Guild Wars 2

NightShadow.1429:

Hahahahaha… 1k bags…. Over the last two Halloweens of easily opened 40k+ and no tonic. I’m now just selling them for the profit since there’s nothing I really want from them anyway aside from the tonic.

Wow. I don’t even want to think about farming 10k bags, much less 40. I have actual Halloween events to attend this week .

I don’t think I’m an average player, but for the player that I am, I’ve focused a little game time on leading zergs in the labyrinth and opening all my own bags rather than buying or selling them. I don’t expect my odds to be good with such a small sample, but they are what they are. No luck yet, but no deep angst over it all either.

Please direct your gaze to the horizon.
You see that dot out there?
That’s the ship.

It has sailed.

Ehra.5240:

Nike.2631:

I’ll agree that “elite” was a terrible choice of names,

Why? As I explained above, it fits perfectly with other uses of the word “elite” in regards to character abilities.

It’s terrible because of the expectation of superior performance it evokes for many players. Off the top of my head in 30 seconds~

Secondary Specialization.
Focus Specialization.
Dedicated Specialization.
Alternate Specialization.

That language is dripping with choices that show the new options are not part of the core choices but also not inherently superior either. “Elite” was a poor choice and my eyebrows went up the very first moment I read that they were being called that.

I bought 4 tattered wings because that’s the part that’s truly time gated. the tonics drop from trick or treat bags that trickle in year round.

I’ve personally farmed and opened more than 1,000 bags during this event. No tonic. I largely accept the price is a good reflection of the rarity.

Interestingly the description of the event expressly states there would be a recipe to craft the endless bat tonic. Whoever finds that first is going to make a fortune…

Well, given that they are the result of the Horizontal Progression CDI, the ENTIRE POINT was to have them be of roughly equivalent power level.

I’ll agree that “elite” was a terrible choice of names, but functionally they’re working pretty much as designed.

Ohoni.6057:

No, that’s the core of the entire argument. If people were happy with the existing Precursor prices then there would be no need for the crafting quests in the first place. The ENTIRE point is to drive the prices back down to a reasonable level.

Not even close, though players sometimes like to think that.

The ‘point’ was to create a reliable means of acquisition that does not require you to throw yourself at the feet of the TP or the mystic forge.

The TP is economic pvp. Thinking it likes you or is your friend is sheer foolishness. Its hostile territory. The materials required to work the collection are numerous, but they’re also steadily acquirable through play. If you objected to giving money to someone holding a precursor, they why should you be more willing to throw money at someone holding a bunch of ascended materials?

MAKE. THEM. YOURSELF.

That is what the collections offer. Not cheaper. Sure as hell not faster. Evaluating it in terms of coin instead of personal accomplishment is what gets most people into trouble in the first place!

Oh I read. Its absurd on too many levels to detail.

Fine. I’ll play. How many jump puzzles were there in Nightfall?

aB EXT.1287:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Going to be investigating this. It may require some change to Smoke Assault, since the active skills are intended to be a little stronger than the passive skills.

My hero! faints

I think you misunderstand. That means the passive is getting nerfed, not swapped or the f2 made stronger.

Faren is the sole living descendant of Mad King Thorn.

There’s been hints and prophecies about it in the game several times now.

A customer believes they should have been given the product for free?

Where’s my surprised face? I left it here somewhere…

Mahuyo.3079:

True, but I don’t think I’ve seen ppl kill the lich this year, really I figure at least hot ppl would have the boon stripes and stuff. Not saying that lich hasn’t been killed

Today was the first day (out of three-four days I’ve been leading zergs) where we downed the lich. We had to stop and train everyone on fight mechanics and since we didn’t have as much boon-strip as I’d like we had to make up the different with a lot of active healing to stay ahead of the reflected damage. But after days of blundering into the lich being certain death oh was it satisfying. Now I need to hack about 25 more pumpkins and I’ll have this year’s meta achievement .

You might try using an offensive melee pet (cats/pigs) to get in and trigger their traps, but once you do you’re gonna need to get right in there with them to clobber the DH before he runs off or resets them. Trying to pull a ranged duel with them will get you killed if its a typical DH longbow build. Your biggest hit has a telegraph that lets them know when to use their missile-canceling arrow to shut it down and hit you hard.

Like all Guards he’s got a short lifebar with lots of self-heal, so spike damage (power or condition) will really dig deep into their cooldowns. Watch for the ‘chicken hop’ with the glowing wings popping out of their back. When you see that their innate regeneration is gone and they’ve probably just blown their last heal so you’re getting real close at that point.

I just tag up to get the zerg to form around me and run it with a less-than-80th level character so I’m gathering actual XP. I took one of my guards from 56 to 70 in there in the last few days .

Tag’ing up in the labyrinth is a lot like becoming the brain of a shark: you have to move constantly to stay alive and you can sense prey from miles away and start moving towards it even as you finish swallowing your last big meal.

That announcement was surprisingly explicit though…

I’ve enjoyed the new maps a lot. I wish gliding could be propagated to a few more places (PvP lobby!).

I’ve also been fairly pleased with the iteration since the launch.

BUT…

I’m still concerned that after showing they could actually get out of the secret bunker and interact with us to the benefit of all, the Balance Team looks like they’re getting back in the habit of hiding under a rock.

Ragnarox.9601:

One dodge nullifies traps.

People say that, and yet traps are proving so devastatingly effective in the real world they’ve needed 2 nerfs in 2 days.

Having tools for range and tools for in close is FLEXABILITY.

Stacking the holy crap out of one range category isn’t the only kind of good game design.

Dragonhunter effectiveness is as much because closing with them will get you killed (traps) as it is that they will burn you to the ground at range (longbow). They force opponents to make real choices.

And this is the terrible lesson of Tequatl — that people should retreat instead of getting rez’d.

That’s not true in the jungle.

If events are going to have any challenge at all, people have to not be able to casually self-rez by popping back to the WP.

Can’t say I see how you get to it promoting Not doing events, since doing the events is how you keep the points open…

NightShadow.1429:

But at least the queen bee is a drop! If you don’t want to shell out the money then you can farm for it…. there is no other way to get this except to dish out the money.

How do you think these things are entering the marketplace in the first place? People wishing real hard and flapping their arms?

There is ABSOLUTELY a way of getting these. That you’re unwilling to do it should tell you why they’re valuable.

Man if only there were puzzles in this game more complicated that ‘run straight at it mashing 1 over and over’.

Booms.3952:

+1 agreed for once guardian is in the top half of the tier list and I’m afraid it’s going to get nerfed to the ground

This may come as a blow to the grotesque self-importance of most posters but balancing is driven by actual play metrics about 1000x more than by the constant NOISE on these boards .

Right now most players don’t have a clue what to do about Dragonhunters because they’ve never actually seen good traps before. Imagine the complaints if Ranger and Thief traps were made good for a change…

Give it a week or three for people to both learn their new specs and to get a feel for the new opposition.

Heimdallr.7021:

Hi all,
i was just wondering, i’ve seen any sort of complaint about the DH in the guardians community (many of which also true).
These last days after the expansion hit I say instead a lot of complain in pvp targetting DH and their supposedely OP traps.
How that happened?

Because DH traps got a GIGANTIC buff after BWE3 that was never tested in a large scale environment.

And because people didn’t know what the kitten they were talking about when they were claiming that it’s hard to hit people with traps. It’s trivial to consistently land trap skills.

I kinda had the feeling calling them “Elite” was going to give the wrong impression for a system of horizontal progression. I mean who could have predicted that would make people think they’re supposed to be superior to standard choices?

((facepalm))

Adrian Guardian.9480:

• choice to range with pet tank

This one always make me laugh… if you can’t do enough damage to pull mobs off a pet your DPS SUCKS.

I’ve never seen a DPS meter that properly assigned a portion of a character’s damage done to the person who made that possible via buffs. Or one that said after you took fatal damage but didn’t go down very point you did for the rest of the fight belongs to your healer…

They will.

At some point.

And shrieking “OMGNEURF!!!” in a vacuum isn’t the right attitude either. Enjoy a day or two of having been over powered and getting some cheap wins. Dragonhunter trap spam is incredibly effective. Stretching out the cooldowns instead of reducing the boons that we get with them triggering is a pretty gentle way of tuning them down a bit. And if they’re STILL over powered they’ll get trimmed again. If the numbers look good they’ll stay as they are now.

You’d pay a lot less if you bought the components to make the ascended materials instead of paying the highest amount possible to progress. And there’s no reason to think people putting in the actual effort to generate the PvP items are doing it so you can have a cheap precursor.

Seriously, if you’re gonna just buy your way to completion instead of putting in the slightest amount of personal effort… suffer the consequences.

Because a chance to see real numbers in a larger field of players couldn’t possibly have shown Dragonhuunter was over-performing.

In fairness, they didn’t change it so much because it was hard, but because they inadvertently mislead us~

“When we ran our beta events for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we allowed everyone to instantly access fully unlocked elite specializations with all their skills and abilities so we could get balance and gameplay feedback on them. We’d also always said you’d need to unlock your elite specialization, but we were never explicit on the details of how characters do this and the hero-point costs associated. We always viewed the elite specialization as one of the major rewards in expansion—but between the betas and lack of unlock info, we didn’t do a great job properly aligning expectations on how your elite specialization is earned. This left some players in a position where they expected to have their elite specialization very early on (or immediately!) in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. Our goal was always to have elite specializations as a part of character progression, but it’s clear that a segment of our players was so excited about the elite specialization system and abilities that they really wanted to experience most of the expansion with them unlocked.”

Raids OTOH aren’t even close to as hard as they lead us to expect, soe maybe those will get tougher .

Gotchaz.7865:

Let’s face it, Anet didn’t cave in because there was a few whiners, there was a 3K long post here and another on reddit. That’s a lot of negative feed back. Plus they didn’t cave and say here you go…you still have to get 250HP per character and I can tell you there’s tons of people who haven’t done world complete. In fact I know people who only do WvW and haven’t touched PvE.

I can give you a list for threads on this board that long they completely ignored. This may come as a blow to people’s grotesques self-importance but thread size is NOT a driving force for change.

Personally I’m content either way. It’s was doable before, it’s more easily doable after. I don’t feel like Elite specs should make people feel like a special snowflake, but I didn’t think they were that hard to unlock either.

Well, that was unexpectedly generous. Back to playing!

Heart of Thorns Story

• Itzel Poison Lore is no longer a Mastery requirement for story.
• Fixed an issue in which the Sign Cutting quest would not properly bypass the Mastery requirement for certain players. Additionally, fixed an issue with Rox’s markings not properly completing the quest step on interaction.

You were having some other gating issue?

quaniesan.8497:

Phy.2913:

Stop trying to rush them.

It’s not rushing. You DO realize even early in the story they demand us to have rank 5 in certain mastery line, do you even know how long it is to get even 1 level?

Uh huh. You aren’t keeping up with the patch notes, are you?

As someone who has run into a barb-wire fence at speed (it was dark) let me assure you that most traps of that nature will NOT be giving you a 3/4 of a second grace period to cross the boundary again without taking damage .

I have 5 Guardians, 3 of whom I wanted to transition to Dragonhunter. None of them had map completion on the 20th (one did by the 23rd, its a pretty straight forward process). My main is done already and I’m only a tiny bit into the third map. Frankly I put it down for a little bit to work Halloween loot and make sure I had all the collections achievements started that I could.

Will my other two Guards represent some repetition? YES. Would I like it to be a little simpler the second and third time around? SURE. But it already is IS simpler since the masteries are account-wide and the guides are starting to get published that make some of the early maps even easier than I had realized. I’ve run enough alts of other professions through Verdant Brink now that getting half a dozen of the points there is becoming muscle memory. Its just not that hard with a little practice.

Some take a group. I’m not wildly gregarious but in a few weeks if the maps are dead and I am still promoting some of my 22 character slots to elite specs I’m planning to tag up and do a little shouting in Lions Arch that “I’m leading a romp through the Heart of Thorns hero challenges and the train leaves in 5 minutes.” Some folks here might even end up IN one of my excursions.

It could be made a little more casual/pleasant without throwing out the entire structure. Just shaving off 100 points would make it something you could finish without ever leaving the first HoT map. It would also reduce the time requirement for primarily WvW players.

But the thing people commenting here need to realize is every day more people who want it are getting it done, and that’s reducing the sense of urgency, not increasing it. HoT includes dozens of long-term tasks. Getting your Espec probably shouldn’t be on the level of collecting your way to a precursor, but all evidence is it already isn’t that level of demanding.

RedBaron.6058:

A lot of people is waiting for the changes to purchase the HoT expansion.

ANet can make a load of money overnight if they listen to their costumers…

Would you kittenING STOP with the appeals to the masses? You don’t know. You CAN’T know. AND WE kittenING KNOW YOU CAN’T KNOW.

The length of this thread doesn’t matter. Your dire predictions don’t matter.

What’s actually happening in game which they will never in a thousand years share with us matters.

RedBaron.6058:

Today is the deadline for me.

ANet likes to announce and implement changes on Tuesdays. I will wait until the end of the day.

Excellent, and when it doesn’t change by then?

Paulytnz.7619:

Nike.2631:

Actually they said it wouldn’t work in WvW long ago… and we all looked at them like they were out of their minds, WvW being THE place you need it most.

Clearly they need a bit more of the hard stare.

((stares))

I could of sworn I heard one of them saying in one of the POI’s that it would work in WvW and yes even when you are dead and an enemy you have damaged dies soon after……

Nope. Exactly the opposite. Which was when the “Are you NUTS?” stares started .

Actually they said it wouldn’t work in WvW long ago… and we all looked at them like they were out of their minds, WvW being THE place you need it most.

Clearly they need a bit more of the hard stare.

((stares))

And here we had to suffer through months of people declaring traps are useless. That people could avoid every last one of them by watching the animation when they are set.

These tears are sweet indeed.

Very doable with 3.

MrH.2591:

Yeah I was being generous I guess, they really didn’t think this through at all.

Really. You think the folks whose livelihoods depend on the game and have been working towards this release for about two years now didn’t think about it?

They have different MOTIVES than you, and different goals, but there’s no question who in this conversation hasn’t “thought about it”.

No.

Lithril Ashwalker.6230:

the dodge types need to be f3,4,5 skills to switch to based on specific situations much like a stance which would free up 3 grandmaster trait types. we need to keep this thread going especially since the HoT is released.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…

No, really. Ha.

velmeister.4187:

It was somewhat expected. Most people, who already have legendary stuff, spent thousands to get theirs. So, ANET probably tried to find some middle ground and ended up with this. Problem is that they killed the main source that funded these weapons – dungeons. Without a steady stream of funds, it’d be impossible to do. So, grind gold in silverwastes or convert gems to gold.

I love how people say that like Silverwastes isn’t the next on the chopping block.

They aren’t into optimal gold grinds.

hurrado.2346:

Praise the lord they are looking into a solution, thanks Colin!

Um, that’s NOT AT ALL what he just said.

So, how’d the poll turn out?

Substance E.4852:

Nike.2631:

Carbon Footprint.3421:

Only 2 ‘sets’ as there are only 2 new heavy chest pieces in the wardrobe.

See, that’s just weird thinking to me. That would be 2 “heavy sets”. Along with 2 “light sets” and 2 “medium sets”. Why people consider SIX completely separate looks to be “two sets” is strange.

2 sets as in 2 themed sets.

Chaos weapons are one set just as the Arah armors or Carapace armors are a set each.

Even the armors in the gem store came in sets despite some having no central theme.

So when people see the new heavy armor that came with Revenants, are they calling that “1/3rd of a set”?

One of us. One of us!

Welcome to the fold .