Guild Wars 2

So which piece of LA is going to get exploded this time? Freeze the bay over? ;P

Sad that I have to give Anet money (or use a lot of gold) to fix a bug (I have the durrrrrr female Sylvari eye bug) but whatever.

Kerithlan.1659:

Angelus.1042:

GrapeGatsby.6937:

Yes but it’s really difficult making players not congregate in one central location to advertise for groups and such.

Agreed…but then that should point to the need of getting a real looking for group system put into the game.

That way people don’t have to sit in one place all day spamming LFG and so on.

I am way against a dungeon finder with automatic party creation. That’s not what this game is about.

However, I am in favor of a system similar to Guild Wars’ party system. Opening the party panel allowed players to see which other players were looking for teams. I want a version of that which can be sorted/filtered/searched and encompasses the entire server. I think that’d sort the majority of problems.

Imagine being able to open a panel that allows you to find a dungeon group, find a guild, find a WvW raiding party, and so on. I think that’d be very welcome to the majority of players.

Agreed, some sort of bulletin board or something that lets you advertise grouping.

I did dungeons with 0 arcana and sat in fire attunement in dungeons with staff. It works well enough. I am extremely dubious that it would work with daggers (let alone in pvp). What if they came out with a utility skill that would let you swap a few times without activating the cooldown or maybe take the attunements that are on cooldown off it? Or maybe make it a signet (so it would benefit from earth and fire spec).

Edit: and the passive could be maybe some negligible amount of quickness to go with the theme or maybe agony resist if we’re being all pie in the sky.

Urthona.3198:

I guess I never considered using it just for the invulnerability. My sylvari is a guardian, and Renewed Focus gives the same duration on a shorter cooldown.

The immobilize also effectively gives you stability (not as useful since you’re rooted but it does help if you are about to get shot off a cliff). I can see how the ability would be less useful for tanky guardian.

I sense you wanted to complain about a sylvari whose name starts with a T and ends with rahearne. The biggest complaint I have is that Caithe is supposedly this extremely untrustworthy character (stated by several characters) yet you never see this. The biggest problem the character has is the tendency to execute prisoners.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I still see decent activity in rata, divinities, and occasionally black citadel, but hoelbrak and grove are dead as can be, which is sad because they are some of the most impressive towns (BC is still my favorite but only cause I’m a charr at heart). I don’t understand why people hate the grove so much, its an amazing town, and once you realize all the convenience locations are just on the 2nd level it no less convenient than anywhere else. plus everything glows at night, c’mon lol. Not to mention the interesting bar they have. I prefer it over the other town bars hands down.

I put all my characters in the Grove because it is a pretty nice town. Still, it could use some improvement (more hidden off the map areas would be cool).

Neoeve.5461:

i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.

Yeah, I saw a train of generic rangers load into Wayfarer and disappear just after loading the other day (could be instantly waypointing, no idea where they went). Bots are still here, they’re just harder to see.

They zapped away so fast I couldn’t report them (yes, the only evidence I have that they’re bots is that they’re all human rangers with bears, there were lots of them, and their names were the usual bot names).

Manta.7962:

What about the idea that the Nightmare Court are the sylvari that are merely reverting back to their original intended form?

More likely it is what happens to a species with strong empathic ability when some of them suffer from mental illness (it basically started with some mommy issues and Caithe being herself). The humans who want to remove the queen aren’t corrupted by dragons, they’re just on the extreme end of a political spectrum. The only bad faction of the playable races that worship a dragon are the Sons of Svanir and they’re mostly just idiots.

Not a bad idea actually.

Akacia.1583:

I’m not raging at you at all. However there is a massive amount of threads and replies on issues from day 1.

Not one single event or sub quest is or was not broken at some point during this weekend.

There is not much people are going to say good about the event. Since that is what they are asking about. They are not asking about if you like the bugged out dungeon or not.

The event itself was completely and totally bad. So the countless replies and threads in regards to this even on the community here does mean and say a lot when you can hardly find anything positive about the actual event.

People who also complain about the problems are people who WANT the game to be good and want the game to succeed in a big way. I wouldn’t be here saying the issues of that event if I didn’t play the game or didnt care about it surviving. The problem is the people who do NOT speak up about what they do or do not like that has issues and instead just logoff and MMO’s die MMO after MMO.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Many people agree there are bugs but feel that saying things like “completely and totally bad” don’t help prevent the MMO from dying (and in fact may contribute to the death). We should state the good and what prevents us from enjoying it as much as we’d like. Just saying it is horrible and the end of the world over and over won’t fix anything.

Kiviar.7063:

Nageth.5648:

On the other hand, with the zone being relatively empty that means they can add more events there in the future without disrupting things too much. But yeah, if they just leave the zone like that for the rest of time it will be a huge waste.

It is unlikely that they will. Making brand new content and zones gets far more people playing than adding to old content. Anet could have put all the effort they put in to fractals and cursed shore in to fixing WvW, Spvp, and the under used dungeons and zones. However they did none of those things in favour of adding new half finished content.

This is a very common pattern with smaller studios Anet, CCP, Trion, all do the same thing.

Huh? Your point is self-contradictory unless you feel adding a new zone as being a prerequisite for adding new content. My argument is that adding new content is difficult to do with all the prior zones because they had a story that couldn’t change much. Hence they added the new zone. This zone has no story other than we invaded it after the consortium did something there to really annoy the crabs. The crabs are still there, the consortium is still there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they added from there.

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

Bsquared.3421:

I hope the fire shield you get from using magnetic grasp in a fire field NOT procc’ing auro traits (e.g., fury, swiftness, protection) is a bug and they get around to fixing it before next year.

If it’s an intended change, than that blows….

It’s a bug

I think so as well. It still procs the visual of the fire aura very briefly but no aura is ever actually there (hence the lack of boon procs). It could be an intentional change but they just forgot to remove the visual (which would be weird) or it could be unintentional and the aura is being instantly removed (possibly by whatever is supposedly keeping magnetic grasp from cc’ing you as much).

Kiviar.7063:

Tbh they should tone down the loot reward and leave the event in game like the dragons.

As it stands now that whole new zone is a total waste of time. I feel sorry for the artists and designers that worked hard on it.

On the other hand, with the zone being relatively empty that means they can add more events there in the future without disrupting things too much. But yeah, if they just leave the zone like that for the rest of time it will be a huge waste.

I wouldn’t be shocked if we got candy cane trees to chop down like the candy corn mining nodes.

Frankly, I think everything after phase 1 was kind of a mess. Phase 2 almost completely bugged out so you had no idea what was going on besides there suddenly being a boat and we were invading. Phase 3 was out of the blue. Was there any reference to an ancient crab outside of the mail everyone got? The whole finale seemed a bit rushed (what with the 3 some hour long event to slowly push a crab into some explosives).

If sylvari don’t get more glowing lights.

Ballistic.4531:

zargnath.9524:

Yeah, was disapointed abot no Ascended questions.

Same here. The survey is ridiculous. It just points that they don’t think the reaction towards new gears on the forums is of any importance. Oh well…

To be fair, this seems aimed at people who probably aren’t even aware of the existence of the fractals. Nothing in the game throws the existence of ascended gear and fractal levels into your face like the game did with giant crabs blowing stuff up in the main city.

Well, just submitted it with my opinion as to how the fractal leveling system is severely hurting lfg. This survey does appear to be mostly related to the one time event backlash instead of the more esoteric problems with fotm.

Have the same problem. Hope they fix it eventually.

I serious doubt repairing permissions would do anything relevant. It only repairs system permissions (basically, if an install goes mucking with system resources and changes the permissions so that the system cannot access them is one scenario). It doesn’t touch the guild wars 2 beta client.

I prefer the faster attunement swapping builds (I favor d/d) so I guess take this with a grain of salt. The signet aura build might work.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEUQFAWlMGyN2bw2AeOBApQLBFEgw4hIgQiowDA;ToAA1CtoyxkjIHbOuck5MIYSA

It is decently tanky and has decent mobility in some situations (using the signet gives you a fire aura which procs protection, fury, and swiftness boons). The earth signet lets you immobilize mobs in your fire aoe fields (you mostly sit in fire attunement with this spec although earth works as well). I wouldn’t use this in pvp or anywhere you’d expect to be hit with a lot of burst damage as you’ll fall over. The healing signet works well and you can use it without losing the heal on cast effect. So you can effectively mitigate constant but lower incoming damage.

Probably about the most straight forward build I can think of.

Edit: Only problem is it requires a high level to make this build effective…but lower level pve isn’t that hard so it shouldn’t be as big an issue.

Well I believe our eyes are not as sensitive to the color purple (pretty sensitive to green) so that could be something to consider.

Removal of the ability to give someone else a conjured weapon would kind of suck (it can be really useful at times). If it would help them make conjures actually usable outside of some leveling situations then oh well. As far as conjures replace your attunements, dunno. I think something like the eng kit system would be better (that and we wouldn’t lose 3 utility skills).

Well the second one seems to be wearing sylvari cultural t2 light shoulders, gloves and boots. The chest is from order of whispers. The legs are the crafted “winged” set. Can’t tell you the dyes. The body type is probably the well endowed chest. The first picture is largely the order of whispers stuff with a crafted “feathered” head piece.

I was in a group with the exact same story as the OP (I even volunteered to go first when the pushy person in the group was threatening to kick random people to try to cool the tone of the the group a bit). I wasn’t the person kicked (well I left and came back after my level was confirmed) but I didn’t say anything even though I would have been fine to repeat level 2 instead because finding a group is so difficult. For that, I am sorry. I didn’t want to stand around for another hour (with my /map chat locked down due to the spam filter). I’d be 100% happy with running level 2 for the foreseeable future, frankly as I’d only want to do the agony stuff with an extremely well coordinated group. Unfortunately, anet released a feature where the path of least resistance by a large margin leads to these kinds of situations (and I wish they were kitten situations because then you’d at least have a kitten).

I’m likely deleting the items tomorrow.

Another point in favor of taking a breath here is that anet didn’t put a full set of ascended gear in. They were obviously aware that what they’re doing could go very very badly.

They could do some neat things with this area. The consortium is still present. I assume what they want there is still present. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another one time event there. Not to mention there is that poor sylvari cook who went completely insane still being there. But yeah, for daily use. shrug

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Nageth.5648:

They increased the rate of acquiring pretty much all the materials. While I agree that legendaries should be difficult to get, they were encouraging rather obsessive behavior as far as acquiring the materials. What this shows is that they’re willing to allow progression from more play styles. I bet ascended gear will not be limited to the extreme end of the fractal grind. That doesn’t fix the current problem with fractals, though (and hopefully they will fix the fractured player base sooner rather than later).

Tell me, how did any of their changes to Legendary acquisition change the number of ways the components could be acquired ?
All I see is that you can get them quicker. I don’t see any new methods to acquire them.

But I also see that Ascended gear was launched with exactly one way to get it. Thus closing off all other paths from getting max stat gear. A major reduction in options.

So I see this as a net reduction in options.

Karma acquisition doesn’t require such blatant grinding (the addition of the vials and bags). Many of the materials also do not require obsessive grinding either. Yes, you still need to run dungeons to get the requisite gift (but that is much easier these days). They also added some ways to get materials by running fotm (although that is problematic due to the current state of fotm lfg). They’ve stated they’re going to open up more paths for legendaries and progression in general. So yes, you need to take their word at that.

The gate is actually labeled metrica province.

Go to the human city, then go to the asura gate (in the middle of the city, it is the purple swirl on the map…note, don’t go to the purple swirl on the outer edge of the city as that goes somewhere completely different).

You’re now in Lions Arch, the main hub city. Now go to the gate with asura guarding it. You’re now in the asura city. The gate to enter the starter asura zone is in the south east (the northern most gate of the 3 there).

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Sondergaard.8469:

You assume that ArenaNet won’t continue with listening to their community (as they have proven many times over that they do and will) and look at ways of implementing alternative methods to acquiring Ascended gear. I refer you to the changes made to acquiring precursors for Legendaries, and the planned future changes.

Like I said in my post, I have every faith that they will address these concerns and expand on the current system to allow additional methods to acquire Ascended gear.

Why should them making Legendary weapons, which were always meant to be something that takes ages to get, quicker to acquire as proof of anything good ?
How was precursors being too hard to obtain even a problem ?

As for faith in ANET, I had that right up until the point they introduced Ascended gear and made their own advertising a lie. Then they made it worse when their solution to the precursor ‘problem’ was a reward at the end of a one time only event, to show everyone that they think real life issues like sleep and work should be of lesser important than attending ANET’s ‘epic’ events.

Maybe they will fix it. But I no longer have any faith that they will do the right thing, so I’ll be complaining till they fix it or I give up and go play something else. Though ANET saying something about this mess they caused might soften my attitude.

They increased the rate of acquiring pretty much all the materials. While I agree that legendaries should be difficult to get, they were encouraging rather obsessive behavior as far as acquiring the materials. What this shows is that they’re willing to allow progression from more play styles. I bet ascended gear will not be limited to the extreme end of the fractal grind. That doesn’t fix the current problem with fractals, though (and hopefully they will fix the fractured player base sooner rather than later).

Treeline.3865:

They are ruining their game, and they are ignoring it so far. It will end in mass exodus. And that’s not to be a dick, i really love this game, it has so much potential. But it’s going the wrong way every day.

I agree that the fractal leveling system is broken and absolutely needs to be fixed.

However, I think this is a tad bit of an exaggeration. They’ve made karma and dungeon tokens easier to obtain. They’re supposedly making legendary precursors easier to obtain. They have been fixing problems. I think they can still make this right but they’ll probably need to address the fractals faster than it took them to address exploration mode dungeons.

Some amount of gating is okay. When you make such a rigidly precise scale of gating is when things become bad for the game. There is no real reason to mandate a specific fractal level 1-10 other than trying to get to the 10+ agony levels. Yet, people do it because the system encourages it. It is confusing why they made such a needlessly complex scale.

It does confuse me how they implemented this system. It would have been wiser to create a system closer to the story/exploration system that was previously in the game. In other words, one for playing for fun and another for “progression”. Instead, they created what, 30 categories? More? What is the cap? They could have handled the desire to create more challenging content without requiring such an obsessive system.

Correct me if I’m wrong, you can’t buy ascended gear as it requires a soulbound item. You can buy some of the parts but not all.

I’m dubious of the idea that this treadmill is designed to push you to buy gold with money. I think it is more of a poorly implemented dungeon with a progression element (the fractals themselves are great fun, the leveling mechanism combined with the lfg system has all the grace of a flying brick).

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

You might want to try an elementalist. Their attunement switching means they basically have 4 weapons, not 2.

Though I have to ask: Of the games with lots of options, how many of the options were something you held back till you needed it, and how many were ones you spammed ?
Because utilities in GW2 are mainly things you hold back until you need them. Especially elites.

Then you need to consider your position. In GW2, if you’re standing still your either casting something which requires you to be stationary, you have enemies preventing you moving, or you’re doing it wrong.

Regarding attunement swapping, d/d is very heavy on rotating between the different attunements and using only the abilities you need (and usually requires your skill build to have a large amount in arcane). Other weapons (e.g. staff) can stand better in one attunement. Some builds save the utility skills for emergencies while others you use them constantly (e.g. signet builds have you constantly using the signets and swapping attunements only when you need the utility of the particular element).

So the answer is, if you want a profession that you can make do a wide variety of things go elementalist. Just be careful as you can end up shooting yourself in the foot.

I think the leap aura nerf might just be a bug. Auras have always been kind of buggy (especially if you try to spread them to others).

There is an awful lot of people talking about falling off ledges in the fractals for there to be no jumping aspect. :p

I think some of the npcs actually do zero damage and are intended to die (saw a sylvari npc tickling a nightmare hound/doing nothing to the health bar). They’re encouraging some wider zone participation with the current patch but yeah, nothing down to like level 20 zones.

Found her during my circumnavigation of the zone. Was sad they didn’t make use of the lazy eye sylvari bug to make her look even more nuts. Hope she gets rescued.

Fuz.5621:

I agree with everything except number 2.
I LOVE jumping puzzles, they’re one of my favorite things in the game (even if they are frustrating due to the camera, sometimes). And they’re not mandatory at all.

I’d agree with you regarding the optional part before this patch. The fractals (the living statue one in particular) requires some ability to do these puzzles (admittedly it isn’t that hard but it is still there). This is coming from someone who likes these puzzles. But I can see how some people would be annoyed by this.

d/d is good for breaking lines, though. A well played d/d can seriously confuse an unorganized group to the point of breaking their line.

What if they found a way to make the level per player? Everything else is already per player (loot, xp, etc). So you could have one person at 10, another at 1, a few at 5 or so. The higher fractal level person would get better loot but would also be taking more damage and be susceptible to agony or whatever. The level 1 person could basically treat it like a story mode dungeon.

The main issue I see with this idea is that you could have one person at max level and everyone else at level 1. The max level guy dies constantly but who cares, you can four man at level 1. So they’d have to come up with a way around that kind of cheesing (reduced loot if you die, I don’t know).

I feel this would realign fractals with their design decisions. GW2 has always had personal progression. The problem is when it forces personal progression to require a group of a certain kind, when it encourages you to make demands of others to ensure you have fun. You don’t demand someone leave your farming area because who cares if they help you kill the mob, you all get loot. Who cares if they’re only fractal level 1, I’ll still get good loot from my higher fractal level.

Well, enough of my dreaming.

Good summary and thanks for posting. It is nice to remember that this is largely a good game. There were just some problems this weekend that will hopefully be addressed.

I was hoping this would be about a new flavor of pop rocks like how they do Halo Mountain Dew. Monetization!

Seriously though, I think the a lot of what we fear will happen is just as likely as what we hope will happen. I hope that whatever they change makes the game better, though.

No, it is like expecting a system where you don’t have to rush to tag a mob to complete a quest that involves killing 100 boars to get 10 livers.

I’m beginning to wonder if they intentionally made this patch a complete mess to try to prove a point. There are lots of great things about it spoiled by these weird things that completely go against the originally stated design goals.

For instance, they could have made fractal level progression much less of an issue. Instead they made it so people could easily level up 10 times or so over the course of a weekend. They then incentived this new dungeon with extremely good loot drops that got much better at high levels so people would demand max fractal level groups. Finally they put out the trial offer so you have a bunch of new people and you side kick them to 80 so they can “try” to find a group that will take them into the new dungeon.

It is like they were literally trying to shoot themselves in the foot.

Tito.3270:

I just can’t figure out why someone who isn’t 80 yet wants to already start dooing things he will get bored of at lvl80 because there is so little to do at 80 :/

I believe this was specific to this weekend as it was billed as a way to encourage new players to try the game out (and many people coming from WoW think that the game is post level cap so they put in the side kicking for the weekend). Again, I don’t blame the players, anet put in this system that seems to contradict their design goals. I hope they figure out a system that creates a nice compromise (e.g. the story mode and exploration mode was actually okay outside of it originally being too grindy).