Guild Wars 2

I periodically run a full GC Staff ele in zergs and it’s incredibly powerful and effective. Just be very, very, very, very careful to stay with the group and on the tag and not to be caught lingering behind even a little bit or an opportunistic Thief (or something else) will flatline you.

Thaddeus.4891:

Vol.7601:

Some common examples of noobs being noobs:
-There are several downed players nearby, along with numerous mobs nearby that die in seconds, and they don’t utilize the rally mechanics and instead hold ‘4’ for 30 seconds

I always found funny when I kill a mobs next to a downed pug and he’s mad because i didn’t rez him. USE THE FREAKING RALLY SYSTEM, it should be your first reflex when you down. It not funny at all, now that i think about it. sigh.

If I kill a squad of mobs solo and the downed player doesn’t rally from them, I just walk away. They can res themselves or get killed by something else at that point for all I care.

Suggest to your friends to get the game but not level their first character with crafting at all. Get out and experience the world. Enjoy the game for what it is. Don’t rush your first character.

If they want to convert $10 into ~50g, that’s great because now they can do that and get half of a set of fancy T3 armor for themselves if they want to. Back in the day you couldn’t even get 1/10th of that same armor set. Life’s pretty not bad for new players these days, really.

Lore-wise skimpier armor makes a lot of sense for Norn (both genders). They have higher body temperatures and get grossly overheated in massive amounts of clothing, even in freezing external temperatures. Males have greater surface area for cooling, so they can get away with slightly more armor, but females having lower surface area actually vastly prefer less clothing to keep themselves an appropriate temperature.

Anyway, there are plenty of options for both if you really want them. You don’t have to use cultural armor. Use what you like.

Wanze.8410:

Vystirch.3418:

Where is the information source for these new legendaries to come out? Can someone link it plz.

Its speculation.

ANet actually posted back last July that we would see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013, but later on in December noted that this had been flexed into 2014.

Vol.7601:

What if you can only do that every 8 hours? Because that’s how it works. It has an 8 hour cooldown.

That’s pretty rough, and far less useful in that case. I probably wouldn’t pay for it in that case. Maybe they’ll eventually have the option of a 2500 gems method that removes that cooldown.

Solo the spider in melee range. It’ll never even use the cocoon skill.

Nike.2631:

Porting directly to your buddy instead of walking for 20-150 seconds across a monumentally non-threatening bit of real estate from the nearest waypoint counts as winning now?

Seriously? That’s even more trivial an advantage than the infinite tools that’ll pay for themselves in 2.6 years of average play.

I guess I reserve the term ‘win’ for larger things.

Win or not, I’d pay 1250 gems to be able to teleport to any ally anywhere on any map instantly. And you can bet your britches everyone would complain about how unfair it was that I was paying for a service that is saving tons of travel time left and right.

Vol.7601:

Taras.4578:

400 a piece, that was a bit greedy of anets imo. Would loved to have seen a 600gem pack for both, nevertheless i bought both of em to show support to anet’s living story. Even tho it will just count to their more future sales of these kind of prices.

I know, it’s a shame that you can’t buy these with in-game gold

OH WA-

It’s a shame this doesn’t matter in the least when considering the blatant inconsistency of their pricing schemes, which inexorably leads to ‘overpriced’ / ‘underpriced’ discussions like these.

Bumping this because this desperately needs to be fixed. This is time-limited content and this absolutely has to be fixed with ample time for people to complete it before it goes away.

I don’t know what ANet’s plan is, but I am assuming that they are a little more sophisticated than that. A long time ago in order to keep supply for T6 balanced out slightly with demand, they increased the drop rates of many of the T6 from bags and other places. I believe that if they are going to introduce new legendaries that incorporate entire stacks of T6 still (there is a chance they may change the recipe or require different, new mats), they will simultaneously introduce new sources for those materials in order to keep T6 from reaching the 60s mark. They may still spike and you may still be able to make thousands of gold, but I genuinely don’t think they will rise and maintain those higher prices in the grand scheme of things.

I have always been a huge proponent of skill visibility and visual distinction in this game, and have always agreed that Necromancer marks should be more easily distinguished. I wouldn’t even call this a nerf; this is a visual distinction that should have been there from the start.

To the question posed in the title I answer:

Because berserker Guardians and Elementalists are better and more generally useful everywhere you’d ever consider using a berserker Warrior.

…and then ANet releases new legendaries that you like more than your current ones.

Destroy them if you don’t want to make the backpieces.

ANet doesn’t need to put up notifications. Server time is UTC – 0:00, and all resets are based around that time, which isn’t changing. The only confusion to be had is with players who don’t follow time conventions.

Shademehr.1397:

So just to make sure I understand correctly: Reset is currently 7pm Eastern (US). Once we “spring forward”, reset will be at 8pm, right?

Correct.

It’s nice that you’re an electrician, but you apparently have no idea how software development works. Bugs happen and are inevitable, and if you don’t get any, your software isn’t complex enough (and sure as the stars isn’t a video game).

Ghostextechnica.3270:

Gah you guys don’t understand at all.

If you give everyone gold or a item worth a lot of gold then inflation will happen (i.e. more people have gold to spend, so more stuff gets bought – all prices go UP). You don’t want that!

Actually, it appears you don’t understand. If you give everyone an item worth some number of gold, it actually does the opposite of inflation by removing gold from the economy in order for it to be sold on the trading post. Dropping for a player an exotic item, for instance, does not create more money in the game. Plus, given the nature of ectos, dark matter, and inscriptions to be had from exotic items, giving a guaranteed exotic item to each account that participates and wins the living story would barely affect the market at all. The only market that might be affected only a little is precursors, but we’ve seen what happens when they come into the market in great numbers and it always bounces back. Precursors get removed from the game very frequently.

While we’re at it, T2 and T3 charr heavy cultural armor uses the same icon set, and Volcanus doesn’t have a unique icon yet.

I want to emphasize that this bug also happens frequently with the Karka Queen. I imagine it’s very similar in origin. Maybe that will help a developer find a solution.

We are still recruiting and still going strong fighting Scarlet and all sorts of other related things. Guild missions this week went really well as usual, and otherwise things are moving along per the norm. If you’re interested in the guild don’t hesitate to let one of the officers listed in the OP know!

I’m pretty disappointed with the number of questions left hanging. The motion of how the steam creatures played into her schemes, the motivations themselves, what the deal is with her and Caithe, whether she was actually trying to awaken Mordremoth or defeat it, what the actual purpose of the Marionette was, what she wanted to do with the leylines, what her connection is with the dragon, what she actually saw in her viewing of the ‘eternal alchemy’ and so forth.

I’m also pretty annoyed by how anticlimactic the entire ending was, but yeah.

I got a blue sentinel’s item. waves a tiny flag

I had this real smooth run on my Engineer where I used Rocket Boots, landed right next to her, and Elixir-S stomped her before she even finished speaking her first after-cinematic line. It was pretty satisfying.

Every time I get one of these one-time chests I hope it’s half as good as the Ancient Karka chest was. It never is. I genuinely don’t think one random guaranteed exotic item is too much to ask for or unreasonable by any stretch.

Funnily enough, in my overflows the southern one always succeeds and the northern one fails. As I understand it, though, there are three, and people get added to them in a poker card dealout fashion (one gets added to all three before a second is added to any, etc).

The goal, presumably, is to keep 150 people from piling on top of one hologram.

Zaoda.1653:

I’m asking for a queue to get into the main/more populated EOTM instances rather than always getting dumped into a completely empty EOTM overflow.

These empty overflows are exactly what I love. Come in, find empty overflow, ferry guildies in, train everything.

All of the things that make the most gold will no longer make the most gold if people tell others about them. Learn to find these niche markets yourself and you’ll go far.

I think it’s a lot of talk for a very simple problem. When you’re dealing with a mapwide event, individual contributions matter little unless they are specifically made to matter a lot. In recent events, they are not made to matter a lot, so there is little encouragement for people to be ambitious.

I agree that these achievements are poorly designed, but someone achievement hunting (and potentially afking a little to do it) is no less or more valid a way to play the game than your approach. The proper solution isn’t to blame the players who are just trying to get achievements and things, it’s to blame the design and bark up ANet’s tree to get it improved. Consider the following achievement idea for Escape from Lion’s Arch that would’ve completely changed the number of people contributing to saving civilians:

Rally 1/25/100/500/1000 civilians
Rewards:
AP: 1/5/10/20/40 Total
Item: Ultimate Citizen’s Rescue Bag
Title: Civilian Savior

Just having an achievement like that would’ve encouraged a lot of contribution from players to get civilians. Similarly for the hologram, achievements shouldn’t be based on avoidance, they should be based on engaging. How about the following achievement to encourage players to participate:

Skip the six-split holograms phase by killing all three colored holograms at once
Rewards:
AP 10

Now you’d get people contributing to try to get that to happen, and players would be encouraged to improve in their understanding and contributions to the fight as opposed to afking it. Want to alienate afking even further? Make it so each phase is it’s own event, and that if you attack in phase 1 and afk you’d miss participation credit for phase 2 and 3. Suddenly people will participate!

The real problem is with the design, not with the players. Players are predictable and easily guided. The reason Marionette was such a success and drove a lot of players to participate is that it had achievements that encouraged them to do well in the fight and to know the mechanics… Not considering the power core grind, anyway.

phys.7689:

removal of random in fractals, is really not a good idea, lets be honest, 90% of people want to remove random in order to make their runs easier/predictable, that doesnt make for a non grindy/replayable dungeon, just a faster way to get rewards.

It really is, though, because it means your runs are predictable. If they normalize the time for each tier, like they should (and like Anthony Orden was assuming in his last couple posts), then there could be alternate means to encourage players to play different fractals. Maybe certain ones reward certain lodestone types, maybe there are specific items acquired in each fractal that you need some number of for Fractal Armor in the future, or something along those lines. They should encourage diversity in playing through rewards, but shouldn’t force it up front. Removing that randomness is key to fractals both being more accessible to hardcore players and casual players on a time crunch.

Wethospu.6437:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Yes, it would, because the instability-stacking would only apply across a tier. That said, it requires a higher level of AR immediately to go to 40, which would force players without enough AR to be doing 30-39 until they’re ready to move up. I think this way works even if 40 is technically ‘easier’ than 39 because you can create unique experiences within each tier, and I think 30 instabilities stacking would be pretty chaotic and silly. You then could have unique and interesting speed clear runs for L39, L49, and so forth because each would be a different experience. What do you think about that?

I don’t really like the idea of making gear gating even more prevalent. If you have enough gold to craft gear you can just keep doing easy levels over and over while someone has to do all the challenging stuff. Not really my definition of skill based content.

Sure, the levels would be interesting but would anyone really want to run them instead of L40 or L50?

You might if the leaderboard played into it. You might also if each tier rewarded something meaningful that you couldn’t get in the higher tier. I don’t think it is reasonable to stack instabilities up into the 30’s of instabilities around L50 or whatever. Rewards could also be, in general, staggered to reward playing L39 instead of L40 and L49 instead of L50 so that maybe L44 and L39 have the same reward chances, but L40 is lower than L39. There are options here for that, but I think it ultimately comes down to an improved reward scheme being developed in tandem with removal of randomness.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Fractals are not competitive yet, however.

This is something else I want to chime in on. If we remove randomness and enable players to choose the next fractal, then competition and our long-promised leaderboards could be a reality. The LBs could be for specific fractal combinations at specific difficulties, with the fastest team showing up at the top. This would also play well into the stacking across a tier instability suggestion I made, because players would choose tougher tiers and higher levels for greater prestige.

Wethospu.6437:

Would this mean that L40 would be easier than L33-L39? Stacking instabilities on top of each other quickly gets out of control.

Yes, it would, because the instability-stacking would only apply across a tier. That said, it requires a higher level of AR immediately to go to 40, which would force players without enough AR to be doing 30-39 until they’re ready to move up. I think this way works even if 40 is technically ‘easier’ than 39 because you can create unique experiences within each tier, and I think 30 instabilities stacking would be pretty chaotic and silly. You then could have unique and interesting speed clear runs for L39, L49, and so forth because each would be a different experience. What do you think about that?

My issue is that this painstakingly reminds me of all of the skill-requiring content in GW1 that just doesn’t exist in GW2. Everything is achieved through zerg-smash, and nothing distinguishes specific players for being particularly skilled.

The weapons are fine and their release is fine, this just reminds me of all the things GW2 doesn’t have that makes it far less interesting a game to me than it could be. I really hope they get the ball moving on making some actually difficult content.

Alma.2496:

So my question is, will Marjory daggers / axe skins and Kasmeer Staff / Grenth Hood being added in this sale ?

None of us know and ANet won’t tell you. You’ll just have to wait and see.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

It’s no surprise that the “add more mechanics” idea comes up a lot for difficulty scaling. Not only does it sound really great, it was also the original plan. Unfortunately it’s just about the heaviest approach we could take because it implies that every boss in the fractal needs to be updated and rebalanced for every tier that we add. Assuming 2 bosses per Fractal (and we never added new Fractals), every time we add a tier of difficulty we have to do this 30 times. I’m not saying we can’t do it; I’m saying it would be slow. Much slower than say, adding one or two new Fractals per tier with entirely new content.

What I actually don’t like about that approach is that it has a lot of filler progression. Hypothetical levels 51-60 would effectively all be the same. We thought the advantage of assigning an MI to every level was that it literally made every level unique and also avoids the re-rolling problem that fractal selection has.

What about the notion of a growing mistlock instability list within a tier, like I suggested above? In this way you could create uniqueness to tiers, and also use it to create difficulty. You might only ever add new creatures if one of the mistlocks was specifically about that… For instance if the entire theme of 30-39 was that Mossman stalked you the whole time. That’d give it a unique feel while simultaneously removing the silliness of people just using the easiest mistlock to rise their personal reward level and raising the difficulty as you moved up in the tiers.

So, for example:

• L30: Agonizing Expedition – Take agony damage periodically
• L31: Mist Stalker – Mossman stalks you. (L30’s Mistlock also applies)
• L32: Outflanked – Enemies do more damage when attacking you from behind or the sides (L30 and L31 still apply, meaning Mossman could sneak attack you for big damage, etc)

And so forth for the entire tier. This creates the theme that the 30-39 tier is all about being stalked and trying to keep your wits about you to unseen threats. Maybe at one point you could in that area have a Mistlock where mobs will periodically stealth themselves to add to that feel, and so forth.

This should also help reduce the burden on you guys, right?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

First, I want to stir the pot on Instabilities. (…) I’d like to know what you think. Is this a good system? Does it add to the Fractal experience? Would you rather have 30 new Instabilities or 1 new Fractal? Which ones do you like/dislike? From reading the feedback, I’ve already been gathering some assumptions:

Firstly, let me say that I love your directness in how your post is worded. This is a phenomenal precedent for player-interaction from developers. Thank you.

Secondly, about instabilities, I feel that they are largely ignorable in their current implementation. I reached PL50 without ever experiencing 18 of the instabilities. I just repeatedly did L40 and L49 to get up to PL50. With this implementation, I feel that they are largely lackluster because they can be ignored.

Way to improve this:

• Use instabilities as a means of increasing difficulty by adding growing mechanics

Start a tier at L30 with instability X, and then L31 would have instability X still as well as something else. In this way, newer levels are actually harder than earlier levels, as opposed to how it is now. For instance, right now L49 is easier than a lot of the earlier instabilities, and L50 is actually the easiest if you have enough AR. I feel that if the instabilities actually included earlier instabilities within a tier, you could create a system where each level really feels tougher than the last and each level actually prepares you for the next by introducing the new mechanic you’ll feel for the entire rest of the tier.

As for your assumptions, I feel that they are very correct. DPS reduction is awful, combat adjustments are mildly interesting, and environmental or creature additions are very exciting. Also I absolutely agree with your idea about builds; far better to enable new builds than to disable others. Ways to encourage condition damage, for instance, would be amazing.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Next is the difficulty/progression question. (…) what else would add meaning to progressing through higher level Fractals? How does that align with your goals, whatever they may be (rewards, defeating hard content, discovery, etc).

I think if you approached instabilities like I suggested above as a growing challenge that accumulates over a tier you could create a really difficult (and predictable) challenge that would force players to actually play in a unique way to overcome obstacles.

As a general rule of thumb, making mobs more durable doesn’t increase difficulty, it just increases the time it takes to plow through them. I would rather mobs with more difficult mechanics that die quicker than what we currently get with scaling. For instance, permanent Protection on Dredge only drags the fight on, it really doesn’t encourage interesting play. Mobs with interesting mechanics like the new mobs for the Living Story (for instance) would be much more fun to fight against and a lot more actually challenging. You could then add new mechanics (or new mob types) at higher tiers to increase difficulty further.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Finally I have sort of a meta-question which is: what place, if any, does random have in the Fractals? (…) Imagine if we completely strip random out everything possible and conjure a system where you complete specific sets of combinations of fractal/instability/difficulty to build specific items. Does that entice you or sound like a big grind?

Randomness in general is bad for the following reasons:

• It makes it less predictable, which makes speed running hardcore players unable to really quantify and compete with each other for best time
• It makes the time that each run takes variable, which alienates casual players who only have so much time to play

I think a much better approach to fractals would be to enable players to choose the next fractal in every case, but to give each fractal unique rewards (unique cores/lodestones, for example) and possibly unique rewards for crafting Fractal weapon / armor skins. Like, for instance, each of eight fractals gives a specific type of trophy that must be combined in high quantities in the Mystic Forge to then craft ascended armor pieces. That would be an exciting fractal reward scheme, and even if a little grindy, it’d be for horizontal progression in the form of special skins, which is exactly what the end-game should be about. This would encourage people to play different combinations, enables hardcore players to time more easily and compete in Fractals, and enables casuals to have an expected time to completion enabling them to play more. It’s win across the board to get rid of randomness.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I can’t find it now but there was a post talking about secondary objectives and rewards for completion of said objectives.

We do this with the Grawl Shaman and I would like to see more of this in the fractals.

I absolutely agree with this. Stretch goals are great in content, and getting a little bit of an extra reward for it is very motivating of players to push themselves. The way it’s done in the Grawl fractal is nice. I think similar things could be employed in the Cliffside fractal and elsewhere as well.

I love these weapon skins. That said, it disappoints me that what I would consider the most attractive weapon set in game from GW1 has absolutely zero prestige associated with it in GW2. I mean, sure, you could buy the stuff to get them in GW1, but because the items that gave you these items only originated in one of the hardest instances in-game, the cost was huge. These will be locked to the ticket value of a BL ticket, which essentially makes them… worthless. No prestige, just some minor monetary cost, and that’s it.

I would gladly pay a monthly subscription, honestly, if it meant we could get real content with real rewards again. That said, hooray to ANet for making money.

I’m on SBI and we haven’t been doing so hot, so when I noticed we held such a huge percent of everything I was baffled. Then I realized that the max keeps only adds up to 9, and 3 of Maguuma’s keeps weren’t being counted for PPT. This is a major scorekeeping bug and needs to be resolved ASAP. Check out the attached screenshot, which clearly shows at least one Maguuma keep and the big “0” under their keep count on the scoreboard.

I use this with the meta build and just throw on my Shield, grab Endure Pain, and swap in Defiant Stance and Shake It Off for Immob. That gets me across no trouble.

Yeah he got tagged by Lupi twice which put him under the 90%. I think a flawless run in his case could easily go sub-2 minutes. Really, really impressive either way, though!

Just because ANet announced that glory would go away doesn’t mean they can fairly just screw people over who have these boosters. ANet is still rewarding these boosters today in achievement chests and reward chests. Because they keep rewarding them and consequently taking away valuable spots from other boosters we could get (or other items in general), they absolutely must do more than simply get rid of them.

I fully support the idea of these boosters becoming a consumable worth a lesser amount of Glory, such as 250 glory.

I just wanted to chime in about a common misconception: Diamond Skin does not promote passive play.

It is, on the contrary, quite active. You actively have to make it a point to try to stay above the 90% threshold, and your opponent actively tries to whittle you out of that 90% threshold to again be able to apply conditions. This is nothing like Healing Signet, which does promote passive play, whereby Healing Signet simply does the same thing regardless and has no play or counterplay at all (at the moment). Diamond Skin invokes a lot of play and counterplay, and although it’s rudimentary in the form of “stay above a certain amount of life”, it’s still very much active.

That’s all. Carry on.

Reconnect was the single best thing ever implemented in GW1, and if it came back in GW2, there would be much rejoicing.

Here’s my hope:

• New legendaries
• Precursor crafting
• Commander Tag improvements
• LFG Merge Bug fixed
• Guild QOL updates (last logged in, please)
• Fractal QOL updates (dredge fixed)
• Minipet inventory slot
• Easier to use halo/horns/rep button/etc slot or something
• Charr armor not clipping / looking better (hey, a guy can dream)

It works, but does not show up in the hero panel. This was confirmed ages ago by a developer, but I don’t have the patience to find the source at this moment.

Da Sonic.6521:

Go into a PvE zone anywhere, target an enemy, and walk in and out of range. When you’re out of range, the skill icon will have a red bar underneath it. If that is the case, you will whiff the application and it will go on full cooldown.

Use the red bar. Never whiff again.

Is that really what the red bar is for? Wow. I had noticed it, but could never tell what it meant. This is great information! Does this also apply for obstructed LoS?

Yup, absolutely do what Vol suggests.

They’ll probably give us the 9th on the preview page for the final LS. That or we get it somehow in-game and put it in and find out supah’ sekrit spoilah’.