Guild Wars 2

Ah, that makes much more sense. Thanks!

Impale.2503:

The bracket list was being linked every 10-15min on the stream.

I think DonQuack has a good point, which you’re actually reinforcing by writing this. You refer to “the stream.” DonQuack is saying that he doesn’t know what that stream was, and that you should have had a link to it in the OP, which strikes me as reasonable.

(I tuned in for the finals and found them at http://www.twitch.tv/gw2king , but I only found that by going to the end of this thread, clicking on the google doc with all the individual team streams, and clicking on “Main Stream” at the top of that document. And I can’t see any harm to having a link to the stream in the OP. You could just put it in big bold letters right at the top once the tournament begins.)

Anymras.5729:

If something isn’t going to be available on the Trading Post, it should have a reliable, skill-based means by which it can be gained, in my opinion.

I’m not convinced that the method has to be skill-based (though it’s great when some are)—buying things on the tp isn’t, and anyway I’m okay with Anet putting some cosmetics behind a simple grind—but I do think it should be reliable. And hey, Anet said they did too, once upon a time! But five months later they added fractal weapons. Whoops.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

One Note Chord.5031:

but I might be biased: I made Kamohoali’i Kotaki. (I don’t regret it! I just wish I got to use it more.)

Frenzy High-Five

Woo! High-five!

Substance E.4852:

Pretty sure the Tormented gear only got underwater weapons because it’s a set from GW1 that also featured a spear.

Yeah, that’s my guess about tormented weapons, too. For dreamthistle I dunno. Maybe because it was added with tower of nightmares, which had a little underwater stuff? Or someone just felt like it? shrug

Aeniklast.9283:

I get a feeling end game PvE is non existent.

I genuinely like dungeons (explorable, though story modes aren’t usually as bad as Arah) and fractals. But I’m more than a little tired of them. If people around here seem jaded, it’s more to do with the fact that we’ve been doing the same stuff for nearly two years, not that the stuff we have to do is inherently awful. Well, it’s also that Anet has shown that they’re not very interested in (or especially good at) supporting dungeons and fractals. But still.

The large majority of new weapon sets over the last year (and some even before that) have lacked underwater weapons. I actually thought they’d stopped all together over the last year, except for the aetherized nightmare set, which was a reskin anyway, but it looks like there have been a couple other exceptions—tormented a handful of months ago and dreamthistle several months before that.

I’ve always assumed that they just gave up on underwater content, at least for the time being. They’ve worked to remove it/minimize its importance in pvp and wvw, and it hardly shows up at all in new pve stuff. I think it’s a shame, but I might be biased: I made Kamohoali’i Kotaki. (I don’t regret it! I just wish I got to use it more.)

Without looking too hard to make sure I’m checking every set, here are some post-release sets that don’t have underwater weapons but are otherwise complete:

• ambrite
• dragon’s jade
• fused
• super/king toad/storm wizard
• ley line
• lovestruck
• phoenix
• sclerite
• sovereign
• zodiac

Sets with underwater weapons:

• aetherized
• aetherized nightmare
• dreamthistle
• fractal
• tormented
• zenith

I’ve only been there from the beginning of the fight a couple times, but I’m pretty sure she does both three and four. I think the first time is three and the second is four, but I’m not sure of that, and I’m really not sure of how the fight progresses from there. And yes, the fourth jump (and maybe the third as well?) are timed differently—you need to jump earlier. But hey, you’ve learned that now! That’s what experience is for! Sounds like the fight’s working just fine.

Anyway, I get that it can be frustrating, but I honestly think it’s good for the game to have encounters (even an achievement, in this case!) that you have to learn and practice, and maybe even that not everybody can complete.

I was only able to catch the finals, but they were a lot of fun to watch. Great tournament, and great stuff from the teams! Really unfortunate about the dcs at the end, but nothing anyone can do about that.

Anymras.5729:

What’s so terrible about allowing people to give it or trade it to somebody who does want it?

Then it goes on the tp, like nearly every other skin the game. People will disagree about whether that’s a bad thing, and I’m not convinced there’s one right answer. Personally, though, I like having some skins in the game that you can’t just buy with gold (and there aren’t many, at least for weapons! fractals, mistforged, and now ambrite are the only ones I can think of, though I’m sure I’m forgetting something). I’d rather they make fossils available for some large amount of geodes, like the 2600/2000 suggestion. Turning unwanted fossils into geodes also sounds nice.

frifox.5283:

• Arah p1 – Legendary Jotun Stargazer: Illusions will instantly die on summon when the fire rings around the room are active.

Just a minor note, in case adding it might help it get fixed or something: it’s been a couple months since I did p1, but at least back then, they didn’t die instantly if they were summoned inside a feedback (so you could get two wardens up).

Thanks a ton for taking over the maintenance of this list!

Edit: Also, it may be worthwhile to rewrite QoL 02: “you can no longer use the Swap.”

Edit again:

Also the focus reflect doesn’t work with the Harpies in Fractals.

I think wardens always worked for me. Am I very confused there? Or do you mean temporal curtain? If you mean temporal curtain, I think that goes back to QoL 01.

Shriketalon.1937:

And if that means a few other classes like the Necromancer complain about their underdeveloped main mechanics…that’s a good thing. Because the current distribution simply isn’t fair.

Just wanted to say I agree with everything up to the last sentence. Well, I probably agree even with that. But I don’t think it matters—I don’t think we need to bring fairness into it (which is a good thing, because then people start arguing about what’s deserved and what Anet owes and what’s really fair and blah blah). All that matters, I think, is that the game could be better than it is for some professions, and as you point out, they’ve already displayed a willingness to use more skills to give professions more options.

lmperdigao.2567:

I have no hope at all for the mesmer balance preview. It’s like Anet just doesn’t understand mesmers anymore.

It never felt like they had a good idea for the profession. It was the last one they revealed, and even then they said that it was hard to get right. And I mean, it makes sense, because they took out everything mesmers did in gw1—energy denial, interacting with opponents’ skill bars, hexes, and interrupts. But they’ve always been floundering.

Also, I don’t trust them to fix anything any more. I honestly don’t want them to touch iwarden; they’ve already screwed it up enough.

It took five years for Anet to overhaul mesmers for gw1 pve. Don’t hold your breath.

Thanks for the guide. It at least came closer than anything else to getting me excited about playing my main!

I spent years as a useless mesmer in GW. This just feels like home! (But after I stopped gvging, I only played GW a couple months every year, and now I’m regularly taking two- or three-month breaks from GW2, so…)

grayskull.2367:

If you ask me Mesmer need a touch of evil added to them as at the moment there all purple and butterfly Blaaaaah!

so i this is why i come up with this look for phantom puppeteer!

Oh man, devil horns + that face (+ the eyes and skin color) is awesome.

Lana Del Rey.1873:

Simple but classy.

Love this too. It’s so hard to keep armor simple in this game.

And to contribute, I was taking screenshots in that empty part of Dry Top that you can jump to but isn’t unlocked yet and decided to take a portrait. Sylvari always look better at night! Plus one just for fun of lightning (coming from the clouds?) in a sandstorm.

Wolfheart.7483:

One Note Chord.5031:

Yeah, I think maybe some of us are talking past each other. I don’t think Anet owes anybody anything. I think they could decide tomorrow to shut down the game, or to give everyone free ascended weapons, or whatever, without incurring any debts. This isn’t, to me, about what’s owed.

It’s just that they made a lot of people feel like they wasted a lot of time and gold, and it’s in their power to get rid of that feeling, if they so desire. But before adding the title, it seemed like they thought it was fine. Or, at least, that they couldn’t do anything about it that wouldn’t harm the rest of the game more. Eh, I disagree, but sure, whatever. But now it seems like they changed their mind and decided they should actually do something about it. Except all they did is add a title, which is a joke.

(I haven’t talked to the npc to get my title. I honestly don’t think it’s worth the 30 seconds or whatever it would take.)

I think using the term “a lot” here is probably a bit of an overestimation. The people affected by this particular issue are people who crafted 2 of the same exact legendary weapon. Naturally I don’t know how many people that is but I am willing to bet it is an exceptionally small percentage of the player population.

Them adding the title doesn’t mean they are acknowledging they should do something, as if they feel obligated because they did something wrong. It is them giving something extra for players who feel they should get something. This is just a customer service nod. Good customer service often involves giving that little extra even when the customer is wrong and doesn’t deserve it.

Fair enough about a lot. I agree it’s not many, and of course there’s no point in quibbling over what counts as “a lot.”

But I just don’t understand this obsession with dessert. Again, I’m not saying that anybody deserves anything. It’s their game, they get to choose how to run it, and we can quit if we don’t like it. I don’t think anything I’ve said has relied on an assumption that they owe me anything.

Yeah, I think maybe some of us are talking past each other. I don’t think Anet owes anybody anything. I think they could decide tomorrow to shut down the game, or to give everyone free ascended weapons, or whatever, without incurring any debts. This isn’t, to me, about what’s owed.

It’s just that they made a lot of people feel like they wasted a lot of time and gold, and it’s in their power to get rid of that feeling, if they so desire. But before adding the title, it seemed like they thought it was fine. Or, at least, that they couldn’t do anything about it that wouldn’t harm the rest of the game more. Eh, I disagree, but sure, whatever. But now it seems like they changed their mind and decided they should actually do something about it. Except all they did is add a title, which is a joke.

(I haven’t talked to the npc to get my title. I honestly don’t think it’s worth the 30 seconds or whatever it would take.)

Wolfheart.7483:

Recalibar.6482:

psyckos.6893:

Funny! That looks just like the ticket I submitted when I had multiple soulbound infinite harvesting tools. Exchanging those for gems I can understand when they changed them to account bound. Exchanging a second incinerator for a bolt…not so much. If that’s the case, Anet please take one of my Infinite Lights and give me a Mjolnir. That would be swell.

At least your legendaries are account bound and you can change stats on the fly. Try 2 soulbound Infinite Lights or any expensive soulbound item you may have 2 of.

I built two incinerators.

Why are you so kittened off?

At the current tradepost price, the incinerator is worth about 3100g or so. At current exchange rate of 1 g to 0.18 USD, just one cost about 558 USD in gold.

But you can give your legendary to your other characters!

Ascended gear can be given to other characters, so I didn’t pay 3100g to have that skill.

But you can trade and swap stats on it all you want.

I didn’t spend the thousands of hours to grind a weapon that can swap stats on the fly, I spent all that time to have matching skins. It costs me 62g to craft another one. 22g for the Deldrimor steel required, 2 for the dusts, and about 38g for the Inscription. Even if I used the feature, the dagger comes with 18 unique stat combos. Each would, again, run me about 62g. 18*62=1116g. Assuming I cared about having access to each and every dagger combo in the game, which I don’t, I would still be shafted out of around 2000g. All I wanted was the skin.

Get over it. With a persistent online game, such as Guild Wars 2, there are bound to be changes over time. Some of those changes will inevitably lead to situations like this. This addition of the wardrobe had many more positive aspects to it than negative.

But I don’t think anybody is saying that the wardrobe overall was bad just because of this. People are just saying that they wish this particular issue had been handled differently.

For the record, I’m one of the ones who wishes it had been handled differently. I have two bolts, and I wish they’d unbound one of them. Does it kitten me off? No, not at all. It’s just a teeny, tiny little annoyance that I’m reminded of every time I swap to my s/s set.

But my problem with the title is that it seems to indicate that Anet eventually did realize that some people were unhappy with the circumstances, and then decided that the best thing they could do to remedy this was to give those people a title. That’s incredibly frustrating.

It’s also kinda a little slap in the face. Suppose, I dunno, you’re fired from a job and you’re sore, because you think you didn’t deserve to be fired. (Or maybe something less drastic—you’re suspended without pay for a week or something. It’s only a little thing, after all.) But you move on. Three months later, the company sends you a card. “Sorry, yeah, we screwed you there. Bye.” If that card is all they think they can send, they shouldn’t send anything.

Malchior.5042:

Cutscene sound in GW 2 runs on the “Environment Volume” slider in your Audio Options inside the game.

Good to know, thanks. I actually play with all game audio off usually, but I turned it on for the new living story stuff and then remembered that I hadn’t heard any cutscene audio in months and months. That was probably it, though. Shame I missed all those cutscenes in the past!

Double post for next page forum bug.

1. Like people have said, the stat switching is not the main point of a legendary. For the cost of a legendary you could make dozens of ascended weapons and buy an extra bag slot.
2. Even if legendaries don’t get refunded because the stat switching is sooo valuable, people with multiple whisperblades, etc. (does anyone have multiple infinite lights, volcanuses, mjolnirs, immobuluses?!) deserve a refund, because there is zero use for the duplicate now.

I think the fairest refund would be refunding all the components. It’s not ideal—people could have bought the weapons directly, prices have changed, etc.—but I think it’d be the best option. And if not for legendaries, at least for other forge skins! (Disclosure: I have duplicate legendaries but no duplicate basic forge skins.)

And of course this post was just about gem store purchases, so who knows if they’ll do anything for any of these. Fingers crossed I guess.

Even lots people who like skipping would probably like it! I would, anyway, and I like skipping too. I also like the idea of having no scripted events, though I think I’d enjoy it either way.

Haha, nice! That looks like fun.

Maniac Magee.2643:

Every group, no matter how experienced, has wipes or near wipes in the high end arenas of this game.

This is simply not true. Well, strictly speaking it’s probably at least close to true—just about every group at least has a chance of screwing up at some point and wiping. But this isn’t all that matters. The question that lots of people are concerned with isn’t whether they’re going to wipe, but whether the overall loss in speed making sure they never wipe is worth it.

If, for example, I have the choice between wiping once every ten dungeons with everyone set up for dps and never wiping because everyone sacrificed dps for survivability, I’m choosing the dps group, because we’re still going to get things done much faster overall. And while I’m not a hardcore dungeon speedrunner or anything, I’m pretty sure I actually see a wipe much less frequently than once every ten dungeon runs.

This isn’t to say that nobody should use staff. It’s a game! Use what you want and have fun with it, and if this thread helps someone else discover a new way to play the game and have fun, that’s fantastic. But here I think you’ve misrepresented how a big portion of the high-end content in the game actually plays out for a lot of people. Wipes are very rare, and even if they happen, runs will still on average be faster (and easier!) with more dps.

Sadly, Colin Johanson does not think hard mode is a good idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU#t=16m19s

(He doesn’t want to fracture the community into people who do hard mode and people who don’t! Instead he wants to make some dungeons harder than others and fracture the community into the people who do those dungeons and the people who don’t! Maybe enough exclamation points will make this make sense!)

Edit: To be fair, they did add one other thing: aetherpath. And actually I really like it—I think it’s a good dungeon. But yeah, one new path (at the expense of an old one!) and a few new fractals (after their introduction a few months after release) are not enough new content. I’m also bored. At least there’s no monthly fee, so you can go away for a few months and come back when they add a substantial amount of permanent content (if they ever decide to do that).

Thanks for doing the tests!

Wow, you’re a fan of a lot of people (and apparently they all love you)!

IrisTheCasual.3742:

DigitalKirin.9714:

Wait, Iris, isn’t Bloomhunger’s poison cloud a projectile attack before it hits the ground?

They aren’t reflectable. Same with poison attack of Old Tom. Only the slam+ shockwave is.

They’re all absorbed by untraited wardens though. Pretty sure of that, anyway.

And while the projectiles from Bloomhunger’s shake aren’t reflectable, I’m also pretty sure that the three projectiles when it waves its arm are (the ones that create a poison cloud but no agony).

Edit: Haha I see everyone said the same thing at roughly the same time.

Avelos.6798:

IT EFFECTS ANYTHING WITH A HEAD.

Only disappointment so far: no giant racoon head (I assume because there aren’t any other racoons in the game, so they didn’t have to give the mini a separate head).

hendo.1940:

the winners will be rewarded at the end of the week.

Think he meant April. :P

Edit: And cool challenge! Looking forward to seeing the successful attempts. Wish I had the time this week to try.

No no, I know that they do things like this. I just don’t know what mindset they have that leads them to these conclusions.

I still don’t understand how somebody at Anet looked at the old droprate and said, “Yeah, fractal rewards are too good right now, we need to reduce them.”

The in-game stuff was nice enough, but my favorites were always the fake patch notes. Wish they’d return!

I really miss Anet’s fake patch notes. These are a nice substitute. Loved the endless experimental rifle and teleportation gun.

Korossive.7085:

Thank you for the guide, editing, and work, but this is very boring and inefficient.

Gold-wise your 12g/h is outdone by orders of magnitude using a level 2 alt TP flipping, requiring vastly less keys pressed, no grinding, no rushing, no guesting, nor any loading screens at all.

This is how it’s built. TP Wars 2.

It’s really all about balancing what you like to do with how much you want to make money. Yeah, playing the tp outstrips everything else by orders of magnitude, but some people just don’t have fun watching, learning, and expending the energy to keep track of markets. Some of us even pay people to do that for us irl precisely because we don’t enjoy it—I’m not going to spend my time in a video game doing something that I can’t even bring myself to do when it would make me real money.

Now, I also don’t enjoy farming enough to do Vol’s farm—I’d rather just be poor and continue to run dungeons/fotm—but the guide is a great resource for those people who don’t like playing the tp but do like farming.

Spoj The Second.7680:

Some classes are just really dull underwater (warrior and guardian). However necro is a lot of fun and op as kitten. I dont think underwater combat is bad, I think the lack of build choice underwater is what causes the problems. Half your utilities dont work and you only have 1 or 2 weapons to choose from.

Agree with both of these problems—some professions just aren’t much fun underwater and it sucks when you can’t use the skills you like.

I think it’s pretty clear that Anet aren’t interested in further developing underwater content at this point, which is a shame, because I think it has potential (and I actually do like it a lot on some professions). New weapon sets never have underwater skins any more, and I’m pretty sure the only underwater part of the entire living story was gathering krait obelisks (though I could be forgetting something!).

But underwater problems notwithstanding, yeah, p2 and p3 would be more fun if the bosses were at all interesting. Some of the most boring bosses in any dungeons in the game. (Actually it’s been too long since I did p3 and I forget the bosses there. But the p2 bosses are boring.)

lordkrall.7241:

But why would they?
I have yet to see any big game that have blatantly stated that they will have a April Fools joke, seeing as that would make the joke pointless.

Yeah, this, and even more to the point, Anet in particular have had April Fools’ things for the past seven years and never announced them in advance.

If all you want is the skin on another character, that should be solved by the wardrobe. (Edit: Unless backs don’t get put in the wardrobe? I’m not actually sure there. Edit again: Well, at least in the wardrobe video, at 1:03 you very briefly see a dropdown menu with Back as one of the options, so that’s promising.)

Yeah, you can’t carry the echoed attack to other fractals any more; that was fixed a while ago.

I think as long as you make it high enough to make people want to complete them, you’ll also make it high enough that after a handful of runs everyone will have all the dragonite they need. More generally, I don’t think that the way to get people to do play content is to reward ascended mats, because it’s already pretty easy to get what you need, and then they just consume valuable mule space.

Gold would be better, but I don’t think Anet wants to significantly increase the amount of gold you get from dungeons. They could distribute the gold rewards across the different bosses, though. They’d have to award them with daily bonus chests or else we’d be back to how dungeons worked before, when we could run them over and over for lots of silver from champs (losing 40 tokens—roughly 1 ecto—on subsequent runs wouldn’t be a huge deal). But it might work.

Nike.2631:

Creating expectations when the delivery date is completely up in the air (as in one person working on it when they don’t have 4 other more pressing things to attend to) is something we’ve seen them actively avoid no matter how much it might sooth people’s nerves.

I think this is probably smart, too. Linsey mentioned working on an alternative way to get precursors back in November 2012 when she was the only one working on it, and it’s been nothing but a source of disappointment for players and backpedaling for Anet. Probably better for them to avoid that sort of thing all together.

Again, they do know about it. (The final post is a good summary of the thread.)

It’s pretty unlikely that they’ll unbind something just because you’re not using it any more. That’s the point of making them bind on use—you can’t use them for a little bit and then sell them to someone else. You can salvage legendaries, but they just give you mats like other items.

Yeah, I’m not optimistic. Even legendaries suddenly mattering for the LS won’t actually help on its own—the LS also needs to be underwater. (They don’t even make new underwater skins any more!)

Still, I figure I’ll keep copy/pasting this every few months. And in the meantime, woohoo, warriors!

Thanks! I actually went looking through the list of skins on the wiki, but I just completely skipped over Trickster. Shoulda done ctrl-f “light”!

Coming soon™.

In reality, the only word we’ve actually gotten on precursor crafting is that it’s not coming with the feature pack because it’s not ready. It’s been nearly a year and a half since they first mentioned it, though. If they couldn’t get it ready in that much time (and it sounds like the reason they couldn’t get it ready is that they couldn’t figure out how to make it work well, which to be fair is a pretty big problem), I wouldn’t hold your breath.

As far as I know we also haven’t heard anything since the stuff in the middle of last year about new legendaries or legendaries other than weapons.

This probably isn’t a bug, but the suggestions forum is gone. I posted this a few months ago, and other people have posted it before, hey, let’s try again.

Suppose you’ve crafted Kamohoali’i Kotaki. On some professions (warrior, thief), crits with skill 1 create a spirit shark. On other professions (mesmer, ranger), crits with skill 1 do not create a spirit shark. These are all melee attacks.

Suggestion: Make this behavior consistent across professions. Don’t do this by removing the animations from warriors and thieves, though, because consistency isn’t really the reason to do this anyway—the reason is that the animation is sweet and some of us could get to see it more often without any unfair changes.

(I don’t have a ranger, but a further suggestion, based on the wiki: maybe also add sharks on crit to ranger 2 and 5 skills. Maybe thief 5, too. And the wiki doesn’t say anything about necros, so one more suggestion: check necro skills and make sure that they get the animation on all their melee attacks.)

Gold rewards definitely need to be rebalanced, and while I’m sure we could quibble over the exact amounts in a few cases, these seem reasonable enough. I could see moving p4 even to 5g just because it’s so much longer long, and I’m not sure that the TA paths really need to different, etc., but I wouldn’t be sad if these numbers were adopted directly.

But surely this will be moved to the dungeons forum where no red names ever venture and nothing will actually change.

During the CDI for fractals it was clear that lots of people wanted this to be addressed. Fingers crossed that they’ll get around to it in the next few months, maybe. :/