Guild Wars 2

I just want an item that lets me loop the daggerstorm animation as a glider so I can thiefcopter everywhere.

Biped is a nice setup for a quick rig if you don’t have a lot of time, but honestly it lacks a lot of functionality that you’re getting from an event driven system built from scratch via constraints and the raction manager. Biped’s foot controllers, specifically, are atrocious.

These days, most people build the rig specifically for the project in AAA settings where there aren’t budget constraints that require the faster and cheaper but less accurate prebuilt rigging from something like biped.

Biped still rocks for quick mocap interpolation though.

vonbladewing.5973:

Omg i hate that i have a BS in digital media and animation…. you guys are killing me
So in gw 1 there just one rig for both male and female since there no gender rig requirements like breast giggle and stuff like that you can have over 100000+ animations just saved in different files per animation its the coding that kills it. You need to every animation in the game with player command and constraints

For gw there 3 rigs for playable race human+sylv+norn is 1 char is a 2nd and asura 3rd those ears man i feel bad for the coder that had to code that. But since most of the animations emotes posture legs and arms movement then it should not be a problem for the animator if it was face animation then yeah that would take allot of time. The reason why i think anet did not add more emotes is that it takes allot of time from going from pre animation to import.

Sorry about spelling

Actually if you looked closely, the male/female GW1 rigs were different. Specifically, different bone lengths around the hips/shoulders for males and females, and significantly longer legs on females.

Also, breast jiggle is usually accomplished via physics simulation, not by baking in a bunch of different animations.

That said, I wouldn’t dream of saying ‘we don’t need more emotes ever’

I’d love more emotes. It’s just important for people to understand that, in terms of actually implementing both the technical requirements and the art direction that each emote is significantly more work in GW2 than GW1.

Minx.7521:

Lets just settle this by having Anet put every single JP + goggles achievement + 3000 gold + 100 fractals + 25,000 achievement points as a prereq for the next awesome skin. That way, everyone will be kittened instead of just some people.

Oh, and THEN, maybe players will stop fighting each other and actually look at who’s creating the problems. Maybe.

I support this idea. That should be a legendary journey for… something.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Many of those are alternate commands for the same emote.

And ALL of them are recognized by GW2.

When you input an invalid command, you get a red message. With those, you get nothing. Not chat line, no movement, no error.

So they are recognized commands that do nothing.

In any case, there’s 3 emotes we NEED in GW2. Not want, not “it would be nice to have”. We NEED them. We have a true, real and physically recognizable NEED for them:

• /doh
• /fistshake
• /shoo

We must have them, whatever it takes.

PopeUrban.2578:

There were only two animation rigs in GW1, male and female.[…]

No. there were 10. Each profession-gender combination had its own emotes. A male necromancer didn’t dance like a female necromancer, and a female mesmer didn’t dance like a female elementalist. While a few emotes were shared for the same gender across professions, not all of them were.

A large number of them were however. Only /dance was truly unique. Most other emotes were shared across at least two or more classes, or were class neutral. Also, (someone at arenanet could correct me here) but it seemed that GW1 characters were vertex animated once they hit the game engine, which means those animations were “baked” on to the model. Vertex animation is nice because it’s very easy to tweak animation sequences, but most modern games use a live skeletal system because you can’t really blend vertex animation properly. This is why animations in GW1 didn’t interpolate various body parts or transition smoothly in to one another.

There were two rigs. That has nothing to do with how animations were assigned. An animation rig is a combination of bones and vertex weights that control what actually happens to the weighted model when you play the animation. Thus, you can use the same animation data set for /flute on a male ranger or necro, but you can’t simple plug in the same jump animation for a human male and a charr male without making some pretty time consuming adjustements due to a different number of bones, different reference poses and base kittenotations, etc.

Sort of how, if you have a watchknight tonic, you’re using the same rig as a human female, so it becomes very easy to just re-use the human female emotes. You couldn’t, however, just use the charr or asura female emotes on that rig and expect them to look right.

Does that make more sense?

Good package of changes. The yak thing especially is exactly where upgrades needed to be, and makes camps (or, alternately, supply drops) important.

Not sure how I feel about kill points TBH. On the one hand I feel like kills shouldn’t effect score as score should be about objectives. On the other hand, the rez changes should keep field fighting from turning in to a morass of people doing nothing but trading wipes so it might be fine. Normally my fear about kill points is having a WvW that devolves in to people standing in a field camping outside a keep WP to farm kills in stead of taking the keep. However, the rez changes make it highly problematic to do something like that on the enemy’s doorstep, so objectives give a significant hom field advantage, and thus is may even out.

It won’t, however, keep people from doing stupid anti-WvW stuff like GvG in a borderland while all their objectives are taken by roamers, but then again nothing will until you give the GvGers a proper place with proper rewards to play mass team deathmatch in stead of sandbox spaces with no rewards.

There were only two animation rigs in GW1, male and female.

There are five times as many in GW2 (possibly minus one as norn and human females seem to have almost identical proportions.)

Not only that, Anet seems to like to give racial flavor for emotes in GW2m so that’s more than just retargeting and tweaking curves to fit the new skeletons. Given my professional experience (I do this kind of stuff for my job) I’d say that doing any character animation in GW2 is about ten times as work intensive as doing the same in GW1, given the race-focused art direction and wider variety of animation rigs.

T2 bar needs to come with permanent belcher’s bluff and golem chess tables.

More Upgrades/Functional Deco!

Guild Bank Collections Tab
Upgrade: Market
Collections tab functions the same way as personal collections tabs, including an inventory rightclick option to “Send to guild bank” from inventory or personal collections.

Black Lion Exchange
Upgrade: Market
So as not to completely kill towns, imagine a point (near the proprietor so he can complain/argue with the agent) where you can pay a small fee to summon a temporary black lion agent for ten minutes. This works, functionally, like the gem store item, but can only be summoned in a designated space in the guild hall, and costs 25s to summon. This makes it more expensive than going to LA, but functions as an additional gold sink/QOL for scribes and other crafters.

Aetheric Reconfigurator
Upgrade: Workshop
Similar in theme to the temporary black lion thingy, this device is attached to one of the scribing benches. It allows the user, at a cost of 50s, to transform that station in to another type of crafting station for one hour. Again, this is a QOL/Gold sink to prive town-like services, but at a higher cost.

Aetheric Transmogrifier
Upgrade: Workshop
This device can trasmogrify stacks of resources in to other ressources at a loss. Simply put, it pays out random resources by eating resources from the previous tier at a 5:1 ratio. This is, in essence, a highly specialized mystic forge used only for crafting materials. There is a gamble involved in getting what you want out of it, but it allows you to crunch excess materials down in to random types of next-tier mats. You could put in copper and get soft wood, or iron, etc.

Hall of Monuments
Upgrade: Tavern (Requires T2 workshop as well?)

This attachment to the tavern allows those with permission to commission statues of guild members, and attach inscriptions to those statues. Aesthetically, this is similar to Eir’s house, with a limited number of nodes, and interactable plaques in front. This allows guilds to commemorate great accomplishments, honor lost comrades, display arena champions, and can generally be used for any purpose. Like the arena, this is a sandbox feature meant to enhance the hall without any real economic or functional impact, but be a unique fixture in guilds. Given the static nature of the decoration interface, it doesn’t seem feasible to have craftable ‘place anywhere’ statues, but this approach would fill that mold without overlapping with the decoration system.

Bonus points if you could attach guild buffs to the statues for people to “channel” the greatness of your guild’s heroes for a non-stacking lesser banner buff. Say, half as effective as a normal banner.

Guild Mission Achievement Trophies
Similar to raid trophies, these decorations are unlocked as the guild completes various missions a specific number of times. For instance, after your guild has successfully complete the “Chicken Run” Guild Mission, you gain a wooden chicken trophy to display in the hall. After completing it on 10 separate weeks, you get a bronze, 25 is silver, and 50 is gold. You could build similar trophies for the various challenges and bounty targets as well. These are to build on the idea of guild hall trophies and tie them in to the guild mission system so that all guilds have a way to gaze upon their mighty accomplishments and build an even more impressive trophy hall.

Bonus points if the trophies could be channeled by guild members to unlock titles of their own from gold trophies. Things like “Wrangler” for a gold Yakona trophy, or “Chicken” for a gold chicken trophy, etc.

Bonus BONUS points if they function as collection-like groupings, granting a “meta” trophy for each mission type. So, say you’ve got wood on all races, you get the wood “Race mastry” Trophy. The meta trophies could even unlock special adventures and challenges in the hall!

I’ve had this trouble with some guild members that are somewhat new to MMOs.

To short answer is that you should learn to turn with your mouse. When playing any sort of actiony game on a PC, turning with a keyboard is like playing a console game and refusing to use the right thumbstick.

Mouse camera control is an integral part of PC gaming, and most games with 3d camera control are designed around the concept that players will be using the mouse for controlling the camera.

learning that skill has favorable repercussions beyond this JP. You’ll find that once you’re comfortable with it, you’ll also be better at GW2, and many other PC games just because you’ve learned to use the intended control scheme.

If it kills your hand, experiment with mouse sensitivity settings. after a while most people end up using very high sensitivity. I can do a completel 360 of my camera by moving my mouse about an inch, and that’s on the low end of common sensitivity settings.

It will be awkward at first, ut I’d say try the new action camera to “force” yourself in to it for a while, and just do some easy content that way until you’re used to it. Once you’re there, there’s no going back, and you’ll wonder how you were ever happy turning with the keyboard.

Good luck!

Snow.2048:

Didn’t cost money, costed influence which you got from playing your way with guildies instead of having to farm kitten…

Which, as a small guild, you had no hope of getting enough of to keep up all your buffs and afford all of your guild missions each week. Especially if you failed a mission or two.

I understand some people preferred to get guild stuff for doing nothing. This is not that system. However, what this system pays out is of sufficiently greater value to make it worth it in the long run for small guilds, and is cheap enough it’s a non-issue for large guilds.

New players in an established guild save extreme amounts of money and laurels on ascended recipies from the trader, and make significant amounts of money from resonating shard trades.

BL bank items are useless to any guild with a guild hall. So are bank yaks. So are vendors. The more targeted personal buffs mean everyone can easily focus on what is important to them without logistcal headaches of deciding what buffs to run, how to que them, and so on.

The only real problems the system have are all related to the war room and scribing costs. Banners are too expensive to craft. The upgrades to unlock them are fine, but the actual scribing hosts are simply too high, Same for war room upgrades and tactics, which whould be more reasonably achievable by guilds that are most likely to prioritize that structure, those that play primarily in WvW.

It isn’t perfect, but for PvE guilds? It’s a massive improvement over the old system, and makes being in and investing in a guild actually worth it, no matter the size of the guild.

It’s not that it’s impossible, or even difficult. It’s that it’s different.

The new system expects you to invest in your guild. The old system just handed you stuff for free. The new one is based around permanent buff unlocks. The old one was built around constant buff upkeep.

The new one actually saves your guild money and time once you complete certain upgrades. (WP discount, Guild trader, Merchants, Banks, Harvesting nodes) The old one just cost you more money the more upgrades you got. (Constantly refreshing buffs, constantly crafting guild missions)

It will take some adjustments, but in the long run I assure you, the new system is far better and more fair for small guilds, and allows those small guilds to put in the hard work once in stead of having to toss an infinite amount of gold at influence to keep up with the same amount of benefit a large guild would get in terms of buffs or mission access for free just by earning more influence from people logging in and possibly not even playing together.

Unless you’re a WvW only guild, then it just sucks.

While we’re arguing about semantics for no apparent reason…

What’s Winterfest?

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a party specifically stacked to just CC everything.
But it is awesome

Once guy with golemancer runes is kind of annoying.

However six guys with golemancer runes. It’s hilariously awesome.

Just FYI. Venomshare condi d/d daredevil is actually a pretty nice hybrid support/damage build for raids. It allows some others to take some CC off their bar and still easily burst breakbars, and keeps up decently in damage on bosses due to the way venomshare works off the thief’s condition stats.

It’s also much less prone to interruption of its damage rotation due to how short it is.
Basically, you make up the extra DPS by letting other people take a DPS util in place of a CC util since shared BV is effectively 10s of stun on a 40s cooldown for the party.

You’re not going to get that advantage in a PUG with PUG-Meta builds, but in a static guild group where people build around one another it works quite well.

AsurasRCute.4136:

PopeUrban.2578:

p/p needs additional mobility or gap openers. The damage is actually decent now.

Body shot needs to be cheaper and have a longer immob, and the base damage on the auto needs increased It’s not that efficient a bleed source for condition builds anyway, so condi builds getting a slight damage buff on the auto wouldn’t really change much.

Honestly though, gunslinger needs to be an elite spec, it needs to replace steal with a disengage style ability, add a 900 range rifle with a heavy single target condition set, and have traits roughly designed around pistol/rife buffs, ranged utility, and support focused “powderbomb” ranged aoe utility skills so it can build in to either a solid 1200 range power or condi dps build using core utils, or a solid 900 range build with a lot of support utility with trait buffed powderbombs. I’m thinking non-DPS grenade-like abilities like throwable blind fields, an aoe version of smoke wall, a ranged aoe 5s immob, and an elite “reload” that simply refreshes all init and the f1.

Since its an elite spec and wouldn’t work with daredevil, I think they could get away with such an elite without creating too overpowered melee builds that utilize it.

We certainly see eye to eye on how the ’slinger should play/feel, but I disagree with the approach to fixing the core class being to push the problem to the right with elites.

Your char should thematically play/feel like that archetype as you play the actual game; not something that doesn’t throughout until you slog your way to 80, then buy an expansion, then have to do a potentially unfun grind to fully unlock the elite, and only then can your ’slinger play/feel like a ’slinger.

That’s why all my suggestions totally ignore Daredevil: It shouldn’t be necessary, and the journey itself should be fun – not an unfun means to the end of reaching the alleged fun of the endgame.

The main problem here is that there isn’t much space that you can use to alter P/P without affecting P/x or x/P. Having some Rogue thematic stuff baseline for ‘Thief’ adds some design/balancing elbow room (and is fair, compared to other classes).

If 3 gets any better, it’ll just end up being nerfed; so I’d be wary of improving that.

Which leaves only Steal -> Reload, upon equipping two pistols, as the last bit of space. I’m sure that there’s no reason why only an elite would be able to do this?

I agree. The base class should feel like a watered down version of what you actually wanted to play. With the proposed body shot changes and the way unload damage works now, you’re still looking at a fully functional slinger. Does it have rifle access, gunpowder bombs, or the reload elite? No. But then again, daredevil is the “dodge thief” elite. You can (and many people did) play a very similar feeling build before investing in the elite, but the elite takes that playstyle and cranks it up to eleven.

Elite specs exist to un-hybridize a given playstyle. The concept that a core spec should feel as specialized as taking an elite is a broken notion. The entire purpose of elite specs is forced specialization, as you can only ever take one at a time. That balance is what allows them to specialize in ways that would otherwise be broken (like reload or disengage on a daredevil)

In any case, despite anet’s best intentions, core specs by their very nature can never have more than one or two builds that are competitive with what an elite spec offers. P/P Thiekittenlinger should abolsutely feed like deathblossom thief>deathblossom daredevil. The core spec version cn do a decent job at it, but using the elite trades off potential hybridization (like taking SA just for vendomshare, CS for extra passive heals, etc.) to ratchet the specialized nature of the build up to eleven (in this case, evasion and condition damage)

P/P at base shouldn’t be comparable with an elite spec meant to take a baseline, middle of the road general thief and turn him in to a highly specialized ranged character. P/P with some additional wiggle room from an improved body shot to make up for its biggest issue (mobility) is still a really good build, even without baked in extra range of AoE. Would it be inferior to running a proposed gunslinger spec? absolutely. However gunslinger might not be a good option for a more hybridized build like p/d or d/p, which is where we should see the core class shine more.

Don’t take this as me saying base theif doesn’t need some improvements. It does.

However those improvements have to be made from the lens of elite specs being the sum of all future build enablers in the future, and not being wholly limited to just being useful with their granted weapons, but have interesting uses within the specs themselves.

P/P can be made “good enough” at base while still leaving plenty of room for a potential elite to make it more specialized. The difference between p/p with steal, and p/p with a disengage doesn’t seem like much… but consider what you’re potentially losing when you toss out steal. Certain traits are effectively without use, like anything that affects a target. Those may be important parts of a more midrange p/p build if we can get body shot in a place where it’s usable, where you’d see a slinger build much more focused on maintaining distance and using new utilities for a more defensive approach.

The problem is that Traherne’s character arc was finished. This has nothing to do with whether you like him or not, but rather that he had nothing left to offer as a character.

GW2’s main storyline is the story of you, and the story of traherne, and the story of DE. DE and Traherne’s primary arcs were completed, but while it makes sense to have DE just go about their separate ways and explore what and who they are aside from that organization, Traherne’s arc is defined solely by the formation of the pact and the fight against Zhaitan.

The story demanded the dissolution or at the very least severe crippling of the pact. Not just for the HoT plotline, but for the good of the story going forward. The pact that Traherne and the Commander built was too powerful in a narrative sense.

However, with as important as the Pact is to Traherne’s character arc, it wouldn’t make much sense to have traherne persist if the pact does not. Traherne is defined by the pact. The only way for Traherne to belivably finish his story was to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The way in which he made it may have felt contrived, but a world in which the pact is ruined and Traherne does anything other than attempt to rebuild it wouldn’t make sense. It’s too core to him as a character. Traherne has to pass the torch to the player at some point as he has no depth as a character without the pact and the fight against Zhaitan, but there is not narrative reason for him to belivable do so willingly.

One way or the other, Traherne was always going to sacrifice himself to save the commander. It was the only way for his story to end. It doesn’t matter how much you liked or disliked him. The pact needed to die for believable strife against the remaining elder dragons to happen, and as goes the pact, so too does Traherne.

Only places I can think to find them are fireheart rise, certain fractals, and CoF.

I’d try doing all three and see if they drop instantly. If they don’t, it’s probably RNG.

1: Create a balanced and engaging game that draws in and retains players by allowing them to choose freely between the classes and equipment on offer and design unique and effective builds.

2: Collect feedback from high level players and use that feedback to make continual balance adjustments.

3: Choose between allowing players access to all of the equipment, builds, and classes on offer immediately, or match them based upon what they have access to to ensure fair matches.

4: Watch que times lower at all levels as more players actually que to play the game because it isn’t broken.

Point five assumes everyone on the team isn’t a bunker.

This is inaccurate advice in the current meta.

Kaliny.8265:

/\ I’m a Thief and I’m offended.

At least warriors were actually in the meta to do something that wasn’t decapping.

That said, bunker meta is trash. You can’t move from low TTK to stpudly high TTK overnight unless you do it for every class.

The situation we have now is that certain classes are twice or three times as difficult to kill, but are made so by giving them massive amounts of passive sustain, while other classes are expected to leverage active tools to reach a comparable level of sustain, and even then, the “active sustain” from classes like warrior and thief is sorely lacking, and the tools they were originally given to counter passive sustain (boon hate and boon theft) aren’t useful because all of these newfangled sustain mechanisms are non-boon buffs.

I used to play thief exclusively in PvP. it wasn’t the most powerful thing, and I could have picked a different meta build and done better, but I had fun on thief and contributed.

It took about a week after the release of HoT for the new meta to emerge, and it was a meta in which certain classes weren’t just underpowered, but in which they were literally unable to accomplish anything. My thief is sitting on a shelf right now while I play condi rev because it finally reached the point that I was literally unable to take points or win matches when I qued with thief. Warriors are in a very similar position. It’s not just poor balance. It’s laughably poor balance that actually excludes whole classes from PvP.

Normally I’d laugh at people saying ‘go reroll theif’ and do something useful anyway. At this point, as much as it pains me to say it, they’re right, and I did. It’s not just that there are apex predators any more. There are literally classes in the game that are just prey now.

If Arenanet is going to do balance freezes between seasons, they need to get a whole lot better at testing things and general balancing.

Have you tried killing flame effigies?

If you’re really looking to minmax your character out, start looking in to acquiring ascended gear and those expensive +5 stat infusions. This is a very small bump in stats, and you can complete anything in the game without them, but it does represent the mathematical pinnacle of power for a character. This goal can take you quite some time, and altogether kitting out an entire set of ascended with +5 infusions will easily take as much effort as a single legendary weapon. Especially if you’re really stacking one specific stat type and need omni infusions.

Past that, GW2, like GW1 is a game about personal goals. Your goals may vary but most people start chasing down particular titles, skins, achievements, and other such things.

Raid and fractal progression is a thing, and again the point of this isn’t to add power to your character, but rather to accomplish that goal for the sake of the accomplishment and for its associated cosmetic rewards. Raids and fractals are where Anet plans to take the ‘challenge’ endgame from here on for PvE, as well as the living story updates for the more casual endgame.

It can take some adjustment to the idea that you can actually finish a character in a mechanical sense, as it’s different than many MMOs that are built around constantly adding levels and better gear so you’re always chasing that treadmill, but the core of ongoing play in guild wars has always been about choosing goals that seem important to you, and gaining rewards that are primarily cosmetic in nature for doing so because your ability and time spent rather than your gear is the primary determining factor of how fast and what you can accomplish in the endgame.

See, what you’re saying makes sense, except for the part where years of microtransaction metrics indicate that people spend more money on RNG gambling boxes that might contain stuff they want than on direct purchases to obtain exactly what they want, even if the pricing is normalized.

This is why practically every microtransaction store has some sort of randomized gambling feature. Even if you sold a 1000gem dye, and a box that had a 10% chance to drop that same dye for 100gems, people are actually far more likely to spend more money in your shop buying the 100 gem box.

This is especially pronounced when the gambled items are tradable, as they are in GW2. In this instance users don’t generally stop buying gambling boxes when they get the thing they want, as they can see the profit potential (the jackpot) of gambling well and selling the result to other users.

Despite what users say on this subject (and we ALL say random boxes are something we hate) it has been proven time and time again that the number of users willing to just grumble and buy the gamble boxes anyway is far higher than the number of users that actually put their money where their mouth is and refuse to spend money on them, or only spend money on non-RNG microtransactions.

For this reason, I wouldn’t expect to see an end to things like dye packs or black lion skins. They make far more income per development dollar than their non-RNG counterparts. If you can convince the entire user base to stop buying them, that’s when they’ll stop selling them.

Aww shucks. Thanks

I’m closing in on 13k and have taken several long breaks from the game. The bulk of achievement points came from temporary release achievements during season 1, as those were geneally short achievements that paid out very well in AP, but overall achievements are all about going out of your way to do them.

You’re not going to break in to 30k AP just by playing passively because achievements are designed to reward specific content and actively choosing and completing them. That means going out of your way to do every daily, every collection, every JP, etc. etc.

That said, the AP rewards since they added that system are usually updated way ahead of time (like the new backpacks) so that there are always new benchmarks for existing players who are heavy AP hunters.

AP isn’t really a system designed to be quickly farmed. It’s supposed to be a secondary reward for veteran players that have taken the time to pick up achievements slowly as they were added to the game. New players are going to be quite far behind for this reason, and that’s kind of intended.

The easiest fix for this is properly reward scaling fractal end chests and not altering the dailies at all.

If people want to run swamp and duo all the time just to get the dailies out of the way, that’s fine, but those same people tend to complain about the lack of mist essences. This is by design. Increasing mob drops in general, and chest drops relative to the length of fractals would create a better relationship between time, difficulty, and reward.

I think people should be able to do fast fractals just to get their dailies done, but a swamp and dredge shouldn’t have basically the same amount of encryptions in the end chest.

Conversely, adding an optional old school run mode might work. Have it start at a random scale and run three fractals, and have the random scale reset daily. This would prevent the old exploitation of rerolling swamp to always be first, and offer a fractal option for people who want to embrace that randomness.

Aye.8392:

Most missions can’t be completed with 5-7 people.

False.

I know this because my guild does missions every monday. We normally do them with 5-7 people. Some weeks we have a few extra people.

Easy missions can usually be soloed or done with 3 people or so when not soloable. We’ve done all the puzzles with 4 people. Yes. Even langmar’s estate. We’ve done all the challenges with 3-5 on light weeks.

A week has not gone by in which we don’t complete every mission on our list with the exception of the wvw slot, or legitimately bugged missions, and the wvw slot is more a function of people being split between wvw servers and disinterest than inability.

Every member of the guild makes an average of 10+ gold in raw currency or materials weekly off of missions. Most of them contribute at least half of that to the guild in the form of mats or scribe materials.

Our upgrades aren’t progressing as fast as theoretically possible, but we’re seeing on average 1 or 2 a week. We’ve got all of our buffs at this point, as well as a t2 market, and some t2 nodes and deco merchant. Feels like a reasonable amount of progression for the effort invested.

Randulf.7614:

PopeUrban.2578:

Several guild hall decorations to spruce up the place for wintersday. people can argue this is content that some can’t use, but honestly, it’s far better than the many many years of nothing guilds got previously.

It looks like holiday decorations are an official thing from here on.

Yes, I’m a big fan of this. I doubt we will get our scribing up in time so soon after HoT, but overall this is something I’m glad to see in game and gives us an extra aim

If you have a workshop, I’d happily scribe your decorations for you at the cost of the materials.

Several guild hall decorations to spruce up the place for wintersday. people can argue this is content that some can’t use, but honestly, it’s far better than the many many years of nothing guilds got previously.

It looks like holiday decorations are an official thing from here on.

Kiba.9743:

I think this suggestion has merit. I would like to see something like this get implemented. I only do dungeons when I want a certain skin and no other time. And when I do, I hate it and force myself to do it because I dislike all the players skipping through everything. I would gladly forgo playing with other people so I can have a better experience.

Why don’t you do them with a group of like minded players? There are constantly people hanging around entrances that are completely new to the game these days looking to experience this content that is still new and fresh to them.

Cycling seasonal events are repeated content for a reason. They give a nice little change for the seasonal event that gives the developers a way to take a little time off work without completely leaving players in a content desert.

I look forward to the “same holiday content” every year.

It’s not a living story update. It’s a festival. of course you’re completing the same content for different rewards each year. That’s the point. You do a thing each year to get that year’s shinies, and arenanet gets to be a little lax on the work to put out the update.

If they were pushing completely new content every year in stead of just a little bit of new content, festivals would take so much time to produce they’d get in the way of real content updates.

I like the concept of adventures, but I think a bigger mix of actual encounters and minigames is called for. Adventures are essentially the GW2 equivalent of GW1 challenge missions. The majority of challenge missions were still built around the idea of high score tables and repetition to refine a run, but with only a few exceptions they were still pve encounters in which you used your characters, builds, and skills. They were just designed in a fashion where you had scaling rather than binary objectives.

I actually like the adventures, but we need more adventures in which we get to use our meticulously designed builds and equipment than adventures in which we just get some random transforms.

The funny thing is, one of the primary value concerns people have about HoT is the lack of skins.

It’s pretty obvious the art staff is on hand to output a much higher volume of rewards, and somewhere a managament decision is being made to nickel and dime customers for gem store sets in stead of add value to an expansion.

If even half of what has been released in the gem store since hot launch was avaliable in game, I’d imagine HoT sales might be doing better in the long term, and gem sales wouldn’t have suffered all that much.

The appearance backages and "angry chests are beginning to reek of exploiting an ever dwindling number of whales in stead of creating better value propositions that are attractive to a much larger subset of the player base.

It may make more money. It may be a better business move. However, I don’t think GW2 needs that kind of negative press when its relatively cheap to just throw the community a bone.

I don’t know if Anet has looked outside the GW2 reddit and their own forums at more objective third party criticisms (and they should, you can’t gauge honest feedback from your own forums and subreddits as they are historically full of complaints from customers you are retaining anyway) but you should.

“toxic” is a buzzword like “slap in the face” and “veteran players” that people just use because they think it makes them sound smart.

As for your experiences in bloodtide and queensdale, I’d imagine you didn’t encounter any problems with others because you weren’t disrupting their farm, and didn’t hang around their farms in local all that long. There were, however, lots and lots of screenshot backed posts in both incidents, and those player complaints (in addition to possible botting or economic concerns) were likely the catalyst that clued anet in that there was something they might want to look at.

The fact is Arenanet doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what goes on in its game and the fact that something goes unchanged for a long time persists is no indicator it is intended behavior. I assure you the only reason key farms were left as they were for so long is that nobody decided to look in to the metrics and saw exactly how much money they were losing on key sales, not because Anet wanted people to have more keys. When they wanted people to have more things, they started handing them out.

Anet is never subtle in its balancing. They do it with a sledgehammer that sends shockwaves of forum posts radiating from the point of impact with the force of a thousand kittens. I can’t percieve a world in which anet does anything with secret ulterior motives that the player base doesn’t immediately recognize because, quite frankly, they’re not that good at tweaking by small margins as a studio.

DeWolfe.2174:

PopeUrban.2578:

wall of more daft

Jana.6831:

Is people using bots to farm these bags a problem? Yes it is and I saw it – one guy with 8 bots.

I’m pretty certain you only saw what you wanted to see Jana. Just like Pope only see’s the “intended” design to be what he wants it to be. Anyone deviating from that is obviously doing it wrong and it must be removed, right? That is exactly what is toxic in game. Players telling other players what to do and how to do it. That’s probably what most troll’s in game tell themselves to justify their actions too.

And just as you attach… unsubstantiated claims using completely subjective reasoning, despite what we were told directly by the people who designed the item, and adjusted it right?

Because, when measuring basic logic and arenanet’s own statements against someone who is simply openly antagonistic to the product and development team in general, with a long post history of blaming literally every economic change on the gem store somewhere, it makes infinitely more sense to say “Yeah DeWolfe, you must be right, you’re qualified to make these decisions, and are completely objective!”

Rather than actually attempt to refute my claim you simply dismiss it with one statement because there is no evidence to support your position.

You’re just mad that arenanet did… whatever… that you didn’t like and choose to blame it in microtransactions with no evidence whatsoever to back that up.

In fact, your entire position supposes that they nerfed balm to sell boosters. Even if we completely discount arenanet’s statements, we can see through action that they have demonstrated a clear pattern of giving away larger and larger amounts of boosters as time has gone on since release, and nerfing mob farms that do not conform to their intended design but leaving be farms that actually conform to that design

Like such greats as:

• Shelter-Penitent (nerfed because anet didn’t want people farming one event over and over)

• Queensdale Champ train (nerfed because of conflict between new players and champ train farmers)

• Boss train alt farming (Nerfed because anet felt alts overly advantaged players using them for boss chests)

• Dungeons (Nerfed because Fractals were designed for gold farming, dungeons were designed for token farming, and there were no further plans to support dungeons)

• Maize balm (nerfed because of social impact and unintended play patterns)

• L10 Story key Farming (nerfed because of unintended play patterns and unintended gain rate of free keys. This one actually IS about gem store sales)

• VB Spiders (nerfed because of impact on zone meta and social impact)

yet they left

• Silverwastes Chest farms (left because chest hunting teams is the intended design, and events must be completed to gain access to shovels

• Northern Champ Farm (Left because it mirrors normal play patterns and is simply more efficient event cycling)

• CoF xp farm (left because it has no potential negative economic or social impact on others)

Their pattern aligns well with what they’ve said.

Now, if all you’ve got is the word “daft” then more power to you, but the fact is there’s no logical or factual basis for your claims, and they are built on nothing but a desire to appear smarter than other people and sling mud at arenanet.

Anet deserves to be held accountable for the stupid crap it does, and it does a lot of stupid crap, but your level of delusional paranoid conspiracy theories would be comical were they not so blatantly mean spirited.

So what you’re saying is that you’d like arenanet to add even more ways to discourage people from doing dungeons with one another.

The vast majority of the game is built around soloable, casual content. There’s no reason to take the small portion that isn’t and change it in to something it was never intended to be.

It’s a waste of time and effort they could be spending putting out new LS episodes and zones, and would take significant amounts of UI and back end work to get implemented, and for what? The ability to break the game design?

Heroes/henchmen existed in GW1 because the game was designed to be unplayable without a party

GW2 was not designed this way, and thus they only designated certain areas as party areas. This is very similar to the elite missions in factions, which when originally released you needed other players for as well.

Ah yes the ’Every inconvenient economic change exists to sell gems" defense.

No.

That’s not it.

When they want to shill gems they do exactly what they’ve been doing. They create overpriced “appearance Packs” and rachet the release rate of gem store skins up to 11.

They don’t derive a meaningful amount of gem sales from gems purchased specifically for gold/gem sales, and they don’t give a crap about booster sales. That exachange rate doesn’t meaningfully alter the economy because buying gems doesn’t create gold and furthermore they give away so many boosters that leaving them in the shop is an afterthought

It’s the same reason that PLEX prices in EVE are a reflection of, not a motivator for, the value of currency or relative gold/currency ratios, and EVE was the originator of the “sanctioned gold selling” idea.

They’ve shown pretty clearly that when they’re desperate for gems money they simply add more crap to the gem store and less to the game. They don’t nerf ingame gold faucets to encourage gem trading because in order to get a good gold rate for gems, people have to be able to farm gold in the first place to sell it to the buyer

As for your attestation that you had more fun maize farming than doing HoT content, that’s completely subjective, and intentionally obtuse. Point is they didn’t design balms for farming. They don’t design anything for “stand here and kill x 90 times” farming. They design the game around completing instances, PvP matches, or Events. They’ve made changes multiple times to every mob farm that became disruptive to intended play patterns. Including as recently as nerfing the verdant brink spider farm. They didn’t nerf the CoF farm because its in an instance and has no disruptive effect on other players in an economic or practical play sense.

In your haste to just talk crap about HoT and Anet, you’re blinding yourself to the facts. Anet’s management has been screwing up and chasing cash at the expense of player enjoyment a lot lately, but that has nothing to do with maizebalm nerfs or any ingame economic adjustments.

By your logic, one could attribute any change in any game with a cash shop to ‘they nerfed it so they can sell more gold’

Lucent.8906:

PopeUrban.2578:

but rather a way to remove excess wintersday stuff and karma from the game in an effort to increase the value of those items and karma

Let’s face it, removing 10-20 per day(?) per player, and accounting for the fact that most players won’t even bother, means it’s not a big enough sink to affect their value at all. So basically it’s not going to do what it was meant to do.

I’m guessing it’s more about the karma TBH.

Here’s a massive karma sink.

Don’t worry, here’s a temporary and cheap way to earn extra karma that’s kind of a pain.

The result: People with massive stacks of karma just buy the stuff. The people who need to earn the marks gift some orphans cheap stuff for a bump to afford that stuff.

The end result is less people with massive stacks of karma, but more people able to afford the wintersday karma items.

Kalavier.1097:

gclhoutx.7234:

It would be nice if ANET could implement more of the Clothing and wardrobe style based on that timeline period. I know I read somewhere about a Katana skin however I’ve been unlucky any finding anything like a Katana or even a Samurai Sword skin. I know the female Hexen skin recently had the a Chinese Looking hat along with it but the male skin didn’t have it.

I’d agree if they had a LS section which featured Canthan’s arriving to Kryta heavily, or we went to Cantha to get more “Canthan style weapons/armor skins”. Out of the blue? Not as much.

Canthans (in lore) have been, like other humans, heavily integrated in to the nation of krya in the 200+ years since GW1. Kryta is am immigrant state more akin to the USA than the primarily ethnic Krytan nation it was during GW1.

The reason there’s no Canthan district has to do with some questionable decisions by a certain NCSoft person that wasn’t around during GW1 taking offense at the “mixing of Asian Cultures” present in the cantahn district before release (despite elona being a clear mixing of african cultures, original kryta being a clear mixing of south american cultures, and ascalon being a clear mixing of european cultures)

Canthan families and culutre are, lore wise, very present in modern kryta and have been for hundreds of years, just like all human cultures as they immigrated and found refuge as humanity around tyria continued to flee failing wars, elder dragons, or political persecution. They’re just not in vogue like the majority krytan/ascalonian cultural identity that pervades mainstream krytan culture.

warduke.1780:

Ayrilana.1396:

warduke.1780:

Ayrilana.1396:

warduke.1780:

Ayrilana.1396:

1) There have been threads with players complaining about being harassed when killing ambient a whether it be to complete a heart, go for the achievement, or as they’re passing through. They were not in their own bubble.

2) It could be automated and was. Not difficult to program a bot to go around in a set loop I would imagine. Bots have done more complicated things.

3) Maize farming wasn’t restricted for the reasons that you listed.

4) Doesn’t mean that this method needs to get reinstated. Have you tried node farming for lower tiered wood logs and ore?

All wrong. ArenaNet just decided to ruin “lower tiered wood logs” in their latest patch. So, they need to reinstate old methods of farming gold.

All that I said were true. Please provide source that Anet ruined lower tier wood log farming with the latest patch.

Source? Look at the prices now. Go on. Have a little look.

It’s not ruined as you can still farm it as you did before and make a decent amount of gold. It’s just not as lucrative as before with the 30G/hr. I also don’t see anything stating what the cause so how are you certain that it is Anet?

Oh the bags. Like I said, you can still farm the nodes and there’s still the T6 node farm. It’s also not the only farm.

Farming wood is now pointless, like every other farm in the game.

That’s kind of the idea.

They want you playing the game because its fun, not doing boring repetitive tasks because they make better gold.

p/p needs additional mobility or gap openers. The damage is actually decent now.

Body shot needs to be cheaper and have a longer immob, and the base damage on the auto needs increased It’s not that efficient a bleed source for condition builds anyway, so condi builds getting a slight damage buff on the auto wouldn’t really change much.

Honestly though, gunslinger needs to be an elite spec, it needs to replace steal with a disengage style ability, add a 900 range rifle with a heavy single target condition set, and have traits roughly designed around pistol/rife buffs, ranged utility, and support focused “powderbomb” ranged aoe utility skills so it can build in to either a solid 1200 range power or condi dps build using core utils, or a solid 900 range build with a lot of support utility with trait buffed powderbombs. I’m thinking non-DPS grenade-like abilities like throwable blind fields, an aoe version of smoke wall, a ranged aoe 5s immob, and an elite “reload” that simply refreshes all init and the f1.

Since its an elite spec and wouldn’t work with daredevil, I think they could get away with such an elite without creating too overpowered melee builds that utilize it.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

IMO, the extra dodge bar and the different GM dodge effect should be baseline to the profession, no traits required, just something unique the Thief brings to the table. Only because it’s too good that any other Elite Spec in the future will fail in comparison.

Nowadays, I can’t see myself without the extra dodge and Dash. It’ll just never be the same without them.

Honestly, without massive buffs to core thief, every future spec will have to incorporate some hardcore base defensive mechanics, but I can think of several that would stand up to the dodges.

Forms, feign death regens, actual blocking, spammable shadowsteps, etc.

There’s going to be a lot of interesting choices to make once people have to treat the elite spec system the way it was designed.

You feel cheated because you tried to game the system and failed.

Okay.

or… they’re awesome at designing things and it’s not intended to be a massively profitable and endless karma farm, but rather a way to remove excess wintersday stuff and karma from the game in an effort to increase the value of those items and karma, while simultaneously giving a reasonable temporary karma boost so players can more easily get the karma items they want for wintersday if they don’t already have massive unused stacks of karma.

You know.

Because maybe they have some bigger non-wintersday plans for karma, and they knew that affording the gift items was really cheap on the player base.

Intended. You can’t “bank” xp because if you could there would be no progression when new masteries are released in the future. In addition, you can’t apply mastry xp to locked masteries because the entire design of the system is meant to make you want to do tasks to gain the points as a priority, which in turn drives you to diverse content sooner, to avoid wasting xp.

The whole purpose of mastry points is to prevent mastries from being just an XP grind, but rather to give you personalized choke points where you go ‘hey, I should do this other different thing so I don’t waste xp’ so progression doesn’t just boil down to repeating the same xp farm forever and only then going out and getting all your mastry points.

You’re missing the point.

They nerfed maize balm farming (and in fact nerf pretty much all unintended farms eventually) because it created an antagonistic relationship between farmers and people playing the game as intended.

Maize balm was added to the game as a utility item for some random halloween cheer, just like toilet paper and raw eggs. The fact that players decided to use it as a primary method of earning income was a failing in the design of the item, and anet wasn’t aware of the problem until those farmers got really up in the face of all the new free to play guys that were just playing the game as intended. Then forum posts were made, anet was made aware, and they fixed the design flaw.

Now it still has its intended function, but it can’t be abused in an unintended manner.

Expansions are not pay to win.

Especially in a buy to play game.

Don’t let the “play for free” hype fool you. GW2, just like GW1, is built in such a way that they expct players to buy major releases to continue playing. The only change they’ve made is to have it be cheaper to new players to get in to the game.

Pay to win models directly correlate money spent with character power, usually through lossy crafting models or seriously potent consumable buffs.

This expansion does neither. It’s simply asking you, after three years of release, that they’re now technically giving away free, to pony up fifty bucks for features and content between now and the next major release. This is standard for for MMOs for a reason. You either get people to pay directly for content access, or you give it away for free and structure your cash shop in such a way that players need what’s in it to play the game effectively. GW2 has gone stupid with the cash shop recently, but those items are cosmetic in nature. It costs money to develop content updates, and it’s just plain unrealistic to believe the majority of your player base will purchase cosmetic microtransactions often enough to fund that long term for a game of the scope and player base of GW2.

While we’re at it, how about a few less styled looks for males as well? There are like twelve buzzcuts, and the rest look like we just stepped out of a salon. Heck, why not start with all of the hairstyles from Nightfall and go from there.

Humans literally have a character creation option that allows us to start seriously impoverished peasants. Somehow, humans lack a significant array of “bedhead” or “unkempt” hairstyles even though, given creation options, these should be like a third of the options.

I saw a thief run to decap a point faster than a shiro revnant. They’re obviously too strong.