Guild Wars 2

They should have been banned from dungeons and fractals (like WvW), not nerfed into oblivion. Now they are utterly useless, and the stacks we purchased before are worthless and may as well be destroyed.

Keeping this up top so that more people can see it. I’m glad we’ve gotten so many hits from this recently, and all the people interested have been great additions to the team! I look forward to meeting more of you!

I don’t know, I feel like even if SBI has better coverage, when everyone is fielding their primes, the fighting is great. We didn’t have this in T4, but here it’s a whole different story. I feel as though we’re sort of an inbetween server, and that’s slightly unfortunate. We’re able to take on T5 and do exceedingly well, but T4 is too much for us. There’s no middle ground where we can fit comfortably and have good, even match-ups at all times of the day.

That said, DR and IoJ are still showing up and doling out good times. Last night in EB when IoJ pushed out Veloka / OW was great! I also thoroughly enjoyed DR’s attack on SBI BL’s Bay. We only narrowly made it with reinforcements in time, and only barely held you back in spite of that! Those instances were awesome and memorable, and I look forward to and know there will be more. Even though our coverage puts you guys a little bit down and out, I’m happy that you’re still coming to fight and not making it easy. That says a lot about your servers!

I didn’t even read the list of dailies last night and got 7/9 completely by accident within 30 minutes of random playing. This new system has been really simple for me, but maybe it’s because I am always out and about killing enemies and doing events and stuff.

I solo these events (yes, even the Champion Shark) pretty much every night. The events already scale down based on the number of players, and they’re already easy enough. They just take longer with 1 person, but honestly, that’s acceptable.

Anyway, the proper solution to this is to encourage players to go back to SSC, not to nerf SSC.

Lanser.8520:

Red firey kitty, it was overtuned with spy kits.

Definitely. Spy Kits weren’t the only way to do it, but they made the length of the fractal tolerable. That’s the key point to take away from the discussion. At least with Spy Kits you could ignore something like 120 Dredge spawns, and get the thing done in a much more manageable time frame. Now, however, you’re really just out of luck.

I think it’d be more valuable if, instead of talking about data you have that we don’t in moments like that, you created weekly announcements in this forum with interesting data. They wouldn’t even need to be formatted into blog posts or have pretty graphs, just some raw numbers for us to crunch on. Something like how the WvW people put out weekly tables of points.

Areann.1304:

We used 1.000.000 influance to unlock everything so fast. Over 80 members participated and we had 7 commanders where we could rally to if one was found. We had 2 seconds left on the timer. So yes it’s very challenging. Finding them is the hard parth though, you can kill them with 10-15 people.

My God, small guilds really do have no chance at completing these things.

I’m just going to pop in and say that yes, level 48 Dredge is doable post-patch, it just takes so much time that my group and I can do CoF 1, 2, and 3 without skipping a single mob faster. It is a mind-numbing experience filled with a few hundred level 82 Dredge mobs immune to blind with permanent protection and regeneration and intense dps. This fractal is heavily overtuned without Spy Kits to help out.

Edge.4180:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I got my daily yesterday by accident. If that isn’t getting it playing the game the way I want to, then I don’t know what is.

I’m not sure if happening to be in the right place at the right time (either purposely or by chance) counts as “getting it playing the game the way I want to”.

Either that, or you like to spend your game time doing fairly specific activities. The difference is that the older Daily tasks were much more generic and thus complimented a larger variety of activities, and so more players were able to complete the Daily “by accident”.

Maybe that’s true for today, but not for tomorrow. Maybe sometime this week I’ll have to do something crazy to get my daily, but for me when it happens that’s okay. It will get me to experience content I’d otherwise ignore. Yesterday, for instance, I happened upon random groups doing [Group Event] events in zones that days before were completely unpopulated. I tagged along because “PEOPLE ARE DYING I MUST SAVE THEM” and got credit, and apparently that was 1/5 of my daily. Fancy that. With 9 options available to me each day, there’s plenty to choose from. Dare say if that Keg Brawler one pops up again sometime soon, I might actually try it to see what it’s all about.

I think experiencing the content that’s there is important, and I think having dailies push (not very hard, mind you) you to do things slightly abnormal for you, sweet. Still, I’d be very surprised if people couldn’t accomplish 3/5 of the daily requirements doing whatever wherever. (If you never kill enemies or harvest materials, I might ask if you’re playing the game at all!)

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Our feedback was that rather than face the challenge of Explorable dungeons, high skill groups would just afk faceroll the much easier story mode content for the guaranteed smaller token amount.

This is ironic because for many dungeons, the story modes are more difficult and more tedious than the explorable modes.

You still make less than a quarter the net gold per hour than other places in the game. More loot bags is nice, but better rewards are still a must. Let’s not forget that WvW is a massive gold sink (I spent 20g on siege plans and upgrades last night alone), and the rewards you get back scarcely touch the surface of what is necessary to sustain the war effort.

I’d love it more if the developer shared those facts with us more regularly in a more intuitive medium than stalking the dev tracker (weekly economy short-blogs, anyone?).

I got my daily yesterday by accident. If that isn’t getting it playing the game the way I want to, then I don’t know what is.

I believe that was mostly market speculation and panic-purchasing. The prices for many of these items have leveled out to just barely above their pre-patch prices because the demand for them hasn’t really gone up, just the supply has been shortened for awhile by speculators.

tl;dr: Put in a buy order 1c above the next highest buy order and keep doing this until you get it. You will.

Raf.1078:

I’m pretty sure ANet said that other people would be able to help out any guild’s mission. I’m assuming that means you’ll be able to fill your large group needs from the general public.

Not unlike LFG right now…except with better payoff. And a chance to meet new folks?

Except not with better payout. Helping a guild doesn’t give you the commendations or the rares with a chance at exotics. You have to represent the guild starting the mission to get those, otherwise you just get a fat dynamic event reward of like 400 karma, some experience, and ~1.8 silver.

Well, I can safely say I’ll never help a random guild earn their rewards if I’m not also sharing of them. If that’s the attitude ANet wants to foster, then this implementation makes sense.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

As for things players feel the spy kits were necessarily to get through, we’re watching the feedback and will make sure to give them some extra QA attention to ensure they are in line with what we want players to experience.

That’s good. As it stands, the Dredge fractal is the most mindnumbingly painful experience in the game, and not because it is hard, but because it takes so bloody long to do the “intended” way. The only reason people didn’t complain about it beforehand was because Spy Kits made them tolerable.

By the way, it would be awesome if we could get refunded our karma for these spy kits. You might say pay-karma-to-win is bad, and I’d agree, but surely you can agree that pay-for-functionality-and-no-longer-be-able-to-use-it is equally bad. People have hundreds of thousands of karma invested in these items across multiple characters and currently all that karma is a waste. If you’re not going to fix the issue you’ve created, you should at least not screw over everyone affected by it.

RakaNishoo.6071:

Actually that item (and similar ones) should have never existed in dungeons. Removing them completely is a valid option, but was probably harder to accomplish than just increasing cd. These items role is to have a fancy cool feature in open world pve not necessarily increasing your power/performance and should not make it easier to run a dungeon. That’s my opinion and I hope and expect that ANET will eventually ban all of these in explorable mode dungeons.

Don’t want more dissapointments, don’t use them?
I mean there is even no interface to use consumables like these during an encounters. I doubt it was desired functionality and I would even go as far as considering bringing any of those into a dungeon an exploit.

You want to know my opinion on that? I would have loved it if they never changed Spy Kits, but like WvW, simply banned them from dungeons and fractals. Let me use my useful open-world PvE item in PvE, don’t ruin the item everywhere. This change would be like if the WvW team, instead of disabling consumables in WvW, changed every consumable everyone used so that no one would want to use them anymore. Fortunately the WvW team is better in-tune with how best to handle these situations and doesn’t do that. Unfortunately for us, Rob did not consider that.

Please, please just ban the blasted items from dungeons. That addresses the issue completely and perfectly, and at least maintains the items being useful in open world PvE. I used these things to save people dying from random mobs in the open world, and there is no exploit in that.

‘Grats JQ! Honestly, I’d still be impressed if this were SoR, SoS, or any other server. The point stands that a server in the top-most tier available in NA has by some combination of coordination and demoralization of the enemy servers acquired absolutely every possible PPT available. That, to me, is impressive, particularly because I have been there and fought every single one of the servers up in T1, and I know how absolutely terrifyingly effective their coverage and skill is. No matter how anyone wants to water this down, color me impressed.

I like things that encourage smaller groups, scouting, and playing strategically. I dislike things that have players reacting to a Skale attacking a camp guard the same way that you’d have to react to a swarm of 24 invaders at the same camp. Less information does not make the game better, and there is a better way to approach this.

Someone suggested orange / red swords as a difference between whether there are fewer / more invaders at a location. I think that’s a decent idea. I don’t know what the best solution to the problem is, but I personally don’t think hiding information from players and forcing players to do things they don’t enjoy doing is the way to do it. WvW should encourage first and foremost fighting against other players and strategizing against them, not sitting around in anticipation.

Either way, I’ll play with what we’ve been given, and while this change has favored me some of the time, it has also favored the opponent some of the time. That’s just how it goes.

Well, it’s a figure of speech and not actually a comparison of SB to ALSKs. The point of the analogy is the design process involved, not what the design process was applied to.

To 25/90 something is to make it utterly unusable because the development team cannot discern a better approach. In that case, Izzy decided it was better to not allow the skill at all than to properly balance the skill (or even change the mechanics of the skill, which had been done with many skills prior). In this case, Rob decided that he didn’t like ALSKs and that they were a detriment to the game, and instead of trying to find a healthy balance rendered them useless. In both cases, the end result is that the target of the developers was made valueless because they didn’t think through the balancing process and didn’t want to.

10 seconds of camouflage, not stealth, and with the new PvE invisibility mechanics means that when you’d actually want to use them, they essentially do you no good.

Works for me. Make sure the TP is properly allowed via all necessary ports, and if that fails, delete the GW2 data and have the game redownload everything. If that fails still, then you should post in the technical support forum with your technical support question.

Pinch.4273:

Rising Dusk – I don’t really want to pick apart your post, but your examples on the Dredge fractal is proof of why I think Spy Kits were harmful for the game, because it shows that you have never had to deal with the events properly.

1. The mobs on the left door only spawn at certain door-health percentages (Nuke door -> clean up mobs -> nuke door -> clean up mobs).
2. The cage event requires someone to aggro the veteran away from the panel guy, as well as having the other party members not on a button controlling the adds.

The bonfire event in Snowblind is the only difficult part of that fractal if done without spy kits, so I don’t care that it is very dangerous at high levels.

Then, on top of that, you generally have to play well enough to not constantly die, because your party can no longer res you with impunity under almost all conditions. I don’t call it “skilled play” when your party is dying.

With spy kits mostly out of the picture, it will be clear what the truly poorly designed mechanics are (the ones that you can’t get better at with practice). Then, from that, the designers can learn from them and hopefully fix them / never make the same mistake twice, and the dungeons will be better for it.

I understand the mechanics in question here, and performed it just like that in earlier levels because it was tolerable. As it stands, since the patch, you can do the entirety of CoF 1, 2, and 3 without skipping a single mob faster than you can do the Dredge fractal. The notion that we need to attack the door, clear the entire room, and then attack the door more (and repeat this ~5 times) is absurd. This fractal at high levels should not be about mindlessly killing 500-600 level 82 Dredge that are immune to blind and spam perma-protection and regeneration. This fractal is heavily overtuned, and my only argument in my last post was that the developers nerfed Spy Kits (which is fine), but didn’t for an instant consider why spy kits were used in the first place and adjust accordingly. That shows a severe lack of insight, and I am very disappointed by it.

I agree that Spy Kits were harmful to the game in their previous form, but I think that the handling of it has been very poor. I also think that nerfing them as hard as they did makes them so useless that I can’t even justify using them in the absolute worst cases. Players, right now, are better served by destroying their stacks and getting inventory space back than saving them for the most extreme cases where they might be valuable. That’s poor design.

Hopefully this analogy will make sense to Rob as an ANet employee, but you guys totally 25/90’d Spy Kits here. You should be beyond that.

It’s one thing to nerf the item, it’s another to render them totally useless. 10s duration / 60s cooldown completely invalidate using them in any way, shape, or form, particularly with the way stealth was changed in PvE with this patch.

If they gave any other rewards beyond experience and achievement points, it would be unfair to the people who choose to only do 5, and go against the whole purpose of “choose your own daily”. If you felt compelled to do all 9 because of the bonus rewards, it would invalidate the entire reason that there are 9 in the first place.

This is working as intended, and good for everyone right now.

I support this. We need Carrion and Valkyrie.

Right-click the item’s icon, not its name.

This bug has been around for awhile. Furthermore, I would like to point out that the new hints added with yesterday’s patch do not count toward this achievement and probably should.

This isn’t a bug with Mirror, this is working as intended for GL’s projectiles.

You know, I understand that some people looked down on spy kits, but they added a dimension of skilled play to lots of encounters where team members could actually resurrect other team members in battle while the others kited and mitigated damage. While they did nullify some of the challenge inherent in many events, many events are totally unfeasible to achieve without them. Guardians are now more necessary than ever in Fractals because how else can you possibly keep someone from getting hit once during a level 49 dredge control panel event? The Dredge are immune to blind already, which is one of the major contributors to most classes’ damage mitigation! Even better, try the Dredge door gun event after that on left path on level 49. That one’s going to be a blast. The only possible alternative to double guardian in this instance is double Thief using SR to keep certain players stealthed the entire event. Both of these are bad for team-composition and team-building. I could see this being doable with one particularly exceptional Thief and SB 2 spam in a smoke field, though the likelihood of finding one of those in a pub is nigh-impossible. Another one that’s going to be hilariously stupid is the L49+ Snowblind bonfire event. At least that one can sort-of be kited, though.

The point is that many events in fractals weren’t complained about previously precisely because Spy Kits existed. You could use these items to compensate for poor design and poor scaling. I never used Spy Kits anywhere else in the game because the content is so easy that it is unnecessary. Before I used to see the Dredge fractal as the second fractal and go “Nice, time to get some Dredge bags and Destroyer Cores”. Now I am going to see it and reroll because the events are horrific, and I’d rather repeatedly do the Swamp fractal and try for a different second fractal than try to get crafty and get by the Dredge fractal with a pub group.

tl;dr: This is not a l2p problem, this is a problem with overtuned events incentivizing the use of Spy Kits and Spy Kits getting made worthless in all content without the events being patched up in tandem.

I absolutely crack up whenever he says that NO NO NO line. It’s hilarious. I would be a sad panda if it were ever fixed.

NO NO NO! We have to go to the armory. That’s where Zadorojny will be. NO NO NO—NO NO NO—NO NO NO—NO NO NO!

What!? No! Spy kits were the only things that made half of the fractal encounters even tolerable! It was also the absolute only thing that allowed you to seriously resurrect defeated players mid-fight, as otherwise there’s simply no feasible way to do it in encounters that are remotely difficult. I can only imagine how asinine the Dredge fractal is going to be now on 48+, or any number of other stupidly tuned encounters.

Blah! Rob, I am now putting it on you to fix the encounters that are ridiculously overtuned. I blame you for this!

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Iruwen.3164:

Puandro.3245:

What is the new internal cooldown to life stealing foods? This change affects many builds that rely on it and it would be nice to know a # instead of just a mystery number you guys like to give out, thanks.

There are builds that rely on food?

Yes, there are. Many of the glass cannon builds rely on the food buffs for lifesteal that is greater than healing. I added a 1 second cooldown after each proc to stop abuse using certain skills that could heal a character from near death to full health due purely to critting with a food item.

Zinkey.6983:

Was sad to see no mention of any spy kit nerfs in the patch notes, I suppose the stealth changes mentioned could be there to address this…would be a bit silly to break the crystals from caledon forest but leave spy kits.

Great catch – I did in fact do something to spy kits (both OOW and Ash Legion) that got dropped out of the patch notes by accident (Stealth stealth nerf!). I’ll go make sure they are properly put into the patch notes.

Daecollo.9578:

Yep, I can’t really play my Pistol Whip thief anymore, now I “MUST” go stealth critical copy cutter thief.

That may be true, but this is a good fix that was definitely long overdue regardless of its side effects. Hopefully now that you can’t use those builds as effectively will be a signal for ANet as to what to buff in the next patch. They’ve already said that they buff things based on usage, so something going completely unused is a definite signal for them to fix it up.

My only question is: What is the internal cooldown?

Hey, hey, don’t forget SBI! We may have just entered the tier a few weeks ago, but we’ve been crashing ever since we lost a lot of guilds before free transfers ending. Some new blood is always good for the soul.

I wish I could do this. You guys should come out east for some conventions and do a similar event. I’d love to show you guys the bars in Maryland, haha; first few rounds on me!

“Mesmer Portals can no longer be interacted with when there is an obstruction between them and the player.”

While this is probably a good thing at large, one of the biggest benefits of the Mesmer portal was using it as a way to save players and teammates who had been stuck in some impassable part of the terrain. If you are intent on keeping this nerf to the portal ability, then it’s important that you properly fix the /stuck mechanic so that it can get you unstuck from a terrain pathing glitch without effectively rendering you unable to do anything. This is particularly bothersome if you get stuck while someone in your team is in combat in a dungeon, since you cannot even use a WP and have to relog and die to come back.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rising Dusk.2408:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Just wanted you guys to know that these are also available as guild mission rewards as well. You can get them as random rewards from completing missions or from the commendation vendor.

That’s good news. Although it really makes me wonder how you guys came up with this price as a valid equivalent to a guild mission. I seriously doubt you expect 6 guild missions to be as difficult as acquiring 40 laurels and 50 ecto.

It’s partially related to the time it takes. Personal rewards for guild missions can only be claimed once per week per mission category. Therefore if your guild only has guild bounties unlocked, it will take you 6 weeks to claim one of these accessories from the commendation vendor (assuming you don’t spend your commendations on anything else).

Aha! And 6 weeks of doing your daily every day is 42 laurels, which you rounded down to 40. I guess the 50 ecto is there just because why not make ectoplasm more expensive than it already is? Wouldn’t 40 laurels have been enough? You don’t have to respond constantly, I’m just really curious why the laurels weren’t enough… They were for amulets and rings (thankfully).

Also, is there any hope for these new ascended items being available from fractals such as your “play the game your way and get rewarded for your time” philosophy suggests? If not, is there a particular reason why you’re preventing that sort of personal reward acquisition? I’d think you (ANet) would want all ascended items acquirable in all ways that you can acquire ascended items, that way you truly can play the difficult content you want to play and be rewarded for it.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Just wanted you guys to know that these are also available as guild mission rewards as well. You can get them as random rewards from completing missions or from the commendation vendor.

That’s good news. Although it really makes me wonder how you guys came up with this price as a valid equivalent to a guild mission. I seriously doubt you expect 6 guild missions to be as difficult as acquiring 40 laurels and 50 ecto.

Farming materials yourself doesn’t make them free.

Immobilize has this effect on the vets from what I can tell. If you immobilize them, when it ends they move super speed toward a captive. CC in general seems to be okay from what I can tell.

Whether it’s intentional or not is anyone’s guess.

Porky.5021:

Ragnarok.4586:

Make another tag for WvW then? I don’t know what to tell you. Someone that doesn’t have at least 2000 badges of honor to spend on a tag should not be leading troops in WvW.

No. You shouldn’t be following him.

Yeah, he’s probably leading you into the JPs, haha.

Proud of you, JQ! Don’t get complacent in your victories, these other servers are really big hitters! We’ve been there and felt it, so keep strong. It’s been fun watching this over the course of the week.

I have something like 4k BoH, and if I spent those on my icon instead of 100g, I don’t think it would’ve improved anything. People get those badges doing jumping puzzles and crying on the forums when they’re forced to PvP in a PvP zone (who would’ve thunk it?). The only real way to make this work is to have some sort of ‘vetting’ system where the players support commanders who lead well, and that support is translated into a “number of supporters”. Then, this number of supporters is listed somewhere, so players know who the good commanders are and who the inexperienced ones are. Then, as a final note, give players the ability to filter commander tags visible by how many supporters they have, and now you can listen to who you want to and ignore the rest.

It’s elitist, but really, it should be. You want good commanders being able to lead, not bad ones. The only real challenge here that I dislike with my idea is that it makes it very difficult for new commanders who are skilled but not well known. How do you get known if no one will listen to you in the first place because of a lack of renown?

There are lots of challenges to getting this system right, and no doubt that is why it’s sort of been left alone. I don’t think the best answer is as easy as just making it badges or something.

I love this change. I missed the wiping mechanics of GW1 so deeply in GW2; before this change it felt like you could never lose. Now you can lose, which is great. It’d be nice if eventually we get such difficult instanced content that if you wipe once, you’re ejected from the dungeon entirely. This was very much a step in the right direction.

The picture is here.

Who would spend 40 laurels + ectos on an accessory when you can also obtain them from a week’s worth of Guild Commendations (12) + 5g?

If both are the same, then I agree. However, since the patch isn’t out yet, well… It’s tough to say. The pictures we’ve seen don’t show the same ascended items, though they might just be different parts of the same list. It’s also possible that some people who aren’t in guilds capable of that content or who don’t want to be can and will buy them with laurels and ectos. It’s the same reason why some people have bought and will continue to buy Ascended rings with laurels when they could just do Fractals.

I played GW1 for seven years, and if they had ever made better items, I’d have gotten them. I want skill to be the only determinant in my battles with other people, so I will always maintain BiS gear so that I don’t have to worry about other people having advantages over me when it’s so close that it matters. I’m definitely not alone in that view either.

BiS gear is never optional. All of the benefits from the ascended items so far make a noticeable difference in end-game content like WvW, and visibly improve your contributions. It may not be as huge as the jump from rares to exotics, but it is noticeable with a keen eye. This will only continue to be more relevant the more items that get released. If you want to compete with the best, you need to gear like the rest.