Guild Wars 2

jweez.7214:

I bet Scarlet could do magical things for the bickering between republicans and democrats.

“Republicrat Isle” all new content coming 26th November. You get a donkaphant mini for completing the meta.

Don’t worry, she can recycle the existing alliances when she runs out, the Molten Alliance and the Aetherblades for example can become the Molten Blades. Eventually she’ll end up with a pile of grey goo with the occasional arm or sword sticking out that is the result of combining everything with everything repeatedly.

The alliances thing is wearing kinda thin (personally, I thought it was kinda thin to begin with).

It made me laugh too, seemed perfectly in character for Marjory, dry, well delivered and exactly her style.

I quite like her and Kasmeer I think they’re developing quite nicely as recognisable characters.

Overkillengine.6084:

By all means make what they had for the female version as a separate armor set; just give us something that actually resembles the current male version without having to reroll Charr or Asura (both of whom also tend to look like crap outside of very specific sets)

Judging by the massive floating shoulders in the medium set charr will look pretty crap in these ones too.

I mean you’d imagine that by now they’d have learned to reduce them, rotate them a little and fix the floating equipment for charr (like they did for the aetherblade armour) but they seem to constantly forget to make sure that they don’t look completely idiotic on charr. But that’s a separate issue.

Thanks for telling us Volkon, completely understandable and no harm done. Hardly any harm anyway.

Well then, mystery solved I guess.

Amethyst Lure.5624:

The male set should have a revealing alternative. And the female a full-plate alternative.

I would love that, I would love it if the Phalanx set was a heavy heavy armour set and they brought out a chainmail speedo/bikini next set. I think people are mostly disappointed at the huge difference between the sets, at least I am.

If the preview picture had shown the female version of the Phalanx then I wouldn’t have been half as bothered, I’d just have disregarded it completely and moved on with my day but as it was it got my hopes up but they look nothing alike.

Ohoni.6057:

Agreed, I do not like having to finish PvE enemies. At the very least, give them next to no downed HP, so that they can be DPSed down within seconds.

Actually, they were being DPSed down in seconds on my server. I think one of the reasons why you have to defeat them once downed is to give people time to get hits in so they are credited for the kill.

I like it. I got to enjoy my SAB finisher.

Helicity.3416:

Put them side to side on two tabs, and switch between them. They are not the same model at all, and that disgraceful cop-out is indeed female phalanx.

So disappointing.

Yeah, just did that, you’re right it is disappointing.

It’s funny, but “cop-out” is the exact phrase I was thinking of too. Somehow this actually seems lazier than just adjusting the breastplate of the male version of the phalanx armour.

Celebratty.1632:

You all do realize the heavy and medium armor are the same model with a bit of different textures, right?
The helmet is different, but just look at it. Its clearly the same model.

Yeah. I was wondering at that… I hope it’s a mistake and they’ll release the real female Phalanx armour instead.

shadowshift.5320:

This is really disappointing. I was really excited about the Phalanx armor, until I saw that the female version is nothing like the male version.

That’s exactly how I feel. The female armour doesn’t look right at all. It looks like a… a mistake to be honest. It doesn’t look a bit like the male version, doesn’t look like heavy armour at all and doesn’t actually look like a set of armour.

Well, that’s 800 gems I won’t be spending.

skullmount.1758:

Do we not get anything else for Halloween (like a better way to get corn/materials? for those ridiculous cost new items/recipe)? Is the tower the only thing we’re gonna be able to do for those two weeks (besides the existing Halloween stuff)? No QoL item(s)? Is there anything permanent being added (tower obviously won’t be…)?

Why is it “obviously” not permanent? We have seen nothing about what’s actually involved in this update so I don’t see how you can know that?

1) Condition Stack Caps
(If you have 100 people in an encounter 25 bleed stacks isn’t enough.)

2) Ascended Gear
(The sheer grind required to craft it, the resulting problems with gearing alts or creating alternate weapon sets for different builds.)

3) Living World Story Telling
(The story is told in a very disjointed and drawn out way in game and so it’s difficult to keep track, also there’s very little of note happening in the game)

Thanks!

whyme.3281:

Mesket.5728:

The only possible fix I can see (and this is for PVE since on PVP conditions are strong enough):

If target max stack of condition was reached
then apply (X, could be 3/4 or something similar) damage as direct damage.

This will let condition players to keep damaging the boss even when max stacks were applied. Not applying full damage is because I assume condition damage is stronger because it is spread over time and to avoid players speculating on whether apply their conditions now or later when the boss is full on stacks.

This is no sollution.
People are playing condition builds to do their damage over time and allways the same amount of damage to every enemy.

With your suggestion, every condition build would be played like a direct damage build.

What difference does it actually make? If the game calculates that you would have done 10 ticks of 20 damage to a boss but instead does 200 damage all at once because his bleed stacks are full then how does it affect you or your play style? You’re still applying applying conditions the same way as before so why would it be bad? Because the damage is all reported at the beginning? If that’s it then the conditions damage could still be reported by the client the same as before. A bit of smoke and mirrors perhaps but a lot better than just dropping the extra stacks.

Atherakhia.4086:

I probably have a better grasp of computer programming than you do. But this is a server side latency issue, not a client side display issue. It can’t be resolved. They’ve said as much.

I don’t think they’ve said it can’t be resolved but if they have then they are wrong. With 20+ years of experience in the software industry I can pretty much guarantee that it is solvable, with time, effort and some creativity.

They have said that the problem is due to technical limitations, that just means that it won’t work now because of how the technology works now it says nothing of the nature of those limitations.

At the moment they’re unwilling or unable to commit time or effort to investigate the issue and redesign the way the system works in order to get around these technical limitations.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Catch you all tomorrow.

I really like the idea of Collaborative Development between devs and players but I don’t think that the forums as they stand will be a good way of doing that. In a typical forum thread people debate and complain and contradict one another far too much for clear ideas and recommendations to be made and you end up with a thread two dozen pages long where most of the posts are people having side-arguments with one another on off-topic issues. Sifting through that would be difficult.

So my suggestion is that surveys (as frequent as is useful) could be used to gather a general overview of peoples views and feelings about the game, what they like, what they want to see improved and so on.

These could be used to produce “blind” threads which are focussed threads where an ArenaNet employee puts up the initial post with the usual title and a description outlining the specific issue or feature to be discussed (“PVE condition handling”, for example) providing information on the problem and then people can post their ideas and outline their issues with it. So far, very similar to normal forums but the difference will be that, while all ArenaNet employees can see every post, the players can only see ArenaNet employee posts and their own posts. ArenaNet employees can reply to and quote specific good ideas, or pieces of good feedback and then everyone will see that and can in turn comment on it indirectly.

Then after a week or two, when you’ve gotten the feedback you need you close the thread and turn off the blind side and show everyone everything. People can now +1 the posts they like or agree with and the thread isn’t bogged down in arguments or off-topic discussions.

The downsides of this of course are that you may get a lot of duplicate suggestions (but that’ll happen anyway, as it stands now if someone suggests something on page 5 then by page 10 other people will be suggesting it) and you won’t have that refinement process where someone can rework a suggestion based on other players but I think that the pros outweigh the cons: You have a more succinct thread with “purer” content where people aren’t getting side-tracked and the thread isn’t getting derailed the entire time.

Victory.2879:

If no champs spawned or they didn’t drop loot then people won’t bother with invasions- sad but true.

How is that “sad but true”? Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely true but the event itself is pretty boring; all it is is a series of events where a bunch of minions spawn and stand in a field until you kill a certain number of them, then another bunch of minions spawn in another field and you run off to kill those. Once you clear enough fields, Scarlet spawns and everyone piles onto her and you win. If the meta event succeeds or fails the end result is pretty much the same: the invasion ends and life carries on as normal. It’s hardly all that interesting stuff, is it?

If it wasn’t for the champions and their loot there would be no compelling reason to do these invasions more than once or twice. The only way you can get more people interested in actually killing Scarlet is by increasing the reward for defeating Scarlet enough to make it desirable. Give an ascended item chance, get bonus boxes for downing her with time left on the clock, the more time left the more bonus boxes, that kind of thing.

RuneCrimson.7380:

Do events Do hearts but I stay away from dungeons cause you need a crap ton of people to even get through them and I do not want my exp split amoung people or people tagging monsters and me getting nothing for killing and yeah I have heard that does not happen in this game but I have watched it seen it and proved it time and again.

You may think that XP is split but you’re wrong, experience is not split based on the number of people fighting a mob. This means that so long as you do enough damage to get a kill credit (i.e. you get XP for killing the mob) you get the same XP regardless of how many people were involved. You get the same for soloing a champion as for killing him with 10 other players. This is just the way it works.

However monster kills can award a variable amount of bonus XP, this variable amount is dependant on the time that mob has been alive for, so if you’re away from where other players have been playing you will get more bonus XP than if you’re in an area surrounded by other players. If you’re in fights where there are other players it’s likely that the mob you’re fighting has recently re-spawned after being killed.

So it is not reduced by other players fighting the same mob as you but it is reduced by mob having recently respawned after being killed.

You will also get reduced XP when you are down levelled or possibly due to diminishing returns.

Also your loot isn’t affected by other players, if you get XP for a mob then you have a chance of getting loot from that mob. Other people cannot take your loot.

Nike.2631:

I love how the vaguest statement of intent is automatically rendered a “promise” in the minds of players.

Well it was in his “things we’re working on for the second part of 2013” post so it’s hardly a vague statement of intent.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Based on that I would say before the end of the year we’ll see the first of these new skills and traits.

phys.7689:

you still have the vast majority of those events, and while in small groups, with 5-10 people doing these events its entertaining, almost all of them become incredibly boring with 40+ people there. Shatterer is a prime example. afk fight almost completely.
The game world is enriched by having a greater variety of content, of varying difficulty. Now i dont think every world boss should be like tequatl, but some of them should be tough fights in the world, that need coordination.

Yeah, I think the lesson here is that it’s never a good idea to take something away from people. People have been killing Tequatl since shortly after launch, personally I think that suddenly taking away that kind of content from your players isn’t really a good idea.

I also don’t think that the game engine or servers are technically capable of handling this kind of fight, the overflows, skill lag, condition mechanics and so on just don’t work in this kind of scale.

Holland.9351:

They should basically revert Tequatl back to how it was, but add the new version as a “guild raid”, which you can enter like a “guild rush” or “guild puzzle”.

A very good idea, they could even rename the dragon in the open world version to “Claw /Wing/Fang/Junior-Associate of Zhaitan” or something similar in order to distinguish between the two.

Elxdark.9702:

Add to that, 6 of the f***ing 8 games were 4vs5 and two were against 3 necros 1 engi and 1 guardian.

Add to that, it was in only one f***ing day.
It was the worst day of my life.

That was the worst day of your life?
I envy you. Really, I do.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

This happens on TC .-.

Also, they buffed the rewards in the last patch.

Yep, and it seems to be still dead the few times I went to check on it (Ring of Fire).

The fact that Tequatl simply spawns at the moment means there is no time for people to actually organise enough to defeat him, unless your group is actually ready and waiting you just won’t have a group of players capable of taking him down.

The Tequatl fight itself is good but it just doesn’t fit into open world content where it has always been “drop in and play”. It’s a bit late in the day to be changing that.

They need to change this fight. If they want hard content like that needs coordination it should be given to and controllable/spawnable by the guilds that will be running it.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

But you wouldn’t really get that unless you read the short story not even hinted at in the game and/or dig for an interview ArenaNet never mentions.

They are so bad at telling a story in this game.

Guhracie.3419:

rjnemer.7816:

Please dont join groups that say “Experienced only”. I dont feel like taking an hour to get past the ooze part. You will be kicked. K thx.

Did you not even read the post?

Personally, I love when people advertise for “experienced only” because I know (no matter how experienced I am) that it’s not the kind of group I want to run with. Good job for representing the stereotype so well.

He ain’t got time for reading! He’s too busy being leet!

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Montgomery.1986:

Make two paths and split the content. Each path being half as long as the current dungeon. So we don’t have to spend 2-4 hours doing one path.

It kinda sounds like you’re asking for less content. I would personally disagree with this if that were the case. Short dungeons are not fun.

Well, without getting into a discussion about how more content is not necessarily better content, he’s not asking for less content.

He’s asking for the same content in two paths. I don’t understand how you can read his post and see that as asking for less content.

BobbyStein.2315:

We haven’t revealed her motive yet. I can understand the confusion and/or frustration surrounding that so we’re looking at ways to accelerate the plot and implement some features that will make it easier to track Living World content. The first phase of that system will be implemented before the end of the year.

I’m delighted to hear that because, to be honest, I don’t think you’re really telling a story at all at the moment. It’s incoherent and not just because it’s so drawn out.

You’re providing a backdrop where, apparently, things are happening but you don’t seem to have the mechanisms required to tell an actual story: so much happens “off camera” that it’s like reading a handful of scattered pages from a book.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

True, but I think black and white shows off the contrast for the parts that can be dyed really well. If you have another color for the charr set I can take it real quick and post it.

It does cover up the clipping. The chests clips through the shoulders pretty awkwardly. Plus the stretched textures just look so bad. Considering this is supposed to be the “best” armor, it doesn’t look very good.

Assuming you’re still around, could you use something like black white red blue? Not because it’s a nice colour scheme but so we can see the four areas (assuming there are four dyeable areas)

I’m hoping the worst of the clipping will be fixed before these release. Well, I’m hoping but I’m not too hopeful.

Evans.6347:

I’m sorry but I find such comment distasteful.
Nobody is at any point forcing you to stand there and press 1. That is your own choice.

You don’t have to press one anyway. You can just turn on auto-attack.

It’s funny but I enjoy those events a lot, but then I move and I use my skills to support during those fights and being a Shadowstepping, Shadow Refuge, ninja-resser is very satisfying for me (my record is 5 people with one Shadow Refuge at Dwayna, it would have been six or more but some people don’t seem to know to stop auto-attacking when they’re being stealthed).

BlueZone.4236:

Ascended gear is meant to ease the majority of players into the grinding mindset, with extra stats as a good incentive to grind.

Also, it is easier to develop filler “content” that takes up some long arbitrary amount of hours versus new fun content that takes the same amount of hours.

That’s precisely it. It’s so, so, so much easier and they do need to keep people playing. The time gating and huge amounts of materials makes it abundantly clear that this is here to keep people logging in and playing to get mats to craft their equipment. When people are more or less done with a set of ascended weapons they’ll release ascended armor, then ascended back pieces and jewels (because most people truly interested in Ascended equipment probably already have those for their mains).

The fact that there is only a single set of ascended skins (and it’s a pretty horrible set of skins, IMO) requiring us to transmute our Exotic or Rare skins back over them also supports this.

I’ll make a full set of ascended equipment for my Thief but that’s about it for now, I think. Exotics are more than enough for this game. WvW roaming being the only possible exception and, practically speaking, I think it’ll only very rarely make an actual difference there.

I’ll be interested to see what they do next year to keep people logging in. Probably, about February or March they’ll add ascended equipment to dungeon and WvW vendors (but that’ll probably come a couple of months later because, you know, it’s really hard to update a vendor’s inventory) for huge amounts of tokens and gold and ectos. And your lunch money.

And your new bike.

Yeah, I actually had one in my bank so I previewed the changes and created a couple of dummy charrs and… decided that it wasn’t going to get any better. Floating equipment is unavoidable.

So I have two choices ignore it or reroll a male, where it’s better edit: well slightly better after checking my male warrior.

I hope that the OP realises that his statement about his first try being successful says more about the other people working on it than him. Once everyone else is doing the right thing it just works, he could be running in circles and it’ll work anyway. Unless he’s on a turret I suppose.

Weindrasi.3805:

A heavier body type won’t help. My medium armor charr has one of the heaviest body types and still has the problem. However, I found an armor set that I like. Have you gone to PvP and looked in the armor locker? It gives you access to every piece of armor in the game to preview.

How do I keep forgetting about the locker? That’s perfect, exactly what I need, thanks Weindrasi! I can bring any remade charr char there to make sure that they look the part.

Ok, I’m going to reroll my skinny female charr engineer to a new charr engineer (probably female again) because the floating shoulderpads and shield are annoying me.

So I was wondering which of the body sizes and heights are the best when it comes to minimising clipping and floating gear?

I suspect the armor and equipment will fit best on the largest body type but I am wondering if they in turn suffer from weapons and stuff clipping into them? Any advice would be appreciated.

locoman.1974:

Well, we have no way to know the SAB metrics, but considering that even lower pop servers seem to have multiple overflows of the tequatl fight, I don’t think it’s such a disaster when it comes to player participation..

Participation? Maybe, but I don’t thing that participation in an event should require thousands of players to idle on their servers for hours on end waiting for the 15 minute fight to start that they will then fail and have to wait for another hour and a half for another chance. That’s a pretty poor thing people are participating in. The kind of thing that will frustrate.

locoman.1974:

That said, they do seem to be watching and taking notes, I’ve seen at least twice an anet player in overflows when fighting tequatl.

I never have but then I’m in Europe so that’s no surprise. I’m hoping they learn from this. I’m hoping they don’t just churn out similar Claw and Shatterer fights without applying those lessons. They need to fix the problems here first, not just repeat the same problem in other fights.

Holy Whirlwind.2067:

Im afraid that metric may be skewed if groups (of the same people) are guesting on others servers just to say that it was done on that server. And the same groups are the only ones that are consistantly repeating it 3-4 times a day…basically a false positive….However I hope to be a part of that group soon!

I’m sure their metrics will be able to tell them all that.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

i would say Steam OS will allow us to play any win XP , win 7 games.

no need for the developers to do anything.

because Steam OS will be that awesome.

I’ve heard that it has already cured several diseases and that you can actually divide by zero on Steam OS.

KeybladeMaster.3148:

Verow.6904:

I think its kinda small compared to older updates, at least we know they are going to release a new balance patch in mid octomber.

source?

It was said on these forums somewhere, in the PVP subforum, on the Dev Tracker somewhere earlier this month but the search engine is broken so google might be a better bet.

Actually hang on… “gw2 mid-october balance patch”

Here ya go:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/October-15th-balance-skills-updates-preview/first

Shiren.9532:

I suspect they are trying to give players a reason to kill trash mobs as well as implement something similair to fractal weapons but for other dungeons.

Yeah, I’m expecting quite a few colour shifted weapons in the dungeon updates. I guess that means that dyeing weapons is (un)officially never going to happen.

Breaking Bad.6241:

Depends. I was very annoyed by the election choice because they said they will only make one of the fractals and will never make the other one. This was stupid because both were great ideas. It’s like asking us if we want new weapon skins or new armor skins but whatever we chose we can never have the other choice.

Yeah, losing the other fractal leaves a sour taste in my mouth, they both sounded interesting (but either will reveal the same information on the nature of magic, I think). As for this, they’re still working out ways to make these things feel “special” I think but I don’t think this kind of forced choice will sit well with a lot of players, the collectors especially.

Personally, I think the backpack would look good on my engineer. A mini I can pass on. Well, for the periods of time where she’s not using a kit, that is. Out of combat, mainly, I suppose.

hedix.1986:

timidobserver.7925:

Eh, I’ll pass on the mini given that I find them useless.

This. I still don’t see the point of the minis. Sure, they look cool… for about 10min.

Faren is a lovable idiot of GW2, I had a Skywalkerish “nooooooo” moment when it seemed like he died he died during Queen’s Speech.

Yeah, I like the idea of minis and I was originally going to collect all of them but when it became obvious that collecting minis is almost purely a cash (gem or gold) spending exercise I gave up on that.

Besides, the fact that they tend to get deposited to the bank automatically means that when I did get one I tended to “lose” it almost immediately upon mining/harvesting/gathering the next node (and yeah, I do know about invisible packs, thanks everyone).

Me too on Faren, I forgot that I have at least one character waiting to go meet up with him at some stage and was genuinely worried for a second. He’s good comic relief.

Shiren.9532:

Zojja is MIA as far as I know.

/sniff

I’m sure whatever Zojja is doing is amazing and important and is far better than what the rest of Destiny’s Edge are doing.

I dare say that she is working on the maguffin that will allow us to end Scarlet’s threat once and for all.

Set a genius to catch a genius, after all.

ahuba.6430:

Tequatl is permanent, the new path is permanent. the last 2 update have been permanent so this thread doesnt make sense right now

Is the new path confirmed as permanent? I hope so, I love seeing the amount of overall content grow.

The simplest solution for this is, for bosses at least, just keep a queue of the incoming bleed damage ticks (one per second) for the the next 30 or so seconds and when someone adds a new set of bleed stacks then just calculate what the ticks would be (at whatever Might stacks they’re currently on) and just split the damage up, add them to the appropriate bleed damage ticks, “credit” the player for doing the damage then and there (for the sake of determining participation) and stop trying to calculate everything constantly. The same could be done for torment and confusion and whatever.

It’s a boss fight, he’s going to be here for 10-15 minutes so in the grand scheme of things it’ll even out: I mean, some times you’ll use your ability that adds 10 bleed stacks over 20 seconds and be at 15 Might stacks but the next time you might have 0 Might stacks if you do it 20 times over the course of a fight, then it’ll even out.

Victory.2879:

This is a great exclusion event: it excludes casuals, non-ts users, non-english speakers on mixed EU servers, ANY condition builds, anyone who isn’t willing to fork out for new armor, foods, swop their traits, etc.

That highlighted part is such a huge thing and needs to be “fixed” somehow. Personally, I’d just have extra conditions be applied in a single burst of damage: in the grand scheme of things, if you and a hundred other people are fighting a mob with several million health for 15 minutes, does it really matter if you apply 200 damage for a skill in one burst or over 10 ticks of 20 spread over 10 seconds? Sure you might lose out on or gain a bonus for Might but the cooldowns will prevent you “abusing” that mechanism after all and I suspect it would all balance out in the end.

The inability to crit him is also a huge issue as it invalidates a lot of food, traits, sigils and so on. How many people don’t even know that you can’t crit him? I didn’t until someone pointed it out in map, which of course lead to an huge argument where other people said you could if course crit him or you could in certain phases.

I respecced and reequipped my elementalist to be useful in this fight because I couldn’t think of a way to make my main (my Thief) as useful but I wonder how many people didn’t even realise that they need to do such a thing?

Bweaty.9187:

Pretty sure my server’s done it once, already down to not enough pplz showing up to even defend 1 group of turrets. 2 turrets up, 3 people under his feet in the ‘zerg’.
Still getting lag spikes tho! hahahah

That’s probably because of all the other worlds and overflows doing the same fight on the same set of physical machines. That’s one of the flaw in these massive “everyone in the region does the same heavily stacked fight at the same time” events. I was getting pretty bad skill lag when playing the event, that has to seriously harm DPS in the event. I wonder how it would be if there was no skill lag?

I hope they’re taking all this into account for future revamps.

I failed several times and killed him once with [TSS] I doubt I’ll bother again soon, the waiting is tedious and it’s far too easy for griefers, AFKers and idiots to ruin the event for the 100+ who want to do it.

Personally, I’ve had far more fun (and felt like I was making more of a contribution) with the revamped Golem MK II and Fire Elemental.

Jordo.5913:

any other thoughts?

If it’s all you’ve got and all you can afford then yes, it’s enough, one person in Rares doing the right thing is worth twenty people in full ascended doing the wrong thing.

mEEze.8405:

Aisina.4963:

Ok guys we’re now at 500 members. Tends to fluctuate as people leave so always worth checking in. We just downed him again, so proud <3 event succeeded at 00:01!

Time to work on refining our strategy I think.

it was more like -00.01 time xD

That was amazing we were all just beginning our “so close, what a pity” as he was just starting to take off and then he dropped dead. I swear skill lag accounted for the delay

Such drama, it was great to be a part of it!

Special thanks go to KehxD and the officers and other leaders who decided to take it on themselves to try to herd cats in this event

Can everyone interested in downing Tequatl please make sure to watch the Livestream where the fight and tactics are explained:

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/463692993

please invite me