Guild Wars 2

My top things they did wrong…

- Pretending that the content is forever. They should have said straight up either:
a) “The game doesn’t have a continual subscription and it won’t have continual content. You pay your fee, play your 100-1000 hours to taste, and get the end credits. That’s one of the best deals you’ll get in gaming.” or…
b) “Any additional content more substantial than Halloween and balancing patches will cost money, and will justify that cost.”

Instead, we have grinding to fill the hours and the gem store to fund the servers. People thought they would get something for nothing, and they are getting not much for not much.

- Ascended gear.

- Dungeons are hard mode, with no normal mode. There should have been a training wheels mode with minimal loot, and a lucrative hard mode for pros.

- About 80% of the map, almost everything below level 70, is filler so the game can have 80 levels. They have to invent horrible dailies to get people to even flirt with the dead maps. 80% of the maps should be level 80.

- Defiance, immunity to reflects, etc. Bosses that ignore the rules and mechanics of the game, and invalidate many of the more interesting aspects of play.

Couple of things they did right:

- Trading post. I would not have bought GW2 if I faced the prospect of standing in Kamadan again.

- No new skills, weapons, classes etc since launch. They can’t balance the ones they’ve got, adding more will screw it up for at least a year. The game would probably be better if they cut some dead wood.

Randulf.7614:

According to the GW2 homepage, it is the finale of Season 2, yes

I wonder what comes after. Chinese New Year, maybe?

• delurks*

When I entered my first GW2 story mode dungeon (AC) I thought “man, this is like hard mode”.

I think GW2 dungeons are like GW1 hard mode without the normal mode. In GW1 I learned my dungeon paths and devastating boss attacks and so on in normal mode with heroes and henchmen, then went on to do HM with players or lovingly crafted h/h groups. But in GW2 new dungeoneers go in the deep end, HM on day 1.

Bit of a necro, but some feedback on this…

Spoj was right, awareness and some CC to shut down the rushes will get me through.

Once I learned “if you fight that husk slinger against the cliff, three teragriffs and two thrashers will spawn on top of you 20 seconds later”, and got some chill and cripple going, I am doing alright with the daggers. I wouldn’t call it easy, but my necro does as well as my warrior.

Pino.5209:

What op called toxic is nothing new

Not new, but it affects more people since the new dailies introduced “daily Metrica events” and so on. And that would be an easy thing to fix.

Yesterday I didn’t play much because my video card died so I plugged in an old one. I only got about 440 empyreal fragments. So the star is better than nothing. It was cheap and easy to get.

Mawdrey II seems very expensive in comparison. I’m inclined to delete the exotic vine and the seed, to save inventory along with the bloodstone dust.

FWIW I have not been after the legendary at red rock but I spent a similar amount of effort looking for the one at blue. It eventually spawned during a chest farm, of all things, when the entire zerg that had taken the map over hit Blue Oasis for shovels.

Vukorep.3081:

Why are people so focused on cantha all the time?
Elona is closer,

Because I fear Elona is full of undead and the Crystal desert is full of branded.

Done them, want enemies I’ve never seen before.

You guys should get yourself an orgaised farm zerg. The beauty is, with 2 shovels you can open 2 chests but if 100 people bring 2 shovels each they can open 200. And since you take the map over, you’re not interfering with anybody doing events.

And it is mine bwahahah

Something like 100 breaches to get all the mordrem parts

I am not going down another hole until Jan 13th, at the earliest

Zok.4956:

Second: The general concept/design devalues crafting because it is often cheaper to buy items on the TP than to craft them yourself.

I don’t think that’s the TP’s fault, the pricing is a symptom of other problems. e.g…
- People craft at a loss to level their characters and dump the resulting items
- People craft at a loss to level their ascended crafting and dump the resulting items

If there were no reason to craft and sell other than profit, crafters could sell at a profit. And you would save TP tax + whatever their margin is by crafting things for yourself. Or you can pay the extra for convenience.

The trading post — after standing in Kamadan in GW1, I would not have bought GW2 without a trading post.

Separating skins from stats.

Dodge rolls. Livens things up, without being too twitch.

No healer class — I shudder at the time I spent in missions in GW1 waiting for “6/8 GLF heals” to lure somebody in.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Azure.8670:

You literally have no idea what you’re talking about people farm silverwaste chests all day I’d at 2000 bags in 3 days add me in game I’ll farm with you main farming tools are Tyr almighty and crypt the immortal

That’s not the norm by any stretch since the nerf and you know it.

Are you US or Euro?

On Euro, there’s an organised farm at every day, with a commander and banners and so on. It fills the instance, and takes in some events along the way to build the five stacks of magic find and get shovels. The last one I did started early and was still going when I quit after 2 hours. I got a stack of 250 bags and some spares. In three chest farms I’ve gotten an ascended assassin’s focus for my mesmer, all the carapace skins I needed (and didn’t get from the breach), and I seem to be 300 gold richer for some reason. This is all in the last week, when was your nerf?

Sorry Ardenwolfe, but I think you’re plain mistaken about this.

All I need now is one husk bladder part. Will I get it before Jan 13?

By my (probably inaccurate) count I went 53 breaches without getting a bladder part, then 2 came at once.

I was pathetically grateful.

There is something wrong with me.

Free play is great, hit about 50 buttons at random and you’ve got the daily. Don’t even have to time anything.

I keep thinking I’ll skip them, then I do them in the interests of science. Yesterday I soloed a fractal to see if I could be done (my fisrt time in an instanced dungeon). I’ve also killed dolyaks and taken camps in WvW.

I don’t know if Anet mean these new dailies to get more people into WvW or fractals, but if they are then it’s not working. I do exactly what I need to do and leave.

About a month ago, whilst map completing in WvW, I ran across a really cool zerg fight. Our team was against a much bigger group who were coming out of a keep, but they didn’t want to commit so it was fairly even. We built arrow carts and lured them into the fire. It was great, for ten minutes or so. I went back the next five evenings looking for more, and there wasn’t even a commander on. I guess that’s Fissure of Woe for you. Later, people told me I’d caught a week of unusually good server balance and I wouldn’t see anything similar for quite a while.

So, Anet, if you want me to do WvW you need to sort out population and balancing, maybe ditch the whole concept of worlds and balance some other way. You need to improve it, not market it via dailies.

I have seven, all except engi, so it doesn’t take much. But I haven’t really gotten on with ele because it’s too twitch for my slow old fingers to do it justice, and people say engi is similar. So maybe it’ll happen at the next sale, maybe not.

Things that would increase the chances…
- Reports that engi has become less fingers, more brains (not to suggest that there’s anything dumb about it now)
- Yes, a trait rework. I’ve only unlocked the bare minimum of traits on my four post-April characters, still haven’t got RHS on the Guardian who made 80 months ago. One day this is going to haunt me.
- I can live with NPE since I have a couple of level to 20 scrolls which gets past the daft stuff like no vistas.
- If I collect some more +1 level scrolls from daily login, that’ll help.
- A new profession would have my attention.

khani.4786:

Meh. I rolled a level 1 underwater fractal and soloed it to get the “Daily Fractal”. Kill a few krait, swim down a dark tunnel and kite a giant jellyfish into some electric fields. Done in a few minutes. [..]

But I didn’t need fractals to do my daily because I went to wvw, found a yak and killed it. And for fun I followed the zerg around for about an hour (wvw xp booster) and took everything in sight.

I’m an open world PvEer, never been in an explorable dungeon. In the interests of science, I just soloed the aquatic fractal (once I worked out how to get it). I do not feel one tiny bit happier about being pushed into fractals, even though I’ve just soloed one. It’s not about difficulty, I don’t want someone else choosing what I do today, in my recreation. Work is bad enough.

I’m not WvWer but I learned enough from map completion to know that I can solo a tower door to get at the PoI inside but I can’t solo the lord and his crew. I might solo a camp, if I built for it and sussed out the AI, but not today. So, like you, I loaded up the WvW map and looked for dolyaks. It was an awfully long way, and I thought “I really don’t want 10AP that badly”. But I suspect that if I had plodded off to kill a dolyak, I wouldn’t have thought “hey these new dailies aren’t so bad” afterwards, for the reasons above.

Then there are the low level map zergs, where you need to precast DOT AOE to tag things. Those are just awful. What were you thinking, Anet? Almost every player in the game would have told you this would happen. How can you be so *#?&ing stupid? Did it come from management too senior to argue with or something?

If they changed "kill a specific world boss " (which implies specific times of day) to “kill any world boss” (which you can generally do in the next 20 mins) , it would be better.

If they changed "4 events in Queensdale " to “4 events in Kryta”, it might be less bizarrely zergy, or maybe not if the megaserver is already breaking it up. The old “5 events” would work fine.

But really, Anet, I will start doing PvP/Fractals/WvW if I ever want to, not because you put them in a daily. It ain’t gonna happen. You’re just making me wonder what other MMOs are out there.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Just accept it.

ANet wants people to play fractals. Achievement hunters deserve to suffer.

They do seem pretty desperate.

Both Anet and the achievement hunters, that is.

This is not working.

OK, I think I’m done with dailies. I only really want the laurels, which I get for logging in, but I thought I’d give it a week or two and see if it was worth it. It’s not.

Dalwhat.2867:

Rangers have always generated the most angst/hate in every MMO I’ve played. I think that basically it comes down to the fact that people want to be Legolas and then find out they can’t be Legolas.

I’m sure there’s a lot of truth in that. People make rangers because they want to use a bow and a pet and rain death from afar, then they’re told to get in melee/boon range and use a sword. If they wanted to do that they’d have made a warrior or guardian.

I made my ranger because I wanted something a bit different — I have five other characters that do PvE meta melee (warrior, guardian, mesmer, necro, thief). So my ranger just does dailies and the Silverwastes (where a ranged/melee mix is pretty good).

It was the same with my ele, I found scepter/X and Lightning Hammer very effective but it turned her into Another Melee Toon. So I got a staff, and hung back casting big nukes, which feels like a real wizard.

It pains me to say, though, that there does seem to be a good supply of gormless rangers. E.g. I’ve been running taxis into SW and it’s been rangers who can’t grasp “join and leave”. Most people just do it, a few need a word in party chat, but rangers need kicking.

The mystic forge… wow.

I thought it might be the end of Daily Gatherer, but that didn’t seem like enough…

Lazaar.9123:

Botting is using third party software to do an automated process. Afking is nowhere near the same as botting.

Agreed. However, using a bot to avoid being kicked for inactivity…

I just reported someone for botting after they stood in the gate of Blue Oasis for over an hour (I collected screenshots with timestamps), including during the breach. I wonder if anything will come of it.

Thanks for the replies.

I hear a lot of people talking about more extractors in the next release, but have Anet actually said this?

How do you time using the extractors when breach hopping? I presume you would use an extractor, tag the champ, move on, and not use the next extractor or attack the next champ until you see the bag from the first one.

Is there a rule of thumb for how much I need to hit a champ to tag it?

Actually, a break until January seems like a good idea. I’m pretty sick and tired of the Silverwastes because of this, even though I really like the general design of the map.

In my inventory I have a Piece of Mordrem Thrasher Gas Bladder, a Piece of Mordrem Teragriff Bladder, and a Piece of Mordrem Troll Bladder. I need the other half of each to complete my colllections, so I plug away with my experimental extractor. It’s now 29 breaches since I got a mordrem part I could use. I can’t remember how long it is since I got the first of those, the troll, it might be fifty.

Does anyone have any advice on how to improve my chances?

I wondered if maybe my magic find is too high, and it’s only giving me “superior” parts like tendons and spleens and those gold ones that are worth 50 bandit crests. I could stop eating peach tarts, and avoid helping with the events before the breach, to bring it down.

The one that is meant to spawn at blue is about the same. I’ve done over 30 capture and hold cycles at blue in the last week and not seen it.

The last alt I made, about 2 months ago, I used a birthday scroll to level to 20 then did cookery + jewellery + artificing + leatherworking to 400 each, which got me to level 50. I did them in that order to leave artificing (for refining luck) and leatherworking (which I actually needed) active. I get my crafting schemes from www.gw2crafts.net

Then I used 5 level-up scrolls I had in the bank to get to 55. Then I did personal story from the beginning, which got me to 67 before I needed to be 70 to continue. Then I did the EotM zerg to 80.

I wonder if you only got 5 levels because you started at 2, and the XP is a bit weird at the start.

In general, I would suggest that if you’re going to do any leveling the normal way you make it the first 20 — they go faster.

Point taken about the chest farms, but I can’t say I feel guilty about the two farms I’ve taken part in. How else would I find enough shovels? One person with five shovels can open five chests, twenty people with five each can open a hundred chests.

Perhaps one approach would be to find a way to segregate chest farm maps. About half the commanders are “nice” enough to announce that they’re starting a farm after the next break and people not interested may want to leave by LFG taxi. But there has to be a better way…

As for Silverwastes, I like it on the whole. But I’m pretty fed up (ok, really sick and tired) with the RNG on underground champ parts. I have half each of three bladders I need, and it’s twenty-four breaches since I got anything I needed. My experimental extractors will produce nothing but fangs and spleens…

Play at Blue Oasis. Staff guardians don’t want to get that far from the waypoints.

Knockback rangers, unfortunately…

In the last week I have had a similar experience to the OP.

I got two globs from the first thing I salvaged, then nothing from the next five.

Oh… And I don’t want new weapons and skills and traits. They can’t balance the ones they’ve got to the point that more than half see use. It would be better to remove some. And sort out the daft trait unlock system.

Necromancer minions not standing around without attacking

Guild halls

A fundamental change to WvW to bring populated but not queued maps for all. Not just people who got lucky when they picked their server two years ago. Not just people who pay the price of a triple A game in a Steam sale to move servers. Not just people who got the Cinderella match this week. All. This probably means ditching worlds, and using guilds or something like that. It might mean ditching weeks, too.

An end to XP for crafting and needing to crafting to make your own ascended gear, so that throwaway level up crafting no longer wrecks the market.

Fire whoever said they could hide white swords to get an event with “ninja” in the description.

Pilot Ripsky to finally cover 100 yards without bugging, after 2 years.

DaveGan.8065:

The problem has honestly sorted itself out quite a bit in recent times.

• Silverwastes offers more karma, dragonite ore, and champ bags.
• The people who ran some of the EotM guilds are getting bored of commanding (and especially organizing multi-trains)
• There are more bag farming groups to counter ktrains.

I’m also hoping that the new daily system will offer some meaty XP scrolls over the 28 days. Then people who’ve been at it for ages and don’t want to map complete their next character will have another option.

I use EotM to level. There seem to be as many levelers as karma farmers, judging by the number of people who are(n’t) level 80 in the zerg.

When EotM is in PvE mode you get 4 or even 5 levels an hour with boosters, which is much better than doing hearts and events. Usually I follow a commander, see whether the map seems PvE oriented, and pop my XP boosters if it looks that way.

Sometimes it changes because my commander gets ambitious, or an opposing commander does. I know it’s over when I find I haven’t leveled for half an hour, and I’m getting messages about daily WvW kills, and the commander is ranting about people who don’t “push with him” (whatever that means). Then I change to another character and try again later.

If somebody disrupts the leveling train by PvP I’m a bit sad, but I absolutely can’t complain. Don’t stop PvPing for people like me.

I’ll say one thing for EotM: I learned to pick up supply and work a ram, so when I was map completing “proper” WvW I could bust a few doors to get at the PoIs behind them. It’s amazing how you can spend 10 minutes with five supply runs building a ram and breaking a door in the Eternal Battlegrounds and not see a soul, yet EotM has multiple zergs who carefully ignore each other quite a lot of the time.

I would guess until January 12th, since the new Living Story kicks off on the 13th.

Behellagh.1468:

I’m Free!! I’m free of the compulsive need to do dailies for laurels. Don’t give a skritt’s butt about AP.

I do/did them for laurels, and I’ve just realised this too. It’s wonderful, isn’kitten They really are giving me what I’d work for just for logging in.

Now that there’s no daily gatherer, I wonder if prices will go up for things like mithril and nopales?

Thank you, Drarnor.

So, since I don’t care about APs, I’m not sure that I need to do dailies anymore. I guess I could maybe store the minor XP thingies for levelling that eventual 8th character.

Oh juvenilecat. I meant to say “laurels”, not “karma”. Sorry about that…

Um, question still stands.

I do/did dailies for karma. Am I better or worse off, or won’t we know until we see how many karma are in the chests?

MFoy.3284:

“Play the way YOU want to play!” was the guiding light for the game and now it’s “Play stuff we have a hard time getting player counts up”

Yes. This. This.

mtpelion.4562:

The point of dailies is not to dump items into your inventory. The point of dailies is to incentivize players to participate in specific content.

By trimming down what can be done in PvE, you create the impetus for players to participate in WvW or PvP.

I paid for this game. It’s mine now. I resent the attempted manipulation.

Oh yes. Definitely.

It would be really good to see a definitive comment from Anet on the Scaling Dead issue, i.e. whether the dead scale events, and whether/when they stop.

1256 hrs, no drop.

If I were interested in getting a legendary, I’d work on making money to buy the precursor (or the legendary). I want nothing to do with the RNG route.

If I were rational, I’d earn the money IRL and convert it via gems, but gaming ain’t like that…

Poking around in my AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2\ArenaNet.log I found a message from the time of the crash. It starts:

• Crash <—*
  Assertion: A file was corrupted in the archive. Please run once with ‘-repair’!
  File: ..\..\..\Game\Main\MainCli.cpp(622)

I don’t have that file now, I imagine it was removed by the subsequent repair process. There’s an 823kb file CorruptArchive.log with the same timestamp.

I don’t know how big the corrupt MainCli.cpp should be, but I can’t imagine it needs a ~25GB download to repair it.

[In case it’s not clear, I’m not reporting file corruption as a bug — that happens. I’m reporting the 25GB download to repair one file as a bug.]

Anyhow, I’ve decided since it insists on the 25GB download I may as well try for a clean slate first. I uninstalled GW2 via the control panel and renamed the AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2 folder since it wasn’t removed by uninstall. I’m now running the installer and leaving it to download overnight (I’m in Britain).

Here’s hoping…

Luna.9640:

Morte.5916:

Will it tell me where to go and what to do?

ATM if I want to level my new engi in Kessex I can likely get daily gatherer, kills, revives, recycler, events, dodges, interrupts while I’m doing that. I do what I want and do the other stuff in passing.

Is the new system going to tell me “do a group event” or is it “go to Lornar’s Pass and do event X”?

If it involves “kill Shatterer” what do you think ?

Well… {juvenilecat}

Will it tell me where to go and what to do?

ATM if I want to level my new engi in Kessex I can likely get daily gatherer, kills, revives, recycler, events, dodges, interrupts while I’m doing that. I do what I want and do the other stuff in passing.

Is the new system going to tell me “do a group event” or is it “go to Lornar’s Pass and do event X”?

Hi,

I’ve had GW2 installed for several months. It has had the occasional crash, and I’ve either run it with -repair or said yes to the “would you like to repair” prompt. In these cases, it has always downloaded a few MB as one would expect.

This morning (not after a crash) I got the repair prompt, said yes, and the game downloaded about 25GB which took around six hours. I played for 2-3 hours, and it crashed on an area load, and then tried to again download 25GB on restart (I stopped it for now).

Surely a repair tool should not be doing this.

Here is the crash.dmp file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80519209/Crash.dmp

My system seems to be in good working order, no apparent disk issues.