Guild Wars 2

…got 1 Black Lion Claim Ticket Scrap.
What’s the deal ArenaNet?
I strongly recommend people do NOT buy Black Lion Keys until this is resolved.

Yeah, nice problem to have
It makes up for all the gold I had to throw at making my first Legendary.

So to finish off my daily today, I decided to craft some yellow greatswords and chuck them in the Mystic Forge.
Overall, I made 20 greatswords, getting my Daily achievement on the last combine.
But that’s not all I got!

Out popped Dusk!

I already have the legendary I want on my main, The Juggernaut, so this is some nice cash for me!
Now I’ve just got to save up the listing fee :E

If you have any spare from dailies, a regeneration booster works during this contest.

While doing Claw, someone made the claim that targeting the Claw’s head does more damage than targeting his feet.
I don’t believe this is the case, but can I get official confirmation or denial?

Looks like Arenanet liked this idea:

In addition, we’ll also improve the functionality of legendaries, allowing you to set their stats when out of combat to any stat combo available, so you don’t need to transmute stat changes for legendaries. Legendary gear will remain with the same tier of stats as ascended gear and will not be made more powerful than other gear, it will simply be slightly more convenient since it will no longer need transmutations to change stats.

To approach it from another angle, the absolute best is probably the crafting XP booster if you’ve got the materials to back it up. In conjunction with gw2crafts.net, this is the fastest way to level.

I was enjoying it up until Adnul.
I don’t understand, if they’re allowed to spam their signature moves, why can’t we?
There’s no reliable pattern that can beat Adnul because his signature move effectively blocks any tactics you have.
It’s pure chance and relying on the NPC making a fatal, or rather several fatal judgements in error.
Where others seem to have an effective flaw to their game, Adnul has none. A good heal, huge health pool and a spammable signature move that prevents you from faking.
Not impressed.

Even so it can be irritating when you click it by accident and it shuffles all your other bags.
I’m +1ing the OP’s suggestion, as there can never be too much UI customisation.

I’ve been getting this too when running up & down that passageway down the bottom of Cursed shore, east of Rotbeard.
I’ll see if I can find out the source when I get back home.

It’s actually the same with all weapons, and most noticeable on a maximum size male Norn.

There’s also a couple of other things that are related more to underlying game mechanic problems which ArenaNet either don’t see as such or are taking too much time to address.
Namely, AoE being blanket limited to 5 targets, whether friend or foe; and condition builds suffering from max stacks and lack of damage to static objects.

The 5 target AoE fix is completely responsible for the ridiculous zerg stacking mechanic that currently rules WvW and shatters immersion. They really need to look at defining max targets on a skill by skill basis.
PvE players will come across this limit a lot less than in WvW, and will suddenly wonder why their awesome Meteor Shower / Chaos Storm / Earthshaker etc. is barely making a dent on the horde of enemies.

And as a lot of WvW is PvDoor/Siege, condition builds are massively underpowered. Realising this and that you’re going to have to grind out a completely new set of gear in order to be even remotely useful is soul destroying.

Wrong thread Queenie?

colesy.8490:

2. Depending on the server I guess, but not getting on the godkitten teamspeak. Commanders can’t waste time using map chat for decisions that need to be communicated in a split second in the heat of battle, so if you can’t hear what they’re saying, you’ll probably end up getting killed and therefore, not being helpful to the zerg.

Nobody will bite your head off in a server’s teamspeak, everyone treats everyone equally unless you’ve made a bad rep for yourself.

Ah, thank you colesy! You’ve tickled my memory bone!

This is something I couldn’t quite believe when I played beta; most newer MMOs are integrating VOIP, and for GW2 not to be strikes me as somewhat backward.
Personally, my friends and I use Mumble, but I would drop it for proper in-game VOIP in a flash.
There’s a few reasons people new to WvW don’t immediately hop on the server VOIP server, ranging from minor issues to not so minor ones.

They might already be in communication with their friends and guild members.

They might be using different VOIP software and are averse to downloading another.

They may be shy.

They may have had bad experiences with VOIP in the past and do not like the idea of just hopping in to a server populated by strangers.

They may be worried about not understanding the etiquette of the VOIP server.

They may not have a headset.

While willing to download a VOIP client, they may not understand how to set it up, and it’s VERY rare that someone may be prepared to take the time out to take them through set-up on in-game text-chat.

And while setting up the VOIP software offers challenges, further challenges face the uninitiated when trying to set up their system’s audio IO, and others may not be able to help them easily as there are hundreds of different configurations out there.

An in-game VOIP option would help lessen some of these problems while entirely eliminating others.

Edit: For people who don’t know, VOIP stands for “Voice over IP”, where IP means “Internet Protocol”, which very basically is the “language” of the Internet.

I’m mostly PvE, but I really enjoy the occasional jaunt into WuvWuv.

The thing that really sticks out is that the goal isn’t that obvious. You don’t immediately understand WHY you’re taking all these towers and camp, and it all seems a bit pointless when they flip five minutes later.
Over time, I got a grasp on how everything works, and understood the value of holding and upgrading stuff, but it took a while.

This is also part and parcel of the overwhelming feeling you get when you’re new to WuvWuv that your individual efforts don’t count for much, and you’re only really contributing when part of the faceless zerg.

As to how to fix these initial impressions?
Wow, that’s a hard problem.

One thing I think could help are permanent objectives; things that once you’ve captured, STAY captured for your world. However, making something like that would be really hard to balance, and ensuring that one server doesn’t grab control of everything could also be difficult. Maybe it should be the at the end of a long, complicated event chain that could be disrupted by enemy players?

For the second point, to increase a player’s sense of relevance would necessitate smaller group scenarios, and again, making such things could be difficult in WvW.
Maybe mini-dungeons that close access once a certain number of players have entered? They could be competitive, say 5 versus 5, and a rush to kill a boss while fighting off the enemy?
Make the reward something that provides your world with a substantial bonus, either temporary or maybe even tie it into the permanent objective idea?

TheDaiBish.9735:

While I personally think this is a good idea, I can see the potential for abuse.

I mean, there are players who think PvPing in the EB JP is griefing.

Yeah, this is the bigger issue, especially with new players.
About a month after release I even saw a player ranting at people who were supposedly stealing his kills and mining nodes.
If that player had access to a grief report, it would needlessly take up a support rep’s time, although it would give them plenty of laughs.

…have unique minimap colours representing them, yet there’s still no way to visually differentiate between commander icons in WvW.
It’s possible ArenaNet, you’ve just proved that, so pull your collective fingers out and kitten well implement it.

As someone who did play GW1 and has all the skin rewards (if not all the titles), I wholeheartedly agree that they shouldn’t grant GW2 achievement points.
And to be honest, I’m getting fed up of seeing titles from GW1 displayed too, ESPECIALLY GWAMM, as it is longer than any name you can have and causes needless screen clutter.
Let players display GWAMM, but give me the option of not displaying the titles of other players.

Yeah, I made this same suggestion a couple of weeks back, called it the “Clone Stone”.
+1’ed, as maybe if more people post the same idea, ArenaNet will cotton on to the money-making potential of the idea.

This would be great in PvE too.
+1’ed.

Or you could take one activation of its damage and use a condition remover to get rid of it.
Really, if you complain about how Confusion used to be, you cannot have played Guild Wars 1. Mesmers would have broken your mind in that game.

I could make it so an Elementalist would take thirty seconds to get the pre-cast off for Meteor Shower, then I’d interrupt them at the last second.

I could drop Panic on someone in the middle of a group, and whenever they activated a skill, it would interrupt all of their nearby buddies.

I could hit them with Diversion, and if they weren’t paying attention, the cooldown for their next used skill would be dramatically increased.

I could interrupt one skill and all other skills of the same type would be disabled for 12 seconds. That one in particular could stop entire builds from working and was a thing of beauty.

Confusion is peanuts by comparison and really is a case of punishing the stupid.

It wasn’t overpowered, ArenaNet just didn’t give the userbase enough time to learn how it works. They bowed to community pressure and applied a knee-jerk fix.
It basically came down to people not understanding how they died and not willing to even find out how.

@ selan: while I don’t agree that mesmer is in a bad place at the moment (my 2 mesmers are still as effective as they’ve ever been), I heartily agree about the Confusion and Retaliation nerfs. These mechanisms were in place to punish the unobservant, mindless auto-attacker, and even in their original forms were a lot less punishing than the equivalent mechanics in the first game.
Anyone who died from Retaliation or Confusion deserved it as far as I’m concerned.

Nerfing these effects was just ArenaNet bowing to pressure.

My favourite is a really simple one at Golem Mark II.
Place Portal Entre in front of the chest, then run past it over the small drop behind it and place the exit. The confusion is visible as people try to work out where they are.

My point being, if it were possible to do that, it would encourage servers to maintain active player defenses of structures, people who just stay in forts/towers/garrisons in order to defend them from opportunistic Blinkers.
At the moment, zergs just flip these structures then abandon them.
But yeah, it’s kind of off topic here.

As for getting ahead of myself in your first paragraph, I don’t think you understood what I was trying to get across. To the user, the end result of activating Blink would be the same as it ever was, except that now you could cross gaps.
To the engine, it would treat the movement of the player as a near-instant physical move.
It could even be interrupted by impassable skill barriers such as Line of Warding. The Blinking player would not be able to Blink past the line, as it would count as a physical obstruction to a body trying to move through it.

I’d have to test it to be sure, but I’m pretty positive that at the moment, Blink will take the mesmer past otherwise impassable barriers placed by player skills.

That could lead to hilarious moments of blinking mesmers hitting these barriers while trying to blink onto walls, only to be rebuffed by the appropriate skill.
To the observer, it would look like the mesmer appeared in midair and started falling

You’re welcome.
May endless gigglefits consume your evenings.

Jaken.6801:

It was possible at the beginning as far as i know, however thankts to the obvious possibility to exploit things, it was taken out.

however you are right with the matter of jump skills. They still work “everywhere” while a mesmer for example cant even blink down a rock, just because there is a height difference.

Yeah, I was aware when posting this that behaviour was changed because people were using Blink to get into WvW keeps/towers/etc.
But you can’t do that with the other “jump” skills, so maybe ArenaNet should look at getting the engine to treat all of these movement skills the same way?
Maybe Blink should be changed at an engine-level to be an instantaneous jump rather than a teleport?
Does that make sense?

Then again, I’ve often thought that preventing people from using movement skills to get into enemy structures was a bit of an over-reaction on ArenaNet’s behalf.
If this was still possible, it would actually promote active defense of structures rather than the “Fire and Forget” flipping tactics that currently prevail in WvW.

Having all professions at eighty and some substantial time behind all of them, I’d have to say that at the moment, Ranger is probably in the worst place. Not necessarily because of balance, but because of how active the play-style is.

What do I mean by that?

Well let’s define active.
To me, an active class is one that requires a lot of actions per minute and constant awareness of the environment and enemy to get the most out of it.

As an example, I’ll describe how I play my warrior:
I use Hammer & Longbow. My build is centered around generating Adrenaline very quickly and bursting every 5-6 seconds. I use shouts and Healing Surge to help keep adrenaline high. I’ll optimally start with Hammer, then swap to Longbow to get Adrenaline on swap as well as stacks of might from Sigil of Battle.
I’ll lay down a fire field with Combustive Shot, then immediately fire Arcing Shot into the fire field for an Area Might combo.
I’ll then swap back to Hammer, maybe using a shout or two to help refill Adrenaline if it isn’t maxed already, then immediately Earthshaker into Combustive Shot’s fire field for even more Area Might, a three second AoE stun and increased damage from the +50% crit chance Unsuspecting Foe gives thanks to Earthshaker. The pulses from Combustive Shot also benefit from this enhanced crit chance while the enemy is stunned.

That’s active gameplay. It’s fun and engaging. I’m constantly thinking about how to get all of the skills off when I need to, paying attention to blinds, ensuring I’ve got enough endurance to get out of trouble if needs be and removing troubling conditions as well as watching the enemy movement like a hawk to ensure I don’t fluff anything.

Almost all of the other professions can require the same degree of engagement from the player, and benefit from it. Mesmer, Thief, Elementalist, Guardian, Engineer and Necro all have rewarding gameplay if you want to play them actively and look for combos.

Yet Ranger increasingly feels like the auto-attack class.
Pet attacks aren’t immediate when activated, so feel sluggish and unresponsive. Main hand sword is horribly “Sticky”, making it incredibly hard to break out of combat, further reducing engagement. There’s some neat evade skills on sword, dagger and shortbow, but again they can feel a bit unresponsive.
And more often than not, Ranger feels like it’s contributing the most when it’s at range, where it really does come down to cycling through skills and auto-attacking most of the time while waiting for cooldowns.
Shortbow outclasses longbow thanks to the faster attack speed and generally feeling snappier, yet again encourages simply auto-attacking, as it’s akittens best when using flanking auto-attacks.
The end result is a profession that feels much more static and less engaging to play than most others.

Sure, it has interesting combo fields, but more so than any other profession, it feels like you’re just pumping them out and waiting for the cooldowns. You’re not being reactive, you’re just following a rotation.

Ranger needs a LOT of work.

Works every time on my server

Not really mixing them up, just saying the end result should be the same.
Personally, I use instant AoE targeting so never see the red circles anyway, but yeah, aside from the red bar under the skill icon, there needs to be more visual feedback about the activation range for these skills.

I place mesmer portals on event chests. Would this get me reported under “Griefing”?

Yeah, good point, I forgot about Infiltrator’s Arrow. Maybe the Elementalist’s Lightning Flash should also work the same way?

So currently, if you are a mesmer and use blink in an attempt to cross a gap, you teleport to the near edge without crossing the gap.

However, as a warrior, you can use Earthshaker to jump the same gap, and you even have some degree of vertical movement too.

Can we make Blink behave like this for the purpose of movement?
At the moment it’s only useful for crossing small distances on one continuous surface.

Apply the same fix to the first phase of the dragon fight as you recently did with the second phase:
Remove the ledge so that the idiots who sit there doing minimal damage to the ice wall pew-pewing with Charrzookas get off their lazy behinds and run bombs.

Hah, shows I rarely play with mantras!
Cheers

If I’m a mesmer and I’ve done all of the jumping puzzles, it’s my right to be able to portal other players who may not be as good as me at them.
Hell, some people can even charge for it, although that’s a red-rag to a bull with me. I’ll usually do the same jumping puzzle upon seeing someone do that then subvert them by offering free portals.

But this topic does gloss over one crucial fact, and I believe there may be a critical misunderstanding of how mesmer portals work amongst some elements of the community; specifically those who don’t have mesmers themselves.

Portals don’t make the jumping puzzles any easier for the mesmer doing them. True, they allow a do-over if the mesmer remembers to place portals at certain points, but generally we forget.
The mesmer has to do the jumping puzzle like everyone else. Portals do not allow them to bypass anything in jumping puzzles. You can’t place a portal ahead of yourself.
So a mesmer who has done a jumping puzzle has done it “properly”, of that you can rest assured.

If we weren’t allowed to use portals to help other people, I would be deprived of a lot of the fun I have with this game. I have a guild member who’s great fun to play with, but hopeless at jumping puzzles. I massively enjoy helping them through these things, and generally they’ll try their hardest before asking me for help.

And another thing.
Mesmers have a harder time than most in jumping puzzles.
Mesmers have no access to stability for example, so Goemm’s Lab can be a challenge, as can other puzzles with environmental hazards.
Our access to swiftness is not as easy as with other classes, so in general we’ll do all jumps with no speed boosts. And I know I do, as they have all been designed to be done without swiftness. A lot of players don’t even realise this, thinking that swiftness is mandatory for certain puzzles.

So next time you look to complain about portals making jumping puzzles trivial, roll a mesmer and do every jumping puzzle in the game.
Then message me and ask me to portal you past the one you get stuck on.

This one caused mass complaints when it was introduced, but I really enjoyed it.
I heard that there were problems with it and that it might be bugged, but I never had a problem with it.
A friend and I loved experimenting to see what triggered it, and it taught us some interesting things about our professions and how they play together.

This achievement, more than any other, promotes teamwork and coordination.

So go on, bring it back.
It may get people playing together more.

No, you don’t. Check again.

Edit: As proof, check the following table for all sets available from temple vendors.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Armageddon_armor

For heavy armour, the helmet has to be acquired through other means.
For medium and light, it’s leggings.

Ah, sorry, forgot dungeon armour as I try to stay as far away as possible from them.
I stand corrected

Bad understanding of PVT here from a couple of posters.
Firstly, you can only get 5 of 6 pieces of PVT stat armour from Orrian temples. The sixth piece currently has to be acquired through WvW.
Secondly, Sentinel stats are NOT the same, being V/p/t, instead of P/v/t, where the capitalised stat is the primary stat.

But again, the main reason Order sets aren’t exotic?
Same as the Cultural gear.
ArenaNet want you buying Fine Transmutation Crystals from the gemstore.
While they’re making money from it, this will never change.

I used rifle for ages, but converted to longbow when I started getting serious about weapon swap builds.
Rifle feels good and pumps out great single target damage, but it’s not a very synergistic weapon. When taking advantage of the warrior’s fast weapon switching mechanic, there’s just no reason to swap to rifle. It doesn’t mesh with any other weapon.

Longbow on the other had offers fantastic combo potential with combustive shot and arcing arrow.
On top of that, the auto-attack, as well as effectively clearing blind, doubles adrenaline gain, something not to be sniffed at when you’re building around maintaining a burst every 5 seconds.
Then it has its own blind as well as a root.
It’s just a FAR superior weapon, and weirdly works best when used in close combat.

Took me a long time to become a convert, as to use it effectively requires a lot more active playstyle than a lot of warriors are used to, but I’d never build without it now.

Another thing I’ve noticed in the preview shots:
Don’t expect full suits of armour.
The pieces displayed are helmet, shoulders and gloves.
Looks like doing a full set of even derivative stuff is too much like hard work for ArenaNet.

Hey;

I’ve recently noticed that while the Vigil flamethrowers in the Claw of Jormag event have the same number 2 “Flame Blast” skill as the Engineer’s flamethrower, unlike that skill it can’t be detonated.
This strikes me as an oversight from when the skill’s behaviour was changed a while back.

You can actually tell which will give you Aetherblades and which will spawn holos from a distance.
If you hover the cursor over the projector and you get the contextual gear “Use” pointer, it’ll spawn holos and needs to be activated.
If however your cursor remains unchanged, then the projector will spawn Aetherblades when you get close.

However, even with this knowledge, the quantity of projectors that spawn Aetherblades really does seem to have drastically decreased.

Why more fiery armour?
Because this game is trying increasingly desperately to appeal to the lowest common denominator who have no taste beyond “OOOOO SHINY”.
ArenaNet must think their userbase are a bunch of Skritt.

I’m beginning to get a very strong feeling of GW2 being a case of quantity over quality.
They’re rushing to release new shiny stuff as quickly as possible, all the while ignoring key issues with the game.
And a lot of the new stuff feels rushed too, with a distinct lack of quality assurance going in to it. After all, how can you realistically and thoroughly test content if it’s being released every two weeks?
The Aetherblade outfits are a prime example of this, with yet again no provision for Charr tails.
All the while, we still have culling issues in PvE, condition damage builds are ineffectual against static objects, AoE is still broken after being quick-fixed and limiting ALL AoE to 5 targets, crowd control skills are of limited use in PvE thanks to Unshakeable / Defiant forcing players to focus on DPS weapons, etcetera, etcetera.

I get the feeling ArenaNet are no longer interested in fixing big things that take hard work and are only interested in providing quick, shallow fixes that are more focused on short term profit.

Other recent examples of sloppiness:

Aetherblade jumping puzzle exotic shoulders use recycled skins.

The first Ascended equipment to be produced consisted of trinkets that require no 3D models to make. They’re just stats and an icon.

The exotic armours and weapons that can be attained through the queen Karka event on Southsun again recycle existing armour skins.

Before community outcry forced them to change it, the Consortium Harvesting Sickle had unfinished and poor animations. Even after changing it, they recycled the animation for the Warrior skill Fierce Blow instead of designing a custom animation.

The diving goggle platform in the new jumping puzzle feels more like sloppy texture and model alignment rather than good map design. Why on Earth do we have to jump through an opaque piece of scenery that can’t be seen from below?!

The list goes on. Unfortunately, crap like this will never get fixed with this new “Fire and Forget” development schedule.

Flameseeker.1563:

snip

You didn’t understand my point. I suppose I should be used to people failing to comprehend simple things on this board by now…
The point is: The laser room does not promote teamplay.
Having one person there or 5, dead or alive is almost completely inconsequential.
It is not taking advantage of the game being multiplayer.

Jolly good show old bean!

I’ve had nowhere near 100,000 pieces of candy drop, yet I’ve had 2 wing covers and 2 tickets.
So yeah, I see no point whatsoever in buying Jorbreakers.
Especially when the wing covers can be bought from the BLTC for a relatively low price.

Ech, guys, I’m not saying it to punish you, I’m saying it would be a good way to highlight exactly how bad trash mob design is.

I hate trash mobs between bosses too, but as players have found various exploits in order to bypass them, no-one’s really complaining, so ArenaNet don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way they design dungeons.

The purpose of this suggestion is to force players and ArenaNet to acknowledge how bad the design is.
If we don’t force them, they’ll just continue delivering mediocre dungeons that encourage players to exploit.