started this game we are allowed to play ‘how we want’. However, if I want to play my condition damage-based thief, I get shafted in gear because Arenanet takes 6 months to release an item set that would take 10 minutes to make.

I have over 125 laurels just waiting to be spent yet they haven’t been in anticipation of this update. If Arenanet does not want these stats to be available to players, at least please give me a confirmation of this so I can respec altogether and get new gear, because at this point it is getting ridiculous.

BillFreist.1527:

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

While although not 100% relevant to the other posts, any news to be said about the mac client? There has not been a posted update to it since last October. While although I get it’s a cider port and will suffer some drop in performance due to translation, I use bootcamp on my same rig and actually gain 25-30+ FPS with even higher settings turned on.

Appreciate you posting here and any information you may be able to give. Thanks!

I just finished doing an event in dredgehaunt cliff. I spend 40 minutes doing the event, and then Scarlet appeared.

I ported to the area where she was at. Players had her cornered inside one of the norn houses. I got inside, started shooting her, then crashed to desktop. Logged back in, no credit, no achievement, no loots. GG.

Just chiming in to say I am really glad Anet has not added dueling.

I really do not want the culture of people getting into petty arguments over the internet and then threatening to duel the other person to prove they are the ‘better’ player, or even people asking me to duel them if I call them out on their being a jerk.

I had enough of that in other mmos, I don’t want the nice and friendly teamwork-oriented culture unique to Guild Wars to evolve into that, and it’s changes like that which could enable or encourage it.

I think back to this a lot too. And I also find myself playing primarily towards where things are rewarded rather than things that would in theory be more ‘fun’.

And I think this has, in part, largely to do with the combat system. After going through 80 levels of the combat system, it starts to get bland for me — sure, it is better than other MMO’s because of being able to be mobile and dodge, but other than that it doesn’t keep my interest.

I always wish for more action-oriented combat. I wish they would have made a truly action-based system, where you aim with a crosshair and have to actually aim with your skills. That would be way more fun to me, and would have truly broken the typical mmo mold. The coding for this seems to already be in place as if you aim to a certain area with nothing targeted, your character will shoot in that direction.

But instead they played it safe by design and stuck with the simple and bland ‘click to target’ system we have currently.

Excalibur.9748:

minbariguy.7504:

Excalibur.9748:

Nerfing liadri would just be ANET caving into the majority and making all content accessible to everyone again.

Honestly, what is the big deal that some people have with needing the game content to not be accessible to everyone?

It seems as if the same people that are so fond of pointing out that frustrated players don’t need the achievements and/or rewards from certain content are always forgetting that they also don’t need to feel like an uber-special-crystalline-snowflake because they have something that someone else doesn’t.

well considering, i spent 4 gold, with 50+ tries, and tons of time theorycrafting a variety of builds…. if think if anyone wants the mini they have to work for it, like I did. It wouldn’t be fun if everyone could just ez-mode through it.

Did you really think that spending 4 gold and 50+ tries (Meaning 49+ tries failing repeatedly) was ‘fun’ though?

I mean hats off to you if you did. I didn’t find a single moment of it enjoyable.

I loved seeing these flying around!

A little bit OT, but I just did a guild challenge for the first time yesterday and loved that it was in the open-world as well! I really love how well ANet has tied in content to the open world.

Excalibur.9748:

Lunaire.5827:

I totally agree with this sentiment.

I consider myself to be a pretty good player. I was able to beat every other gauntlet boss on the first attempt without looking up their attacks. However, when I got to Liadri, it took me roughly 35 attempts to actually beat her.

While although difficulty is welcomed, this sort of ‘difficulty’ is much more frustrating and aggravating than it is fun. It is not fun to spend hours doing the same exact content repeatedly only to fail and fail again. I can only imagine how it is for players that have spent over 100+ attempts on this.

To add to this, they added an exclusive reward to it which you cannot get unless you beat it, made the content temporary so you are time constrained, and also require a cost of entry to even attempt it.

To make something so frustrating and alienating to such a large number of players is a terrible design decision. Even though I have beaten it, I wholeheartedly support a total nerf of this boss.

Well the whole point of the mini is so that it would be exclusive. Nerfing liadri would just be ANET caving into the majority and making all content accessible to everyone again.

I see nothing wrong with ANet making all content accessible to everyone. Everyone did pay for this game, after all.

I don’t game to show off my E-Achievements to other people to prove how better I am than them. I play them for fun, and this imo is not fun.

Also, I am totally fine with making content difficult. I am not, however, fine with them making difficult content temporary, pressuring players to do them and beat them within a constrained time frame, causing unnecessary stress.

I think if content in the future is going to be this difficult then it should be permanant so players can attempt it whenever they want, and not be saddened if they can’t do it within the next 2-4 weeks but when they get better (or in this case, have a level 80 of a different class).

I support this, and also want to add to it —

Also require the Dev who designed this to record and display each and every time they fail, and how frustrated they get while playing it. Maybe then they will learn that video games are meant for fun.

I totally agree with this sentiment.

I consider myself to be a pretty good player. I was able to beat every other gauntlet boss on the first attempt without looking up their attacks. However, when I got to Liadri, it took me roughly 35 attempts to actually beat her.

While although difficulty is welcomed, this sort of ‘difficulty’ is much more frustrating and aggravating than it is fun. It is not fun to spend hours doing the same exact content repeatedly only to fail and fail again. I can only imagine how it is for players that have spent over 100+ attempts on this.

To add to this, they added an exclusive reward to it which you cannot get unless you beat it, made the content temporary so you are time constrained, and also require a cost of entry to even attempt it.

To make something so frustrating and alienating to such a large number of players is a terrible design decision. Even though I have beaten it, I wholeheartedly support a total nerf of this boss.

Bambu.4270:

This has become the “norm” for companies these days. “Oh everyone does social media so let’s post all details there and forget our own WEBSITE that our customers mainly use”.

I think I’m going a bit too far but I think this info should also be INGAME.

I’d totally be up for seeing this in-game. Perhaps even in the achievement panel where the living story achievements are — they could have had a nice graphic of each candidate, what they promise, where they stand, etc.

Aldred.9345:

Yep, it’s awful. The few times I’ve seen game devs reply about why, they usually say it’s because they’re so busy and it’s more convenient to quickly post something on Twitter than make a proper statement on the forums, which sounds like rubbish to me.

I really don’t know why they do it and why they want people to constantly be checking Facebook/Twitter for information instead of at least posting all of it on their official website too.

I guess it’s something to do with marketing. Even though you don’t need to like/follow/whatever them, a lot of people will, and then their friends will see that, and maybe one of those friends will start playing GW2 as a result.

Glad to see I’m not the only one that feels this way.

And I do understand the use of social sites for marketing — I don’t, however, understand why it can’t be posted on the forums or official site.

I feel this living story was a great opportunity to even have a page on this site with a vote counter of sorts. If not a constant-updating one, one that will give out the same updates that they have been done / will do on facebook. Would have been pretty neat.

So, I just read that a few days ago ArenaNet published some current vote results for evon/kiel on their Facebook page.

Yet, none of this information is available here on their own website. Why do I have to go to an entirely different company’s website to view information on your game/product?

This is an unsettling new trend I have seen many game devs do now. They leave their playerbase that visits their own official website and forums for information in the dark, and then post the information on some social media site. It should be available both places, and more importantly, on your own official website first.

That is all.

As much as I hate to say it, I’m going to highly recommend you use bootcamp with that configuration.

I have a current-gen maxed out 27" imac (nvidia 680mx, i7, 756gb ssd, etc.), and on max settings on the mac client (which don’t even include high rez textures), i get on average maybe 30-40 fps with v-sync off. With it on, it can drop down to 5-15 fps in crowded areas.

Conversely, when I use bootcamp, with max settings (including v sync and high rez textures), I get 45-60 fps on average depending on the area. That’s almost up to double the fps while using even higher settings.

Sadly, with a machine like yours using the highly unoptimized cider port mac client, you will either have to tone settings way way down, or the resolution way down to get good fps. Because of this I think you’d get the best experience going the bootcamp route.

Esplen.3940:

Arenanet heard the players.

Some players didn’t want to do jumping puzzles.

Some players didn’t want to do dungeons.

Now, you can choose.

If you’re one of those few that don’t want to do dungeons OR jumping puzzles, what DO you want to do?

I would actually be fine with doing dungeons, if there was either an effective LFG system or the dungeon scaled down to number of players. A big draw of this game is to be able to play how you want to play, and sometimes I just want to log on and not have to organize a group, or spam /m to do so. A system that organized groups for you, or would scale down to number of players would be great.

Additionally, the Southsun Cove event was quite fun and popular, and yet did not require either of the two things you described.

So, out of the past few Living World events, what was some common negative feedback about them?

-It’s difficult to get rewards without completing numerous jump puzzles / SAB
-Forced grouping for dungeon without a sufficient LFG system / Flame and Frost
-Jumping puzzle to get a sample for achievement / Southsun Cove

Now, what was some common positive feedback from past Living World events?

-The instance scales down to the number of people in the party! / SAB
-The storyline has a finale that is solo-friendly or group-friendly! /Southsun Cove
-The jump puzzle for the 11th sample isn’t required for achievements! /Southsun Cove

So, ArenaNet received these comments, and what did they do for the recent event?

They added an event that requires you to either do forced grouping or lots of jumping puzzles.

What’s up with that? They made a double whammy out of the two most common complaints of past events, and furthermore, made one of the achievements in a WvW zone? Really?

In an effort to keep this thread constructive, I highly recommend adding additional achievmeents to future events that allow the player to not do jumping puzzles. While although I personally enjoy them, they are not everyone’s cup of tea and require knee-jerk reflexes that not everyone has.

Additionally, I think it would be safe to say that the community would greatly appreciate either dungeons that scale with the amount of party members, or a better LFG tool to assist with the completion of limited-time dungeon achievements.

So there is one other Ascended set I noticed that may be of use. I’m not exactly sure if I should use it or not though. It’s stats are:

-Cond. Primary
-Toughness Secondary
-Vitality Secondary

So I would be losing the power-gain from rings, amulets, and accessories if I do this …. but would gain toughness in place of power. Does anyone know how viable this would be for condition builds? My fear is that in circumstances where my conditions are periodically cleansed, the lack of power would kitten my overall damage in this case.

But I would also be a bit more survivable. My main focus is WvW, though I do plan on doing an occasional dungeon.

Honestly, I feel like they all lack true emotion …. or realistic emotion, at least.

Especially Trahearne, every time he says something his tone of voice generally sounds the same. Not to mention all of the goofy jokes or dialogue that is put in the midst of supposedly serious circumstances.

Same with Carrion Ascended gear….

Apparently it takes several months + to copy/paste some coding, write " condition / power / vitality ", and use a pre-made inventory icon.

Rayya.2591:

toughness > vitality when you got high acces to healing and lifesteal since they are not precentual and heal fixed amount of hp
example :
shadow rejuveration heal for 340 /sec
assasin reward 1100 /initiative pool / omnomberry ghost 325 /crit (1 sec CD)
10 sec stealthed / 15 initiative waste / 3 criticals – 3400 +1100 +1000 = 5500 HP
If you also consider to add healing skills, armor will become more valuable then vitality on an build with 0 /0 / 30 /20 /20
1. IF you got max Hp 14000 = 40% hp regenerated.
2. if you got max hp 21000 = 26% of hp regenerated
The build with more toughness will be able to stay longer in combat

Yeah, I have heard that with substantial healing that toughness is more effective. Im not using any form of lifesteal though as I prefer hide in shadows.

I guess i will continue to save for future build, or keep waiting until they make ascended carrion…. Just frustrating not being able to spend your laurels for your set. Thanks for the input guys!

So, I play a d/d + p/p condition thief. I know it’s not the most effective build, but it’s what I have the most fun playing, so I try to optimize it as best I can.

I have enough laurels for about 2 ascended gear pieces, except… They all seem as if they’d actually be worse than what I already have.

All of my gear is currently exotic carrion gear, and there is no ascended carrion gear and apparently it’s not a huge priority for Anet to add it as it has been absent since ascended gear was released.

Anywho, the only viable condition ascended gear that is available is either gear that is:

-Cond. Primary
-Toughness Secondary
-Precision Secondary

or

-Precision Primary
-Cond. Secondary
-Power Secondary

Whereas Exotic Carrion provides:

-Cond. Primary
-Power Secondary
-Vitality Secondary

So, from my understanding, power is better than precision if you do not have any crit damage (which I don’t), and vitality is better for thief than toughness due to the thief’s low hp pool.

Is this true, then, that getting ascended gear would actually decrease the effectiveness of my build?

If it helps at all, my current stats are as follows:

1,898 Vitality (20,000 Health)
1,932 Power
932 Precision (5% Crit Chance)
932 Toughness
1,159 Condition Damage

Any input regarding this would be appreciated, thanks!

Currently running a new late 2012 27" iMac.

Specs as follows:

3.4 GHz i7 Ivy Bridge (Turbo Boost 3.8GHz)
32GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
752GB Solid State Drive
Nvidia Geforce GTX 680MX

Using Mac OS client, framerates on all max settings with VSync disabled runs consistently around 45-60FPS. Keep in mind that the MAC OS client doesn’t even have high res textures available as an option.

With VSync, frame rate drops consistently to 30FPS or below, going down to around 10FPS in cities or crowded areas. So for the game to be playable at max settings, I have to deal with a lot of screen tear sadly.

After playing Guild Wars 2 for quite some time now, I wanted to make a list giving a shout-out and kudos to Arenanet for making some of the best game design decisions I have ever seen in an MMO.
—————————-
1. Players are rewarded for helping each other, rather than conditioned to compete with each other, such as xp awarded for ressurecting other players.

2. Players do not compete for resources, and all players are allowed access to gathering nodes.

3. Players can learn all trade professions on one character, and do not lose the knowledge of recipes when switching.

4. Players can progress and earn the top-tier gear by playing how they truly want to. One may earn ascended gear from doing dungeons, doing pvp, or even doing pve on your own through dailies.

5. Items sold in the gem-store do not offer advantages when facing other players, and gem store currency can be bought with in-game gold.

6. Content is constantly added to the game despite there being no subscription fee.

7. End-game gear progression is mainly for cosmetic looks, with ascended gear only adding minimal stats above exotic gear, and legendaries having the same stats as exotic gear. This puts an end to constantly ‘needing’ to get new gear, and allows you to do what content you find fun.

8. The latest living story achievements in SouthSun Cove do not require players to do the jumping puzzle to complete, yet still offer a reward for those who do.

9. Super Adventure Box provided infantile mode which allowed those who do not enjoy jumping puzzles but still wanted to see the content the opportunity to do so.
—————————-
With all of the negativity that naturally occurs on forums like this, I think it is good to keep all of the positive things in mind. If you have anything to add to the list of great design decisions you have seen, feel free to do so!

Just logged in to say that I agree with the sentiment of being sorely dissapointed that ArenaNet has gone backwards in terms of content-accessibility in requiring us to do a group-based dungeon to finish off the story.

Something that I really enjoy about the game is that there are multiple ways to obtain items and gear. For example, one may do group fractals for ascended gear, or one may do pve on their own, or pvp on their own. This covers all bases and players, allowing them to play the game how they want.

On the other hand, this content forces people into group-based content. I don’t have any friends that play this game, and the game does not have a LFG tool so I am just out of luck. I was also sorely dissapointed they chose to end the personal story this way too, and therfore I have been unable to complete it.

Another flaw in this update is the addition of the molten jetpack. Many players, including myself, would like this item — but not only does it have only 1 method of obtaining it (without spending insane amounts of gold on the TP), it also is not a guaranteed drop chance so a player may do the dungeon 10 times and never get one. Then it will fade away never to be seen again.

I don’t know about others, but having content and items that I cannot access, and will never be able to access again leaves a bitter taste.

Wow okay thanks for all of the advice guys, I appreciate it!

Humorless.1573:

What’s wrong with some toughness over power if you have a good amount of vitality?

And what do you mean with con dmg not being the primary stat on ascended gear?

By that I was meaning how most gear has 3 stats, with one being higher than the other two. With the ascended gear that is power/prec/cond the condition damage is of the lesser 2 stats. It only isn’t if you get prec/toughness/cond. My main concern is the usefulness of the precision stat considering I am losing power by switching from exotic carrion.

So I want some opinions on whether or not to get ascended gear. I currently have all gear pieces as exotic carrion for my thief. However, none of the ascended gear is carrion, so I would be trading off power/vitality/cond for toughness/cond/precision.

I know the stat numbers are higher, but I’d actually be losing some condition damage as it is not the largest/primary stat on ascended gear. Another concern is that with criticals not helping condition damage, and having only precision on those items, it seems like a nearly useless stat.

Because of this I have not bought any ascended gear, which is depressing because I have the laurels available. Am I right to not purchase any and just save for the endless cat tonic? If it helps I don’t do dungeons at all, mainly wvw.

Just wanted to report this issue and also see if anyone else has been having issues with the Razer gaming mouse brand on the OS X client.

I have the Razer DeathAdder, and while using it in GW2 the mouse scroll wheel does not function whatsoever — no scrolling to zoom in/out of camera angle, no scrolling through inventory/menu bars etc.

Not only this, but it is also intermittently unresponsive with button clicks when I click both mouse buttons at the same time — hit or miss on that though. It does really hinder combat and movement to the point where I don’t even feel like playing anymore as I will hold down both mouse buttons to move, but just the left mouse button provides an input and it leaves me panning around the camera in combat rather than actually moving like I am supposed to.

I do know that this is not an issue with my mouse but one of the client, because it works fine with other applications, and even works perfectly with the game under the Windows client.

System:

Late 2012 27" iMac
3.4Ghz i7 CPU
32GB 1600MHz RAM
Geforce GTX 680MX
768GB Solid State

Thanks!

Speaking in SPvP:

I feel that our damage output can be too much if speced for glass cannon.

Alternatively, I feel our survivability is very poor, particularly if not speced as a glass cannon thief. Glass cannon thiefs can kill people near-instantly, allowing them to stealth out and get away.

However, specing a thief as a tanky thief does not seem to give very good results, encouraging more glass cannons as that is really the only thing that we excel at.

Also, I personally play a condition thief because I don’t like being a glass cannon…. however, my survivability is terrible, and you need great survivability to be a condition build because it is not instant damage.

I feel that this could be supplemented by adding an amulet with cond, +vit,toughness ….. as it stands right now, the closest is Carrion which is +cond, +power, +vit — when condition builds do not really need power all that much.