Guild Wars 2

Also confirm. I recently helped out a group of guildees with their last four quests before Arah, and ended with the same amount of karma I went in with.

The community was excellent during pre-view.

Since then, it depends on where you are. Trolling Lion’s Arch seems to be an “endgame” for a number of people, but there are also a number of kind and helpful people there as well. The Orr areas are generally unpleasant (probably because of the “endgame” attitudes that it causes). The starter areas are a mix. Frostgorge is generally very pleasant. Mid level areas, while they may have low populations, are fairly friendly.

I don’t PvP or go into WvW, so I don’t know about those areas.

deriver.5381:

I wonder what do you mean by currently broken jumping puzzles

You can collect the keys, but cannot open the door since the 10/7 patch. There are several posts, some with developer comment, about it.

I’m honestly surprised at many of the people who oppose complete separation. Do you really want people who do NOT want to be in WvW, who are not participating or helping the server effectively, and consume limited space (increasing queue times) weakening your server?

I have no problem with a Legendary weapon requiring heavy PvE and WvW play. The intention of it is that you have mastered a large portion of the game. Getting the star and title is a different matter.

ichyboy.2315:

ok that is weird… i check the maps and shows there that I’ve already went through all Hearts, vistas, POI, Skills and waypoints. it says on the map…. <map name> completion 100%

Exposing the map names is a different part. There are several areas that have no vistas, hearts, points of interest, skill points, and waypoints, but will “unfog” an area of the map and show up as a white name.

It’s the white name that counts for the area achievements. Malchor’s Fingers, Artesian Waters, and several other areas in the game (Tail of the Serpent, Demongrub Caverns, Shaman’s Rookery for example) do not have any map completion elements, but do count for the area achievement.

The 10/1 patch which adjusted the camera angle helped seeing, but I miss a bit more jumps in tight places than I used to.

I still do Troll’s End daily for the farm and the level 80ish scaled chest, it just sometimes takes a few tries where before, I could not see well but didn’t miss as many jumps.

My charr Ash Legion ranger is working toward ‘Militant’ (dignity/ferocity). Seems to be fitting.

The Brisban Wildlands heart where you infiltrate a bandit camp (and have a completely different skill bar) is one example I remember. Being full Noble on my main norn elementalist allowed me to avoid some fights by choosing a noble specific dialog option. Doing it on another alt (sylvari mesmer, building charm) would not give me that option, but I could use the charm options on some different npc’s in that heart that noble didn’t work on.

That particular heart was the most prominent one, but I do remember it used elsewhere.

I personally have long since gotten tired of the attitudes that typically surround any PvP activity. Part of it’s probably my age and gender, part of it is probably my supporting and cooperative nature, and part of it’s probably wanting to avoid the same behaviours and attitudes in my entertainment that I deal with every day at work (in education).

In the betas, WvW was fairly fun. People were still learning what was going on, people were helpful, and it was a new experience.

Once live hit, WvW became completely and utterly “serious business”, with a lot of trash talking, insults, and those same attitudes that I want to avoid. And this is all coming from the same team, not the opponents.

I did the WvW map completion on two characters, and in my opinion that’s enough for me. My main character who I play 92% of the time (going by /age) has her star and that’s all I really wanted.

I personally also have no desire to get a legendary. The only one I really like is the staff, and I’m a scepter/dagger Ele. I’d rather not spend massive amounts of time getting limited drops from PvP kills, or getting jumped and ambushed while doing the (currently broken) jumping puzzles.

Events do scale with your level, and scale a bit more strongly with with the level of the area.

On my level 80, for instance, doing an event in Queensdale or another 1-15 area will generally give me a bit over 3,000 experience. Doing an event in Cursed Shore, or the Claw of Jormag event in Frostgorge Sound will give me over 17,000 experience. Other areas range in between.

gw2cartographers.com does not have the names needed to get the explorer achievements. Your best option is the maps on the wiki, or the text list of areas for ones that are reasonably complete.

For Orr, the most commonly missed ones tend to be The Artesian Waters (if you haven’t done the near-end story mission), and Desmina’s Hallows, both in Cursed Shore.

Other miss-able ones include Malchor’s Fingers (Malchor’s Leap) and Sea of Elon (Straights).

There is also a “griefing” issue in here, as the veteran and champion mobs are triggered by a “tripwire” type effect, and can be immediately triggered after they are killed.

Still experiencing it as well. Someone else explained the way it triggers (can’t find the quote at the moment), by having a pet or summon brought out just outside your field of view.

It happens much less now, but the issue is still present in some situations.

Aside from the “pet” based aggro keeping you in combat mode…

Another big issue is seen on certain jumping puzzles and on the many krait towers around. Angering a mob, then going up or down to another section of the tower/puzzle that the mob can’t get to will often keep you in combat indefinitely. It seems there is an issue with Z-axis aggro handling.

My guild is a mixture. The core was a GW1 guild, and as people from that guild tried other games, they all picked up their own groups. When GW2 started, it put the Aion group together with the FFXI group, DDO group (where they picked me up), Tribes group, WoW group, and Tera group. While the core is mostly older, mid-30’s+, some of the new additions are younger.

A lot of the younger ones have left, frustrated that this game is not like their last. The one young person from the DDO group remains, probably because of the similarities in mentality between DDO and GW2.

The older core group plus several “strays” they picked up elsewhere who are also older all remain, and still enjoy most of what there is to offer here.

I personally dislike PvP, so I don’t expect to ever get the 2500 or so WvW kills needed to get the 500 badges.

The look and behaviour of the weapons greatly varies. Of those I have seen in videos or other previews, I like the staff best. I use sceptre/dagger, however, and the sceptre is very much not something I would want to hold.

I strongly desire a return of the GW1 style split between PvE and PvP skills. It would resolve a lot of the complaints and issues. The only problem is the extra time spent balancing each one.

A large part of the negative atmosphere is probably the generation gap. Another large part is the group that wants this game to become more like <insert their previous game(s)>.

I play an Elementalist. Yes, I’m a bit frustrated and tired of the constant reduction in power, but I hold out hope that the balance and bug fixes will eventually come. I still enjoy playing the Ele in PvE, and still prefer that character to my others (330 out of 380 hours).

Bugs are always present. Programming on the side and professionally for over 20 years has taught me that. Any non-trivial program will have bugs. A huge program cannot ever be perfect, and an MMO is ALWAYS in constant flux with new things and balancing, so there are always new bugs and unseen bad interactions between old and new code.

As long as I see a fair number of bugs resolved, so the new ones don’t get too far ahead, and the developers and testers are doing their jobs effectively. A number of things cannot be amply tested for prior to release, because of population issues. A large population WILL do things that are unpredicted and not tested for. Testers also have limited time, massive workload, and are in general horribly under-appreciated. I know this personally as I worked as a professional tester and documenter (thankfully not for a game company).

374 hours now, still just the one exotic pulled from a random Orrian mob in Malchor’s Leap.

The NPC only offers a gambling game. That is what is disabled.

When the harpy event is over, and after they shoot the cows (and complete their dialogue), you should be able to directly click on the Cattlepult. You can hold in CTRL to see when the object becomes interactible.

Note that the “event” that triggers getting more cows (disables the Cattlepult while it goes on) often gets itself blocked, and when that happens the Cattlepult is never usable again until the servers are restarted.

The Metrica Fire Elemental would be much less nasty with a reduced Ember spawn rate. It could also possibly use a bit more time between the red circle appearing and the damage (this is a level 15 boss, not a 75…).

Most of my deaths at that Fire Ele are due to getting a couple Embers on me (sometimes accidentally, sometimes spawned on me, sometimes intentionally griefed), who fill the ground with red circles and I can’t dodge or avoid the Embers plus the Elemental’s fireballs+knockdown.

334 hours of gameplay, and only 2 keys have dropped from mobs. The rate must be in the 1:10,000 to 1:25,000 range.

Maybe it’s because I’m old, maybe because I’d rather not use yet another privacy invasive product than I absolutely have to, maybe it’s because I’m jaded after seeing “fads” come and go since being on the Internet since 1995…

I always felt the best place for information and news was the official website for a product. Feel free to post it elsewhere, but it should be on the official site first or at least at the same time.

I figure that if some bit of “exclusive” news is posted on a social (engineering) media site, some player will post it to the official forums.

Depends on the champion.

Any class who can do reasonable ranged damage would be able to indefinitely kite the champions who either only melee, or primarily melee with slow and easily dodged ranged attacks.

Well built and played Guardians and Warriors can successfully melee many champions if they use their dodges and defensive abilities effectively.

Stevoli.8795:

How about that one level 60 veteran spider that’s guarding the skill challenge out in Sparkfly Fen? Took a group of 5 people almost 10 minutes to kill it… wth is that about?

It was actually labelled a Champion early in the game. I ran into it again helping out a guildmate, and although it is now labelled a Veteran, it still has Champion grade HP and damage.

Both times I dealt with it, it was in a group of two getting it down below half, then a third person joining in for the finale.

It’s caused by Guardians moving them. This bug was mentioned about a month ago, started getting really abused three weeks ago, and still has not be corrected.

It’s less the “skill cap”, as even people I know (both genders) without any gaming experience at all can learn the basic controls, find their way around reasonably well, and be able to survive in the open world in a couple weeks at most.

She could start with a profession that’s a bit more forgiving and durable, but that’s not truly necessary. The three recommended ones above, Guardian, Ranger, and Warrior are all like that. All three can clear out trash mobs well, all three can take a bit of abuse, and all but Guardian have very effective ranged capabilities to emphasize the importance of switching tactics.

Even if she chooses Elementalist, after the first few weeks of learning, she will do well enough to survive without too much trouble. A guildmate’s wife is playing her first game, period, and made an elementalist. After a month’s play, she’s doing explorable dungeons and doing quite well.

Just let her choose, make her own decisions, and be patient.

Voidspawn.1934:

Shouldn’t this have been fixed in the beta?

For open betas and stress tests, the only dungeon available was Ascalonian Catacombs. Fireheart Rise was also not open.

For closed betas, it probably should have unless the particle effects were a late addition.

The one and only one I pulled came from a “trash” mob during the Claw of Jormag fight.

I use Renewal almost all the time in open world PvE. I swap it out for something instant in heavy CC areas.

I have water 10, and still like the extra condition removal on the heal rather than taking up space in my utility skills.

The drop rate is low enough that random number streaks will happen. You can immediately get a drop, or you can kill thousands of mobs and not get one. It’s the same for the crystal in Metrica.

Whirlpool has a 3 minute cooldown, and for a long time did NOT function in PvE at all.

Tidal Wave (water 5) has a 25 second cooldown, and can easily miss if a mob decides to move to the side.

Ice Globe (water 2) is great if you can perfectly time the detonate, which can be tough if you have other things to worry about (like in Orr).

Your major CC has 25 (water 4), 30 (fire 4), 35 (air 4), 35 (air 5), 35 (earth 4), and 45 (earth 5) second cooldowns. Three of the CC effects do no damage, and two of them are single target only.

An event chain will have you break in, capture all the parts of the base, and kill an obnoxious little asura to open up the entrance to CoE. The chain is also how you get the points of interest and skill point inside.

Aviar.4892:

This may be bugged, but I think it is working as intended. Here us how to complete it.

1. Talk to a displaced spirit, they are down around the house.
2. Follow them to their body, you will be attacked by spirit spiders and such
3. Rez the body when the spirit rejoins with it.
4. repeat about 3 times and you are done.

Yes, this is the intended means to complete.

What this bug report is about is that most of the spirits are NOT present on many servers. They get stuck inside of trees or below ground, simply aren’t spawned, or become non-interactible objects on the map, so as the week goes by the heart becomes nearly impossible to complete.

The world event in the area does spawn spiders, but that event also often gets stuck and cannot proceed.

I do reasonably well in Orr on my ele, able to handle most of the map without needing someone else, but that doesn’t mean it’s in any way enjoyable.

When solo, I avoid densely packed areas (especially those with lots of anchor wielding Putrefiers and shovel wielding farmers), stay away from the water, and make ample use of my Snow Leopard stealth “emergency button”.

Even one other person with me to work on clearing the way makes a huge difference, and a group of 3-5 can breeze through anything except for a few of the champions or taking the temples.

My biggest personal issues with the Orr area are:
1) Huge but incredibly random aggro range. Sometimes you will get aggro from mobs in the next county over (all spamming their near-infinite range CC), while other times you can breeze through an area with minimal impact.
2) Sheer number of CC effects, which combined with the large numbers and large aggro range, makes getting anywhere feel like a real drag.
3) The lack of any sort of “downtime”, as mentioned above. It becomes stressful to constantly be under assault.
4) The pulls are incredibly jarring. I don’t get motion sickness, but I’m sure the amount of pulls would trigger it in a lot of people.
5) The behaviours of some players and some chat is much more negative than most other areas of the game. Part of it is probably the “endgame” mentality, part of it is probably the frustration level of the whole place.

Most, if not all, AoE buff effects only affect a maximum of 5 “targets” in range.

Large ISP’s often have huge dynamic IP pools.

Years ago, those IP blocks were registered for specific areas, but now they are in a large pool for all coverage areas.

I haven’t noticed a real increase in how often this happens to me. It mostly occurs if I skip a mob, then get uphill from them in some way.

Happens often with vistas on krait towers, the vista inside the dredge mine in Dredgehaunt Cliffs (Tribulation Rift isn’t as bad), and jumping puzzles like the Shattered Ice Ruins.

Feels almost like the Z axis is not being taken into account for measuring mob aggro distance in those certain areas.

I reached level 80 in about 70 hours of playtime (as shown by /age). I completed all the 1-15 maps, then moved on to the 15-25 maps, and so on. I saved Frostgorge for last.

Doing this, I hit level 80 a short time after entering Straights of Devestation, and made approximately 15 gold over the course of it (most of the time had no trading post, so I npc’ed a lot more, and gave a number of items away to guildmates).

The only crafting I did was making 8 slot bags.

Bsquared.3421:

Air 2 I barely use at all.

why wouldn’t you? It’s instant cast, instant hit, on a fairly short cooldown. You can use both skills #2 and #3, they’re both instant and can be cast while in the middle of RTL. I believe they can even be cast while channeling #1.

Basically there is no reason not to use both skills #2 and #3 continuously, every time they are off cooldown if you’re in air attunement. Do you not like free extra damage?

Tested it and you’re right. They NOW (but not in BWE2 when I first tried them) are instant cast.

I do regularly use Air 3 because it’s another source of blind. I just never bothered with Air 2 because it used to break channels.

Depends on whether the skritt are alone or with their group.

I don’t see the appeal of kodan. They look interesting, and their lore has some draw; but the ones in game are unbelievably condescending, arrogant, and unpleasant to be around. Horrible attitude for a race of refugees, who are looking for a place to settle in another “lesser” (in their own terms) races territory

As bad as asura attitudes are, kodan are way worse.

There was a discussion last night on this very topic when I was in Frostgorge last night. It also was brought up how much nicer Frostgorge’s community was as compared to Cursed Shore.

I am in a party almost at all times I’m on. The parties just happen to be primarily guildmates. Guilds running together in a party get a boost to the influence earned.

As for voice chat, it’s not laziness. With the active combat we have here, there is simply no time to type in most big events, especially a boss fight. Stopping to type can easily get you killed, think of trying to type a line of text in the Metrica fire elemental fight.

My previous game had built-in voice chat for the entire party, and it made a huge difference in communication, as even many who didn’t have a mic would still be able to listen.

I tend to use Air 1 only on objects, due to their being immune to condition damage. This is between fire 2, 3, 4, Arcane Wave cooldowns to stack Might of course.

Air 2 I barely use at all.

Grumwulf.9602:

The downlevelling was meant to prevent this problem and is clearly not working for the 1-25 zones.

It’s likely the traits. They don’t seem to be affected much, or at all, by downscaling.

I don’t mind backing off and doing more support. I always played a CC, support, or healer character in any game (from Secret of Mana, MUD’s, and on), and that type of play fits my personality. Many people, however, do not like holding back or playing support. There was a thread a week or so ago where a player wanted to help a friend, but didn’t want to “be a healer”.

An important point.

I do a lot of running around with lower level friends and guildmates. I try to remain aware of not impacting their gameplay.

Since I use an Ele, I can easily demolish huge groups of low level mobs. Instead, I may just use a Ring of Fire rather than toss any other bursts. It’ll still do 30-50% of a mob’s health up until level 20-25 mobs, so I get enough contribution, but without preventing others from tagging the mob.

I’ll use my lower damage CC abilities instead of high damage blasts. I’ll do more healing and support. I’ll run around and take aggro first because even downscaled, I can take a lot more abuse than an actual low leveled player. I may even switch to staff rather than my normal scepter/dagger.

When doing hearts, I make sure my friends/guildmates do enough damage to tag a mob before damaging it myself.

Ele since BWE2 (tried Guardian and Mesmer in BWE3 after the wipe). ~280 hours with ~255 on my Ele since headstart.

I only PvE, and still prefer playing my Ele over anything else. Two jewels to make and my equipment will be complete. It might be different if I did sPvP, but I don’t.

Player: Favourite norn. I always liked Norse themed races and areas. Least asura. I don’t like those little arrogant jerks, who can never accept blame for the things they do.

Non-player: Favourite either tengu or quaggan. Least dredge (and risen but they don’t count).

Agrak Kraal in Blazeridge Steppes is another example, for the reason Mandralan stated.

Swagman.9013:

It is not impossible to do, each map reset your servers position for bases rotates. That means one week in eternal battlegrounds you’ll be on the top portion, the next week you will be in one of the other 2 positions, the third week you will be in the last spot.

You don’t always rotate, with the way matching works. You often will but you don’t always.

rook.4625:

Can always transfer and then transfer back if World Completion means so much to you.

That works for now, but will NOT work a some time in the near future.

Ameepa.6793:

Primarily PvP players don’t like doing forced PvE maps. How about giving the Gifts of Exploration to WvW completion because it is obviously much harder to get and Pve-completion could be rewarded with some blobs of ectoplasm?

If you want a legendary, you need to do full PvE completion, farm out at least one dungeon, have two specific fully maxed crafting disciplines, and get a significant number of WvW kills. A legendary specifically requires play across the entire game.

Map completion should still be split into a PvE form and PvP form. PvE one gets you the PvE oriented part of a legendary. The PvP form should get you the PvP part of a legendary (or for WvW only players who don’t care about dungeons, crafting, or PvE, something that helps them in WvW).

The risen giants don’t count for the Giant Slayer achievement, they count as Zhaitan’s Bane.

The only two actual killable giants I can think of are the two mentioned, Kol and the DE with the attack on the town.