Guild Wars 2

Great news! I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for this announcement since the BWE’s, this will be awesome to finally have.

Is there a long-term plan to address the issue of NA and EU players being locked out from each other? To be honest I was expecting this, but in an ideal world we could guest across data centers.

The real solution here is to make team color assignment random, so that each week you have a chance of getting to the mapping points near the team spawns without relying on your team dominating the map.

Culling is brought up a lot by the devs in the context of WvW, but it affects PvE as well. Super-populated event chains like in Orr and Harathi Hinterlands will have culling, sometimes with entire groups of enemies appearing dead because other players (who you can’t even see) got to them first. Will culling improvements be seen in PvE as well?

There’s a related issue where if too many players are attacking the same monster, not everyone (or no one) gets kill credit for it, i.e., no XP or loot. Are kill credit issues being looked at too?

(I posted this in the sticky discussion thread for yesterday’s blog post, but it got buried. Hope it’s okay to break it out into a separate thread.)

ColinJohanson.2394:

However, there are some achievements which are infinitely repeatable currently. It is highly likely so this new system isn’t broken we’ll need to cap those and people who have made insane progress down one of those lines will lose some of their progress to get back to the cap. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go bonkers trying to progress an infinitely repeatable achievement category in anticipation of the release of this system, as you will likely lose some points/progress if you take it to an extreme number.

I’d prefer to see a diminishing return on infinite achievements (even if it diminishes to zero) than have people lose achievement progress. I like looking and seeing how many times I’ve earned Agent of Entropy!

Culling is brought up a lot by the devs in the context of WvW, but it affects PvE as well. Super-populated event chains like in Orr and Harathi Hinterlands will have culling, sometimes with entire groups of enemies appearing dead because other players (who you can’t even see) got to them first. Will culling improvements be seen in PvE as well?

There’s a related issue where if too many players are attacking the same monster, not everyone (or no one) gets kill credit for it, i.e., no XP or loot. Are kill credit issues being looked at too?

I have 3 Armor art issues.

Human Female Necromancer
Hero Panel Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/gpZbd.jpg (attached, gw027.jpg)

(All equipment is level 80)
Helm: Demon Masque (starter necromancer helm, transmuted) (hidden)
Shoulders: Noble’s Mantle (Caudecus’s Manor dungeon reward)
Chest: Noble’s Vestments (Caudecus’s Manor dungeon reward) (has issues)
Gloves: Noble’s Gloves (Caudecus’s Manor dungeon reward)
Leggings: Ascalonian Clergy Pants (Ascalonian Catacombs Dungeon Reward) (has issues)
Boots: Noble’s Shoes (Caudecus’s Manor dungeon reward)

Weapon set 1:
Main: Emberglow (Exotic purchased from Trading Post)
Offhand: Ghastly Dagger (Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon reward)

Weapon set 2:
Two-Handed: Nightmare Staff (Twilight Arbor dungeon reward)

Tip for reproducing: These issues seem exclusive to the two items I flagged above, and have persisted regardless of what other gear I have on and with no other gear equipped. I provided full information on my gear as requested, but I don’t think it is relevant for my issues.

Issue 1:
Noble’s Vestments do not fully cover my human female’s elbows. Her elbows poke through the armor texture in animations where the arms bend, and you can “look down” the sleeves and see exposed skin.

Exposed skin during idle animation: http://i.imgur.com/j7eL1.jpg (attached, gw030.jpg)
Exposed skin when “looking down” the left sleeve: http://i.imgur.com/qmfBL.jpg (attached, gw028.jpg)

Issue 2:
Ascalonian Clergy Pants clip with themselves. With a contrasting dye pattern you can see the leggings poking through the skirt.

Purple spot over right thigh: http://i.imgur.com/6jyPb.jpg (attached, gw029.jpg)
Purple spot near the center of the skirt: http://i.imgur.com/qmfBL.jpg (gw028.jpg)

Issue 3:
Noble’s Vestments and Ascalonian Clergy Pants clip through each other near the pants’ belt buckle. http://i.imgur.com/6jyPb.jpg (gw028.jpg)

In case the forums are being screwy, here is a mirror of my screenshots on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/uM0uq

Arsenic Touch.7960:

There.

Server dragonbrand.

[snip]

I’m seeing the same bug on Jade Quarry. Any screenshot I take would be identical to this one.

I’ve done this event about 5 times since the bug started happening. One time, the shield was normal the very first time it appeared but it reappeared bugged when the Claw was no longer stunned. Other than that one time it has always spawned underground.

When the shield goes down to zero health and can no longer be attacked, it briefly appears correctly before shattering.

If it helps, this bug’s “start date” did not correlate with any particular content patch or maintenance. It just randomly started happening a couple of weeks ago. Just a hunch: in your local testing, maybe you need to run the event over and over before it will reproduce?

BobJoeXXI.2493:

HawkMeister.4758:

Y E S !
That´s exactly what´s needed right now!

I agree that it is very needed. However, I expected them to make the core of their game stronger during release and shortly after it. Not however many months it’s been since.

Making games is hard, you’re being unreasonable.

We were warned when mass bannings occurred over the cultural weapon exploit from launch. Leniency was given to those who agreed to delete everything they gained from using the exploit. I doubt there will be much of that this time (rightfully so!) especially for any second-time offenders.

That said, I hope their metrics are accurate and people are not being falsely banned.

ChyrosNX.1834:

Right-click does the following:

- Camera function upon drag-and-dropping
- Targets a new enemy
- Works like an “F”-key (ie, Attack an already targetted enemy)

I don’t think there needs to be an option – right-click should simply not do the last two things in this list, ever.

I wanted to echo the complaints about Fear being very weak compared to other professions. Doom is the worst fear skill in the game because it only lasts one second, and imo the relatively short recharge of 20 seconds doesn’t make up for it. Even the necro downed skill that causes fear lasts for 2 seconds—doesn’t seem right that a downed skill is stronger than its equivalent Death Shroud skill. The other main fear skill, Reaper’s Mark, has a long cooldown even when traited and also only has a 1-second fear duration.

Compared to warriors and thieves who can get 2-3 second fears and lots of PvE mobs and bosses can fear for 5 seconds in rapid succession (or more, even though that’s not supposed to be possible,) the necro’s fear abilities are very underpowered.

Azim, from later in that thread:

Oops, I was mistaken. It’s once, period, per account. Sorry for the confusion!

All that’s missing is a way to get more cogs, IMO.

http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-microtransactions-in-guild-wars-2

We have a new player-driven market that allows players to trade gold for gems and gems for gold. If you want something, whether it’s an in-game item or a microtransaction, you ultimately have two ways to get it: you can play to earn gold or you can use money to buy gems. We think that’s important, because it lets more players participate on a level playing field, whether they use their free time or their disposable income to do it.

The holiday event is causing the gold to gems exchange rate to be extremely unfavorable to those who would otherwise have created all 5 minis via the mystic forge. So, I think the complaints are legitimate. They are not living up to their promise right now.

EDIT: The event on the whole is still great. Just because this is one questionable decision on their part doesn’t mean it’s immune to criticism.

Can someone show me the dev post that says we will only get enough cogs for two minis? I haven’t seen it for myself.

No sign you can earn more cogs from it?

Okay, so this was intended/allowed all along. That just means Legendaries just aren’t for me—at least not anytime soon. The game gives me plenty to do, so that’s fine!

Still, I wonder why it took until nearly 4 months after launch for Legendaries to appear on the trading post. People have had them since September, after all. Not a single person wanted to buy or sell one?

Gaile,

Unfortunately I’m not the user who filed the support ticket so I don’t have the incident number. Since it’s not from a red-header post like yours, it’s possible it’s completely fake!

Thank you for giving us an official answer. Unfortunately, I am very disappointed with your answer. I hope the designers will change their stance on this issue. I thought the appeal of legendaries the rigor of acquiring one through playing and mastering many different aspects of the game in addition to acquiring significant in-game wealth, but now they can be purchased merely through mindless farming for a long enough period of time. This is my personal opinion, but legendaries definitely carry less prestige/meaning if they can just be purchased. I am disappointed because I thought this was the designers’ opinion too.

Recently people have begun listing and placing offers for Legendaries on the trading post. As of last night Twilight and Bifrost are the top two valued items in the game.

I can only assume that this is only starting to happen now (and not sooner) because of a bug. The official blog post details how you will travel around the world to acquire the materials you need to make one. If you can just buy one instead, then you don’t have to do any of the things described in the post—all you need is gold. You no longer need to play dungeons, earn badges of honor in WvW, or acquire any karma. Cheating/gold-buying concerns aside, people who buy legendaries simply haven’t earned them.

Based on the above, it seems like legendaries should be account bound on acquire. I hope this will be fixed soon for the sake of the people who earned their legendaries and to preserve their appeal and integrity.

Fortunately in a thread in the BLTC forum we have a (second-hand) official answer that this is not intended. I just wanted to make sure the issue is documented on the Bugs forum as well.

Official answer from Support:

“If you’ve found any Legendary items for sale on the Trading Post, this is not
functioning as designed and should not be possible. We would need more information
on what you saw, as well as screenshots to investigate this issue further.”

So it’s a bug or some error in Trading Post.

I see. I hadn’t thought of the scavenger hunt as a “difficult combat challenge” but that makes sense. As for the other point. there will always be elitists in this kind of game, I hope that didn’t harm the overall popularity of the dungeon.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

In general, Rising Dusk, I would not expect difficult combat challenges in combat updates. The reception of including such content with the Halloween update was very poor.

I’m confused by this comment. Did you mean to say Lost Shores? I was under the impression that Mad King’s Labyrinth (somewhat challenging PvE) and the Halloween dynamic events were very popular. The Mad King Thorn mini-dungeon was fun, but not difficult.

Habib, are there any plans to trial or roll out new culling strategies in PvE too? Though culling is certainly the most frustrating in WvW, the impact of it on PvE is significant as well: mobs not rendering until they have already been killed by other players, players getting killed by invisible Karka during the Lost Shores events, etc.

My guild is doing fine! Lack of guesting and not being able to do cross-server dungeons with our EU members definitely hurts, but we get by.

Hi Gaile,

I attended the event, and looted the end chest without issue. As of last night, I have not received an ancient karka chest in the mail. I assumed this was expected, but others are saying there are people getting their second ancient karka chests in the mail. Should I expect to receive one at some point too? Not super concerned either way, just curious.

Thanks!

Anything in the 30-90 minute range is fine by me. I don’t mind setting aside 2 hours to learn a new explorable path without wiki’ing it first—anything longer and I start to get really tired.

That’s great news for me! I still think there is a general problem here, though.

I wish you were right, then this would just be a waiting game. Unfortunately guesting was never planned to allow access to WvW.

http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2

With guesting, your characters can play on any world where you have friends—with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting.

WvW colors should be random—it feels wrong that I should be rooting for my server to do worse, or think about switching servers, so that I can get my mapping done.

Jade Quarry has been the blue team for 3 matches in a row. All I have left for 100% world completion are the various PoI/SP/Vistas right outside of the Red spawn point in the Red Borderlands, and Red’s area of EB.

Some searches of the forum didn’t reveal a definitive answer on what color you are assigned to. My guildies seem to think it’s tied to your server’s rank in their bracket. If that’s true, JQ is a top server and is unlikely to ever a) fall down the rankings, b) dominate the entire map since the matches will always be competitive.

I am not a PvP gamer, I want to just get my map completion and get out of your way. As a guild leader I cannot be off of my server for a week, either. Am I out of luck?

This is a serious misstep.

fony.5102:

/bug in game next time.

/bug only helps the developers, not the community, and I wasn’t about to hold up my group for 10 minutes to file a bug report. If you aren’t interested in being aware of bugs, that’s on you.

Oreoz.2573:

Well its not even about bugged hotboxes really. AoE just nukes em down in a pinch. Again, if thats not an option circle strafing works fine. Theyre out of whack, but not to the point where you cant do it.

As I said, I’m not going to spec to work around a bug.

I attached a screenshot where you can see that I was killed by a Graveling Scavenger’s leap knockdown attack even though I was way out of melee range. This happened because I had immobilized the Scavenger when I saw it winding up its leap attack, and when it did the leap it didn’t actually move, but it still hit me as if it had moved. So the hitbox of the attack doesn’t actually take into account the Scavenger’s position, which is clearly a bug.

These guys would be hard enough to fight if they were working correctly—can this please be looked into?

Exact steps to reproduce:
1. Wait for Scavenger to wind up its leap attack and cast a long-duration immobilize skill on it (I used Dark Pact)
2. Stand in front of the Scanvenger at a distance similar to what you see in the screenshot
3. The scavenger will perform the leap attack but not move (because of the immobilizer) but the attack will hit and damage you anyway.

(Moderators: Since this is a dungeon-specific bug I thought it was appropriate to file it here where the dungeon designers will see it. Please don’t move it.)

I like this path quite a bit, though I had a few problems with bombing the gate: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/CM-Seraph-Constructive-feedback-for-bombing-the-gate-phase/first#post313377

Yeah, it does give poor feedback on when your barrel is or isn’t in place. The circle should turn green when it’s detecting a barrel and be more forgiving when it comes to what counts as being “inside the circle.”

Both of OP’s strategies have worked for me, except in strategy 1 we also all dropped a set of barrels as a distraction, then all ran for the door with a second set.

Paths 1 + 3 are definitely doable, but I’ve failed at both because we lose too much time destroying the burrows because of the miss/obstructed/out of range bugs and we get overwhelmed and/or the NPCs get killed. Speccing a group specifically to work around bugged hitboxes seems ridiculous, so I’m just not gonna do these paths till the burrows are fixed.

My ele is not level 80 but I have noticed weird behavior with my Flame Eye. It seems not to respect the show/hide checkbox—every session (including on the login screen) it always defaults to being shown, even though I have it unchecked. I must flip the checkbox on and then off again in order for it to hide correctly.

EDIT: I should specify that I still have the unmodified, untransmuted Flame Eye you start the game with after character creation.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

• Restored Asuran head sizes to the size selected during character creation
• Fixed a bug with the Asuran character creation head size slider

Does this also affect the ear width/length options? I seem to recall that these were not working at launch for male Asura and were on the same screen as the head size slider.

Algreg.3629:

very rarely, certainly not often enough to waste even the slightest thought on it, though it is a quirky mechanic, that´s for sure.

You’re completely wrong—I hit this on a daily basis at minimum. With world PvE trash mobs it’s just sort of annoying, but it can be devastating if an event/dungeon boss gets reset and you lose a bunch of progress.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

One token to rule them all.
Any character to find them.
One vendor to bring them all,
And in the forge bind them.

The main problem we see with a universal token system, is that players will find the easiest dungeons they can do within the DR system’s influence range, and just do them over and over.
It would be like if people could use all their CoF tokens from the speed/exploit clears, and buy up Arah Dragon armor. Were that the case, the armor itself would have no real value behind it. When you look at a player and you see a full suit of dragon armor, you know that they did a certain thing to get that armor. With a universal token system, you lose that sense of knowledge of what another player has gone through to get what they have.

Awesome. I quickly fall out of love with any kind of prestige item/reward/rank that can be earned via cheesy means as you described.

(I’m looking at you, IWAY.)

Xyrm.5602:

Sidu.9708:

yup I’ve just “emo quited” from arah path 3. I was doing it for 3 hours with players that can play cuz they are my friends. But bcuz of bad setup we can’t do it?? I’t lame!! W eall have full exotic. Boss should be nerfed…

This post is everything that’s wrong with this community…

:(

Full exotics is NOT “I WIN” in this game. It gives an edge, but you still have to play smart, and pay attention. If you are used to WoW where the UI played the game for you, and are unwilling to change, you will definitely have a bad time.

You’ve nailed it. GW2 is still a new game, especially as an MMO where it’s still in its infancy. Many people still either haven’t realized that the game is fundamentally not a WoW clone, or are wrapping their heads around all the ways it’s different from past MMO’s. They will either adapt and learn to master the new systems, or decide it’s not for them and go back to some other fantasy MMO of their choice.

Thank you all for the tips! I know I am running some Citrix stuff at home so that is probably to blame, I’ll have to make sure it’s not running when I don’t need it (95% of the time.)

Full screen windowed mode (now that I know what it is) sounds like something worth trying out. It might not work for me because I have some trouble with gamma/brightness on my main monitor and it does better with the game in proper fullscreen.

FWIW, I’ve been using alt+enter to switch between proper fullscreen mode and windowed mode when I need to interact with my other monitors. Cleaner than alt-tabbing because you can still see the game, and it takes about the same amount of time.

As a rule, if you are graveyard-rushing a boss, there is most certainly a better way to do it.

Fay.2735:

The hardest boss in Arah is the door before the instance that’s been closed for 2 days on Desolation EU server making it impossible to run the Arah dungeon. The undefeated champion!

I loled

I don’t have a problem with dungeons being unforgiving/punishing—in order to survive a dungeon profitably (e.g. without breaking all your armor,) you need to learn the “right ways” to get through each encounter. People are already saying dungeons are too easy so imagine how many more people would call for harder dungeons if the challenges added by 1shot attacks were removed.

I gained an appreciation for 1shot attacks in AC explorable. Those Graveling Scanvengers that leap on you, knock you down, and chomp on you till you die were giving me a kitten hard time until I accepted that I need to fight them a specific way. Every class can dodge if they time it right. As a necro I have many tools at my disposal for dealing with leap attacks: blind, fear, immobilize, freeze, and cripple. Any one of these can trivialize the leap attack when paired with good timing and intelligent positioning. If one of them does get me and I’m knocked down, I can either equip a stun-break or pop Death Shroud and use Doom to fear it away before it starts chomping. Death Shroud and Doom can be activated while CC’d, and Doom can be used even while channeling another skill.

It’s all about being familiar with the enemies you’re facing and knowing your class well. Don’t ask for the challenge to be nerfed—accept the challenge and meet it head-on.

Can you post another video without QZ for comparison? I think that will better communicate your point.

To those of you who are quitting Ranger over this, don’t switch to necro, it has even less going for it in terms of quick-kills with autoattacks.

So it now takes 7 seconds to down a Risen Abomination with autoattacks—while standing still—and people are upset? That still seems like excellent damage output to me. Am I missing something?

My thoughts exactly. Windowed mode is a workaround, which I appreciate having, but it’s not a solution. I don’t want to see the taskbar or window border when playing a game.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

From my experience, not all traits are useful in all situations and areas. Finding the right ones that work well in respected areas is key to adaptation.

It would be great if changing traits was easier in general, i.e., not buried in a submenu of the Hero panel. I like the current UI when I have a few minutes to play with it, but in a dungeon or even a hectic open world area like Orr it takes up the entire window so I won’t see when I get ambushed, what my allies are doing, etc.

It would be great if there was a button in the main UI (say, to the right of the elite skill slot) that I could click on to change my major traits out of combat. It could expand and have tooltips similarly to how you select slot skills.

I realize that’s a huge request, and I have one more. I would love to reallocate trait points at will (out of combat of course) for free. Having to go back to the trainer for a respec is a huge pain in general, but especially if your current build is poorly suited to a dungeon you’ve already started. Having to pay to respec traits reminds me of Refund Points from GW1, which were completely removed after a few months.

I’m sporting a triple-monitor setup and I’ve had the same problem. For me, I have noticed that it’s always when I’m turning the camera. I’ll be holding down either left- or right-click and the game will minimize, and I’ll be drawing a selection box on my desktop.

I’ve run into this issue before. I was talking in Guild chat (actually chatting, not sending a repetitive message) and I got suppressed and had to wait a few minutes before I could talk again. I also hit it in party chat when I was trying to ping some drops to my party to see if they wanted them. Both incidents seemed very odd (never saw anything like that in GW1) but I haven’t noticed it again in several weeks.

It’s more resilient than you think. After the patch I went to Cursed Shore to get the last skill challenge I need there and arrived just in time to see the NPC bug out. Instead of awarding the skill point when we defeated him he reset himself to full health and continued attacking us. This happened repeatedly until he simply disappeared. As I was filing a bug report he reappeared—and worked!—about 10 minutes later.

It’s inconvenient that they’re bugged but let’s keep things in perspective. There is plenty of other stuff to do and nobody is going to ragequit the game because they can’t get that last handful of skill points right now.

No mounts please. I don’t need another thing to be expected to spend money on. I’d rather see waypoints be cheaper.