Guild Wars 2

I have to wonder if there’s a forge recipe involved now. Though, if that’s the case, I would’ve expected a little community engagement from ANet, like they did in the past.
I remember those events being cute, at least.

OriOri.8724:

In regards to conditions, I would like to see some “soft cleanses” added to the game. This would be a skill, either baseline or traited, that when you use it, in addition to its current effect, it would also reduce the duration of X condis on you by 1-3 seconds. Some of the more powerful ones could affect every condi on you, while most would affect just a few. This way it would be similar to protection for condis, because by knocking off 1-3 seconds you would be reducing the duration of the condis, and hence their total damage to you, considerably.

Its something that I think the game is sorely lacking from a flavor standpoint. Combine these soft cleanses, which would necessitate the need for expertise to get the most out of a condi build, with the removal of Trailblazers and you would pretty much stop the problem of overly tanky condi builds. They could still run dire, but the soft cleanses should, if implemented well, be enough to lower their threat just enough so that you can burn through their tankiness. Or they could run viper to be a glass cannon condi build.

More ‘themed’ cleanses on short-ish cooldowns could also be useful.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stop,_Drop,_and_Roll
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Withdraw

Though, honestly, what we need is some short period of immunity post-cleanse, especially for disables. It would go a long way to blunting the constant application of conditions, and it would help manage ANet’s irritating CC fetish in these story fights.

Perhaps another approach in that is to remove conditions from auto attacks. Or at least have combo chains that don’t apply them until the end, so not every attack has a condition attached to it.

The interrupts work the same for players. Or it should. Granted, 5 seconds of downtime is fairly meaningless when the enemies since HoT are humongous meat sponges.

It does highlight a grander point, though. It seems like enemies don’t follow the same rules as the players. Take the Mordrem Stalkers who pez triple Death Blossoms on a minimal cooldown while still using shadowports in their rotation. Nevermind that it’s utterly irritating to have a completely invulnerable enemy for roughly 3 seconds at a time, but they also churn out high damage along with their HoT meatspongeness. When they scale to higher than Veteran and gain even more absurd damage/meat, I go back to questioning design decisions again.

Mostly having trouble in PvP rooms and guild/personal instances. I try to interact, and it dumps me quickly afterward.

Merciless Hammer: unless you have a pocket headshot thief, hammer is too slow to take advantage of small exploits of stun/disable.

Powerful Synergy: most leap finishes are auras or otherwise lackluster. Doubling them does what? Maybe some utility with stealth/water/blind in the right situation, except Warrior doesn’t get those fields on their own.

Mea.5491:

Bright? What’s that? Stylish ftw! Edit: I also use PangoBright to reduce monitor brightness / eye strain.

Hey, that’s pretty slick.

Though, pst, might wanna blur out your personal details on the screen capture.

Irensaga.6935:

Every time it happens, it feels like the writers are just making a cheap throwaway attempt to make you have feelings about the story.

It does seem the writers are fond of fridging for the sake of getting a rise out of the player.
( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge )

It was most egregious with Belinda, who shows up in the storyline just long enough for her to say she’s related to Marjory, then promptly dies the story step afterward so Marjory has to take time off to mourn (and presumably take her greatsword to become a Reaper).

Eir’s death mostly felt like they had to quick-kill her to ditch a voice actor instead of making a powerful moment of loss for Braham (who is barely characterized in the first place).

Most of the other deaths aren’t even memorable.

..Oh wait, I can probably tell which specific death brought this on. :P Trying not to spoiler here, but in the last scene, the victim gets gacked so that
…we get mad at the murder, whom we were going to stomp a mudhole in anyway? We can’t even say the victim got Fridged to set up the Revenge Plot, because we were already going to stab it. So, the death comes off as pretty meaningless.

I’d been pondering how to do this as well. With the way that regen stacks now, it’s possible for low healing regens to interfere. It also doesn’t compare to the way that Poison does.

My initial thought on it is to make Regen’s power a little less, extend the durations, and make them stackable.

But.. I’m just not sure if that would help at all in ANet’s current environment of damage-spam PvP and one-hit-KO bosses in PvE.

I don’t typically associate the word “bright” with forums.
Just sayin’.

PlatinumMember.5274:

Stand The Wall.6987:

hypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehype

Why?

It is just a balance patch, it ain’t that big of a deal. Or to be more precise it is better to be cautiously optimistic than overly hype.

At this point, I’m expecting:

• Popular profession gets nerfs/buffs dependent on developer whim
• No weak traits are adjusted
• Potential exploity combos are nerfed across the board
• No change on warrior nor breaking of the FG/PS meta
• Stability is still both OP and useless, context and game mode depending

DeanBB.4268:

I’m lost. What exactly is being discussed here?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Ascended-Vending-Changes/first#post6498704
That in particular.

I’m concerned about this meddling in the market, especially after silk, leather, and some of the legendary journeys (10 Elonian Leather for an insignia? …on a weapon? Not even trying to hide it, ANet…)

I don’t mind the change, since I have a full set of 500-enabled crafters, but the econs have a nasty habit of inducing overcorrections that punish the players.

Hm. I suspect it’s all the AFKers.
#sagenod

TorsoReaper.8530:

OneYenShort.3189:

If you ever role play (table top games.) you may have experienced the mindset that can happen of GMs vs Players, aka them vs us. Most of the time that is not very productive for either side.

That’s a really interesting line of thought I didn’t even consider; that is more plausible than “incompetence”…

Considering that mindset already seems to already have seeped into jumping puzzle designs and “challenging” encounter design, I suspect the “stick it to the players” camp is growing. :\

As much as I would love to have dual options, my understanding is that the tech for outfits is different, and the reason why skins are so time consuming is all the armor weights have completely different rigs.

So, I feel ya, but don’t get a cramp keeping those fingers crossed. :\

Probably a nod to the “head of the snake” title of the episode.

And Caudacus had a gnarly beardthing.

TorsoReaper.8530:

Based on 300 salvaged hides using a copper-fed:

Rawhide Leather Section 10.00%
Thin Leather Section 8.33%
Coarse Leather Section 8.33%
Rugged Leather Section 14.33%
Thick Leather Section 63.67%
Hardened Leather Section 8.33%

So even though thick leather isn’t “the only thing” it’s practically the only thing given the other drop rates are so miserable.

So, roughly 2/3 drop rate for leather we’re already floating in. A flat(ter) distribution would actually make that farming spot worth the attention and (little bit of) hype.
Something like…
Rawhide Leather Section 15.00%
Thin Leather Section 18.33%
Coarse Leather Section 18.33%
Rugged Leather Section 24.33%
Thick Leather Section 23.67%
Hardened Leather Section 13.33%

Bamf, problems solved.

OriOri.8724:

I’m not a fan of the farm. I don’t think its a surprise to anyone that I would have preferred that the recipes get adjusted instead of just adding another source of leather. That said I disagree with people who are saying that this was incompetence on ANet’s part.

I don’t think this was incompetence so much as Anet is being way too careful with shaking up the economy. They’ve seen what happened with HoT when they jumped the gun and were far too free with manipulating the economy, so they dialed it way back. And then in April we saw the same thing with resonating silvers. Way too much interference. So Anet learned that dialing it back and manipulating it more slowly is a much better approach (which it is).

They have slowly been altering leather and Mystic Coins (but I think they are happy with MC now) for months, and they obviously didn’t want to make too drastic of a change to leather with this farm. So they set the dials incorrectly. Did they make a mistake? Yes, absolutely. I don’t think that this screams incompetence though, like a lot of people in this thread do.

I appreciate the reasoned response, OriOri.

There’s actually a very decent ‘quick fix’ to the farm: Change the loot tables to include less T5 leather.

That’s it.
That’s the solution.

The perceived “worth” of the farm would be obvious, because it would give more T2346 leather, which is what we wanted direct farming for in the first place. I don’t mind the RNG part of the salvage, but I don’t appreciate blowing T5 smoke up my tailpipe and claiming it’s a “good farm”.

Paulytnz.7619:

I really can not see how you guys cannot see how people would complain over this if they missed out.

I can see how players would complain. They complain about everything. There’s no end to it. So yeah, the flood of whinging that they know would happen is one reason why they’re not going to deal with it at all. It’s a very minor facet of a reward they were gracious enough to hand out. It’s not worth the pain of fixing it now.

But, if they did, I imagine it’s also a matter of process. Count the number of year+ characters on the account, count the number of Jennah minis in inventory and bank slots (is it really all that hard to leave a stack of them in one bank slot?), and return any that happen to be in difference. Also mark the account to be sure the process has been completed, so we don’t accidentally reward it more than once.
Then, set up the birthday vendor to buy Jennahs for …something. I almost don’t care what at this point. Celebration booster, guaranteed leather stacks, anything.

It’s just very bothersome that ANet had all of these one-and-done currency items when other options exist to track those currencies (like, I’unno, a wallet?).

…what Anet intended it to be.

We don’t get much about the “intent” beyond:

“challenging”
It’s not challenging, it’s just punishing. It’s zerg content. Solo = suicide, Zerg = 1.1111*10^4.

“farm”
Usually, the point of farming something is the targeted acquisition of a material, with an expectation of gains above other methods. So far as I understand it, people are reporting better gains by not doing this “farm” than by waiting for a group to show up and flailing away at it for a few minutes before boredom or diminishing returns kick in. Also, the rewards are still far too RNG-driven to even be considered a “farm”. I’d have better luck doing events for karma and buying some Crab Grabbin’ Gloves, because the RNG is focused on bloating T5 drops over everything else.

So, by looking at the only two stated “intents,” we can only conclude that it missed the mark on both criteria. 0 / 2 usually means something failed.

Now, jury’s still out on whether this will, in the end, benefit the players beyond those who perceive Fallen Watchtower to not be a waste of time, and I’m still waiting for evidence of that.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bobblehead_Laboratory

No emote needed. Headflailing available at the Gem Store!

If it’s just entering Bloodstone Fen that opens the track, you could use a teleport to friend to access the map and first waypoint. Wouldn’t have to buy the episode then.

I think. If someone can confirm, that’d be great.

Paulytnz.7619:

Nice suggestion but then they would have to pay a lot of us that have deleted all of our extras I should imagine and that could be a nightmare. At one stage I had 14 of that mini due to a bug so of course I had to delete a lot of them…….

Not really? If you have the item, grand, but if not, nothing is “owed”.

Granted, that perception is likely what’s keeping ANet from actually solving the Jennah Conundrum.

I’ve been faithful enough to hoard one inventory slot’s worth of …28 of them now? It’s not that hard. It’d be nice if we could take the extra copies to the birthday vendor and get some nice kind of bonus, even if it’s something benign like another 24hr celebration booster.

Gudy.3607:

Vayne.8563:

TorsoReaper.8530:

The leather farm is such a failure that leather prices are already back to pre-patch levels.

How do you define fail?

I thought that was clear enough. The main problem people were complaining about was the extremely high price for hardened leather. Which, after a short dip, is back to climbing up again, from what I can see. Whether or not this actually means that the farm is a failure, as TorsoReaper says, is open for discussion, though. Maybe there aren’t really enough people who care about this (or making some gold) and hence farm the place, to make a dent in the price?

If we wanted to be kind about a theory…

Demand is related to need, but only a fraction of it. I “need” the various leathers, but I haven’t put in buy orders (demand). If I received any of that necessary leather, I’m not going to put it on the market (and compete/lower prices).

So, what we may be seeing is that the leather farm hasn’t sufficiently penetrated that gap. People who are going to buy or farm/buy will still be requesting, but people who might consider selling aren’t doing so because they haven’t overproduced for their needs. It’s actually still a bit early to determine if the centaur farm will make a difference.

Running theory is that the group nature of the content and upcoming new content will drive people into different areas (or even just slapping around White Mantle for their leather). So far, it looks like the challenging farm is a bust, partially because it’s still spitting out mostly T5 leather instead of the ones we’re starved on.

dusanyu.4057:

I have secret footage form the design meeting of the Caudecus Fight

(A-Net love you guys and not hating just cracking a little Joke)

I sense in accuracy.

Meme-maker spelled “crowd control” as AOE. :P

(I love the ANet folks, but yeah, the CC fetish has been out of control for years. :|)

ArchonWing.9480:

I guess rangers also lack a good swiftness utility though the druid trait gives 33%movement.

Thing is, you don’t even need a Swiftness buff. Usually the 25% passives grant more than enough jumping distance. (Which just kinda highlights how back 100% movement speed is…) So, ranger, thief, and necro can just temp-slot the signet.

Guard can swap to Retreat, many Warriors run with the melee-weapon 25% move boost or slot it because they like Fast Hands anyway. Revenant Shiro/Glint gives swiftness, Engi has lots of tricks to make the jumps: toolkit swiftness, buff potion, shotgun jump, mecha legs. Mesmer has chrono passive, signet of inspiration, or focus 4. Ele has air attunement, air staff, or the procs from aura/overloads.

There’s no enemies in the hollow, so it shouldn’t be a problem to swap for mobility and switch back when you have both achievements. (Magic gather is a full circle around the island.)

I wanna be a Largos White Mantle Flame Legion Shaman; her contacts with Scarlet’s old alliances make her the leader of all of them so she can rise up and take back Tyria for.. reasons.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Naked Faren yet again. This is what…the 4th time?

• Beach speedo
• Scarlet trying to cook him
• Jungle escapades
• And now this?

Did I miss any?

cringe

To be fair, the more disturbing part is that version of Faren is an illusory plaything for the summoning mesmer.

cptaylor.2670:

Rauderi.8706:

Can the non-race character still equip the gear, or does it just not show up visually?

The gear won’t show up in the equipment tab.

Ah, okay.
Yegh, that sucks.

Probably because it says “Requires: [Race]” in the text to equip, so it won’t show it as an equipable item. Irritatingly minor detail, but I hope they fix it.

Glacial.9516:

This may not be easy to do, but I would think the ideal solution would be instead to tie the transmutation to the Cultural armor level/tier. That way if you transmute your ascended armor to look like Human Light Cultural 1, on a Sylvari it would be Sylvari Light Cultural 1 or a Norn would be Norn Light Cultural 1 and so on.

That’s actually a pretty suave solution. Bravo~
I hope the devs see this and execute it.

nsleep.7839:

http://puu.sh/u2VuP/0973f486e4.jpg Defensive gear isn’t going to stop anything. Maybe I would live some additional hits by trash mobs but these aren’t a threat to Zerker gear anyways.

To be fair, those desolators were designed for garbage. Another hidden fetish brought to light, honestly: the un-CC-able pain-mob.
Desolator, can’t be CC’d or even damaged until it decides it wants to be hit. Until then, Scrapper-hammer bashes its target with absurd damage.
Jade Anything. Massive CC/damage on super-short cooldowns but refuses to take CC 90% of the time.

I can understand this behavior for bosses and leaving strategic windows open, but on veterans that are still meant to be solo’d, it’s beyond cheap.

Can the non-race character still equip the gear, or does it just not show up visually?

OriOri.8724:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ayrilana.1396:

OriOri.8724:

I really don’t get why people are complaining about this. I didn’t even really it was supposed to be a jumping puzzle to get to the peach, there are like 4 jumps tops.

Plus, if you really can’t make them, there is a spot you can glide to the peach tree ledge from while skipping the jumps. So no jumps required at all.

Yeah. I saw it as being no different than a lot of the other vistas that require some form of jumping.

I find it substantially more difficult than anything outside of jumps in actual JPs. I wish it were easier even though I don’t think ANet needs to adjust it.

This is very strange. Are the people in this thread who are having trouble with this remembering to glide when they jump? I just went and did it again several times, trying to figure out where you could fall, but I had to try to miss these jumps if I opened my glider. If I didn’t glide though then most of them became substantially harder, with one of the jumps being impossible to make without gliding (or I assume, I haven’t found a way to do it yet without gliding/a leap skill).

I’ve gotten so used to swiftness for JPs that I find it hard to remember doing some jumps without it. Add in that some allow gliding, and that’s where Watchers Hollow had me fuming for a little bit.

The first two pillar jumps are easier with gliding, but it comes at an odd timing where one might think one needs to jump again or dismount the glider to avoid overshooting the landing. I’d end up jumping off. Swearing was plentiful, until I got the reflexes right.

Now I go there every day for the two daily chests (Peach and Unbound Magic), no problem.

Ayrilana.1396:

ancientoak.4258:

Seeing all those people die in the new map, with their full offensive, no defense/survivability stats with the legendary champs, standing in one spot without moving, i say no. Even at the canon events, which you must cc, or you do no damage, they keep spamming with damage, and do no damage. And eventually die. I try to inform them, sometimes they listen, many times not.
And playing casually (say a normal amount of playtime) is something else as having skill or not. I see many people with max masteries, so they played quite a lot, but dont even use cc when its needed, and die constantly.

If everyone used vitality and toughness gear, imagine how much longer fights would take. Also, pretty much all of the things killing people can be avoided and/or mitigated. would have one-shot them anyway.

Not to misrepresent the point, but certain design devs have a love affair with OHKO and hard-CC spam.

nottsgman.8206:

I’d have been interested in something like this, before I maxed my slots out (bought my last 2 slots in the most recent sale). now if they increase the amount of slots I’d be interested again hint hint

F-Fifty-five Asura? o_O

You don’t have characters, you have a college.

Maybe they can have package deal for releasing a new race.
A 9-slot boost for 5400 gems. We could call it the Big Birdy Bundle.

Tonic/Toy tab and Eater tab functionality would be great. Maybe even get the eaters to operate on stock still in the bank. Then we can have eaters for airship oil/auric dust/ley energy too.

Right now it’s kinda sad that we try to manage inventory bloat with.. more inventory bloat.

Dungeons are dead content. Be glad they decided to have the repeatable achievement that gives bonus gold for salty speedruns.
Fractals are GW2’s current path for 5-man content. And the rewards can be much better if you want to have Ascended gear without the hideous material grind.

The crafting merchants have them under one of their tabs.

Can we get a library in our home instance? A place to store all the books that we’re getting? From all the way back to Marjory’s intro (remember how suave she was? ^^) to the latest letters from E, my inventory is getting bogged down with these interesting yet otherwise useless items.
I’m not saying don’t keep doing them, but can we get a place at home or our hero tab to store them?

Zenith.7301:

The Jade construct is the only problem in the fight.

The jade constructs should be removed entirely but that’s about it.

Boss is manageable and the other adds as well.

It’s when the boss is attacking you at the same time the jade construct is that it becomes a problem.

Yup. I had the fight well managed until the last 1/4 of the fight or so. That’s when the Jade Knockback Construct showed up. It might have gone better if they weren’t doing CC every 5 seconds and would actually take CC skills themselves, but nope, they have to be obnoxiously resistant to everything while spamming disables.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Rauderi.8706:

Well, it’s not really a “lake” anymore. :P
(Because ANet doesn’t want to have underwater anything as a reminder that underwater skills especially Revenant are unfinished)

…as a reminder that underwater combat, especially the 3D positioning parts, are actually pretty terrible given the vision and movement controls of MMOs available today, so it’s not really much fun for anyone.

Fixed that for you.

But GW2 has the best underwater experience I’ve had in an MMO.
…which is a really depressing thought, because it’s still pretty bad. Unfinished and sad.

OriOri.8724:

mulzi.8273:

This may be a stupid question, but rather than all these fancy farms and whatnot, why not tweak the recipe to require, say, 3 leather rather than 4? What does it take more leather to craft the leather upgrade than it takes to craft a bolt of silk?

I seem to recall this same exact conversation a couple of years about, but about silk.

Anet actually answered this question recently. They said that changing the recipes would create a static drop in demand that is extremely unlikely to balance itself out in the long run (case in point, leather: they created a huge static increase in demand with HoT and it was unable to balance itself out, hence the implementation of the new farm). Personally, I still feel as if the better response would have been to change the recipes (either refinement or recipes for patches) to require less leather. That would undo part of the static increase in demand that HoT brought, which should have allowed leather to be able to balance itself out in the long run. But ANet disagreed with me, so we got a new farm instead.

The 4:1 for T5 leather is irritating, but I still find my production isn’t too bad. I just keep a lot on hand in case they do drop it to 3:1 or (haha never happening) 2:1 again.

At the same time, T6 went from 2:1 to 3:1, which was overkill. And it became required for all the armor patches, so of course it was due to shoot up out of control, since it is a rarer material. That is the problem we needed to fix.

andallthet2throught4tooobviously

Ookamikun.6472:

And yeah, gonna echo the statement on Cleric and Mesmer enemies.

Clerics are okay-ish. The most irritating thing they do is shield block for what I would swear under oath is much more than 3 seconds. Or I’m just impatient. :P
Their healing feels kind of random. Like, sometimes it will boost them to near full, other times it looks less effective.

Mesmers… don’t behave like mesmers. Having to smack down an HP wall that has just as many as the “actual” mesmer isn’t appropriately thematic to how they work. I mean, I get why it’s done for mechanics reasons (defeat one, summon the next), but it’s mechanics that aren’t consistent with the players.
Then again, between Anise, Kasmeer, and Jennah, I’ve no idea what a mesmer should be doing thematically. >.>

I accessed it through the human home instance. The node had some number code floating over it. I giggled.

Should probably report that to bug forums, if it hasn’t already.

Astralporing.1957:

Carighan.6758:

But that means the farm does what they wanted it to do: It’ll tank the price. Perfect.

It won’t. People are still doing it only because they haven’t realized yet that it’s not really worth it. T5 leather (which is what you get mostly from this) was never a problem, and t6 won’t be impacted at all.

And it still won’t handle the T2-T4 problem.

Xenon.4537:

Anyway this could all be fixed if Anet just makes the oiled version of the key work on the front door.

Please?

I had this happen to me last night as well. I found out too late that there was a drop item that was supposed to be used, because it looks exactly like flaxseed oil. It’s easy to overlook.

If it limited the noise to not-autoattack skills, it’d be okay.

The shortbow autoattacks are rapid, which is what leads to the WHINWHINWHINWHINWHINNY effect that everyone’s so utterly tired of.

I haven’t gotten to that fight yet, but thanks for the notice.

It seems ANet’s CC fetish is still in full effect.

I don’t understand how a reasonable game designer can look at an encounter design like that and say that it’s remotely fair or balanced. …I don’t even have to be referring to the specific final boss of the patch. I could point out several encounters that are similar.

Mea.5491:

There’s a shortcut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnSkQApnpk

Thanks, Mea!

I feel like such a dunce for not continuing to explore that track after I got the peach achievement.

Aaand, I kinda did it in reverse. I corpse-ran (wow, used an old WoW term…) to a jumping point and flew down to that hidden copse, and only then did I learn the way back up to the tree. :P

Yeah, I’m still clutching onto the Cin collection because I expected him to.. y’know.. buy them once I found him. It would be very helpful to have that kind of information.

And, if those items are only useful for a collection only, it would be kind to the players to make them grey items with minimal value so they can be easily sold.