Guild Wars 2

I would love an offhand sword!

Might be main-hand mace though.

Halan.7931:

So thiefs will sneak up on you and then loudly blow in the ear? Will cause confusion or daze, I guess.

New condition: Heart Attack

Just a flesh wound.3589:

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Yeah, I remember that, it struck me as very odd. For a start it was about a month in and they added a handful of new events to a couple of new zones, didn’t mention them in any patch notes and were then surprised (and apparently a little put out) that people didn’t notice them and then come to the forums to praise them.

As you said I and most others wouldn’t have a clue about whether or not an event was new at that stage of the games life: quietly adding a random event to a random zone and expecting people who encounter it to somehow sense its “newness” (from that “new event smell” maybe?) seems unrealistic to me.

That said, adding dynamic events and letting people know that you’ve added them seems like a good idea to me, they’ve done it several times in the LS (look at the events they added to Kessex Hills for the Toxic Alliance, for example).

Well, time to retract statements for me too. Their explanation about the name “Dragonhunter” being like “Witchhunter” makes perfect sense and does fit.

I have to say that the spec looks good to me, I’m really looking forward to the other specs now although I have to say that I hope they boost the default profession in some way if you don’t choose an elite spec, so there is more of a trade-off between choosing an elite spec and choosing a third default spec.

We can all still look forward to paragon in a future expansion (the expac where they let us use our spears on land).

BrotherBelial.3094:

Eggs.3142:

BrotherBelial.3094:

khani.4786:

An interesting thought from Reddit “This makes sense if the theory of Braham picking up Eirs longbow, being the first Dragon Hunter, following his Ranger of a mothers footsteps. In a way, it brings Rangers and Guardians closer together.”

So if that is true, then longbow + traps makes sense. And the name would be because Braham is now focused on taking out Mordremoth and the other dragons.

From a story stand point, that is quite cool, but still a bit of a duffer when it comes to the specialisation name.

Im just thinking outloud here, feel free to jump in:

Kas is a Mesmer, Human. Logan is a Human Guardian (right hes a guardian?) Mesmer gets a Shield, a heretofore guardian weapon

Brahm is a guardian, his mother Eir a ranger. Guardians get a heretofor Ranger weapon.

Majory is a Necromancer. Her sister was a Warrior. Necromancer get the warrior weapon par excelance’

Can anyone do this for Rox or Taimi?

Taimi is an engineer? We kinda already know they get a hammer, but Zolja is an Ele. So I’m somewhat as a loss.
Rox is a Ranger, Rytlock is now a Revenant. So the staff tracks.

And yes, Logan is a Guardian.

I didn’t think Taimi was an engineer I thought she was a golemancer but it makes sense that her “player profession” would be engineer (although she doesn’t actually fight herself).

tramwajarz.2369:

Zealot, Herald, Warden, Legolas… so many better names than… this.

I’d like to know who is personally responsible for choosing this name.

+1 for Zealot or Warden, hell, xxXLegolazXxx would be better.

Dragonhunter is a bit… lame to be honest (and it shouldn’t be because putting Dragon and hunter together should be awesome!)

Dark Jericho.8609:

Zaklex.6308:

The response provides a reasonable and common sense answer.

I disagree, and it’s a waste of some awesome voice acting too.

I must have missed all that “awesome voice acting” somehow and selected the “out of place screaming for no reason” option.

MattyP.6954:

I went out there and did skill challenges. It didn’t suck, I didn’t rage, I just did it.

I think a lot of people could learn from this. I’m planning on making sure my level 80’s will have at least 65 Skill challenges when HoT lands. It’s a better use of my time than raging on the forums that I don’t want to have to play the game in order to be able to… play the game.

I’m kidding there, of course, I’m happy doing that but I fully understand that a lot of people won’t want to go out into the PVE world and do skill/hero challenges to do that in order to get back to where they currently are. Grandfathering existing level 80’s through a “negative skill points” idea sounds like a good one for people who have already unlocked everything through tomes, skill scrolls and so on.

MattyP.6954:

A few questions/notes:

1. Why does anyone need more than 9 characters? I’m not judging—I’m legitimately curious. Wouldn’t you have rather spent that extra gold/gems/$$ on skins, bank slots, or convenience items? Especially given the system we currently have where it’s relatively easy to unlock all of the skills and traits, and builds are relatively fluid (free trait refunds!), I really don’t understand why you need more than one per profession.

To answer this question about alts, no, I don’t need more that one per profession but I do want more than one.

I have 9 level 80’s already, two guardians, I levelled a human guardian first but I wanted a heavy armour asura too so I levelled an asura guardian too. Personally, I like levelling alts so I’m sure I’ll end up with more race/profession combinations in the future (for example, I have a sylvari ranger, but I want a norn ranger too) I don’t mind spending rl money on gems to support that.

lordkrall.7241:

HoT is a max-level expansion.
Of course they want to focus the betas on max level people.

What lordkrall said, the expansion is level 80 only so you’ll need a level 80 to get into the beta. Otherwise you would get a slot and not be able to take part in the actual beta because you lack a level 80.

I’m about an hour into the vod for the stream now and I’m really looking forward to this. There are fewer traits overall, yes, but what’s there now is a lot more useful and a lot fewer “filler” traits that you’d never bother with. Looking at the thief and elementalist for example, I’m seeing multiple combinations in each of the trait lines that seem like they could be parts of useful builds and I can see more clearly how different combinations of full trait lines would work well together. I think that, ultimately, we’ll see more diversity with these changes, once we actually get to see how they work in the “real world”.

All together now…

Yub nub, eee chop yub nub, toe meet toe pee chee keene, g’noop dock fling oh ah.

C’mon you know the words!

SpudMan.5041:

I am getting SO BORED doing it because everything is so easy to kill. At the same time, I can’t resist the temptation of using it to level up quickly. Please fix this so there is no longer any temptation! I am making myself get so bored of this game!

It’s not an exploit so there’s nothing to fix. Your inability to “resist” it doesn’t change that: ArenaNet cannot fix your laziness for you.

Dagger/dagger and sword/dagger are both a lot more fun to play, though.

Ballads.2509:

Saucermote.9140:

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

This isn’t “good enough”. My focus has shifted temporarily to the Stronghold open beta for sPvP tomorrow. But even so I and other programmers have been looking at source code searching for reasons why some people standing right next to each other have lag and some don’t. Right now that’s the big mystery. As programmers we don’t like it when performance is inconsistent; if it was always lagging for everyone it would be easier to debug but alas that is not the case.

Can you also look and see if these performance blips and server catchups are also affecting PvE when you get back to it? Ever since the stability patch hits, I’ve been seeing the same sort of unresponsive skills, and the server randomly playing catchup after the action seems to be done while the game is showing a healthy ping during busy world boss events. Just pick a busy world, watch for a daily world boss, and prime time. I never had these problems in PvE or WvW until the Stability patch hit, so it may be worth looking at the PvE side as well.

I get good framerates, and 80-120 ms pings during all this, it is just the game world that becomes unresponsive, or erratic.

Go away, WvW issues get dev attention so little we don’t need you in here with your however serious it may be problem. Go post in one of the many sections devoted to pve for assistance to you issue. I would ask you please avoid side tracking over worked mr. Clarkewillson as he attempts to help a section of the game that often get neglected.

If a “fix” made in one area of the game makes others worse it could be an indication of what the actual root problem is, as they are all based on the same technology. Any information here could help them find and fix the problem.

Saucermote’s observations could be very helpful to ArenaNet, your “them versus us” attitude is not.

Carighan.6758:

The only actual fix they could do here would be to change the blueprints for many ascended armor pieces to require less damask.

Can you imagine the uproar? I can’t, only that it’d be crazy big.

No, there is more than one way to skin this cat (although skinning cats should give leather not silk).

The “fix” could also be to reduce the amount of silk needed for the spool of thread from 100 to 50 like the others (150 rather than 300 silk), or to reduce the amount of silk needed for a bolt from 3 to 2 (200 rather than 300 silk), or to increase the amount of silk returned from salvaging goods, or to increase the drop chance for silk (or salvage items that give silk) in containers, or to add some type of cloth “nodes” that work similarly to ore and trees to the world, or to allow people to buy cloth in game for karma, or any combination of the above.

Also what uproar? I think that most people would be quite happy with this. Do you mean the inevitable forum thread where a small handful of people spend ages going round and round in circles complaining about this “slap in the face to all the x who ever did y” while declaring that this change will destroy GW2 and cause everyone to quit and so on whilst other people occasionally posts to say that it’s not a big deal and spark off another mini flame-war in the thread? I can imagine that. I can also ignore it.

People are too quick to declare that the sky is falling whenever a change is made.

Gibson.4036:

And the uproar from those that made the armor with the old recipes?

Sure, inevitably a few people would be annoyed by this (as they are when any change is made). I think that they’ll get over it pretty quickly.

I on the other hand would say, “cool! Now I can start to make that light Celestial set!”

Gibson.4036:

I acknowledged verticality, and didn’t say anything about only one zone.

“More than one zone” doesn’t mean “plenty more zones.” It could mean one or two more. I know this forum makes people touchy, but yikes.

Don’t worry Gibson, your post was quite clear. I don’t know how they misunderstood your post so badly, I can only assume they don’t know that “maps” are also called “zones” in GW2.

Also I have to say that this does seem a little small to me too, assuming that it’s to scale with the rest of the zones (look at the size of the Pact Flagship), if so it’s a little larger than Silverwastes or Drytop. Even if it has three full sub-levels it will still be smaller than Brisban wildlands.

Still this may not be the full zone yet, they could just be expanding the map in game in preparation for the next beta.

http://i.imgur.com/LpJk6hf.jpg

Nike.2631:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Pear skin for staff? Wut? That’s obviously much better as an engie bomb skin.

New “fruit themed” hobo-sack confirmed!

(That’s a cute graphic you made )

Not sure, but I think that’s an in-game screenshot that he superimposed a pear on (I think that’s in Diessa Plateau).

All it means is that they added minis that were created for the first couple of SAB releases (World 1 and 2) as drops in the Black Lion Chests.

They have also removed some dye packs and put others in. They occasionally rotate the content in those chests.

Thank you so much for making the end of the PS soloable too while doing this, that’s fantastic!

Loboling.5293:

Just want to be absolutely certain.

Can I finish the story step Helping Hands, and leave my character ready to start chapter 6 without any issue?

I want to complete chapter 5, but don’t want to get locked out of this new experience. Since the changes are affecting chapter 6, I have some concerns that if I hit level 60 with a character ready to start chapter 6, that my character will be placed into the old story, even when this change goes live.

Let me know if I can complete chapter 5 now. Thanks a bunch.

As Bobby said, do not complete “A Light in the Darkness” and you will be ok. So you can complete Chapter 5.

“If your character has not completed “A Light in the Darkness,” (chapter 6) you should not encounter any issues. You will be able to experience the Personal Story in its restored order along with the minor improvements that begin with this story step.”

Ravenmoon.5318:

lordkrall.7241:

You are ignoring the fact that it is completely different to have a game built with multiple versions in mind and one that is not.

Guild Wars 2 was built from the ground and up for DirectX 9. The whole engine is built around specifically having DirectX 9.

In order to get Guild Wars 2 Direct X 12 compatible, they will have to rebuild the engine, since it is not built to handle Direct X 12 (or 10 or 11) at this time. That will take money and resources.

You – don’t – know this for a fact.

We don’t know how much it will cost but it will obviously cost time and money; if all it took was a simple switch of the DirectX libraries that required no new development at all then the QA costs alone would still be significant.

Personally, as someone who’s going to upgrade to Windows 10, from what I’ve read I think it would be well worth taking the time to at least investigate the amount of development cost this upgrade could cost and indeed what you could expect to get from it. Whether or not any individual thinks it’s worth it or not is up to that individual.

I’m hoping it is bigger than this. This seems like a small map to me, it’s a little bigger than Dry Top or the Silverwastes which in turn are about a quarter the size of Brisban Wildlands, with all three layers combined it’d be about the size of Brisban Wildlands.

If there are only a handful of few zones being added in this expansion (and there are) then they need to be larger than this, IMO.

I think he knows about the mystic salvage kit as his screen shot shows two mystic salvage kits.

I think he wants “regular” salvage kits to stack.

LordAdre.8174:

Pifil.5193:

I had terrible FPS after the patch when I first logged on but it’s always cleared up for me if I change resolutions, for example, I switch it from 1920×1080 to windowed, then switch it back to 1920×1080. It’s important to make sure it actually changes resolution (I can’t remember if you have to hit OK to make it change resolution) but doing that fixes my problem. I don’t know if it’ll help anyone else.

Having the highest setting with 1920×1080 or lowest setting with 1024×768 doesnt change any thing for me … I would like to repeat too, I’ve send 1 ticket the 16th after the patch for FPS drop, I still dont have an answer, I reported from IG too, made several posts on french forum, participated on several posts here, whispered 2 GMs on forum, but nothing to do, 0 official answer…

Ah, yeah, my problems cleared up when I changed the resolution (and then changed it back) for me it seems to reset or clear up something when I do that. Sorry it did nothing for your case.

Many.8419:

pifil are you a developer for gw2? how dare you telling me how this game works. you are noone. I want a red post to clarify if this is intended change and if it is, why isnt it in patch notes and why are they trying to hide such changes?

Thought I’d already replied to this, but apparently not. I’m not a GW2 dev no, but I’ve been a software engineer for many years and I know how this stuff works.

Also calling them lazy is rude and hostile. Being rude and then demanding a “red post” isn’t going to work too well.

ProtoGunner.4953:

To OP: What armor (combination) is that? I especially like the helmet and the trousers. I know only the hands and shoulders though.

It’s Invoker’s Helm and Flame Legion leg armour (and maybe chest).

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Charr_cultural_armor/Light
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flame_Legion_armor_%28light%29

I had terrible FPS after the patch when I first logged on but it’s always cleared up for me if I change resolutions, for example, I switch it from 1920×1080 to windowed, then switch it back to 1920×1080. It’s important to make sure it actually changes resolution (I can’t remember if you have to hit OK to make it change resolution) but doing that fixes my problem. I don’t know if it’ll help anyone else.

Many.8419:

If this was their intention all along why they waited a year with the change? This is why I think it’s lazy. If the scaling was “broken” too high at the beginning they would have changed this long time ago. So this either a bug or, you know, laziness.

Let me explain how this works. At any given time they have a list of things to do. This list contains far, far, far too many things for any team to be able to do all at once. They have to prioritise the tasks they can take on.

Some of the tasks in this list are just skeletons, bare bones ideas, basically just questions to be asked and answered. Others are fully fleshed out, they’ve been considered, debated and have a detailed solution proposed. A lot of work goes into making these changes before they go anywhere near the code or database.

In the case of a change like this a lot of that work will involve gathering and comparing data over a period of months. It’s a tweak to existing systems but is a pretty huge tweak and should be done with great care. It’s important but fairly low priority. That makes this kind of task a classic “back burner” task: something that should be addressed because it’s not right but it’s not as big an issue as something like a crash to desktop or developing a critical new system to support the games future.

Accusing them of “laziness” because they’re doing this now is just plain wrong. Anyone with any knowledge of or appreciation of the complexities of software development will know that they are working their kitten off.

Either a male sylvari because I don’t have a heavy armour sylvari yet and their racial armour is fantastic IMO or a male human because I don’t have one of those either.

xDudisx.5914:

I see sigil swaping the same way as infinite gathering tools. Convenience. Most sigils are cheap and you just place the new over without losing much anyway. How many transfers would be needed for the ascended cost the same as the legendary?

I think that the best way to implement sigil swaps would be give the lengedary a fixed ammount of slots that you can swap. Let’s use the number 5 for example. That would let you put 5 sigils on the weapon, but only be able to let 2 active. So this way we let the user swap between a limited amount of sigils that he sloted. If they want even more changes than they have to replace one of those 5.

It gives more options to make the stat swap usefull (most people just have 2 or 3 builds per charancer 1 for pve and a few for wvw), but also makes you think about what 5 sigils you want on the slots.

Or this, this is another very good suggestion.

Ragnarox.9601:

It could be good if you unlock sigils on legendary like wardrobe, if you buy it once you can change it infinitely on legendary weapon. That would be cool and legendary thing on actual legendary weapon.

I like that idea. I don’t think that the ability to switch between the sigils you’ve unlocked for a particular legendary would be overpowered or unbalanced in any way. The cost of buying sigils to swap in and out is a drop in the ocean considering that legendaries cost thousands of gold to make. Have it so that it can only be done outside of combat (of course) and that would be a nice QoL feature for legendaries.

I also don’t think that this functionality should be shared with ascended weapons, the stats should be the same so a legendary isn’t better than an ascended sword stats-wise but it’s silly to me for people to propose that an ascended weapon has to behave exactly like a legendary weapon. They’re two drastically different tiers.

Gavian Whishaw.2930:

You all should be unstuck now.

Is this a sneak preview of the new death penalty? After many requests ArenaNet has finally implemented purgatory: when your character dies you will no longer respawn at a waypoint instead you’ll wait in a post-game lobby until the six human gods return and judge you. Coming in HoT!

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

wwwes.1398:

I feel like maybe Kiel has a point, the money being spent on defense spending is being hugely wasted. Not long after a humiliating defeat, our huge idea to defeat a dragon that we know has power over plant life is to send a fleet of airships made of WOOD?! That were immediately destroyed?! Heads should be rolling in Lions Arch right now.

Pact airships are made of metal.

Yeah. They’re also pact airships, not Lion’s Arch airships. I doubt that Lion’s Arch has much to do with the pact especially not now.

VergilDeZaniah.3295:

Of course Kiel was a bad choice, she didn’t do anything and isn’t doing anything. I ASK FOR A RECOUNT OF THE VOTES!

Oh please, we all know that’s impossible because of all the ballot boxes that were lost in that tragic accident in Mount Maelstrom. At least now we know that fire elementals don’t make good ballot counters. I’m sure those boxes contained a statistically correct number of votes for Kiel and Gnashblade.

The rumours that they contained only Gnashblade votes are completely unsubstantiated. As are the rumours that they were empty, I personally made sure they weren’t empt… I mean. Erm. Nothing.

This interview is over!

MorDread.2378:

Correct me if I’m wrong but the glider does deploy when falling but from certain people doing vids on the masteries I believe that jumping into the air and then deploying the glider is one of the glider masteries you will need to work on getting.

If that’s the case then that’s brilliant! Exactly how it should be (IMO, of course). I’m really looking forward to the mastery system, it’s shaping up to be a great addition.

Kodiak.3281:

I don’t really see any point in this.

I leveled a new Thief from 0-20 using a birthday scroll, then 20-80 in about 2 days of Edge of the Mist Karma trains. I don’t have to learn to play a character, I just follow the zerg, and mindlessly kill Champs all day long. I never learned how to play the thief, I still have no appreciation for the class beyond spam “Unload” with Pistol/Pistol which I know from my other amount of experience playing the game is a “bad” way to play.

The mindless karma trains are but one way to level. I have also leveled numerous characters by throwing gold at them and level them up almost entirely by Crafting (each craft 1-400 is 11 levels). I have numerous boosters I could turn into crafting boosters and level entirely this way with a birthday booster and I have ample time to prepare and get all the mats I need now to make me a Revenant in no time flat.

Assuming people will learn their class 1-80 is a poor assumption at best and serves no real purpose. Limiting Tomes of Knowledge ultimately serves no purpose but annoyance.

I levelled my thief by basically pistol whipping all the way to 80. It’s so easy to do. I only started to learn how to play him at 80.

Calling for tomes to be banned for revenants because you’re afraid you’ll encounter bad revenant players is just silly.

Geikamir.6329:

BilboBaggins.5620:

Hylgeriak.8250:

I’d consider AP or played time a better measure to reward loyalty than just signing in to a mailing list

I’d consider gem store (cash) purchases a better measure of loyalty. AP and play time is a measure of available leisure time.

Unless they’re testing out making a couple clicks in the gem store, I think AP and play time are vastly more reflective on one’s ability to play through the game deeply.

But both are irrelevant when considering if they can be effective testers. They want players of all skill levels to balance correctly. Suitability is best determined by quality of bug reports and ability to give good feedback. Difficult to judge.

Either way it’ll be largely a lottery for now, they just want active players who sign up and are willing to try and don’t have a record of antagonism or cheating.

Oogo.4083:

yeah but my question is if can i explore every nook and cranny without gliding at all?

No, you’ll need gliding to get across gaps you’ll also need other masteries to get around (to bounce on mushrooms, etc).

“My word, when I first saw these wings I was so aghast that my monocle popped out and shattered, I assure you I shall petition ArenaNet to ban them. And for a replacement monocle. "

Everyone has something they dislike in game in a month there’ll be far fewer of them.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

I don’t care about “points vs Colin”. I care about new information. If you go there only to learn what already has been shared on the whole internet, then there’s not really much of a point to the trip, now is there.

Joe should’ve pushed Colin more, like “Colin, that was not the question. I asked about map size in the x-pac.” Sure he could answer “we can’t reveal that yet” and fine. But at least he’d know he can’t eel his way that easily out of giving some new feedback.

If you’re not gonna drop fresh information, then don’t make interviews for people who rode across the country for this specific event. If you do, you gotta be ready to spill some beans, and it’s the interviewer’s job to rip out as many of those as possible.

I think that ArenaNet’s reason for inviting Angry Joe to this was to generate publicity and get the information out to his almost 2 million subscribers who might not know about it but may be interested and not to share new information with their forum goers who already know everything.

Sure, I would like it if he was willing to share more information but Colin is not on trial here and Joe cannot push him too hard.

Looks fine to me. Plenty of dead people around and I recognise quite a few of the names of the players: they’re a lot of WvW and PvP streamers so I reckon they’re quite skilled.

Obvious answer here. The question in the title seems to suggest that someone is surprised to find they are alone in something, while you might as well be asking “am I the only one who likes burgers?” Anyway, I’m hoping to lure back a friend or two with this expansion.

Astral Projections.7320:

I’m planning to get to The Cathedral of Silence and buy karma armor. Too bad I can’t prebuy.

I thought you could? It’s been a while but temple armour/accessories were “account bound” and only character bound on equip, did that change?

A OK.8276:

2 words… chronomancer specialization. Also…. Flux Capacitor.

DeLorean mount confirmed for HoT!

AngryJoeShow.5864:

Hey guys just got back.
So I got some footage of the game’s PvE and PvP as well as a Video interview with Colin Johanson asking many of your guys questions!

Great! Thanks Joe, looking forward to seeing it and hoping he actually answered them in a meaningful way.

Donari.5237:

I think we can stop submitting questions now, his tour was yesterday.

Oh. Hope he got some good information for us and they didn’t just fob him off whenever he asked questions they haven’t already answered on the “deep dives”.

Sorel.4870:

I do hope they add it, but sorry guys, I’d like this to be a pvp feature only, or at least locked in WvW. Can you imagine roaming in WvW as a power thief, you run into an engi, get rekt but manage to escape in a well timed Shadow Refuge. The engi know which way you’re heading, and you know you’re doomed. So while you’re still out of combat, while stealthed, you switch to condi cheese p/d, and kill the engi. See the problem? But for pvp it’s definitely a must, especially if profession MMR becomes a thing, and if Stronghold and Conquest share a queue.

All it requires in WvW/PVE is for the build switching to be a 10-15 second channelled “cast” that causes the the caster to be revealed. It would allow you to “bookmark” a build, not to insta switch between them.

Hey Joe,

How about: is there going to be new story content as part of HoT at launch?

They introduced the Story Journal for Series 2 of the Living World will the expansion launch with a Story for that Story Journal?

Also is there any new instanced group content and a reworking of the dungeon mechanics?

And thanks for coming here Joe! We have lots of questions that are falling on deaf ears.

@xXLuggXx
That happened, it was part of “the greatest fear” storyline.

Anyway I think it’s quite likely that Mordremoth is the nightmare and those sylvari who are loyal to the dream and the pale tree are immune to Mordremoth (so all PC sylvari).

“Fact” 1 is far from proven, yes the trailer showed some sylvari turning on the pact but we don’t know if it was all of them, they might just have been some sylvari from the nightmare court.