Guild Wars 2

I’m planning on buying two the next time that 25% sale rolls around. So frustrated I missed the first one, argh!

We’ll find out in 8 days. They won’t tell us ahead of time.

I agree with this. All of the imperators should have unique models so that they can’t be replicated as random NPCs like this.

I also just want to say this:

I love achievements and hunting AP in general, but I hate grinding dailies/monthlies for AP. Those feel like a grind. ANet really needs to put some effort into adding a lot of new, permanent achievements that take a significant amount of skill and reward a significant amount of AP. Something like SAB TM in terms of rewards, but that sticks around and can be done whenever.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

With all due respect mate, the AP armor set could be seen as a long term, end game goal. Much like people who got their 50/50 HoM achievement, this goal will take time. There’s no way to quickly farm AP since they nerfed the salvage achievement with a cap. So if you see someone with the full set in the future, you know they earned it.

Yes new players are left behind, since you can’t get AP from old events and stories. Just as they don’t have as much money as us from playing over the past year+. Same goes with SPvP or WvW ranks. Anyone new has to learn to crawl before they can run with the big dogs.

Yeah, I agree that newer players have a lot of work to catch up, and that’s okay. I don’t think having the boots at 12k belittles the ‘earning’ that was done to get that AP. You still had to earn that, and 12k is no walk in the park. That said, 20k AP when there is scarcely 4k AP available from permanent achievements (not counting LS, which gets lumped into permanent achievements but aren’t really permanent) feels more like a grind than earning it. Doing all dailies every day doesn’t take real skill, it just takes time. If there were way more permanent AP available for skillful pursuits, I’d take no issue with this, but there isn’t.

My concern is also that the progression doesn’t make sense and creates unnecessary barriers. If you want the “Radiant set” you have 3k for gloves, 6k for shoulders, 9k for helmet, and then… 21k for boots? Being forced to take Hellfire stuff, which you may not want, before you can get your Radiant boots is pretty rough. I definitely think these things should be earned through rigorous AP acquisition, but I think a proper reward scheme wouldn’t force players to take both sets of gloves/shoulders/helmets before they get to their first access to boots. You know what I mean? I’m trying to approach this more from a ‘proper design’ standpoint here.

I mean, I’ll get these boots eventually. It doesn’t really bother me personally, I just don’t think the currently implemented design is fair or logical for others who really want them. It’s one thing to have rewards for players who put in a lot of time, but those rewards still have to make sense (in my opinion). I mean, consider the extreme example where almost the entire Radiant set can be acquired by 15k, but then the helmet is only first available at 100k AP. That would raise some red flags for you, right?

Seera.5916:

It is in the patch notes:

Added a requirement to attain rank 30 in WvW in order to purchase the Gift of Battle.

Source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-February-4-2014/first#post3591492

It’s in the Balance and Bug fixing section. last Bullet in the World vs World section

Was that added after the fact? Huh. Well, I take it back then. I definitely read those patch notes twice when they came out, though, and didn’t see it. Oh well, thanks for correcting me.

I think this change is a move in the right direction. R30 is easily acquired casually and it forces the player to truly experience some measure of WvW in order to acquire a weapon that can then be used in WvW. Good show.

That said, I am not happy that ANet forgot to mention this in the patch notes. It shows a lot of laziness on their parts, and it showcases just how bad their internal communication is and how poor their release process is.

I think a better solution to this would have been to include the boots at 12k and then to give them automatically to players past that point. Even if it means the people past it get extra stuff, it would at least have these at a reasonable point for newer players. As it stands, there simply aren’t enough permanent achievements to justify a cost of 21k for something like a pair of boots. It really isn’t about entitlement, it’s about consistency and the realism of reward schemes versus time investment.

I say all of this as someone close to my 15k chest.

Vol.7601:

My university has a renowned co-op management program. I was lucky enough to have two internship at my time there that paid really well. It helped pay for both my tuition and misc. purchases.

If I hadn’t spent so much money on games I would’ve been able to pay off my tuition out of university, but I only paid it off 2 years after ;|

Ah fair enough. Yeah, I probably could have afforded a lot more if I didn’t have to pay for the entirety of my tuition alone. I certainly could afford that level of expenditure these days with that all behind me, but sheesh… I just couldn’t imagine spending that much on a game. I think altogether I’ve spent about $50 on the game in addition to the initial purchase.

No, I do not want ‘upgrades’ to that armor to come back. T3 is beautiful as it is, and all cultural armor should stay strictly restricted to the race for which it was designed. Besides, your proposed solution has a significant dev’ time associated with it (developing multiple new armor sets), not to mention that for ‘fairness’ the same upgrade structure would have to apply to every other race… It’s just not feasible, sorry.

Vol.7601:

That’s nothing. Back in my university days I played this game Hero Online across 4 years or so. Spent almost $10,000 on that game (it was F2P).

I enrolled in a contest that gave me the best, most valuable item in game worth $2000. I ended up getting hacked (then subsequently scammed).

Good times. All that money tho ;(

How did you manage to have, let alone spend, $10000 on a game while you were going to university? Rich family? Entrepreneur?

Yes, you can. Read this.

I, personally, love being able to see my own tag. It’s nice, like being able to see and appreciate your own titles would be. I do agree that there should be an option to turn it on / off, though.

Josh Davis.6015:

English patch notes have been updated.

What about Fractal of the Mists chests?

CptAurellian.9537:

Even when expecting such a terrible group, I’d rather swap the sword for scepter instead of taking the staff for actual fighting.

Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but in those cases I never ever fight with Staff out unless crap hits the proverbial fan. When I keep Staff equipped on my off weapon set for these groups, I stay primarily in S+F (or GS, depending) for as much DPS as I can get and only pull out staff when the going gets really tough.

I don’t know. When you have lots of really bad players the heal at the end of Empowered helps a lot, and if no one else is using might stacks, the might helps bolster their bad dps. Line of Warding is also great when half your team is dead and you have to kite mobs around forever. It’s also worth noting that many of my friends in my guild aren’t good players (no offense if any of them read this). So not only do they not listen to my build suggestions to build for DPS, they simply don’t play very well, and so I have to compensate and carry them a lot. It’s painful, but they’re my friends, so it is what it is. Anecdotally, Staff has helped me do that a lot more than the better S+F/GS damage rotations.

pzyonix.1645:

Sylvari are immune to the dragon corruption.

Their immunity to other dragons’ corruption may be directly tied to the possibility of them being dragon minions already. It is impossible for us to say currently without rampant speculation.

Stx.4857:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Why not both? New game mode on a new map.

Sounds great when you say it like that but… are you saying you guys could actually generate those things within the next few years? lol.

Why not balance professions for pve?

Why not fix pve boss mechanics?

Why not add new weapons for classes?

Why not add new skills for each profession?

Why not add new regions to the world?

Yeah…

As for the topic, I vote new game mode! Oh. And trash Skyhammer.

All of these things are done by different teams, so to you I say:

Why not all of these things?

New week and we’re all excited for edge of the mists’ release!

That said we’re still doing all the same things we do all of the time. Tequatl, Wurm attempts (our server hasn’t beaten it yet), dungeons, WvW, and so forth. This week we’ll also be doing a special event on Thursday for the 12 jumping puzzles of February! This time I think I will be bringing my Mesmer so that I can portal people around if need be, haha. We will see.

Either way, have a great week and see you guys in-game! Remember that if you’re interested in the guild at all, don’t hesitate to contact one of our officers!

So I felt like chiming in my experiences having tried changing it up since my last post here.

I’ve been pubbing and doing my guild runs using S+F/GS as a primary rotation, and keeping my Staff on only for the might stacks before the fight then swapping fully out for GS. I still use my staff for skipping segments because line of warding is incredibly effective when you’re running by mobs and I still don’t have trouble using symbol of swiftness without getting put in combat randomly.

GS is great for DPS; you can really feel the improvement using that rotation. The key here is that you have to get inside the hit box of the enemy you’re attacking for those extra hits because that’s really where the bonus DPS comes from. That said, I’ve noticed it’s a lot harder to stay alive in pubs that lack DPS because I don’t have an “oh crap I’m about to die and the team lacks all manner of support and doesn’t DPS fast enough to rally stuff” weapon swap. I don’t think the staff is a useless weapon, and I think it’s very good for those “oh crap” moments in pubs where you’re wanting to blast water fields and drop smoke fields to avoid a complete wipe. It’s like how I tend to use my knights gear in groups where DPS is low such that I can’t sustain myself long enough against enemy attacks. I would attribute this to the shift between an organized group and an unorganized group, really, but that’s me.

Anyway, my strategy moving forward is using S+F/GS as much as possible, but being open to using my Staff if a group particularly needs it. I definitely won’t be destroying it.

I think it is pretty unanimously agreeable that the helmet removing Asuran ears and Charr horns is awful, though. They should seriously fix that.

Josh Davis.6015:

I just finished spending a few hours catching up on these responses. There’s a lot of good feedback here…and some…not so much!

I’ve seen quite a few posts mention the lack of bug fix mentions and I wanted to let you guys know that for the most part they’ve simply been excluded from the balance preview. Our designers have been and will continue to work on profession bugs all the way until this build is locked up and ready to ship.

I’ll touch base with the guys on Monday when we get back into the office and see if we’re able to provide any updates.

Thanks again, everyone.

Above all else, please address the Illusionary Warden doing nothing bug that was exposed when they were made to run into range of a target. This bug makes the skill periodically do absolutely nothing and is crippling to Mesmer builds utilizing a focus offhand. It absolutely must be of the highest priority.

Thanks for the update otherwise.

Gaile Gray.6029:

RisingDusk — really? That makes me think of a good friend and former neighbor. He worked in the tech industry, but never bought himself a home computer. Why? Because he was afraid that “they” would offer something new — faster processor, better video card, improved RAM — and he’d then be “behind” in his tech. So he went without because somewhere, down the line, another something came along that outperformed what he could have been using, with great pleasure, for years!

I am using a… let’s call it “Generic SmartPhone 4,” and I know I should upgrade to the 5, but I worry that the minute I do it, the Generic SmartPhone 6 will come out. And about daily, I tell myself, “Just go get the upgrade” and I’m going to do it this weekend, but I should have done it months ago.

Sorry, long post. The point is, I wouldn’t let “what might be, by and by,” influence what you do in the here and now. Just my opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary!

This case is very different as the new mining pick is better because it produces higher output, and therefore more gold per swing, than any previous pick. It also has a functionality that cannot be replicated in-game without using the gem store item. That latter point isn’t normally a problem because the gem store always releases items that are purely for convenience, but this isn’t just for convenience. On the contrary, Gaile, this item produces a net profit for the user; it is actually giving you more gold in the grand scheme of things. And it’s not enough to say “Well, Sprockets aren’t worth a lot now” because the free market and supply and demand determine that value; the price can change. It is in this way that the Generic Smartphone analogy completely breaks down because that upgrade is entirely convenience, like most things on the Gem Store.

A more appropriate analogy might be as follows:

What if you joined a bank that gave you a 0.06% interest gain on your money if you spent $100 in March, but later on in August the bank has a sale where, for the same price of $100, gives you a 0.08% interest gain and if you got the previous upgrade, you’d have to pay the whole $100 again to get the extra money. This is a shoddy business practice because it is dealing in actual currency that dictates how the person can pay for other goods. I definitely would be in an uproar over that, and I believe it is safe for me to say that many others would as well.

Hopefully that helps shed light on why it’s not okay. I don’t hate you guys. Au contraire, I love ANet and have supported you for more than a decade. I just think this is a very shoddy business practice, and I think the people who endorsed it simply don’t realize it (and I would like very much if they did).

And for the record, Gaile, I have Generic Smartphone 5, and it’s worth it for the convenience. :P

Killing these “griefers” is one of the most satisfying things imaginable. It’s great kicking out the shins of people who think they’re in for free kills and putting them back in their place. Seriously, give it a try. Most of the “griefers” in the JPs or wherever are not very good and are relying on you being worse.

Weekend coming up!

We’ve been having lots of fun trying Wurm, doing Teq and other world events with our server, and generally just enjoying the living story, dungeons, and all of those other things we regularly do. If any of the stuff we do or our community sound like good times, don’t hesitate to let us know about it! One of our officers would love to chat with you about your potential fit into our community.

Gaile Gray.6029:

If you sell items over a year, and then say “This is the latest and best” that’s not to suggest that previous items weren’t good, just that the most recent is the best. And if in the past, the item offered was the best of its class, that can change too as time passes.

It’s still a shoddy business tactic and scares users like myself into never buying upgrades or convenience items for fear that something down the road will come out that’s better. This new pick really disappointed me and shot a lot of my confidence in the gem store. Now I can’t even bring myself to get the Salvage-o-Matic because “what if something better comes out”.

AP isn’t an indicator of skill, it’s an indicator of dedication. Ideally, someone who puts in a lot of effort getting a lot of achievements will put a lot of effort into other meaningful endeavors in the game, hopefully therein including being skilled at playing your class.

I never use AP as a requirement in my group, but I definitely bias based on AP slightly. The way I see it, as long as you have 2000 AP or something around there, you’ve played the game enough to hopefully know the most basic of mechanics (and hopefully have the ability to read).

As I said in the other thread, the introduction of the extra loot from this pick is unacceptable and irrevocably is power creep in the sense that all previous permanent tools are inferior by contrast.

This bonus effect should absolutely be removed.

Wurm’s loot absolutely should be improved. For something as tough as it is, the lack of karma and even just loot in general is absolutely motivation-murdering.

I do not think that requiring a target is appropriate. Requiring a target reduces the play of these skills and the breadth of application for them. What we should instead do is evaluate which skills enable a class to move too much and add an increased cooldown to them if they do not strike a target. In this way, it invokes play and counterplay, which is a much better solution to the issue.

For the record, the only one of these skills I genuinely feel needs this treatment is Savage Leap. Leap of Faith is pretty tame as Guardians primarily lack mobility beyond engaging teleports, and using Heartseeker as a disengage is already pretty punishing because it drains your initiative quickly to achieve decent distances (Shadowstep is far superior). Monarch’s Leap is in a pretty good place for the Ranger sword mainhand too, I’d say, and requires solid play by reversing the facing direction of your character quickly to really use it as an appropriate mobility skill.

There are a lot of assumptions being made incorrectly here. The first and biggest being that you (general you, as this applies to many people in this thread) are assuming that all movement skills that happen to chase a target are intended solely for the purpose of gap closing. What if, by design, Rush is for mobility in general? We don’t know what the design goals are because they haven’t been communicated to us. We cannot say that Rush deserves the same treatment as RtL because maybe RtL is specifically for engaging foes and Rush is intended to give the Warrior greater mobility in general while using a GS.

Anyway, if we’re looking at what we think is a ‘fair’ amount of mobility, I’d say Savage Leap deserves the nerf far more than Rush.

Rangers have Spotter, which is arguably one of the best traits in the game, and in general have amazing DPS and offensive support. Play your Ranger awesome on that platform and I’ll take you over a Warrior any day of any month. Hell, on the platforms where you really need to range, Rangers are king. Just keep that pet ranged or on passive and you’re good to go.

Bad Rangers are really bad on this event, so I can understand the hate, but just ignore them if it doesn’t apply to you. Keep on keeping on and show them what’s up.

I soloed a platform as my Necro after four other players died and you cannot imagine the number of exclamations from onlookers about how amazed they were that a Necromancer of all things could do that. I live for that sort of show of skill, and you should too.

A+

fabipm.4359:

Crystal Reid.2481:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Crystal, please fix the 10 second Invulnerability bug today?

I wish it was that simple, but the fix needs to go through proper implementation and testing before it can go live. Unfortunately we won’t be able to roll this out until the next patch, but it is coming along with several other bug fixes to the edge cases causing the event to stall and break.

So basically it will still remain almost impossible (only one success for now) because of this bug right ? And you don’t even know when it will be corrected.
Thanks for releasing such content that is not doable (except if you are very lucky putting the head against a wall). Not to mention the crazy scaling issues.
Half of your release is bugged and not doable. Good score !

She said it’d roll out with the next patch. That comes out next Tuesday.

Volcanus still wants its own icon, kitten!

chasewystone.2918:

we ran a number of dungeons as the designers had initially intended for them to be run (without stacking, utilizing tactics, and learning to work together). I LOVED the dungeons. Sure, they sometimes took awhile to complete, and we died frequently, but there was this amazing satisfaction following every completed dungeon.

You make a lot of assumptions about what the designers did and did not intend that I do not think are safe assumptions. It’s fine if you don’t enjoy stacking or LoSing because you can make your own groups and have fun that way, but it’s certainly not fine to divine that you know what was intended or not insofar as the game’s design. It is easy for designers to build fight arenas and enemy mobs where stacking is not possible, and indeed they have done so in many cases. That they haven’t elsewhere suggests that perhaps the choice being the players’ was the intent.

I have not made sure of it personally, but purely anecdotally from friends who have, in their own words, “inexplicably been denied the achievement when playing perfectly”. Maybe it’s just a Ranger pet, or maybe they were just wrong. That is the only ‘rule’ that I am not 100% sure on, as I did every single one with a Guardian because Aegis gives you mulligans. (The only unblockable marionette attack is the stomp on the first warden)

As far as I’m concerned, earning (0.2 * 3 * SPROCKET VALUE) more on any node in-game is hell of a P2W. The entire purpose of the game is looking awesome, and looking awesome costs money. A pick that gives you more money per swing is definitely in the realm of P2W for a game like this.

This was pretty fricken’ sweet to watch. I especially liked the portal to skip the first wave of mobs before the first golem. Good job!

I agree with the OP. This is unacceptable and is blatantly converging on P2W territory.

Timers create a different type of pressure than something like the Marionette’s mechanic. They are both equally valid ways to pressure players and create difficulty, and both have merits in different scenarios.

The following requirements exist for the achievements:

- You cannot be downed AT ALL during the fight or you lose the achievement
- You cannot be struck by the Marionette’s attacks at all during the fight or you lose the achievement
- Your MINIONS and/or SUMMONS and/or PET cannot be struck by the Marionette’s attacks at all during the fight or you lose the achievement
- Your entire lane must succeed at defeating all five (5) regulators for you to get the achievement

Being struck during the loading screen is a problem. Make sure you’re among the first into the portal when it opens to avoid this; there is a several second leeway before the Marionette actually begins attacking from the portal opening that helped me a lot personally.

Hopefully this helps.

zwierz.9012:

Hi, I am also a casual player, I have very limited game time (job, family, hobbies etc), an I absolutely love Tequatl, fractals, and other higher difficuilty content. I see no need to cater especially for me, and bring me rewards for no effort on a golden plate!

Please continue making me work on my rewards, thank you!

ps. I managed to kill Tequatl for the first time few weeks ago. That felt good!

I am with this guy. I play less than 3 hours a day, work a full time job, and love difficult content. Marionette is the best living world patch of the entire lot as far as I’m concerned, so please bring us more like it!

Vol.7601:

I have to agree here. Usually I defend Anet against the unreasonable fanbase, but I think this new pick is enroaching on P2W territory. It doesn’t matter that the sprockets are cheap, but the fact that it does give you extra items over your standard pick is not good.

Unlimited picks are convenience, which is fine. Unlimited picks which give out extra loot which is not accessable by normal picks is not.

I logged on because I wanted to post, but found that Vol said exactly what I was already going to say. I agree with his sentiment entirely; it is not okay that this new pick gives bonus loot.

While I appreciate your interpretation of the situation, it is neither you nor my position in the matter that makes a difference. ANet has chat logs, they have logs of the entire thing, and they can investigate. My only concern is that it actually gets where it needs to get, and that the GM in question actually did something. It appears to me that he maybe cast it off and didn’t do that in favor of an unrelated canned response.

Elbegast.6970:

Then why do the mechanics, in an event designed for 100+ players, allow for a single player to foil the attempt? Answer me that.

Players like myself aren’t the problem. The mechanics that give players like myself the power to do what we do are what needs to be addressed.

The mechanics are designed this way because it is those same mechanics that break up the feeling of being a member of a mindless zerg, enable skilled single players to feel like they can show off their skill and save a run for 100+ other players, and create diverse scenarios within which a player can utilize their skills.

I’ll happily deal with players like you if it means players like me can make a difference. Besides, I can always group up 100+ people on a TS server and go to an overflow where you’ll never find me. That’s good enough for me.

This actually happened to me in CoE the other day. I have never had this happen to me before but they were running teleporter path, the LFG looked normal, I joined and we had conversation and things seemed fine and the run began. They were pretty bad and had no idea how to properly stack or whatever; the run was admittedly pretty bad and I was carrying them pretty hard. After the evolved husk, though, I got a load screen and was kicked to Mount Maelstrom. I had their names and whispered them and they all said “oh my god I’m new I have no idea what happened” so I kept saying “invite me back then” and when I would invite myself to their group, they’d deny it. Eventually the group wound up being full again without ever going back to the LFG. It was really peculiar. I ended up reporting the lot to ANet via support ticket and who knows if that’ll do anything, but yeah.

Best thing you can do is take screenshots of the players if you see multiple players from the same guild. Also make an effort to be the one who enters if you can. That discourages this sort of behavior.

Every server on NA in the top 8, at a minimum, has been hard-capped in main doing wurm lately. That is as many people as Desolation had when they successfully killed it, those other servers just need to muster the necessary coordination to succeed. That’s really what it’s about.

So I purchased GW2 through the GW2 website, but I apparently no longer have the email that has my serial number in it. At one point I lost my old email account because I changed cable providers, and so my email account was deleted, and then afterward I changed the email account of my Guild Wars accounts. The problem was that the serial number went to my old email account, which has been fragged, and so now I lack that email. I know I probably could have taken better care to keep it in check, but I didn’t, and so here I am.

Is there any way I can recover the serial number? My account HAS NOT been compromised, and the password is unique and very secure, and everything about my account is working fine. I just would really like to retrieve my serial number somehow in case something does happen so that I can properly handle the situation.

Thanks in advance.

Hiya. I’m a pretty big proponent of GW2 support and most of the times I’ve had things happen I report the issue or whatever and I feel like I get a really good response, like maybe they actually read what was going on, and so forth. Recently, though, I opened a ticket for getting kicked from a dungeon group at the boss to report the people who did it to me, and the responses were really abysmal. First response was as follows:

“I am sorry to learn of the issue you and your party encountered during your recent dungeon run. I certainly understand how frustrating this can be, especially when you have spent quite a bit of time in the dungeon.

Our development team frequently reviews issues related to the game, including potential issues with dungeons. In the past, they have made a few changes to dungeon mechanics and they will continue to make adjustments as necessary to resolve issues."

This was completely unrelated to why I submitted the ticket, so I replied by noting that this was, once again, a violation that I was reporting. I got a reply that I think confirms that it actually got sent to someone who can investigate the report, but then I got what felt like a super canned response that indicated that I should have just used the in-game report feature instead. It seems as though the GM didn’t understand that when you are kicked out of a group in the middle of a dungeon you can’t select anyone from the run to report them, and furthermore didn’t seem to realize that “griefing” isn’t even an option in the report window.

I really just wanted to make sure that it got forwarded to the appropriate people, but I don’t feel secure from the responses that it is getting there even though I’m being as explicit as possible. Is there any way to confirm that it’s getting to the right people (I know you don’t discuss what happens with reports with players)? Furthermore, maybe this ticket can be used as an example of poor issue handling; I think the GM could have done a much better job communicating what he was doing… if anything at all. I honestly can’t tell and it worries me.

Anyway, thanks.

This made me happy because I wasn’t nearly as rich back then when they first came out as now when they were re-released. I also was unwilling to spend 100g on the dye because that shininess just wasn’t worth 100g to me.. But when they were rereleased and the dye dropped to 30g, I totally thought it was worth it, bought it, and now my character looks fricken’ sweet.

I’m glad they did this sort of re-release, and I say that as a consumer of this item. Thanks ANet!