Guild Wars 2

That thread does not include the discontinuities as specifically called out. That seems to just be discussing the chapter breakup itself, and issues related to the chapters. Thanks for your post, though.

Ever since the revamp of the order of the personal story missions, there are numerous glaring lore discontinuity issues that have arisen. These are pretty serious issues, and will cause lots of newcomers a lot of lore confusion when encountered.

• I just finished Ships of the Line in Chapter 8, and Trahearne told me to meet him in Azabe Qabar to cleanse Orr…. Except I did that four or five story steps earlier in Chapter 7.

• In Chapter 7 you meet Sayeh, the Largos, after cleansing Orr… But then Trahearne introduces you to her for the first time (and your character acts like they’ve never met) in the beginning of Chapter 8.

• In Chapter 7 you fight and kill the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan… But then in Chapter 8 you “encounter an Eye of Zhaitan for the first time” and your character and Trahearne both act like it’s a new enemy in the Temple of the Forgotten God.

These are just the most glaring issues I found. I realize that the missions were reorganized so that there was some consistency in structure between the chapters, but this reorganization was done without consideration for lore consistency, and it pains me to see it in action.

Please, treat your lore with some respect and fix these issues! Thanks.

Wow. I’m glad I unlocked those skins all months ago! I’ll take this opportunity to cash out all of the large skulls I’ve hoarded over the months, though.

That this got done at all was Hrouda’s doing considering how low priority it was, so I am at least thankful for that! In loving memory… :<

I have about half of the dungeons fully unlocked from pure PvE. I just have to finish out CM, HotW, and a couple others and I’ll have it. Fortunately for me I’ve always been obsessed with skins, so I never spent my tokens on ectos or insignias or whatever.

What kittenes me off is how few AP it’s all worth. This is arguably more effort than collecting every Ascended armor skin, and is worth far fewer points!

For a 30-deep trait, there is no reason this should be changed. I mean, consider that picking up and repeatedly dropping your banner renders you completely rooted and utterly useless. The Warrior is literally doing nothing at that point. If they want to do that to clear condis that are being reapplied instantly, fine by me.

These things should seriously be 25 uses for $7.50. I would buy them then. The functionality here is just so bloody useful, but I cannot bring myself to spend dollars on something so grossly overpriced for what you get out of it.

VZ is always looking for new people interested in making friends! We’re still (as always) a rather small group, but we’re all very close friends, and so it goes a long way to have other pals to hang out with! We do all guild missions, Tequatl nightly, Wurm a few times a week, and so forth (all with friends!). If any of these things sound good, then please hit us up! We’d be happy to talk with you about the guild.

An Obsidian Shard is 2100 karma at the Temple of Balthazar, so if it’s indeed 3 shards for 5000 karma, that’s a good deal.

Confirming. I experience the same issue.

The item also has a level requirement of 15 now, which is undocumented and unacceptable for use with new alts.

They were separate items. You can no longer unlock it if you did not hold onto it.

They’re looking into it. You can’t rush programming, or else you break everything else and then everyone will complain more. If the issue were as simple as a few lines of code, the fix would be out already. Obviously the issue isn’t that simple, so we need to be patient while they work it. There’s nothing else to be done, and getting riled up over it isn’t doing anyone any favors.

Open a support ticket and demand a refund. If it’s a bug, they’ll tell you so and are now aware of it and will work to fix it. If it’s intended, you get your gems back. Everyone’s happy.

The sound effects are the reason I own a salvage-o-matic (or three). This and the fact that it needs to work at all levels, and not have a level 15 requirement. Please fix these ASAP ANet.

• Even if it were +100% damage instead of +50%, it would still be weaker than a full charge Eviscerate
• This skill currently does not benefit from Slashing Power, which is supposed to buff Greatsword damage by 10%

Currently, the under 50% damage is comparable to the GS #5 skill, rush, which is pretty lackluster considering what you have to give up to use it (adrenal health, berserker’s power, etc). Furthermore, unlike Eviscerate, Arcing Slice doesn’t ‘chase’ a target, making it easier to miss if the enemy side steps appropriately without even necessitating a dodge. Lastly, this skill has a very shallow AOE, making it easy to whiff. On a big Charr or Norn warrior, the AOE is actually much smaller than the animation, which can be confusing.

All of these things come together to create a burst skill that won’t be used by good players. The point of a burst skill is to encourage its use, otherwise it has no purpose for existing. I think it needs a further buff.

Lastly, Warrior already has plenty of Fury. I’d sacrifice the Fury on this skill for further damage or a number of Vulnerability stacks. That would help incentivize the use of this skill a lot.

You might’ve been in WvW when you attempted to activate it. I had the exact same issue, then I left WvW and I could use it.

150 ferocity would indeed be better than condition damage, but I also think it’s less in theme with the Necromancer and way too strong for a minor trait that you get on the side. It would have to be a master major trait at the least.

Open a support ticket and demand a refund for the changed functionality of the item. They’ll oblige or inform you that this was a bug that they’re going to fix, but either way you’ll win.

Also, I’ve found that the up/down arrows on the gold values to be very very difficult to click on max resolution. I think they should either be easier to interact with or, ideally, made bigger.

The most important missing feature that needs to be added back is “Match My Lowest Listing”. Losing that is a huge loss of functionality. The key piece of information we’re losing here is the ability to be able to list things where we already had them (convenience) and the ability to not undercut ourselves (since we don’t readily know now). Pretty much everything else about the new TP I love.

Oh, and it’s really annoying typing “I am Evon Gnashblade” to enable/disable that mode. It needs to be more convenient, maybe as a filtering option?

Arcing Slice, the burst skill for the Warrior Greatsword, doesn’t benefit from Slashing Power, a trait that boosts Greatsword damage by 10%. This is obviously a bug and should be fixed.

Definitely a heavy class so we have 3/3/3. I think that’s just ideal. The rest of the details I don’t care much for, but I think something that has shapeshifting powers would be really, really cool.

I think Foot in the Grave as we have it now is weak. The problem is that they won’t buff it because with sufficient boon duration and when coupled with Near to Death you can maintain the highest percent uptime of stability of any class in-game… The problem is that you cripple the rest of your build and you basically do nothing for your team. I think turning it into a stunbreak is more along the lines of what people want to use it for, requires more play/counterplay (you can now save DS for a reactive stunbreak, or use it for the skills early). I thought about not giving it an ICD at all, but I figured a 7s CD stunbreak was a bit much, considering they could also be packing Plague Signet, Spectral Walk, or Spectral Armor.

storiessave.3807:

The extra blast finishers on marks might sound nice, but they’re wholly unreliable since you have to hit something for them to actually blast – but they’d have to re-design the way marks work for those to actually be viable. Plus, they’d probably increase the CD on marks to compensate for so many blast finishers on one weapon, which would be a pretty large nerf for something we can’t reliably use. They do need to give us an on-demand blast finisher or two somewhere, though.

That was exactly why I did it! Having four blast finishers on the staff (not to mention the blast finishers in Lich Form) would be pretty insane if they could be proc’d out of combat. However, having them in-combat is a sort of balancer, and keeps them fair without making them OP. I also think them not having to change the way Marks work is better because it requires less effort on Anet’s part.

Now the name of the pub guild I ran for the previous dungeon tournament has taken an ironic turn! No FGS indeed!

John Smith didn’t decide to leak information to the previewers. He consulted the person who did it and told them what would happen if they did it, and they did it anyway.

Just some ideas I’ve been refining and spitballing. I’ve bounced some previous iterations around before, but I’ve refined them a bit and am posting them again. Feel free to comment, or not, but these are mostly here for the hidden developers that say they read our forum.

Siphoned Power

• Remove old functionality
• Gain 3 stacks of might for 10 seconds when you enter Death Shroud.

Unholy Sanctuary

• Remove old functionality
• Gain regeneration for 5 seconds when you enter Death Shroud. You can be healed by any source while in Death Shroud

Ritual of Protection

• Applies 1 second of protection on pulse, not only when the well is created.

Spiteful Marks

• Remove old functionality
• Remove the blast finisher on Putrid Mark
• This trait now makes all marks blast finishers.

Soul Marks

• Replace this trait with one called “Soul Strength”
• Increases condition damage of nearby allies (+150)

Strength of Undeath

• Now gives +10% damage instead of +5% damage

Foot in the Grave

• Remove old functionality
• Breaks stun when you enter Death Shroud
• 14 second ICD (only starts when a stun is actually broken)

Unholy Martyr

• Remove old functionality
• Pull 1 condition from all nearby allies to yourself when you enter Death Shroud, gaining 325 (0.2) life for each condition pulled in this way.
• Triggers before Shrouded Removal

Renewing Blast

• Remove old functionality
• Gain quickness for 2 seconds when you successfully strike with Life Blast or Plague Blast.

Some skill changes too that I think would be really neat:

Well of Blood

• Now a Water field instead of a Light field
• Affects Wells of Blood created by Ritual of Life

Well of Darkness

• Now a Smoke field instead of a Dark field

Signet of Vampirism

• Remove old functionality
• Passive: Siphon 60 (0.05) life when you attack
• Active: Heal yourself 3,960 (0.5) life and mark a target with 25 stacks of Mark of Vampirism. When an ally strikes the target while it has a stack of Mark of Vampirism, that ally siphons 392 (0.2) life from it and removes a stack.
• 25 second cooldown still

That’s partially true, but look at how quickly Rune of Strength and Hoelbrak became valuable commodities once they become genuinely useful. People have multiple sets of armor, and are willing to buy more (since exotic gear is cheap) to have more options in build-heavy environments like WvW or even PvE. Once a build becomes “meta” in any sense, the price will stabilize at a higher point, raising the relative value of those runes as new players or new characters go to join the meta. Having more build options that were actually viable would definitely cause more runes to retain actual value.

Yes, the skilled player is the smallest minority of the population, and thus cannot be catered to in order to maintain a healthy game population. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is.

You’ll get a lot of teams entering closer to the deadline I imagine… It’s really hard to know schedules ahead of time for a lot of potential entrants.

As for me personally, it’s unfortunately the busiest time of the year for me at work, so I’m fighting to make sure I will have the time to practice anything and therefore show up. Good luck to all regardless.

I think it’s totally asinine that instead of making runes better to increase their relative value, they’re using runes outside of the context of combat entirely just to boost their value somehow.

I think there has been one major thing omitted from the discussion in this thread.

Precursors for weapon types that players use in great abundance (re: Greatswords, Swords, Staves, etc.) being expensive is only a problem because there is no other guaranteed way to get them. People like making progress towards a fixed goal, and being able to do that also creates a sense of accomplishment as you move along towards that goal. A fluctuating market with prices that constantly change makes that much more frustrating to players. It gets even more frustrating when someone RNGs that one precursor you need (and then brags about it) and yet you never get that lucky. This is a very frustrating and angering experience for players, and it has nothing to do with entitlement, it has everything to do with feeling as if the game was designed in a way to make an item that is designed as the primary end-game cosmetic goal of the game unobtainable to the unlucky and unskilled at economics.

The comparison to Rodgort, the underwater weapons, and so forth would make more sense if they all fulfilled the same functional use. That’s not the case, however, as a Torch is a much less useful item on average than a Greatsword or a Sword or a Staff. So not only is the demand driven by wanting to make a legendary, it’s also driven by wanting to make a useful legendary.

You’re right about the solution not being about drop rates, though. The solution also isn’t about educating players, either. Rodgort is never a suitable alternative to Sunrise because they carry different weapon skills. You can’t use Rodgort as a Greatsword. The solution is to create a standardized system by which any player can create any precursor for roughly the same fixed price. Maybe that means Rage and Venom are cheaper to buy than craft (no one going for those legendaries will complain), but having a more fixed upper limit will keep players able to constantly make progress without feeling like they have to fight a rising tide in the case of Dusk, Dawn, Zap, and so forth. It doesn’t even matter if that “rough fixed upper limit” is upwards of 1000g. Having that process there will on its own ameliorate almost every random player’s complaints. Now they’re not necessarily fighting RNG at the mystic toilet or having to feel frustrated that they’re throwing gold at luckier players; now they can just make progress at their own pace and be happy with their daily progress.

That is why precursor crafting, if it even involves crafting at all, is such a lynchpin to the legendary ‘problem’.

The only way hard mode would work is for dungeons/fractals, and possibly for personal/living story.

I agree with latte. I also suggest not spamming in map chat, as that recruits the lowest common denominator. I’d recommend creating a thread for your guild here in this forum and then periodically bumping it and having your members bump it. Latte’s suggestions for meeting new people in WvW is great for the specific type of guild you’re leading.

I’m still really looking for someone to help out with this! If you have this set and are willing to suffer my eccentric sense of humor for half an hour and help me out here, I would appreciate it a great deal!

Standard, sure, but it’s still hideous, hard to navigate, and annoying enough to the point that I just don’t care enough to try. :P

Unfortunately I have a personal rule against other external sites to the official forums, so you won’t see me stalking your threads. That said, I hope you’ll still post contests here as well. Good luck on the site!

Hey all!

We’re all very excited about the feature patch, and are constantly doing our Tequatl runs and Wurm runs (with friends) and other stuff. Guild missions are still twice a week (Tuesday/Wednesday), and we’re always looking for new friends! I hope we see some more interest from newer and veteran players in the coming days.

Cheers!

Hi!

So I have done this with random strangers before for sets 1 and 2, and both times made good friends out of the process. I am an 18k AP player who has played since the open beta, and am an avid dungeon player, Tequatl leader, guild leader, and so forth. I’m willing to do pretty much anything in-game as far as activities go to play with the person who is doing this for me, not as a payment, but more as an “I want to make friends” sort of thing. Both of the people I’ve done sets 1 and 2 with have become close friends, and I think that sort of a friendship has carried more value than whatever gold cost might have been associated with “renting” the minis.

Anyway, basically what I’m asking for is the ability to borrow all of the set 3 minis to get the achievement, and then I will send them back. I don’t want to get banned for scamming because I’ve spent far too much time on my account, and hopefully my reputation precedes me elsewhere with good behavior on the forums and stuff. Anyway, if you could possibly help me get this achievement before the feature patch, that would be amazing!

Thanks for reading if nothing else.

As nice a QOL change as it is to minis, the fact that minis get destroyed to unlock them, considering their already considerable value, is terrible. Countless minis will be absolutely unattainable by new players as a result of this change.

I like it, but I hate one very big thing:

I hate that to unlock a mini, you have to destroy that minipet.

This has huge ramifications on the exclusivity of minipets. It means that in order to unlock a mini, you have to completely remove it from the game. This will cause all mini markets to run short on supply and eventually spike to ridiculous prices. Some minis will become more valuable than precursors as a result of this, as they were already valued at hundreds of gold BEFORE they were being destroyed and removed from the market.

I believe minipets should be treated more like an item that goes in a slot, NOT a skin that you unlock and remove from the world. A minipet slot is a great idea because you buy the mini, and can then equip it, and it does all of the cool things it would do with unlocking except that if you ever tired of that minipet, you could then deposit it and pick out another one (or sell it if you really tired of it). This made minis more available and an item that more players could enjoy. By making them unlocked, you will damage supply of minipets irresponsibly and ultimately make them less available to new players who might really think a Skritt Bottle Lobber is cute, but can’t afford the future price tag of the item because of the supply being eaten up more than it is already via forging.

In this regard, I implore ANet to reconsider the way they’re implementing these changes. Once they go live in this form, they will seriously hurt minipets’ accessibility.

Thanks for the changes otherwise.

We’re all really excited for the feature patch and the recommencement of the living world in the fall! We’re still playing regularly, doing Tequatl every night (I lead Saturdays), and other world bosses and such. If you’re interested in a tight-knit community of friends, please let one of the officers know and we’ll chat it up to see how well you might fit!

Ryan Diederich.8179:

Harny.6012:

Hello Ryan,
thanks for this information.

Any tips on how to get name of those trolls that kick you from your own instance quickly?
There usually isn’t time to write anything down or to make any screenshots.

Thanks in advance!

There appears to be some nice debug messages for party join/leave that I’m going to see if I can turn into “LFG Messages” in the chat log which should make this easier…

Upvote for awesome suggestion and something I genuinely hope for. Please try to get this into the feature patch if at all possible!

Element Two.7316:

Unfortunately A-net has no idea if somebody is actually exploiting or not :|

http://i.imgur.com/tcacZ5W.jpg

Yes, absolutely report this behavior to support. If they ignore it, talk to Gaile and she will escalate it. An ANet developer kicking you from the game for exploiting when they are in the wrong is unacceptable employee behavior.

Michael Henninger.7451:

We’ve only recently started using visible and active GMs in the game. Prior to say – 2 months ago? – you wouldn’t have seen a GM.

This is absolutely awesome news. I hope to interact with and see you guys around!!

So I had a few ideas about what I would do to make Necromancer’s more versatile and useful in a few different areas of the game without doing, what I consider, too much to make them too strong.

• Change Well of Darkness to be a Smoke Field
  This enables Necros to function as stealth contributors for a team that has lots of blasts, which has niche value in PvP, some neat WvW roaming value but no zerg value, and a good bit of PvE value.

• Decrease the cast time on Life Siphon by 33%
  Sounds like a lot, but it would help the DPS of this ability a lot as well as its general usability. In PvP/WvW, you can get behind the Necromancer to break the channel, but in PvE this would become an actual useful targeted ability for a quick heal / damage as needed.

• Make Siphoned Power give 3 stacks of Might for 10 seconds on entering DS
  This trait is so bloody bad in its current form that it amazes me that it still exists. It should be something interacting with entering into DS, much like Furious Demise. Honestly, there are a number of useful things this trait could be turned into, but what matters is that it changes.

• Make Ritual of Protection apply protection for 1 second on pulse, not when cast
  Right now this trait is not awful, but not very great either. Having it apply protection on pulse instead of on cast encourages better play (meaning you have to stay inside of it) and encourages better counterplay (enemies can AOE the well and force you out, losing your boon). This, more importantly, would really help utility roles in PvE where you stack up on bosses, so you could layer multiple wells for high protection uptime (similar to Guardian Hammer symbols).

• Enable Necromancers to be healed in DS
  This is pretty big, but the way DS is right now is bad for gameplay. The reason for that is that while in DS, the Necromancer cannot be healed by allies who use supportive heals (Healing Breeze, blasting water fields, etc), reducing the play involved in that. I would be willing to suffer a 25% reduction in the maximum DS allowed if it meant being able to be healed in DS.

• Change Unholy Sanctuary to apply protection (2s) to you when entering DS and share boons applied to you when entering DS to nearby allies as well
  So you know my suggestion to Siphoned Power above to give 3 might (and this ability giving Protection)? Furious Demise giving Fury? Foot in the Grave giving Stability? Well, with those existing and this change to Unholy Sanctuary, you would apply those boons not only to yourself, but also to your team. This would enable Necromancers who can stay next to allies to provide critical boons, encouraging strong play in PvP/WvW, and helping PvE a lot (aoe might/fury! Hallelujah!).

• Remove the blast finisher on Putrid Mark
• Change Spiteful Marks to make all Marks blast finishers
  Spiteful marks is bad right now. 10% of basically no damage is senseless. This would enable the staff to be a heavy in-combat blast finisher weapon, which is great for continuing might stacks in PvE, and for making this trait useful in general. By doing this, Putrid Mark shouldn’t get its current blast finisher. Chillblains would also keep its poison field, but it would apply the poison field before the finisher (this way if another field was already down, that gets blasted, but with no field at all, poison gets blasted). This also makes Staff a more interesting weapon to play, which is really nice.

• Make Well of Blood a water field instead of a light field
  This would actually encourage people to use this heal skill in the face of the monster-good heal skill that is Consume Conditions, and enables a bit of team support with water field blasting.

• Replace a Master trait somewhere with the spotter-equivalent for condition damage
  “Increases Condition Damage of nearby allies” (+150). It functions just like Spotter or EA, but with condition damage. This level of team support would be very awesome for a plethora of game modes, and is the type of support Necromancers really need.

I’m sure there are more ideas to be had, but I figured I would post what I would consider “sufficient” for Necromancer to be a serious contender in PvE and a lot more fun in PvP/WvW without being too strong. Feel free to post your own ideas!

moi.4398:

No more faceroll with FGS , bad day huh ?

Nah, it’s a great day. It’s good that FGS will no longer be the powerhouse it was. However, it is a knee-jerk reaction for ANet to completely remove it as a viable elite skill in its entirety.

nearlight.3064:

Ele will still have the highest DPS and burst in the game so I see nothing but a healthy change. Plus ice bow will still be a thing.

Ele will still have the highest DPS in the game, but that isn’t a reason to make an elite skill not worth using. It’s the same reason why Healing Signet on the Warrior wasn’t nerfed into oblivion, but nerfed just a bit.

It sounds like a complete 180 degree shift from what was said in all interviews at GamesCom. Either this page is wrong or they changed their minds in response to player feedback (I am hopeful for this one).

I support this endeavor.

Just follow these two simple rules of mine and you, too, will avoid all issues here:

• Never buy anything from the gem store that isn’t on sale
• Always have gems ready

Now, ANet, how about putting Zodiac armor on sale, eh?