Guild Wars 2

I’m a little confused on the “explorer” achievements. I found that I was close to maxing the “Maguuma” achievement, so I went and just cleared Caledon, which should have been my final point, but I’m only at 161 out of 165. I did clear all the zones listed, got the map completion bonuses for each, is it a matter of them adding new points since I’d cleared Metrica and Brisban or something?

I agree with the Op’s suggestions, I would just like to add that it’d be nice if Magnetic Grasp caused a leap effect whether it hits or not. It’s nice to have a movement effect on each weapon set, and having Earth’s only work when there’s an enemy in range (and the direction of travel) weakens it. I think it would still be perfectly balanced as it does little damage and has a built-in delay as you wait for the “grapple” to fire outwards.

There are a good number of solid bows. I’m not a fan at all of the most generic bow type, and better options should be more common, but there are some fun ones out there. My Asura Thief is running with a Char-based mini-compound bow that looks really slick.

Champ/Vet tags have more to do with the armor/hp of mobs than the damage they do.

That may be the case, but if so it’s a flawed mechanic. Having more HP doesn’t automatically make an enemy harder, the tags should reflect relative difficulty, and a hard hitting but tissue thin enemy can be as hard or harder than a light but persistent and hearty enemy, the indicator should be on how difficult one can expect them to be in sum total, not whether they are a tank or a glass cannon.

The big problem I have with Karma is that it’s WAY too spread out. Each NPC in the world only sells a very set selection of goods. If I want a Beetletun coat, not only do I need the karma for it, but I have to take that character to Beetletun, AND I have to clear the renown heart for the town, and only then can I buy the jacket. With gold, pretty much everything that can be bought with gold is on the Trading Post. I can call it up using any of my characters, anywhere in the world. I can lock in my purchase with that character, and even if there isn’t one of the dozens of trading post reps nearby, I could even claim it with an alt and put it in the bank for retrieval. It’s just so so so so much more convenient.

There needs to be a way for Karma to be more convenient. At the very least there should be a way to shop remotely for Karma items from NPCs you’ve already unlocked, and Karma rewards should be Accountbound rather than Soulbound, so that you can claim them with an alt and sent them to a different alt. Ideally you could also sell and buy Karma items on the Trading Post, for Karma only (no transfer between Karma and Gold).

It wouldn’t be so bad if Waypoint travel were less expensive, then you could hop from point to point to get the stuff you need, but at current prices it’s just not worth it.

They really just need to make these skillpoint NPCs so that they reset themselves at least once per day. They only ever seem to work for a few hours after each update.

I don’t think there is any imbalance here. You’re getting hit hard by a mob that is tougher than other kinds of mobs. That doesn’t suggest imbalance that says that this mob is tougher and more difficult to deal with. Know how to counter!!

But the problem is that the game has feedback mechanisms to tell whether a mob is tougher than other mobs, the Vet/Champion tags, and Imps fail too use these properly. The only way to tell that a Shadow Imp will two-shot you within seconds is to get two-shotted by one within seconds.

They even have the sub-mechanism of telling you under their portraits that certain enemies “bleed, poison, slow, etc.”, but Shadow Imps do not say “hits like a mutha.”

I main a Mesmer and while I think they hit relatively hard(20-25% of your HP), they are by no means imba.

I don’t know why, but if your Mesmer in light armor only gets hit for 25% damage, and my Thief in Medium armor gets hit for 40%+. I’d like Thieves to be able to use Light armor (and not just because they have all the best hoods).

I main a Mesmer and while I think they hit relatively hard(20-25% of your HP), they are by no means imba.

Honestly, I like challenge, but I hate it when challenge begins with you dying. Like I hate those oldschool games where it’s actually impossible to get them right on the first try because if you aren’t reacting to something that hasn’t happened yet then it’s already too late, you should have remembered it from the last time you died. The game should give you the tools to get things right on the first try, it’s just up to you to figure out how to react to them.

Like I said, one Shadow Imp I can handle fairly well, if very risky, and the reward doesn’t really match the risk, but more than one and they’re just too much concentrated kitten for me to handle. Maybe if I had some massive Power-based ranged AoE thing I could take them out with massive alpha strikes, but as a Condition-based melee character I need to be able to fight them for at least 5-10 seconds without dieing.

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Another mob that hit much harder than equivalent level mobs are destroyers. There’s a cave in Metrica where the destroyer trolls are at least 2x harder than the event mobs that spawn in their place. I learned once the event is finished to exit the cave quickly as it’s a death trap otherwise.

I don’t have any trouble with Destroyers (except D.Harpies). Really I don’t mind melee enemies that can hit like a brick, I can tap-dance around Brutes all day, it’s when the attack homes after me at a distance and are non-directional that I have issues with it. I tend to think that enemies should either smack you to kitten in a single attack or be able to fire it at you no matter where you’re located relative to them, but not both at once.

Am I the only one with the complete opposite experience from the creator of this thread? I was exploring the southern part of Mount Maelstrom for the first time last night and enjoyed plowing through the shadow imps because they were by far the easiest enemies on the map. They have such low max health that they barely had time to react when I attacked them, even when I was fighting 4 at a time.

Entirely possible. Based on what people have been saying here, I’m thinking that my Ranger, or my Elementalist with a staff might have an easier time dropping them.

This is absolutely an issue as the game matures and we are working on ways to make running story mode with someone worthwhile even if you have already run it so players just reaching these dungeons can more easily find groups to play with. It will probably take some experimentation before we find the right motivator.

Jon

How about a bunch of XP and gold? I would rerun story dungeons for a bunch of XP and gold.

They are not unbalanced. Imps have always hit super hard in GW.
In GW1, 3 imps could easily defeat an unprepared party of 8 in a few seconds.

That does not indicate balance, that indicated persistent imbalance. If they are intended to be that difficult then they should be labeled as such, what are now title-less imps should be called “Veterans”, and the current Veterans should be called Champions, if that is what they are intended to be balanced as.

Yeah, I mean, it’s not that they’re impossible or anything, but they just seem to be unbalanced, as in if you meet the qualifications to have a fair fight against almost any creature in the game at that level, these guys will be much more challenging, equivalent to at least a Veteran or two. I solo vets with adds all the time, but I’d much rather solo a vet Risen or Troll or something with adds than I would try to solo two or more Shadow Imps.

But they do hit crazy hard, right? I mean, I can usually take on a half-dozen assorted Risen easier than 1-2 Shadow Imps.

Ok, I’ve only fought these guys a few times, but each time they were ridiculously tough. The first time was in NW Caledon, a small patch of these, and I was playing a level 30+ Thief that was downleveled to whatever the area was, 15 or so. The second time was this morning, same character, level 69 this time, in the southern border of Mt. Maelstrom. Today I was at least able to defeat one one-on-one, if I as lucky, but two or more would just annihilate me within seconds.

They basically have a charged attack where they throw a shadow bolt or something. This attack can be dodged, but if you can’t, or just fail to dodge it, it deals about 40-50% damage to me in that one shot. Since it has a fairly long range, and they tend to spawn in open terrain, the only way to deal with these attacks in any way is to burn dodges, and they can do this attack faster than dodge tends to regenerate (even on my Thief with Acro-spec). They can also cast some sort of poison cloud, and that poison ticks very powerfully too.

I just don’t get it, why do these guys hit so crazy hard? They hit like Champions, even though they aren’t even Vets, and there just aren’t enough tools to deal with them effectively.

So guys, it’s one month in, we’ve all had some time to play with various pets, and I was just wondering what everyone thought. Which pets have you tried? Which worked great, and why? Which didn’t, and why? What do you guys think?

Personally, in beta I came to the impression that Bears were the only pets worth using, because they had higher cumulative stats than the other pet types, and the other ones died all the time. After launch though, I focused my traits on the pet line, and on regeneration for my pets, and found some of the other ones plenty survivable to use.

My current character is Shortbow-based, and uses a Raven and an Eagle as pets. I really like these birds, because one Blinds and the other Bleeds, they move very quickly with little wasted movement, they are small and fly so they don’t get in the way visually as much as a bear or lizard, and they can give me swiftness sometimes when I attack a random critter. They have decent damage, keep agro quite effectively, and only rarely die when I pull more agro than most classes could survive anyways, so I don’t blame them for that.

I have also used bears a good bit, and wanted to use an Arctodus or Murrelow for their special attacks, but can’t get over their creepy looks. Same with Devourers, I hear they’re useful, but ew. I like the River Drake, still use him as one of my aquatic animals (still paying around with those to find ones I like). I do kind of wish that once you unlocked a given racial trait you could train it into a different breed, like being able to make a Snow Owl that bleeds things, or a Wolf that can summon a buddy wolf like the Hyena can. I don’t see the harm in it, given that they have the same stats anyways there shouldn’t be any balance issues with that.

Anyways, what have you guys learned so far?

I don’t know what you’re talking about, my Ranger does the most damage of any character I’ve played underwater, especially better than my Thief. The Speargun has terrific attacks to it.

I was hoping we could get colored borders, or some other type of indicator in the item UI, to show what rarity they are at a glance. They currently have different colored names, of course, but only when you bring up the full description, which is difficult to sort at a glance. Having little white, blue, green, orange, etc. borders around the items would make them easier to tell apart.

For the time being, I can use a merchant to help tell them apart, but a more direct method would be nice too.

I have noticed that enemies in story missions seem harder than in the open world. Maybe it has to do with scaling, aren’t stories scaled to exact levels (ie if you’re level 60 and go into a level 54 mission, you’ll be scaled to level 54), while the open world is a bit softer (like if the area you’re in is intended for level 54s, you’d still be level 55 or 56?).

There’s also an issue that some enemy types are just harder than others, like Destroyer Harpies are harder than regular ones, and story missions often introduce enemy types that you might not have faced in the open world yet, or they come at you in numbers and patterns that you wouldn’t see in the open world, or that you’d at least have back-up for.

Ok, after a few hours of gameplay I was able to rejoin my guild and use my Commendation, but it did take a while.

I got a Guild Commendation today from a story mission and tried to use it, but it said I wasn’t representing a guild (even though I’d been representing my own guild since day one). I then “unrepresented,” thinking I could rep up again to fix that, but then the “represent” button did nothing at all, and I can’t get back in to it. I tried switching characters but it did not help.

/third, I hate having a bunch of pointless soulbound obsolete crafting tools on my main, and then either allow them to clutter up space, waste time running around in a zone I otherwise don’t care to be in to burn them up, or waste them by throwing them away, while I still have plenty of alts that would enjoy using them. I know it’s not a ton of money wasted in chucking a half-used stack of copper tools, but I just have a basic aversion to needless waste.

Plant harvesting, for cooking ingredients, is a bit of a mess. I’m around level 60 at this point, working through Sparkfly, and for a while now they have been very random. I frequently need harvesting tools one grade above the other crafts (ie mythril sickles in areas where Darksteel ones work just fine for metals and woods), and whether I’ll need them or not is kind of random, with some types of nodes requiring those high level tools, and others requiring much lower level ones (and therefore wasting money on using the higher class ones to harvest).

I would prefer to see some more consistency in what tools are needed, and/or to have a specific visual feedback as to what level of tool is required to harvest each node, without having to trial-and-error it or look it up online.

Condition damage needs buffed. Direct damage is just far superior currently in any fight, PvE or PvP.

Critical chance and critical damage stats give direct damage a huge damage increase as you stack both. Condition damage only scales linearly. The only thing condition damage has that can compete is condition duration but that is only available through sigils and trait bonuses.

I would just like to note, as a very Con-heavy player, I do not need Condition damage to reach parity with Power damage, but it needs to be close. Power has the advantage of killing things faster, Condition has the advantage of allowing you to apply it and then scurry out of danger, and things die without hurting you as much as if you’d had to stay toe to toe with them the entire fight. It’s basically that “tick-tick-boom” effect of they’re dead and they don’t even realize it.

When it works.

All we need is shoring up the areas where it doesn’t work, cases where players and mobs can “defuse” the necessary “boom” component by clearing damaging conditions, cases where objects are immune to the benefits of that type of damage, cases where gear is not available to properly build in that direction, and cases where larger mobs are easily capped out by a handful of characters. My Thief can fairly easily maintain 10-12 bleed stacks, that means that any battle in which 3-4 similar characters are participating, one or more of us will be contributing next to nothing to the battle, certainly not our full worth, and that needs to change.

Melee is supposed to do more damage than ranged, in general. Never mind that for Hundred Blades to get the full damage, they have to not be moving. You can’t just look at raw damage numbers if a vacuum. I mean, you might as well compare Hundred Blades to other non-condition attacks while you are at it. I don’t really know how that is related to conditions, specifically.

Nobody said anything about melee vs. range. We’re talking direct damage vs. Condition damage here. Melee advantage is a non-factor.

The problem is the concept of major damage coming from bleeds. Bleeds should just be a little something extra, not your main source of dmg. The system is broken at the core.

Just compare dmg of thieves vs necros. Thought everyone was supposed to be equal, just different?

I don’t think there’s any problem with the concept of condition builds, it’s just a different way of dealing damage. You can choose to either go with strong and predictable (Power), stronger but more random (Precision), or somewhere in between but time delayed (Condition).

It’s sacrificing immediate damage in return for long term higher damage., and this is a fine principle, so long as A: the longterm damage is higher than Power builds, and B: enemies can’t easily negate the “png term” portion by clearing damaging conditions.

Really damaging conditions should be kept off the list of generic “remove conditions” effects. Only effects that directly target damaging conditions (like the Thief heal) should have any effect on them. The generic ones should only clear “effect” conditions like Daze or Weakness.

I wondered what was causing that. Yeah, I’ve had this happen several times over the last two days, and now that I think about it I was fighting Risen Grubs at the time. I was also having a lot of general lag (likely on my end) so I had thought the errors were related to that, but I guess this is why.

Yeah, level 14 is a liiiitle early for mobs with one-shot fireballs to have adds. Or even for one-shot fireballs. One-shot fireballs are really no fun at all inside a story where you don’t have back-up. Really one-shot fireballs are just plain no fun ever, and should be avoided whenever possible. I do not like Destroyer Harpies. I’ve beaten that mission on two different characters, a beta Engineer and a launch Thief, but it was not a fun one in either instance (the story is good though, so it’s my favorite Asura line so far).

I forget the tactic I used on my Thief, but it probably involved DB stacking and then running like kittens. I also might have had ambush available, which has been one of my goto skills for a while, and they can help to suck up agro.

are rangers as deadly as Thieves close up?

In my experience (having a main Thief and secondary Ranger), a Shortbow Ranger is deadlier than a Shortbow Thief in close, but not as deadly as a D/D Thief. Rangers are ok, I don’t think they need messing with.

This isn’t really a balance issue, the solution doesn’t need to make Thieves “better” than they are in an overall sense, it can be a “+1/-1” solution, but Thieves should have some more opportunities to deal damage at 1200 range, given how vital having that distance be be when challenging certain content.

Either that or make it much easier to survive when in a general melee press or fighting a giant boss mob with PBAoEs, so that Thieves can chill out as comfortably within 600 range as characters currently can at 1200-1500.

As to levelling: My personal feeling&playstyle is that the game progression is best done somewhat under level, since the open world difficulty is geared to very casual players (not looking for a dungeon level stuff, but a little challenge is fun for L2Ping, testing out one’s build ideas and stuff). For that reason I’m always looking for ways to avoid XP gain, which is quite hard since you get XP for almost everything in GW2 – one session of WvW or a bit of crafting, for instance, puts you over level for an area immediately.

Well, that’s you, and that’s a fine way to play, but for players that do want to gain some levels, for whatever reason, being able to find DEs when you want them can be important. If they did implement this feature, you could use it to avoid active DEs. I assure you that if you avoid DEs entirely you’ll have no problem staying underleveled.

It was bugged the last two days I checked it on Crystal Dessert as well (didn’t check it today though).

I had this same problem occur today. It seems to effect all my characters. It ONLY effects whether I can click to target enemies and NPCs. I can still tab-target, and swinging wildly still autotargets, I can also still both right and left click on menu items and anything else in the game, but I cannot click to select a particular NPC or enemy (or targetable objects, for that matter). This problem has only occurred to me this morning, I was playing yesterday afternoon and for months prior without encountering this issue, and have not messed with the options since near launch.

Okay let’s just take pistols out of thieve’s arsenal then if you want to continue to make shortbow increasingly better than them.

No, pistols are fine, they are just a mid-range skirmish weapon, designed to be used interchangeably with melee weapons, while Shortbow is more of an artillery stand-off weapon, better suited to long range. That really shouldn’t be a matter of debate, but to clarify, the Shortbow already has a 1200 range attack, has three ground targeted attacks, and cannot be paired in a single toolset with any melee attacks.

The Pistol, on the other hand, is all direct fire attacks, all 900 range and below, and can be paired on either side with swords and daggers, so it’s clearly meant to interact with these melee attacks, and to be used while dodging around the opponent just outside of melee range, similar to the Ranger’s Axe or Engineer Pistol. Giving Pistol extreme range is not a good idea.

Now, if you believe that the Pistol is not balanced, then that’s a separate discussion, but if it is, increasing its functional range is a poor way to fix it.

no max stacks
burning adds 8 stacks
poison adds 2 stacks
bleeding adds 1 stack
overall damage per tick balanced around bleeding (somewhere between 40 and 100 damage dependend on cond. dmg. stat on gear)

I get why from a lore principle burning would do more damage to a structure than poison (but then that would also apply to things like earth elementals and zombies where it actually doesn’t in gameplay), but it doesn’t make sense for balance. Why would burning be allowed to have a much stronger effect than bleeding? Not every Condition build has equal access to all types of condition damage. Thieves, for example, cannot apply burning, while Elementalists cannot apply Poison.

Furthermore, Bleeding, which you rant only one stack, is based around building numerous stacks, and does far less damage per stack than the other two types, while Burning and Poison are both abilities that do not stack for magnitude, only duration.

How do you see your solution as being balanced between the three damage types?

It definitely does. As I said, I gain a stack of Might each Dodge, so I might apply DB and it ticks 46 46 46, then Dodge, 48, then Dodge again, 52 52 52, etc. (those aren’t the actual numbers, but it’s something like those numbers). It definitely makes a huge difference.

It would be nifty if traits could be used to flip abilities like this. Like have a Trait in the Deadly or Critical trees that reads something like:
“The direct damage on each hit of Death Blossom is doubled, while the damage of each Bleed tick is halved. "

If you wanted that effect, you could use that trait.

Yeah, the thing to remember with bleed stacking is that bleeds are not permanent. They wear off constantly, so even though my Thief is built to stack bleeds very rapidly, I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 20 at once before the first ones started wearing off (DB, DB, DB, Thief, DB, Roll, DB, that’s 15, maybe a couple more from Caltrops if I’m lucky), and if I managed to break 25 most of those would drop before I could apply any more.

This isn’t an issue where if a character could stack infinite bleeds that would make him overpowered, it’s just a matter of when multiple characters are attacking a single enemy, they should deal their potential damage, the damage they’ve earned as much as any Power-built character has earned his damage. They don’t have it set up so that when five or more players are wailing on an enemy the Power stat becomes worthless and Power-build characters start dealing almost no damage, so why, for balance reasons, would that apply to Condition builds?

If a Power build character dealing hits for 500 damage each is balanced against a Con build character hitting ten seconds of 50 damage ticks, then if ten of the Power characters are dropping five such hits per ten second period, for a total of 25000 damage over that period, then why would it be unbalanced to allow ten Condition characters to drop five of their hits, also dealing 25000 damage (spread across 50 stacked bleed effects)?

I really don’t think this is a balance issue, so much as it is a tracking issue, that they can’t, or just don’t want to track more than 25 bleeds on any given mob. Keep in mind that this is a lot to track, since each distinct bleed has its own duration, damage amount, and that damage amount changes. For example, my thief has an ability to give me Might when I dodge, and if I put bleeds on an enemy, and then dodge, the ticks of damage from that bleed rise with it, so it knows which of those bleed ticks are my bleed ticks, That’s a lot to track if they had unlimited stacks, since in a big melee with dozens of people laying bleeds, it would have to keep track of dozens of different bleed types, whereas right now they only really have to track probably 3-5 different types of bleeds before they cap it off.

But yeah, I definitely like the idea of letting bleeds stack to the cap, and then instantly applying some fair portion of the potential bleed damage as direct damage for all subsequent stacks, rather than having them do nothing.

I have a simple solution suggestion for Condition Damage vs. objects. Just remove the benefits of Power and other stats from the equation. Make it so that a purely Power-specced character would deal the same damage to the object as a Condition-specced one. Of course you’d then have to reduce the overall health of the object so it would take the Power-specced player the same amount of time to destroy it as he does now, but this would then balance it so that the Condition character would destroy it just as fast as well.

Pistols definitely should NOT get 1200 range. They are a skirmishing weapon, designed to be paired with daggers and swords. You should not be able to both fire at 1200 range and have the solid melee options the other weapons provide.

People asking for shortbow to be 1200 range are being very unrealistic. You’re asking for AOE at a 1200 range. You will never get it.

Single target 1200 range is more reasonable.

Not every attack in the Shortbow arsenal would need to be raised to 1200, Most ranged weapons in the game have variable ranges to them. All of the Ranger Shortbow skills are at 1200 range, and at least one Thief Shortbow skill is already at 1200 (and it’s an AoE), so adding a few more wouldn’t be ridiculous.

However, if you’re feeling “useless in WvW” it is probably because you’re doing something that the profession isn’t very well suited to. Thieves are amazing at chasing people down, soloing control points, soloing supply points, killing explorers, killing dolyaks, etc. Far better at it, in fact, than most professions. I’m sorry you aren’t having fun in WvW, because your chosen profession has so many better options than are available to most people for fun WvW play.

How many of those activities increment the “kill 50 players in WvW” monthly objective, because I’m still only halfway through that one, and most of the kills I do have came from people stupid enough to get close to our tower when I had access to a cannon, and not running away fast enough when damaged (if it were a ‘damage 50 players in WvW’ I’d have completed it in ten minutes).

They are supposed to have that. Some longer than others. I would not want an event finder it would seriously mess up the feel of the game. Part of the fun is finding events by exploring and speaking to all NPCs. I mean exploring the game world, not exploring a map or UI that shows you where to go without any context at all.

It can be optional, a toggle in the UI. I want this feature, and if you don’t want it, you could always leave it off.

I agree that 1200 range is almost necessary in many WvW situations. I definitely don’t think that all ranged skills should be 1200 range though. Here’re my ideas:

Option 1: I’m not positive they could do this, but based on other powers I think it’s possible. Give Trickshot 1200 range, but at a cost. Make it like the Blunderbuss style abilities, which do more damage the closer they are, but using ricochet instead of raw damage. By that I mean that the current ability does 3 bounces at 900 range. Change that. Make it so that you can shoot at 1200 range, but if so it doesn’t bounce, it’s just a single shot per draw. To balance it out, and not make it a complete buff to an ability that already works fine, you would only get two bounces at 900 range instead of three, but you’d still get three bounces within 600 range. I think this would be balanced and useful.

Option 2: Replace Disabling Shot with “Sniper shot,” a 1200 range charged blast similar to the Warrior’s Burst attack, but maybe with a Cripple or Bleed effect.

Option 3: New weapon. Rifle, Longbow, whatever, I don’t think we need this, but I certainly wouldn’t kick it out of bed.

I started a suggestion thread on that topic:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Auto-Fixes-for-broken-events/first#post219141

As I rise in level, I notice a lot more broken events. The most common one I’ve noticed is the “Escort NPC X,” where NPC X is just standing in a field somewhere with no particular interest in moving on (like the researcher in Bloodtide, or many NPCs in Fields of Ruin). I’m not sure how they end up like that, as I always encounter this sort of bug in progress, but it shouldn’t be that hard to fix.

Just give the NPC a dialog option that says “shouldn’t we get going now?” That causes them to start moving again. If it’s a matter of them being stuck in the terrain and unable to move, then have this teleport them forward or back on their path a bit. At the very least allow them to be reset by the players. You could even lock these options until the NPC has been stationary for a minute or so, to prevent abuse of some kind.

Another broken event I noticed was a skill point opponent at the very SE portion of the map, who was “activated”, in a combat state you could detect via the event UI, and yet didn’t appear to be anywhere around. Presumably he fell through the map or something weird like that. In a case like this, make it so that if nobody has hit the guy for a minute or so, and he’s not at his starting location, then he teleports to his starting location. Fairly simple.

Similarly, slightly north of there, there was a mission to “clear the oasis of zombies”, one where you had to kill about 8 of them, but if you didn’t kill all 8 then more would keep slowly spawning in until you got them all at once. The problem here is that one of the zombies seemed to have fallen through the world or something, since his “X” was visible on the map, but he was not visible at all and could not be located. This made the event impossible since you could get it to 1 but never clear it and they would all respawn. This also prevented the chain from moving on to the next event. A simple solution to this sort of error is to just have it so that in a “kill things” event, any enemy that hasn’t been attacked in several minutes despawns and is replaced with a new one at a default location.

I know that the goal is to quash bugs completely so that they never happen, but realistically, bugs happen. The trick is to build in redundancies, so that when bugs do happen, the game automatically fixes them so that they don’t stop the event in its tracks.

The point is that if you are on the far side of the map and see event pop up on the opposite side, there is little to no chance you would make it in time anyways.

Depends, if you’re willing to waypoint to the nearest point you can make most events, and in some cases the event might not be all the way across the level, but rather just slightly outside your detection radius, and you’d never notice it if you weren’t heading towards it. Many events last for several minutes, long enough that if you saw it as soon as it came up, then even without speed buffs you could probably cross 1/4 of most maps before it ended.

2 hours in Fields of Ruin, 2 events. 1 of them bugged.

This is quite ridiculous, as DEs are supposed to be the main content of the game.

Yeah, I had a lot of issues with FoR too. Like you I saw very few events, and most of the ones I did see were bugged. Bloodtide Coast was less buggy, but I’ve noticed that the game has a lot of issues with escort missions where the escort just stops moving.

Thanks for the replies guys, I’ll give these a shot.

If the goal is to get people to explore, that’s fine, but there should still be a way to expand your view, maybe even requiring that you get the exploration achievement for that map before it unlocks, or requiring some perk you buy from karma vendors. There should just be some method of expanding your event detection range.

I’m not hugely invested in WvW, but I’d like to complete the monthly objective, which involves, what, 60 WvW kills or so? I’ve played a bit but only earned 15 kills so far. What’s the best method of racking up a lot of kills with minimal investment? Is it best to aim for your own borderlands, or enemy borderlands, or the EB? Best to defend fortifications or to assault them? What time of day is best? I would really appreciate any help you guys could offer.

a) events come in chains, if you finish one another one will often follow, just stick around and don’t run away

Some events do come in chains. Many don’t, or if they do, the chains are veeeeery far apart. I’m pretty familiar with certain parts of the game, I’ve cleared Queensdale, for example, on at least five characters now since BWE1, done I imagine at least 90-95% of the available events at least once, many of them several times, yet I can still spend an hour wandering the zone, passing through areas that I know tend to have events on a fairly regular basis, and not see any of them in an active state.

I even got just within range to be able to “see” the swamp boss event, right in time that by the time that I reached the area I was able to watch him fall before I could get into combat range. Yay. If I’d known about that event a few minutes earlier I could have actually participated in it. That wider reach is all I’m asking for.

I don’t really need advice on how to find events available in the area I’m in, I know how to do that, what I need is to know about events that are going on, or about to go on, outside the area I’m in, because all the events in the area I’m in have either just finished and/or won’t begin again for another fifteen minutes or more. If I’m at the “wurm farm,” I need to know whether I should head west to see if the bull or the spiders are up, whether to head north to see if the harpies are active, whether to head south to see if there’s anything going on at the water pumps, I won’t be able to tell until I spend a minute or two running in that direction, and if I choose incorrectly then by the time I reach “plan b” if an event had been going on there then I’ll already have missed it. A wider “radar” would let me know which direction I should be heading in.

You missed my point. Stub resolvers treat integers as valid, because they get converted to dotted-quad internally. People wishing to advertise a website could simply tell people to visit http://1134830191/gw2gold .

You’d have to filter any mention of any number.

NOTE: That’s not actually a gold-seller website. It’s just an example, using an integer that successfully converts to a valid IP address.

Maybe, but you’d have to be a bit brave (or stupid) to click on a raw link like that from someone you don’t know. That’s virus-bait.

It would be awesome if this sort of dialog could be “phased,” so that it would play once, and ONLY once to each player who enters an area, over a matter of time (they could repeat on a daily basis or something, but never more than once per hour or so). That way, while an NPC would greet you as you approach him, you would never hear him greet the next guy who shows up, only he would hear that. And while a few minutes after you show up, a nearby NPC has an amusing conversation with her friend, you wouldn’t hear that conversation again for a while, but another player might hear it just minutes later.

This would involve a lot of stat tracking, but it’s stuff that could be done entirely client-side, since it would have no potential gameplay impact.

I love dynamic events, I have a lot of fun with almost ever dynamic event I’ve been a part of, but they don’t seem to love me. A lot of positive reviews talk all the time about being able to just roam around randomly and come across dynamic events every other minute, and occasionally I’ve experienced that myself, but other times I’ve run around for an hour or more and only seen maybe 1-2 minor events, the rest of my time seeing nothing particular going on to participate in beyond grindage.

Because they are so random, and because most don’t become visible to you until you’re within about thirty seconds jog of them, some of them even less, it can be very easy to make complete circuits of a zone and miss practically every event in it, because they are all happening minutes before or after you pass through a given area (and that’s even if you know what most of the available events are in a given zone). The “complete five events” condition is always the last one I fulfill for the daily reward. I’ve leveled several characters through the Sylvari starting area and never seen the mega-boss battle event being up for it because it’s so far out of the way of most of the other content.

I would very much like something that makes this easier to manage. My hope would be to widen the “radar range” for events, so that I can detect events happening halfway across the map, and travel to them if I choose to. Ideally there could even be advanced notice for some of the ones that burn out fast, giving a few minutes to reach them before they get started.

I really want to do more events, I just need to know that they are happening.

like say you have a group member everyone calls “Dot” for whatever reason… you try to type “Dot come” but typo and say “Dot com” instead suddenly your whole message sensors because it was interpreted as a website linking attempt.

Yeah, but as you note it’s only likely to result from a typo, and it’s something that people could fairly easily work around if it was a known issue. I mean, typos can happen all the time when you have characters like “Schmit,” “Duck,” etc., you can’t design your censoring mechanisms to ignore potential typos.

Not to mention the fact that they could simply use an IP or an integer in place of the domain name. Both resolve as well as domain names.

You’d have to filter out all integers.

I bet if they were clever they could design the system to filter out anything that resulted from “###.###.###.###”, or something along those lines, nobody would be typing out IP address configurations of numbers and periods unless they were trying to depict an IP address, and if they were, they should stop it. And of course any system they put into place, gold farmers could figure out a way around it, but so long as it doesn’t cause significant problems to normal players, it would be worth the effort.

At the very least they could use filters that detect net addresses and automatically report the post. Yes, they would get “innocent” uses of web addresses in the net, but they could manually filter each of those out, I’m sure they would catch a much higher ratio of gold farmers than legitimate uses, especially if they had a second filtering process that prioritized duplicate posts.

Ok, fair enough, since Robinsiebler wants to promote a blog, goldfarmers are here to stay.