Guild Wars 2

Haha Rob, as a player I think it really enhances the experience to have consumables like that which can give you the edge in otherwise difficult content. I wish there were more useful types of consumables like that, honestly.

That sounds really cool, Rob. If there were more enemies around each torch, but only three torches, then you’d have your really good dps take his own torch and the others get an extra player to support. I think that’s very awesome, and not as reliant on Ash Legion Spy Kits (ALSK) as the event is right now.

Seriously, about the ALSK’s, those things make this event amazingly easy! If everyone packs one, just synch when you use it as a team and you get the torch event done on the first try. I doubt you’d get this sort of coordination in pugs, but it’s really nice for guild runs.

I hate to say it, Savan, but it appears the only drama originating in this thread is from you. This is a serious nerf to necromancer viability in dungeons; they have no unique niche that is actually valuable. They just dps, slight heal, and that’s it. They are a lot less valuable against every boss in the game. This is a fact, and I’m not whining about it; I’m stating it.

Never did I say “ANet broke my class”. Never once have I complained for the sake of complaining. This thread is intended to bring light to how major a nerf this was to the Necromancer versus bosses (Note the specificity of this one aspect of their gameplay), and that they really need compensation in some other form in order to be brought up to at least a worthwhile level. Please, stop trying to grind a thread that says something on the order of “we were nerfed, we could be better, and we should be” to “OMG WE SUCK”. It’s not helpful.

I agree with the motivation behind this thread. This trait has been nothing but a hindrance to me.

I agree, removing this was a terrible idea and I can see no good reason for it.

This doesn’t help people out, it works to drive up the price to take advantage of the people you’re “trying to help”. Even if you aren’t intentionally trying to do it, you’re doing it. Giving free advice to people like this isn’t helpful in the least, as much as I wish that weren’t the case.

I love my Necromancer, and I play it a lot. Perhaps the biggest lure of the class for dungeons was being able to use multiple interrupts on certain bosses to bypass their Defiant stacks and support the team with great damage mitigation. With that gone, perhaps the only justification I ever had for bringing my Necromancer to a dungeon is gone.

Note: The Necromancer is not an awful class, don’t get me wrong. It is still ‘strong enough’, but it is hugely inferior to every other spellcaster and vastly inferior to every soldier class in the end-game PvE scene. Yes, many dungeons are ‘easy enough’ that it doesn’t matter what professions you bring, but many dungeons are hard enough that having intelligent group composition helps substantially reduce the perceived difficulty. Keep this in mind.

Previously:
- Many (re: Half or so) of all Champion+ in the game were immune to Fear already
- Those not immune to Fear could be interrupted by applying Fear under certain circumstances
- The timing of these Fears was crucial and required solid skilled play
- The Necromancer was valuable to the team because it had DS 3 and Staff 5 as fears

Now:
- Many (re: Half or so) of all Champion+ in the game are still immune to Fear
- Those not immune to fear now use up single Defiant stacks instead of being interrupted, rendering Fear largely ineffective against bosses

I have played my Necromancer in quite a few dungeons today, and found him very lacking. Reaper’s Mark is now totally useless against bosses unless you’re lucky and they have no Defiant stacks, which is unreliable. DS 3 is also pathetically useless against champions and legendaries.

The Necromancer now desperately needs something else to provide meaningful contribution to a dungeon team against these bosses. This nerf is significant enough, even if it isn’t directed primarily at Necromancers, that we have had our effectiveness brutally reduced with no compensation at all. I know ANet won’t undo this change, so we need something to help; more CC options / fears, longer fears, more blast finishers, increasing bleed stack limit, any number of these would contribute to making this class worth it in a dungeon again. Hopefully this sees the eyes of those developers that still read here and pushes them in the right direction.

Thanks for reading.

Idolicious, pretty much all of those are outside of Rob’s realm of influence. All he can really do is flail his arms about in a maddened dance at the people who can do something about it, and the bugs are already reported, so I doubt that’d do much. The only bug that Rob’s investigating is the nature of GL’s bubble wall being penetrated by Reckless Dodge and other on-dodge traits.

ANet released statistics a month or so ago and, actually, there are more male characters in-game than female by a sizable amount. Anyway, “I was running through LA” is a pretty huge sampling bias; you encountered what, one millionth of the total population of the game, if even? :P

You can enjoy the events and claim the rewards up until January 3rd. You miss absolutely nothing by not being on when the particular event begins.

- ANet is an American company
- ANet employees work during the daytime in the PST (GMT-8) timezone
- ANet employees need to be working when the patch goes live in case something needs a hotfix due to issues transferring from the dev -> live server
- ANet employees cannot be expected by the company to work all hours of the night if something goes wrong and a release is in the middle of the night to satisfy Europeans

I’m sorry if this bothers you, but honestly, this is the way it is and they have every right to work it this way. If they require their employees to work at 2AM, you kitten off employees and run the risk of losing people because of ridiculous company requirements. They want this to be successful, they want people working the issues right away if any pop up, and they also don’t want to make more mistakes when fixing those issues. It is logical to have patches like this during the work day for them so that they are on their game to fix/address issues and to make sure the switch-over goes down without a hitch.

Furthermore, they’re not going to give you patch notes before the patch is out! The patch notes will specifically say things like “This is now out on the BLTP!” and if they give it to people ahead of time, half of everyone will get confused and more complaining will happen. Patience is a virtue, and there is no tangible benefit to being there when the patch goes live. They did that for a good reason; they did it so that you wouldn’t be punished for sleeping when the patch goes live. Just go to sleep, stop waiting, and if you insist on staying up, know that the only person making you do it is yourself. Grab a beer and wait for the patch, that’s all you can do. There is no ‘disrespect’ or ‘condescension’ or ‘disregard’ for European players here; they’re running a business, they’re working during the day, and that’s just how it goes!

Metahari, you are mistaken. The multiple taps is because of your server’s WvW bonuses; the name “Mature Herbs” is actually the name of a type of plant, not a class of plants itself.

It’s not actually Stability. From testing, it just seems to bypass this one thing that GL does for whatever reason. I’m not sure if it allows the Warrior to escape from Guardian Hammer 5 or roll through Guardian Staff 4, though that would be an interesting test for anyone who has access to their game to do. For the record, Evasive Arcana works here too (though some report it works for only certain attunements).

The Warrior minor trait Reckless Dodge allows him to do that. Other classes’ dodge traits work similarly, though almost none of them are as reliable.

Rangers are good in this match-up with other players, but really bad otherwise. The sword-animation-lock bug really breaks their ability to properly melee GL, and their dodge trait isn’t quite as reliable as Reckless Dodge in breaking through his Phase 3 bubble. It also hurts a lot that the Ranger dps is severely undercut compared to the Warrior’s, so this would take a much longer period of time with many more chances to fail. It also doesn’t help that the Ranger has poor control over its mobility, unlike the Warrior who can aim his GS 3 to evade out of GL’s life steals in Phase 3. What I do is pack Lightning Reflexes and aim my back to escape the Phase 3 bubbles and life steals; it’s pretty much your best chance.

Kormir was wretched. We practically had to carry her sorry hide through the entire campaign, and then at the end SHE becomes the God instead of us. I would’ve cut her down on the spot and jumped into Abaddon’s power myself, probably twisting myself into some dark creature of the abyss, and I would’ve been totally okay with that. The Nightfall campaign was miserable, and Trahearne is several million times less mentally challenged than Kormir ever was.

And for the record, if you play the Sylvari campaign, Trahearne plays a huge role in the early levels.

They give unique tokens to match the achievement to the effort. If I could run AC a million times and get any of the armor skins, none of those armor skins would carry the prestige of actually having mastered the dungeon they’re related to.

Rob has also confirmed this; search his post history if you’re interested.

Solo Grawl Fractal boss on difficulty 20+. You got this, bro!

See this post. There is some speculation in that thread about other quirks to the DR mechanics, but if you follow the rules at the top you’ll have no issue.

Basically, what happened is that you did them all in less than 2 hours.

Most dungeons aren’t hard enough where it matters, and in some places Rangers actually shine (Giganticus, for instance), but in most places I see a Ranger and cry a little inside. But yeah, hopefully they see a buff today that changes my mind.

Thieves that are competent are exceptional in dungeons. I bring my guildies who have Thieves all the time. Stealth ressing is clutch in otherwise tough encounters, and their spammable blast finishers can might stack like no one’s business. The problem is when the Thief is terrible and thinks he can melee ridiculous bosses. I will concede that they have a very high skill threshold for being useful, but for my guild I never mind bringing them.

They are definitely a close second in terms of ‘general uselessness’ though. No disagreement there. At least they can be useful in the right hands. Rangers are just bad.

That sucks, maybe you should change servers while you can during Wintersday if this is common?

No thanks! I want reliable rewards when I complete something, a la Domain of Anguish style. Skip the random drops please!

I’d recommend to play what you enjoy with one caveat: Don’t play a Ranger. I hate to say it, but Rangers slow down every run and basically have to be carried by the rest of their team. In their current state, Rangers are downright bad in dungeons. They’re the only class I discriminate against, and I really wish it weren’t that way, but it is what it is.

Account.9832:

Do you have a link to that?

I really don’t want to nitpick what I respond to since your post deserves a full reply, but I just spent way too much time finding the link for you.

Account.9832:

Does any company pay its employees for “being present at the office on the last day of the year” ? Or do they pay them after completing each objective (ex., each job) or at regular intervals (ex., at the end of the month – based on the number of days they actually worked) ?

I will respond to this. Many companies actually pay you primarily for completing a total task or, in many instances, finishing a specific sale. They do this in order to encourage the employee to follow through and succeed at the whole sale, not just a part of the sale. This is analogous to what is currently implemented in dungeons (small bags of little loot to give you a little now, then a big lump sum when you finish). This is largely philosophical in nature as to which is superior, but is based on whether the company really needs individual sales or whether moving along slowly and steadily towards some far-off goal is the plan. Just like dungeons, people will do them regardless; I want to get paid, and I like my company, so whatever they decide is best is what it is, and I’ll deal with it. That’s my philosophy in GW2 as well (Anet decides, and I’ll work with whatever happens) I don’t really like this analogy, though, because with my company I can take a 4 week vacation and get paid for the whole thing. Wouldn’t that be nice in GW2? :P

Suffice to say, there are pitfalls to both approaches, and I don’t think it is fair to claim one is objectively superior to the other. I personally like the way we have it now, and think that as far as anti-griefing is concerned, I’d rather them find a way to ‘transfer ownership of an instance’ than punish legitimate uses of the ‘kick’ functionality.

Also, let’s remind ourselves that this topic is about the anti-griefing mechanism… Not the rewards. Derailing threads results in their locking (I am partially responsible here too). Rob has already noted repeatedly (search his dev posts) that some dungeons still need reward tweaks to be worthwhile. They’re working on it, and I think that’s all I really want to say on the matter.

Account.9832:

First: What would be the problem with that? If a group of five people prefer to do one boss 4 times instead of doing 4 different bosses, why shouldn’t they be allowed to? It’s not like dungeons even have a difficulty progression; the first boss is often a lot harder than the last one.

The entire goal of putting the tokens at the end, for ANet was to force players to play the entire paths instead of farming the first boss. I don’t necessarily care how ANet handles it because I will personally play the dungeons either way to get tokens in whatever way is fastest, but they specifically stated this. The man you want to answer this question is Rob.

Account.9832:

Second: The game has a diminishing returns system that reduces the number of tokens to 1/3rd on your second run of the day, so if you killed the first boss 4 times you would get 20+7+7+7, whereas doing 4 bosses would give you 20+20+20+20. How does the former count as “farming”, when they would be getting less tokens…?

This plays into the ‘dungeon rewards still need work’ topic that Rob has already said his team is working on, but the point stands that with countless dungeons—even with 1/3 rewards like you note—it would be a more efficient use of a player’s time to farm the first boss. This is definitely true with, say, Arah, CoE, HotW, well… Almost all of them. For instance, if you can get 27 in 6m, or 80 in 120 minutes, it’s pretty clear which you’d go for.

Account.9832:

Third: If people are only playing through the dungeons to get tokens, that means the dungeons are not enjoyable and need to be improved; limiting the number of tokens people get (i.e., making them get no tokens if the dungeon bugs or someone has to leave before the last boss dies) isn’t actually increasing their enjoyment, it’s just making them spend more time doing something they don’t like (and Arena Net doesn’t gain anything – either financially or in terms of reputation – by doing that).

No… It really only means that “people want the best rewards for their time investment”. Enjoyment really doesn’t factor into it. I, for instance, love Arah. I love all the hard parts, Simin, GL, the works. It’s an amazing dungeon and I always have fun playing it. However, I only play the parts of Arah that maximize why I am going to Arah (tokens). I’ll enjoy myself regardless, so I take the path of least resistance, and farm where I can. Your proposed suggestion does not reward appropriately enough for me to want to ever finish a path, and I personally think that’s a problem. There should always be a “you finished the whole path” reward in my opinion, because in my opinion that’s the only way you’ll really encourage people to do it in the first place. I repeat ‘in my opinion’ because some people might not care about finishing paths, but I have really liked being encouraged by the end reward to finish paths. It pays me really well to enjoy the dungeon as much as I can, and that’s nice.

Account.9832:

Is it really so complicated to give people tokens for killing each boss (ex., 20 tokens per boss), instead of 60 tokens for simply being present in the dungeon when the last boss dies…?

Yes, it is, because then no one completes the dungeon and just farms the first boss. Don’t think for a second anyone would finish Arah paths if it worked like this; people would just farm the p3 first boss more and more. The same applies for anywhere else if you want the tokens.

Whatever is done, I think it’s absolutely critical to the health of the game that we be allowed to kick people from runs at any point. I’m all for anti-griefing, but if someone joins a group and trolls/flames/etc. and generally makes life miserable for everyone else, we absolutely need to be able to remove him/her from the group and replace him/her without fear of getting our instance reset. That also applies to people who just leave mid-run (ie. they leave group or they log off). That is so important, I cannot emphasize it enough.

Yeah, I recognize that it’s 20 cents for 1g, but I don’t think it’ll get that far. I think ANet is trying to maintain it at a level where something like the Commander icon or T3 armor are ‘standardized gold sink values’ and they won’t have to add things like an eventual ‘T4’ armor set costing 500g. I’d also be really shocked if things got to the point where it was ~8g / 100 gems to buy gems. I am already shocked that people pay what they do for them, and it’s not even 2g / 100 gems yet. What you get for those gems just isn’t worth it; it’s all power investors battling it out with each other.

The day I can get 100g for 20 bucks through the gem store is the day I will buy gems to convert them to gold. I don’t anticipate I’ll ever buy gems to convert to gold through the gem store.

Flindy.7530:

Ok so i can happily replace the sigil and nothing bad will happen?

Correct.

The only ‘bad’ thing that happens is if you try to transmute exotic stats onto your legendary. That will remove the legendary status, while changing its sigil will not. Be mindful that changing the sigil will, however, make it soulbound. Make sure you do this on the character you want to use the legendary on.

I think the phenomenon described in the OP is expected. The materials used to craft the item you’re selling are more versatile than the item you crafted, which means that the net value of those materials is more than the result of it. Furthermore, the materials can then be used for crafting by someone else, which earns them experience/progress. Selling the end result of the craft does not offer that, and so is less valued.

Flindy.7530:

If i replace the sigil…will that remove its legendary status?

No.

The Dredge bags really aren’t rare drops. They have incredibly good odds of dropping from the Dredge Fractal, on the order of 1 in 3. Furthermore, with 20 bags every time I do the path, I always get at least 2 cores. This isn’t even considering that I get lucky sometimes and score a lodestone/core from the chests in FotM. I totally recommend this for your core-farming needs; if you get a different kind of core/lodestone, just TP it and buy the one you want!

I was wondering why my max size Charr Warrior could go toe-to-toe with him so effectively while all of my other classes get locked inside the bubble! This is very good information. I’ll have to try this with things like Mark of Evasion and see if they play into being able to dodge roll out of the bubble.

Yeah, Slacker’s right. Run the crystals before aggroing the boss (no poison cloud until he aggroes), and position one ranged DPSer at each corner to activate their portion as soon as they can. The other two players usually try to punch Tom in the face and generally do as much DPS as possible. There are 8 crystals in the room per reset, 4 for each side, which results in 4 chances. You should be able to, with a decent (not even good) group, kill him on the 3rd fan activation with 1 crystal left per side.

I’m all for varying difficulties of JPs, no doubts there. But Anthony Orden has confirmed in other threads in this forum that the rest of the content for this event will be, essentially, baby-mode. It’s there for everyone to enjoy. There’s going to already be a metric boatload of content for the player who isn’t very good / isn’t even max level. In lieu of that, I hope that at least this one thing is aimed for a more talented crowd. If everything in this event is super easy, it’s going to be boring for a big part of the player base. Similarly, if everything were uber hard, it’d be boring for the players who can’t do that content; we don’t have to worry about the casuals getting left behind this event, though, according to Anthony.

I forgot to mention, but they also do this because some dungeons go contested and they—presumably—want to force players finishing runs to make sure they still own the dungeon before letting them continue. I can’t speak for ANet, but this appears way too coordinated to be accidental.

If you want a dungeon that you can keep redoing over/over/over, do FotM. It is clear that they intended that dungeon for such use.

All racial skills are—by design—weaker than class skills. This is so that no player gets a significant advantage over another based on what race he/she chose. The racial skills are there for flavor. Keeping this in mind, I am glad that it is weaker than the alternatives.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. On SBI, people succeed at this event all the time for the chest. Then, once it’s secured, they don’t defend it to rinse and repeat. There’s plenty of time before that happens, though, to buy your armor.

Resetting an instance while the players are inside it would result in a lot of lag for lower end systems (including disconnects), a lot of seemingly crazy teleporting (immersion-breaking), and a fair bit of time on ANet’s part to invest in the project. This is doable, and—if they added a loading screen to this process, which would be necessary to prevent hyper lag—so low priority that I’d rather they totally ignore this suggestion and work on other things.

Besides, most players need to leave after every explorable path to sell items anyway. If it reset automatically, they’d have to let it reset and then leave anyway to sell items, resulting in more load times/screens than before. The way it is works out.

They’re so high because everyone and their brother wants a Twilight. They also drop from Earth Elementals in Orr at extremely low levels; you can find them outside the Gates of Arah and in Malchor’s Leap in the bottom right area of the map.

I’ve tested this with CoF 1 → 2 → 1, and I suffer DR pretty reliably on the second playthrough of path 1. I’d be interested in hearing more about your test cases. There may be more to it than either of us thought, and it may have to do with the specific case of CoF being such a fast dungeon (I can perform the aforementioned test in a single hour, which may lead me to believe in a “no more than 2 paths in 1 hour” limit).

Also, I am in agreement about the 5th run in 2 hours DRing you; I think I mistyped this in my first post in this thread despite saying what you said in posts after that. Good catch.

I experience this bug while double-tapping to dodge roll as well as using a keybind. It only happens in the middle of an attack chain with my 1 skill, and—if this helps—only with my Necromancer’s Scepter it would seem. I appear to dodge roll in place animation-wise, but take full damage from enemy attacks and don’t move properly as I would during a successful dodge.

Check this dude’s site out!

It’s crazy to think about, but here’s how I roll in Orr:

I walk into Orr with a different mindset, because, guess what: You’re in the Elder Undead Dragon’s territory

It is a mine field of risen from the depths of the ocean. They all want to kill you, and there is nothing friendly about this area. Quite frankly, the fact that there are so many Pact outposts makes me think ANet was really worried about guys like some posting here who have trouble. They were watching out you for. I was expecting there to be nothing but swaths of undead and no friendlies for miles.

After getting used to it, I now run by basically everything, and if something pisses me off by CCing me when Stability is down or I get surrounded, I annihilate everything. I play a Necromancer, a Ranger, a Warrior, a Guardian, and most of the other classes, and do the same thing with all of them. I never die in Orr bar extreme situations like tanking Shades at Grenth with too few players or when the High Priest at the Gates of Arah decides I’m a good pincushion.

My verdict? I think this zone, for being an end-game zone, is a lot more forgiving than I was expecting, but still tough enough that I enjoy it. Waypoints are contested because people ignore the events to unlock them (or in many cases fail them), and honestly, most of the time enough waypoints are unlocked to still get where I need to go. I like these zones because they immerse me in a field of ruinous draconic corruption and make me feel like I am really in the hellhole of Tyria from a story-wise perspective. That said, as a player, I welcome the challenge, and thoroughly enjoy punching Risen in the face and having them give me T6 materials and other goodies. I want more zones like this, themed based on the appropriate dragons, for me to run around against impossible odds and win.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

There are new crafting recipes, but the components for those will come from the rewards gained by playing any holiday content.

There goes the price of every speculation item in the marketplace. GG! Love it! Thanks, Anthony!

Fair enough, guess I’ll wait for January / February for some tough-stuff. Thanks for the answer!

It still auto-levels you? They said they removed that at the tail end of the free trial in the patch notes.

Because it is end-game content.