Guild Wars 2

Gotta say, that’s a first time for me. Congrats on a good run, and it sounds like you all had fun doing it.
Keep up the good work!

Oh, and yes, I did fix the scream.

Essence Snow.3194:

^^This..I have 9 lvl 80s and had one parked at every meta event that had a chest so as to avoid WP fees.

Congrats on 9 of them. I’m working on my third now.

So long as you play the events you should be fine to park characters in a given area.

lekyii.9856:

Thats true, but why now? why only after patch ppl start to complain about the loot!?

People have been complaining about bad loot since day 1 of the fractals. It isn’t new, and generally I don’t bother to answer those questions since it is just RNG and speculation. Some people find a precursor in that chest, and others get blues. Just the nature of RNG whenever you open that chest.

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

We are working on it, and hope to have it out as soon as we can.

Locking thread.

Each new piece of AR gear is meant to allow you to progress to further fractal levels, which have increasingly better rewards compounding with higher scaling difficulty.

Syeria.4812:

Anecdotes are worse than useless for trying to track alleged changes in RNG as people will only ever comment when things are going poorly. Of course all your anecdotal evidence is from people having poor luck, they wouldn’t ever bother to comment otherwise. It’s like interviewing people leaving a bar and freaking out that almost everyone you talked to had been drinking.

This pretty much sums things up. People rarely comment when something is working properly, and usually only bring things up in a positive light if there is a discussion about it and they feel provoked to do as such.
For instance, we recently made it possible to join and reconnect in fractals. Prior to that patch there would be a new thread nearly every other day about how bad fractals were because of disconnects, and those threads would be the most popular. But since fixing it there hasn’t been a single thread about it, or any comments. It’s just the general nature of people to happily enjoy things instead of taking the time out of enjoying something to exclaim that you are enjoying something.

It was never intended that you could get higher without further AR gear that has not yet been released. There was an exploit in the system we were not able to close up until this last patch.

lekyii.9856:

So DR starts if i stay “30minutes” in the same area or something?

I can’t go into specifics to how DR works since it is a safety net system, but no that is not a metric it operates on.

Essence Snow.3194:

When ya’ll did this “tweaking” ya’ll broke dragon DR.

The issue with the dragon chests should only effect people who park characters at dragons and don’t play them anywhere else. Is this what you are doing?

lekyii.9856:

So DR also affects Fractals of the Mists?
That may be the reason for all the complains that the forum are getting about the loot on fractals…

DR does not effect fractals in the same way. What players are seeing is just RNG.

DR is still in place, just better now. In this last patch we adjusted DR, but how it works shouldn’t punish efficient/speed running players anymore. If you run the same path continually you will still be hit by it, but we’ve looked at the data and made tweaks in hopes it won’t be punishing players who are legitimately completing things very quickly.
We’re watching it though to make sure nothing weird happens because of it. Please do report your findings if you feel you are hit by it unfairly so we can look into it.

Since DR is a safety net system for exploits, we’re likely not going to announce when and how we made changes to it.

Hey folks,

Thanks for bringing this back up. We still had the safety measure on after the patch went through that fixed the problem. We have now turned the safety measure off, and can confirm that the Svanir in the forest area will now drop loot once again.

I tend to let the discussion threads drive themselves, so that we here at Anet can watch them and what the players say without directly influencing what goes on in here. We do read this thread though, and I actively browse it when I get moments to do as such.

One of the things I’d like to address is the question of “Why would you do only half the update?” implying that phase 1 and phase 2 should have been rolled out together and made into one huge update some time further down the line.
The main reason is because res-rushing was a problem to the entertainment and longevity of dungeons, and was never an intended mechanic for players to be able to do. Our explorable dungeons were billed from the start to be harder content that required teamwork and would test your character prowess. Res rushing meant that players didn’t need to be coordinating with each other or have character/class mastery – they could just throw themselves at content until they eventually completed it, incurring armor repair costs and having a negative experience as a result.
I PUG dungeons quite frequently, and I often saw people not helping downed players, and not even trying to res people. They would just die and run back while the rest of the team held Agro, and this would cycle between players until the boss finally died.
People really didn’t have to learn boss mechanics or communicate with each other to figure things out. That was the inherent problem with res rushing and why it had to be removed.
Res rushing had to be resolved. Dungeons can be completed without res rushing, so we know the content isn’t impossible. It’s hard, and we’re watching carefully to identify places that may still be unfair. Anti res-rushing was going to be an update no matter what, independent of any other actions we wanted to do with dungeons. It only became a “Phase 1” when we decided we wanted to tell players about upcoming boss changes to dungeons, which we are calling “Phase 2.”

The boss and monster re-designs/improvements are something we have wanted to do since launch, and we want to include the community in the process. There’s room to improve, and we want to make things better. We are looking at each dungeon individually and doing what we can to make things more interactive and entertaining while staying true to our promise that dungeons will be tougher content that requires coordination.

I’m Designer Hrouda, and this is my favorite thread on the forum.

…

……

That being said, we are always looking at our reward tables. I agree with you that a blue is very unsatisfying of a reward for GL and other instances. Part of our Dungeon work coming down the line is going to involve changing reward tables and whatnot, so please be patient as we work through things as fast as we can.

Minos.5168:

Though, I guess that does promote transmutation stone sales in the gem store.

Map Complete is where I get mine. I’ve never bought a single transmutation stone from the store and I have a stack of about 50 fine, and around 200 regular.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’d like you to look at the system in place in Fractals with regards to Fractal Weapons. Your designer mind should see something wrong.

In the case of fractals, there is a different reward system in place for obtaining the skins and the items there. It is not the same as the dungeon reward scheme, because fractals serve a different purpose than dungeons.

I will also mention that I am not the authority on reward schemes – I see trends, play the game, experience the content, and and draft proposals to the leads and those responsible for reward structures. I have brought up proposed changes to the reward scheme for the fractals, but it is not my place to be the decider on those issues.

Hey folks, this discussion has kind of veered off topic to a control scheme discussion. Let’s bring it back to the video and the guardian play, and if we want to talk about key bindings, start a thread

Ioflux.4369:

This is definitely harder to work with imo when you have an elementalist for tune swapping as pressing ctrl forces your fingers into a lower position. I’m sure it works well for your ranger since pets hardly need any F key pressing outside of their skills / F4 swapping (while in combat). Or maybe I just dont have as long fingers as you do =(.

I’m 6’10 so I have some pretty long fingers. Ranger pets require more control than you would think (especially in dungeons/fractals), but certainly not as much as Ele. I have to use mouse clicks on the earth attunement because I just can’t hit the f4 on my keyboard at home without moving my entire hand off the WASD, and all the other nearby keys are in use.

my remapped skills (Use your pinky finger)
7 = ctrl+1
8 = ctrl+2
9 = ctrl+3
10 = ctrl+4

That way I can remain mobile through WASD while also using my fingers to use utilities and elite if needed. I typically mouse-click my heal though, so I don’t accidentally hit the key at the wrong moment.

Awesome.6120:

I was being completely sarcastic Robert.

Ah, sorry about that. As a designer I click my mind into a state where I see a problem and try to mentally design a solution to it regardless of its level of sarcasm. That being said, I do like item rewards, but there’s a downside to it in that it’s not always the item you want. There are other games I have played where I would kill a boss 20-30 times and not get the specific item I wanted, and I would just have to keep at it and hope I got lucky. I much prefer the system we have right now where there is a guaranteed token reward to allow me to buy whatI want… although I have been giving thought to a system that also reflects our personal story reward structure, where you could potentially choose one of three things offered at random. Again, just thoughts, but I’m always trying to develop better ways to reward players in dungeons.

Awesome.6120:

If only there was some guaranteed reward when finishing an event or dungeon!

Our token system for dungeons allows you to exchange and get things, and tokens are guaranteed at the end of each dungeon path. Events give out karma and currency, which can be used to buy things as well. Or are you implying a guaranteed item reward system, instead of a currency/token exchange reward system?

No. There is no flag for good and bad loot. It is just RNG.

I’ll look into making a safety net for the iron forgeman fight if you die in the lava. Thanks for letting us know.

Seren.6850:

get a princess wand and embrace it

I actually do this on my guardian. I don’t use it often, but when I do I get a good laugh out of it. Totally worth it IMO.

Very impressive! I don’t think I’ve seen a guardian solo vid yet, but that was pretty good. I don’t think I saw anything out of the ordinary that raised any alarms. Good solid play and knowledge – I like your means of getting through the trap bubble. Good skill rotation and composure over such a long period of time.

Allow me to correct myself – it’s not the party leader, but rather the instance owner. Whoever is the first person into the misty portal/dungeon is considered the owner of the instance, despite his placement in the party. I will correct my first statement.

You may have kicked the instance owner, which would indeed close the instance and boot everyone out.
We are aware of a problem related to that though, and are working on solutions.

EDIT:
Whoever is the first person into the misty portal/dungeon is considered the owner of the instance, despite his placement in the party.

Dungeons
General

Fixed a bug where projectiles passed through the ground in several locations

Fractals of the Mists

Fixed a bug that did not remove the Lava condition from players who died in the pools of lava at the final boss in the Volcano Fractal
Fixed a bug where players were stricken with Agony even when they avoided the Ice Elemental’s AoE ice storm

I recently changed the spark behavior in this latest patch – they should follow much better now. I noticed this thread was created yesterday, so I’m wondering if folks feel the sparks are still behaving badly? I watched our QA do it a few times and the behavior seemed to operate much better than it was before.

Without going into detail, to stop an exploit we found during development.

this was a bug fixed with the latest patch.

This stuff is currently patched and in game. I tested it last night on my necro and ranger, and the lupicus grubs did not spawn on either my pet or the minions.

EDIT
-Also changes were made to Alpha and his attacks.
-Jade Maw was left alone. There is some good play that happens, but the argument is 50/50. At least with other cases there was a definite need for change. I will continue to investigate/debate Jade Maw adjustments.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. We are able to reproduce this if players die in the pools of lava during the final shaman boss fight, and I am working on a solution for this.
Did you notice this happening anywhere other than the pools of lava in the final fight?

I’ll look into this for the next patch. As it stands right now this situation can be mitigated through proper dodge and stability, so it’s not blocking any content and not an emergency issue.

I think my solution for this will be to teleport dead players who die in the lava to the edge of the lava so that other players can revive them, but they won’t be in complete safety from the boss.

We have things planned, but are always open to feedback.

“Data” is a nebulous term. Part of that data is forum posts, part of it is personal experience in PUGs/groups, and other factors as well I won’t go into. I feel I know why people res-rush, and had a good sense through data where people were doing it. Using that info I made my changes.

Our QA was able to replicate the issue, but it didn’t block the content. If a player is downed, then they will have to heal themselves and get helped up, which blocks things. Being downed puts you in combat, but the laser is a bit buggy in that it shouldn’t be trying to kill you if you are dead. I’ll add that to my to-do list this time around, but this issue is not a blocking issue.

Thanks for posting!

I’ll look into this, it certainly seems like an issue that may have slipped through our fingers. Are you confident nobody in your party was otherwise in combat?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/robert-hrouda-on-upcoming-changes-to-dungeon-mechanics/

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/robert-hrouda-on-upcoming-changes-to-dungeon-mechanics/

Dungeons

Polished dungeons and removed the ability to use waypoints while any player is in combat.

Dynamic Leveling

Attribute calculations for dynamic level scaling have been rebalanced. In general, this means weaker when adjusted down, stronger when adjusted up. Rewards when adjusted down have been increased to compensate. It is now possible to receive your own level of loot from any level of enemy.

Fractals of the Mists

Players can now reconnect to the Fractals of the Mists if they are disconnected.
Players can now connect to a fractal map even if they are not part of the original group that created the fractal instance.
Players can revive at a checkpoint in fractal maps if the entire party is out of combat.
Players are no longer prevented from entering fractal maps. The difficulty of the fractals is shared, and players will receive rewards based on their “reward level.”
Reward level increases as players complete fractal rounds.
If players have a higher reward level than the current fractal difficulty, they will receive bonus karma at the end of a round. However, item rewards are set to the minimum of the fractal scale and reward level.
Daily Fractals of the Mists bonus chests are awarded after defeating the kraken. The rewards are now based off of the minimum of the player’s reward level or current fractal scale.

Post feedback here.

BALANCE, BUG-FIXING, POLISH
Dungeons
General

Fixed a bug where creatures in dungeons were no longer becoming invulnerable to players they couldn’t reach.
Updated the costs of several dungeon reward items to be consistent with their costs in other dungeons. These include leggings, chestpieces, and shoulder armor from Ascalonian Catacombs; tridents and assorted armor pieces from Sorrow’s Embrace; and focuses from Caudecus’s Manor.

Fractals of the Mists

Swampland fractal: The tripwires have been rebuilt to reflect their names. Several have been lifted out of the ground and made more visible.
Fractal Marshes: The traps in the first area now scale with the difficulty scale of the fractal.
Fractals: Added day or night time to specific fractals. Day and night do not cycle.
Underwater Fractal: The Jelly boss will no longer try to devour NPCs like pets and minions before they try to eat players. If no players are around, it will eat NPCs.
Fixed various exploits and minor bugs.

Ascalonian Catacombs

Story—The Lovers: Reduced health for both bosses and damage from Ralena.
Story—Coffin Intro: Additional coffins cannot be interacted with once the boss shows up.
Story—Ranger: Damage has been reduced for the trap skill.
Story: Some enemy group compositions have been altered.
Story—Adelbern: Reduced damage and modified his melee attack.
Explorable—Detha’s Chain: Decreased the recharge time for cannons in the final event and modified their attacks.
Explorable—Detha’s Chain: Adjusted the respawn rate of the groups at the “Defend Detha and her traps” event.

Arah

Story: Reduced most veterans to regular strength during the ship events.
Story: Attacking dragons have reduced damage and no longer knock back on their flyover barrages.
Story: Zhaitan’s acid pools do less damage.
Explorable: Fixed issues that may have prevented events from starting or ending properly across all paths in the dungeon when an NPC was potentially dying, reviving, or being interacted with.
Explorable—Seer Path: In the Dwayna fight, the sparks will now target players primarily, and their attacks have been adjusted in a way that should make them chase the player as initially intended.

Citadel of Flame

Story: The Baelfire fight now has a safety net in case players fall off. If players die in a dangerous area, their body is teleported to a safe location for players to revive.
Story—Forgefire Armory Boss: This boss’s damage has been reduced.
Story—Bolok Barracks Boss: The group composition of the reinforcements summoned by Bolok Barracks boss has been modified.
Explorable—Magg’s Chain: The event to defend Magg while he plants a bomb has been rebuilt.
Explorable—Magg’s Chain: The respawn rate of creatures in the magma field has been adjusted.
Explorable—Rhiannon’s Chain: The torch event at the start has been adjusted to only require 3 torches instead of 5; enemy groups have also been adjusted accordingly.

Sorrow’s Embrace

Explorable—Inquest Path: The infinitely spawning waves have been adjusted to no longer spawn when fighting with the golem miniboss. They will continue once the golem event completes. The group compositions were also adjusted to add more variation.

Crucible of Eternity

Explorable—Evolved Destroyer: This enemy’s health has been reduced. The time window before the shield turns back on has been increased.
Explorable—Subject Alpha (All): The enemy’s health has been reduced.

Twilight Arbor

Explorable: Leurent’s Elite Guard shields have been fixed so they no longer deal damage after they disappear.
Explorable—Leurent Boss Encounter: The group composition has been adjusted.
Explorable—Worm Boss: Spit puddles have reduced damage, but more puddles are created with each attack.

Honor of the Waves

Explorable: Aldus Stormbringer adds are no longer veterans and have adjusted respawn times.
Explorable: Aldus’s invulnerability shield now properly decrements to melee and area attacks.
Updated the effect for the Cone of Cold skill used by Controller Andal to match the area affected by the skill when he turns.

The only people who got banned for salvaging snowflakes were a very select few who abused the exploit several hundreds to thousands of times.

It is okay to salvage those things. You earned them through time spent in dungeons and spending the tokens as you wanted. It is okay to salvage dungeon rewards and Mystic Forge them.

Latinkuro.9420:

Changes I would love to see implemented now that hey plan to redesign Boss Encounter Mechanics:

1 Remove the annoying defiance buff from Bosses it was a lazyman’s way to fix the core of the issue anyway.

2 display name coherence, what I mean is most of the time I have no idea who is writing to me because the name is always different and if I’m in the middle of a fight I can’t stop to hover over their name to see the account name !

Give us options, say, display account name only for all characters of the same account or display chosen nickname for all characters of this account.

Just my 2 cents.’’

1. Defiance is necessary unfortunately, and we figured that out early on. Without defiance, groups just stack knockdown skills and utilities and kill every boss without them being able to get up off the floor. There are some funny videos of this that can be found where players repeatedly throws rocks at Adelbern and knock him over constantly, allowing them to kill him with ease.

2. I’m a bit confused still about what you are implying with this and how it effects boss re-designs. Could you elaborate some more?

The glitch where a boss can’t fight back will be fixed this patch.

Because there was no content patched yesterday. It was a routine maintenance.

EDIT:
And I also have not adjusted the boss in any way for the upcoming content patch either.

Shiren.9532:

Robert, are you the head/one of the top people on the dungeon team (it’s possible I just made up “dungeon team”)? You are one of the most communicative members of the ArenaNet staff and you seem to post with solid and satisfying information (possibly a luxury when dealing with dungeon design as opposed to WvW culling or the ephemeral concept of class balance), it would be interesting to know if you are a minion or the guy holding the whip.

Even when I disagree with things the “dungeon team” does, at least I usually understand them from your posts.

After Fractals shipped and just before this last week, I have been the sole designer on the Live Team’s dungeon content. We have designers on the team for other content, but because I built a few of the dungeons we launched with, I am familiar with the current content. I am also a passionate dungeon player, so I feel like it’s been a good fit for me to update and upkeep the dungeons.
In a sense, I both hold the whip and and whipping myself in regards to dungeon content and getting things done (ouch). I have my leads that I answer to and get permissions from, but largely I am acting on what I feel is making the dungeons better. I am leading the charge on improving dungeon content, but I am not a manager or anything – I’m a “in the trenches” designer who just so happens to also post a lot in the dungeon forums to keep players up to date and keep an eye on things.

This last week I have been allotted a fellow designer (who sometimes posts here) by the name of William, who is going to help me with updating dungeon content and our plans going forward (we have big stuff coming down the pipeline for dungeons).

Shiren.9532:

Some TA paths might benefit from additional WPs. Just saying.

Yes.

Oglaf.1074:

I misread the last part as pleasure.

Oh myyyy.

Oglaf.1074:

Any chance for a sneak peek? Just one encounter….?

:P

Throw us a bone here!

I was hoping it would be a surprise, but sure. I rebuilt the “Defend Magg while he plants the bomb” event in CoF (path 2). It now involves a special flame legion assassin who must be killed before he reaches Magg, while dealing with never-ending spawns of (non veteran…) flame legion out to distract the players and add pressure.

Oglaf.1074:

So you’re just punishing us this patch, promising us compensation for the increased difficulty Soon?

You should hold with the respawn changes until you got the additional Waypoints ready…

Turning off res rushing was a programatic thing to do. As a designer, I spent the entirety of this last patch’s development tuning and ensuring encounters could be accomplished without res rushing.
When you see the patch notes, you’ll be more aware of how much work went into making the anti res-rushing fix not a punishment or an increase in difficuly, but rather a solution to a problem.

As the Dev who built it, I am fine with players doing Ferra’s path also doing the bonus encounter. It’s a tricky jump down, and an additional boss they have to face. It’s a bonus event, and it doesn’t cause any problems with Rhiannon’s path that I know of, so I’m fine with players going out of their way for that additional optional boss.

I do intend on putting more waypoints into dungeons, but due to the work required for this upcoming patch we didn’t get enough time to make it happen.
I’m not a fan of “punishment running” wherein your punishment for failing is having to run a long distance back to the fight. To discourage res rushing potential we went initially with fewer waypoints. Now that we are implementing a new tech, I would like to add more to reduce the time spent running back to an objective.
We have more info coming soon to how the system will be working.