Guild Wars 2

seventhson.6932:

That’s not very reassuring, you don’t sound convinced.

“We are absolutely certain that today’s patch might possibly fix some of the issues. Maybe.”

I can tell you what worked for me. Pile on his butt, keep poison up at all times, and dump EVERYTHING you have into him. His health will occasionally stall out when the crystals stack up over 20-ish. That’s when you just keep up the pressure and wait for them to stop healing him. If the boss turns toward you, dodge roll through it and continue to zerg mindlessly.

Easy fight, once you realize that doing it as it was intended is almost certain to end in failure.

Oh, and if you have a Guardian, force them to drop Hallowed Ground. If you have an Asura, do the same thing, but for Radiation Field.

I just use “She Beats Me” for all my pets. Keeps it consistent.

I love my devourers for two reasons:

1. They’re all about range, so they might actually survive an encounter once in a while
2. They have enough sense of self preservation to burrow and retreat, which has saved mine on many occasions

Devourers are winners in my book.

Well, I just managed to do this, but it was frustrating. These are the strategies we tried:

• Spread out, keep stability up as much as possible to avoid knockdown, and maintain poison.
• 1 on crystals, 1 person use piercing attacks to hit crystals + boss, everyone else on boss full time.
• 1 person on boss, everyone else on crystals, nuke boss during the brief periods when he stops being affected by crystals. Repeat as necessary.
• Pile on his tail and zerg with poison.

Of course, the strategy that worked for us (and apparently many other groups) is the one where we ignored all mechanics and zerged like idiots. That’s just fantastic dungeon design.

http://bit.ly/xErIWz

Are we talking about normal every day common-as-dirt wolves out in the open world? If so, I think you need to take a hard look at your equipment/traits and see where you’re losing so much damage. In most cases, all you need to do is land an interrupt on the first howl and the thing will be dead before it gets another opportunity. Sometimes you can kill it before it even attempts its howl.

I honestly don’t understand what practical purpose this could serve. Before you get your torches and pitchforks, hear me out.

Let’s imagine that marriage confers no combat/vanity benefit to a player. In that scenario, it’s a waste of development time because it’s a system that does absolutely nothing.

Now, imagine that it DOES confer some sort of a benefit. Suddenly, it becomes a requirement. If you want X then you must be married to another player! That’s a pretty terrible system, so whatever benefit player marriage provides would have to be obtainable through other means as well, so as not to force the player into an in-game partnership with someone they probably don’t know at all (and really, that sounds awful no matter how you spin it). So now, you have <Reward> which can be obtained through marriage OR through <Other>. At that point, marriage would be redundant, because it’s less hassle and frankly, less creepy to do whatever <Other> entails.

Keep in mind that both children and adults play this game. If you couple a marriage system and the anonymity of the internet where it’s impossible to verify someone’s age, a Ravenholdt-esque pervstorm is inevitable.

Now that you know my concerns, I challenge you to convince me that the marriage system would be a valuable and worthwhile asset. I promise, I’ll keep an open mind.

• BLTC “Pick Up” integrated into crafting stations
• Ability to see cooldowns on weapon set X while wielding weapon set Y
• Ability to swap in secondary skills while the present ones are still cooling down (obviously with CD inheritance for the sake of balance)
• More options for controlling pet behavior (Ranger)
• Ability to “store” multiple trait builds to streamline re-traiting
• A global LFG system that allows players to create/join groups based on the criteria of dungeon and difficulty setting, thus eliminating the need to spam map chat. If not the above, at least a dedicated server-wide LFG channel.
• Higher stack count on dungeon tokens (1000?)
• Ability to “recharge” items such as salvage kits and gathering tools by combining them with other partially-depleted items of the same type

Poorly thought out knee jerk reaction that punishes legitimate players more than those breaking the rules?
That seems to be standard operating procedure around these parts.

bamp for helping me out earlier

Hyoro.2615:

Hello Anet,

I’m almost 100% sure there is allready a post about this subject, but I don’t have the time to check. Either way I would like to report an exploit people are using in CoF. I asked my party about it and it seems people are using the torchlight @ Magg’s path, before the last boss. By using this torchlight people skip the event and go straight to the last boss.

I left the party when they explained to me what they were doing.

Do you got any date when you are going to fix this.
Since the worst thing atm is that I can’t even join a party for CoF when I tell them I don’t want to do the exploit. People will only take you in, if you DO the exploit.

It’s sadding.

Greetings,

Thorius

I believe they’re deploying changes to dungeons in tonight’s update. Whether or not that change will be in the new build is unknown. Since all it would take to fix this is the removal of a single mesh (or even just removing its collision), I can’t imagine it will be around for much longer.

It’s worth noting that the majority of players don’t resort to this kind of behavior unless they feel that it’s the only feasible way to complete their objective. A person doesn’t come to the conclusion that “cheating” is the optimal method without evidence to support it. That is to say, tens of thousands of players didn’t just spontaneously decide to exploit this dungeon – they simply got tired of wasting time, effort, and cash banging their heads against an encounter that was pretty lame from the beginning, and got a lot worse once it was determined that the ideal way to make the dungeon harder was to take the least enjoyable event and make it last twice as long.

I went to CoF2 last night for the first time since the changes. I fully expected to bang my head against the place for hours, but I figured I should at least see what has become of my favorite dungeon before they fix it (again). To my surprise, the party leader cheerfully explained that we would be in and out in less than 30 minutes. Skeptically, I shrugged and followed the pack. True to his word, we completed the run almost as fast as pre-buff, which was pretty darn mind blowing. After leaving the dungeon for the night, I thought about how everything in CoF has played out.

Go back a few weeks. The players are speed running CoF2. It’s quick, profitable, and most importantly fun. There are a few complaints, mostly centered around the lava field and bomb sections, but those quickly begin to disappear as people learn the tricks to them. Life is pretty sweet, and the exotic gear is plentiful.

ANet decides it’s too quick, too profitable, and is taking advantage of bugs in the coding of the dungeon (all fair points, don’t get me wrong) so they fix it. In doing so, they opt to crank up the difficulty on the two most frustrating and time-consuming parts of the dungeon.

Within 24 hours, players found a way to easily complete the first of those two, making it only slightly more challenging than before. Shortly after, they discover a way to circumvent the bomb section, using the skills they’ve developed from jumping puzzles.

So now here we are, and not only are the players still getting to do their speed runs, they’re actually receiving MORE loot than intended while completely avoiding the major annoyances of three separate encounters.

I think it serves as a fantastic demonstration of the cleverness and tenacity of ArenaNet’s player base. If you dig a pit, we’ll walk around it. If you put up a fence, we’ll climb over it. We will always follow the path of least resistance for fun and profit.

Alex.9432:

Have never failed to complete a story mode dungeon with pick up groups.

This is not a typical MMO. You can not sit there standing still feeling all god like and powerful while everything dies around you. If this is the experience you are looking for – you will never find it in this game.

You must dodge. You most think critically.

“I did it without having any issues, so I can only assume that everyone that’s having trouble is bad and doing it wrong.”

Nice attitude.

StormFox.3267:

Rush.8239:

erm that boss is so easy

he lifts his sword behind him and the sword glows before he throws out that scorpian wire and all you have to do is dodge it , so easy

although i agree dungeons need tuning this post makes legitimate concerns over dungeons look like just a bunch of noobs that cant work out simple tactics

I’ve said from the beginning, “Am I missing something?” and have been open to suggestions and ideas.

So, if you feel the absolute need to imply insult, go somewhere else.

Ignore it. Anyone who hasn’t learned to use the shift key isn’t worth replying to.

Fay.2735:

Why use money to teleport? Just use the heart of the mists to teleport to lion’s arch and from there it’s fairly easy to get to most of the dungeons. Or alternatively walk and enjoy the world that’s what I do, I rarely use waypoints.

I doubt that saving 3 silver is going to make the dungeons less terrible.

Might not be so bad if the graveling burrows didn’t throw out Obstructed/Miss messages after they hit 65%-ish where they begin to collapse.

That doesn’t change the fact that any event in which I have to play babysitter to an NPC or object has become the bane of my existence.

Freky.1903:

The dev that created CoF wanted to make it so we actually fight them, fair enough I would like to fight them. But 3 champions spawning every 10-20 seconds for 200 seconds…really? No one can survive that at all thats why we have to do the stupid line up thing. I want to fight them but it’s not possible.

I have a theory that goes a little something like this. Players will always try to fight a hostile target placed in front of them in a dungeon. When they discover that this is not possible, they will then resort to other methods with which they are familiar. In short – kiting/corpse training is never the first choice, it’s the response to the first choice not being feasible.

If I can come to that conclusion, I’m sure a certain content developer is capable of the same. Whether or not they choose to act on that information is what will determine the future of dungeons in this game.

Frankly, I’m still astonished by the comment made recently about how the NPCs during that event only hit for 3-4k. At first I thought it was sarcasm, but then I realized it was a serious dev post and I died inside a little bit.

Choch.8349:

I WANT TO MINDLESSLY FARM BADGES FOR EPIKZ ON EZY MODE LOL OMGQT. Really guys, it’s not that hard. Learn your class inside and out, learn the mechanics, learn the bosses and mobs.

Do not cry until you get your way and ruin this for those of us who are actually competent at what we play. Yes we still wipe, but that’s part of the learning process. Ask yourself this… Are you really doing everything you should be doing (blinds / dodges / LoS / speed buffs to get out of dodge / tossing heals / really and truly supporting your team) or do you run in there with a guardian and think he’ll tank and you just dps like crazy?

Nice post. I like the part where you were giving off this vibe of “I have in inflated sense of self-importance because I can play video games.”

I’ve played many MMOs in the past, and over time they turned me into the type of gamer who isn’t satisfied until I’m leading the realm-first group (and on several occasions, I did). If there’s a way to be better at what I do, I’m all over it. If I see someone doing something wrong, I make an effort to correct them without being a prick about it, because I refuse to sacrifice fun for success, and nobody has fun when the group leader is a jerk.

Now, I’ve spent weeks learning my Ranger, and I’m probably sitting at about 2g spent just on retraining talents to try new builds for PvE (I don’t do much PvP). I’ve tried everything from glass cannon and snare builds all the way up to full blown toughness/vitality “can’t kill me!” builds. I’ve encouraged others to do the same to see if the extra survivability makes much of a difference.

Simply put, it doesn’t.

Even with heavy defense builds, trash silvers can still hit for a ton of damage, and you don’t fare any better against bosses, though in my experience, it’s not the bosses that are challenging, it’s the insanely high HP trash mobs that take forever to knock out. What’s worse is that these same mobs have been given one-shot mechanics that either aren’t telegraphed at all, or have such a minor tell that it’s nearly impossible to notice and react accordingly, especially when every enemy is drowning in spell effects. Fortunately, every profession has unlimited Endurance and can just dodge forever, so it’s not like anyone’s ever in any danger of being cornered without a way to escape this swarm of one-shot-capable trash NPCs. Right?

Of course, there are plenty of annoying things that have nothing to do with player skill, such as AC’s graveling burrows and their “obstructed/miss x1000” crap. Only A.I. and AoEs seem to be able to strike them reliably. What upsets me most about them is that they would be so easy to destroy in a matter of seconds if this bug didn’t exist, thus making the encounter trivial. Is that why a day-one bug that makes paths 1 and 3 incredibly frustrating STILL hasn’t been fixed? There are other equally frustrating bugs scattered throughout every dungeon – artificial difficulty at its finest?

Speaking of artificial difficulty, how about these bosses that have piles of HP? You know the ones. Their abilities are pathetically easy to avoid, the group is never in any real danger of dying, and it’s been made abundantly clear by the time the thing hits 85% that the fight is over, but it’s going to take another 7-8 minutes for the boss to finally get the hint and fall over. Talk about fun times, especially for someone like me that can hang back at 1500 range and slowly chip away at the boss without any fear of retaliation. An even better example is SE explorable, where the last step before the final boss is boring trash that spawns more boring trash until it just becomes a kitefest around a cloud of red names.

I could go on for hours about all the problems that I’ve seen, and I know there are dozens more that I haven’t seen yet. The point is that dungeons in this game are poor in quality, mostly due to the “challenge” being less about player skill and more about dumb luck or corpse trains. That just sucks the fun right out of dungeons for me, and I’m clearly not alone in that sentiment.

SideStep.1347:

You are not the only one. Plus all the traps that you have to pass if you died!!!

You can easily disable those traps. As soon as you leave the hall, interact with the chain to your left. There are still one or two circles that continue to activate, and I can only assume this is a bug, because their positioning and timing is such that it can’t really kill you unless you try to take a nap inside the rings.

As for the boss and his tell, I can’t say for certain that it bugged out for my group, but I know that I have been pulled in the past without ever seeing the animation. Whether this is due to his animation not playing or it just being lost in the pile of spell effects is anyone’s guess.

Once you learn to watch for it, the boss is pretty simple, though I wouldn’t want to have to fight him in melee. Then again, I wouldn’t want to fight anything in this game as melee. GW2 seems to be a giant middle finger to anyone who chose the sword over the bow.

Tearmatt.5410:

Yeah well, still kills one of the social aspects of the game like gatherings in front of dungeons while looking for pt and open that box of fun where you can buy from the gem store, you can chat with the people on the entrance rather than sitting there doing nothing and wait till the Que Pops lol.

Yeah, because sitting in the desolate area in front of the portal spamming map chat in vain for people is such a wonderful example of the social aspect of the game. You’re going to have to come up with something better than “but you can just buy a box o fun lolololol”.

I promise you, a properly-implemented group finder is an asset, not a detriment. How other games did it is irrelevant. Their success or failure with it is irrelevant. If name-an-MMO managed to destroy their community by turning everything into an LFG speedrun, do you really believe that ANet would mindlessly repeat the exact same mistake? Is your opinion of them really that low?

The face of the thing isn’t that hard, really. Set up a GUI that allows players to publicly advertise that they currently have X/5 people and are trying to fill a group to go do Dungeons X, Y, and/or Z on Story/Explorable. This can be as simple as clicking checkboxes or selecting from dropdown menus. Allow a text box with a 100-ish character limit for them to provide additional optional information, such as which path they intend to take. Make their group publicly visible and joinable through the interface by anyone who fits the necessary level requirement for the selected dungeon(s). The community remains in tact, players still have to run to the portal, but the tedious chore of spamming map chat for more players becomes automated by an intuitive user-friendly system that has NOT been buried in a hidden corner of the contacts panel.

That’s it. You don’t even need a queue system, it’s just first come first served. For an added touch, when the group is full, play a short sound effect to alert everyone that it’s time to go. Of course, the coding behind such a thing is likely no small feat, but I don’t know coding, I know 3D modelling/animation and UI layouts, so that’s where I’m going to offer my opinions.

The ugly truth is that the current LFG tool is presented as a very hastily-implemented afterthought. ANet is better than this, and everyone knows it, so I have confidence that they’ll turn it around in no time at all.

I see I’m not the only one that finds it odd that an enemy can be torched with this thing and only receive a single burn tick at the very end.

Seriously. Why is this thing not piling on burn damage? It’s a device that punishes poor life decisions by dispensing flesh-melting agony to anything in front of you!

I see I’m not the only one that finds it odd that an enemy can be torched with this thing and only receive a single burn tick at the very end.

Seriously. Why is this thing not piling on burn damage? It’s a device that punishes poor life decisions by dispensing flesh-melting agony to anything in front of you!

I’ve actually seen a greatsword guardian do a fine job of holding off NPCs while the rest of the group unloaded on them. It’s not unheard of for a single character to build and play tanky, but it’s not feasible to believe you can be the sole defender of the group in all situations.

I can honestly say that I have never encountered any problem fighting Captain Kirk.

I once jumped off a bridge in Lion’s Arch, landed safely in the water, swam to shore, dried off, ran to the trading post to pick up some cash, went home to take a nap, and woke up screaming like I was on fire.

LittleZoe.4970:

It makes sense that the projectile gets destroyed when it hits an obstacle..

Not really. If it can fly right through a heavily armored enemy without even slowing down, why would a nearby tree present any more of a challenge?

It’s also a very poor design from a gameplay perspective, since it halves both the damage and utility (vulnerability stacking) of that attack, punishing the Elementalist for fighting in enclosed areas, which seems to me would be the ideal place to use the dagger main hand.

Whether or not this is the intended function of the skill, I can’t really say. If so, it might be worth looking into changing how it handles obstacles. I can only assume that they were following the “if a projectile hits an obstacle, then the attack is obstructed” model, but that only works with attacks that fly from their source to their destination and do nothing else. For attacks that return to their source after a certain distance, especially ones whose damage is split between the launch and return, it would be much better to have the entity detect the wall and return early than to simply destroy it.

Making them collectible is good. Making them tradeable is good. Allowing both would be huge.

Having a public acknowledgement of “these are things we know about and are working on” is one of the greatest things that a game dev can offer the players. Weeks, sometimes even months of complete silence about pressing issues is extremely frustrating to the fanbase.

ChaosKirin.1328:

This is the same mentality that caused SWTOR to go F2P.

No. Just no. With all the love and tolerance I can muster from my black little heart, I must ask you to never try to compare GW2 and SWTOR in any way.

The problem with human zones is that it’s always the same. Nothing ever changes. Every 10 levels, there’s a new centaur-infested zone in which to to commit genocide.

After a while, I start running out of creative ways to kill horsepeople.

I don’t even know how the hell the LFG feature works. I noticed it, poked at it for about five minutes, and then quickly gave up on trying to figure it out because none of my poking seemed to do anything.

Now that I’m 80, I log out and do other things, only logging in for an hour or so each day to see how my guild is doing.

I’d like to do dungeons, but I can’t stand how the difficulty is all over the place. Option X is a breeze, options Y and Z will murder you to death, and then Martha Stewart your corpse into a tasteful centerpiece for the dining room table.

So yeah, they did a fantastic job of taking the exploration out of explorable mode. You either choose the one reasonably-tuned option or you simply don’t get through the dungeon at all. Cool stuff.

I’d really like to take another shot at the temple of Balthazar out in Straits of Devastation, but the southern invasion line has been bugged for three days, making it impossible to progress any further. The whole zone has become a ghost town (Ha. Risen pun.) because there’s absolutely nothing to do out there if the zone events are broken. I spot the occasional player completing a skill point or something, but they’ve become quite rare since I first arrived in Orr.

Because of one bugged event chain, the major attraction of the zone becomes impossible to even attempt and everyone leaves. Sucks the fun right out of ya.

AliceKaye.1903:

Avalron.1569:

I don’t really see any major problems on my server, well besides the lack of engineers.

I have an engineer and liked it until I got around level 30. I hate that I don’t have more actual weapons to use. I understand I have kits and all but I haven’t found one that I like very much and instead I wind up just being a turret-placer which… has gotten repetitive and boring (which sucks because I really desperately wanted to play that class).

That feel. I know it.

One of the biggest problems with Engi in my eyes is the wonky weapon mechanics. Flamethrowers seem to fire in a T shape, allowing me to hit my 3, 9 and 12 all at once. If you use the 3 ability and immediately follow with 2, it’s almost always obstructed. Oh, and let’s not forget having to remind each secondary weapon every single time I decide to equip it that the first ability should be on auto-attack.

I stopped having fun with mine in a big hurry, which is a shame, because I loved the idea of being able to equip myself with a tool for every situation and be prepared for anything that could be thrown at me.

My Engi motto has become “screw it, I’ll just drop some turrets” and that is not the Engi I signed up for.

On topic: I see tons of Warriors. I think on Tarnished Coast, they just fall from the sky – complete with their trademark pile of signets and precision gear.

Being able to separately bind Loot, Interact, and Revive would take up more keys, but offers a greater ability to control priority, and that control can be the difference between saving a dying player or chatting with the nearest NPC while you’re in the middle of fighting a boss.

Interact “F” should use the following priority:
1) Your current selection
2) Loot
3) Revive/Stomp
4) Anything else

I like how looting is higher priority than reviving.

“I know you’re about to die, but I really need to get to the small handful of copper that you’re lying on top of, so just give me a sec. Oh, and stop bleeding on my loot, you inconsiderate jerkface.”

This pretty much sums it up, I think.

Seriously though, there are already plenty of money sinks in this game. Burning over three silver to go help my low level friend, and then another three to get back to Orr feels like a “good guy” tax.

I’m gonna have to start charging people for my assistance at this rate.

Here are the problems as I see them:

In Explorable mode, the paths often vary wildly in difficulty, with options X and Y being nearly impossible and Z being pretty well balanced.

Story modes often have extremely challenging trash and laughably easy bosses. That seems so very backwards to me.

Dungeon difficulty in story mode varies heavily between the instances as well. One of the most prominent examples is how difficult AC is (particularly trash) and then you go to Arah and kind of laugh your way through the bosses…. and then cry at how easy it actually is to kill Zhaitan…

One-shot mechanics are never fun, but especially so when you can’t see them through all the spell effects. As we’re all aware, the larger the boss, the larger the spell effect is on them, which makes fighting some things extremely frustrating.

I can’t bring myself to really enjoy the dungeons as they are currently. I just run them out of a desire to get decent-looking gear. That’s pretty much it.

Ryukin.4205:

It’s not so much a bug as it is a balancing issue. It’s from the nerfing of GS back during the BWEs, followed by the buffing of 1h sword. But it does place GS at sort of a weird place.

GS is a giant utility kit. Evade on the third autoswing, a long range leap, a block/knockback, and an interrupt. The only thing that’s exclusively damage is Maul.

Seems odd to me that a sword as tall as I am is the item I choose when I need to throw myself across a large room, rather than violently destroying everything in said room.