Guild Wars 2

I knew that I would (dis)like the game mode of adventures after my first try, but I actually played all of them and reached at least silver where required by some collection or mastery point. My view didn’t change while doing this – only that dislike turned into hate.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Anet heard a kitten ton of complains anyway, I think (and hope!) they will do it better with next expansion.

Will they? I’m worried about the total lack of response from Arenanet to the adventure and mastery point feedback of the players. The only thing they did was to make the worst offenders a bit easier, but the general design was not reworked. But it’s the design that is frowned upon. At least from me.
Hope is all that is left, but for hope alone I will not buy the next expansion.

Djinn.9245:

Here’s a question for you: did being forced to do Adventures if you wanted to get the collections done make you like Adventures? Do you do them for fun now that you’ve been forced to try them?

This didn’t make me like adventures. I never play them again after the required collection item or mastery point was obtained.
After I tried my first adventure, Bugs in the Branches, I knew that this was not a game mode I would like. More tries were not required to find that out.

My feelings changed from dislike to hate only after I found out I was required to make adventures for mastery points and certain collections. Before, it was just a game mode I disliked – like pvp, for example, which I don’t play either, but I don’t hate pvp, because it isn’t forced upon me like the adventures.

I also hate adventures, and I also gave them a try because of the half-completed collections which would be left dangling if I didn’t. Where silver was required, I managed to get silver.

The point is, practicing and doing it was not fun. Not for a second. Not for a single adventure. Although I play games for fun, I did this without fun. I felt I was forced to do them due to a half-completed collection. Scrap rifle silver, my last, took approx. 1 hour of pointless dumb clicking that I hoped would be over forever as soon as possible. I wasn’t even able to make completing an adventure a group event together with my guild, since adventures are strictly solo.

In conclusion, the game should not encourage gameplay that is not fun for a non-negligible part of the players. I cannot write “force gameplay”, because collections are optional. But we all know that they are shouting “complete me, complete me!” very, very loud, because they continue to show up every time you look at your incomplete collections, and you are not able to deactivate collections you don’t want to complete.

It’s quite a funny reading. As far as I know, the player population of video games is approx. 80% male, and now they ask for costumes to dress their doll. I am no different of course, I’d really like more sexy dresses for my male asura main character. Especially ones that promotes the ears, because as you know, asura have some obsession with ears, and I’d like to attract some more female asura.

He means athlete’s foot. His words are a literal translation from german, which is not applicable in this case.

In your diag file are two traces. One path is from you to the EU data center in Frankfurt, which has a latency of 147 ms. The other is from you to the US data center in Dallas, which has a latency of 244 ms. That is much more.

If you look closer, you see that the packets both go to Paris/Marseille (EU) and then split to either Frankfurt (EU) or Dallas (US). Paris and Frankfurt are on the same continent, not very far away. The way from Paris to Frankfurt only adds a few ms to the path. The way from Paris to Dallas, on the other hand, cross the Atlantic ocean and add more than 100 ms on top of the already long path to Paris.

What you can do to reduce latency: choose the EU data center for your account.
You do this by changing to a EU world in the character selection screen. All EU worlds are hosted in the EU data center, and all US worlds are hosted in the US data center. Choosing a EU world will give you ~100 ms lower latency than the US data center.

The downside is, that if you are currently on the US data center, you will lose the ability to play with your guild and friends that are still on the US servers. It’s not possible for an account located on a EU world be on the same instance of a map or dungeon as an account on a US world. It also costs money (gems) to switch worlds.

Vayne.8563:

I’m saying that HoT is not much different from Orr on release, or at least, I remember seeing the same kinds of posts about it.

There is some truth in that, but there is also a fundamental difference between HoT (VB) and Orr:
For Orr, you could always go back to the previous and easier maps and build your character and abilities until you felt ready for Orr. In contrast, for HoT, you had to play in HoT to prepare for HoT. You had to prepare in the same area you were preparing for. That’s one of the crucial downsides of HoT.

In a way, I did go back and prepared elsewhere: I played Fractals for a year instead of HoT. But I don’t think that was expected and intended gameplay. It was expected that if a player buys HoT, he will play HoT and not an old game area.

Vayne.8563:

The problem is trying to find a commander halfway across a map on a map you’ve never visited like following a commander tag blindly is the game.

It was a new thing. Following a commander around to explore the map was never necessary and was never done on the old maps. If someone offered this on that new map, I thought it was a good idea to follow to ease the exploration, because the map looked a bit confusing from the first story mission. Before, I never followed farm trains or the like. I wanted to prepare. I thought it would be easier with some kind of guide – that commander tag. Apparently, I was wrong. I don’t blame the game for me being wrong, but I blame the game for prohibiting me reaching some person on that unexplored map in a very unpleasant way.

Looking back on that situation, I cannot find a fault in my initial reasoning. There was no event in sight, so I was totally free to do anything. I simply was unprepared for my task, so I failed. I blame the game to not prepare me for that moment. I know now that this was actually the design of the game: to get the player into trouble unprepared, just like Mordremoth caught the pact fleet unprepared and destroyed it.
Well, I can only say that this is a design that makes me abandon a game. I see this as a personal insult. Very personal. If the game designers send me to perish, I want to let the game perish in anger. I cannot see the slightest bit of fun or entertainment value in that. I never felt a connection between the pact fleet failure and my failure: the pact fleet failure is due to Mordremoth’s story, and my failure is due to the map design. Not due to the jungle being dangerous.

If you are speaking of VB, let me tell you how my first open world experience looked like on that map. I just got out of the HoT prologue mission.

I saw a green mark somewhere on the fogged map for the next mission, and I said to myself: “well, let’s explore that new territory before I continue with the story”.

I saw a commander tag, and I saw an invitation from the commander in map chat for exploration. That was exactly what I was looking for. I joined his squad and tried to reach him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to reach his tag. Either I was downed by enemies and had to start over. Or the tag was “over there” across, but no path leading to him. Or he was above me, or under me, and once I managed to get across, he was on the opposite part of the map. It was neither possible to reach his squad, nor possible to understand how that map and map navigation worked. I was constantly running and looking for contact with some group, but I wasn’t able to find any. Sometimes, I found a group, but it suddenly vanished into the void minutes later (they were flying away, porting away, jumping up or down as I now know).

That was my first experience in HoT, and it made me turn away from HoT for months. I simply wanted to play the game as it was presented to me, but it didn’t work. If there were not my guild, I would probably have left the game at this point.

Allowing such things as starting experience for a just released expansion is bad design.

Apparently, the devs focused solely on the endgame experience of a fully leveled and experienced player and totally forgot about the rookies that just started out. I sincerely hope that for the future expansion, Arenanet will invite players and not professional game QA testers to test and evaluate the starting and leveling experience of that expansion. We need people who test and evaluate how playing feels, not only QA that only ensure the non-existence of bugs.

Vayne.8563:

Whatever complaints still exist about hot are a vast minority.

This is is because the actual “end-”gameplay in the HoT maps is really good and fun, and complaints mostly deal with preparing yourself and grinding away the obstacles.

Leveling your masteries, having to ramp up your character and getting used to the maps is an awful and tedious experience. The things that can be described with “getting ready to have fun” are no fun. But once you overcome all the obstacles, playing the HoT maps with events and meta-events is really fun. Even I have fun there these days, although I complained very much about HoT and hold up all my complaints.

In the north-west corner of the pit is some kind of safespot on the ground. The lava does not extend to the wall in that corner.There are no worm attacks, no damage, no elementals. And nobody seems to have recognized that spot until now.

You can reach it if you fly from the platform over the lava down to the opposite edge of the lava, keeping left. The neck of the worm is reachable with at least 1200 ranged attacks from there. I don’t know if 900 is also possible.

It’s overkill of course only for displaying your character creation date, but together with gw2spidy, gwefficiency is probably the most valuable community-created website for GW2 that exists. It’s very useful and trustworthy. It’s difficult to explain why it is trustworthy, but it is.

I’m sorry, but according to the Doctor, this isn’t allowed.

You can display this and a bunch more statistics and information about your account on gw2efficiency: https://gw2efficiency.com/

It’s all about convenience. During gameplay, you need to access these locations/perform these operation frequently:

• vendor
• account bank
• trading post to claim money and items you bought
• crafting stations to craft something
• travel to main cities

Without pass, I did this:

vendor:

• open guild panel, enter guild hall, go to the vendor near the spawn location
• if I know that I need access to more than only the vendor, I would enter the pvp lobby instead.

account bank:

• open pvp panel, enter pvp lobby, go to the right to the bank access

trading post:

• open pvp panel, enter pvp lobby, go to the right

crafting stations:

• go to Lion’s Arch. If in the pvp lobby, use the portal there. If somewhere in a map, either go directly or through the pvp lobby and again through the portal there (no travel costs).

travel to main cities:

• go directly

The lobby passes makes this a bit easier, you click an item in your inventory and you don’t have to think where you should go, because you have all services available at a singe location. It’s even possible to transport to the main cities for almost convenient access to your home instance. Depending on your map loading times, you save 5-30 seconds and time you need to think if you need this or that service, thus need access to this or that location.

I have a permanent pass. Would never buy one of these 2-week time limited passes. I bought mine before all services except crafting were available in the pvp lobby and the guild hall. Today, I would not buy it again but use the services in the pvp lobby and the guild hall.

If you have real money to spend for the game, get one of the permanent passes. If you consider buying a pass with gold->gem exchange, don’t do it. Much too expensive that way.

I use my pass perhaps about 10-15 times a day.

Ayrilana.1396:

The map allows you to switch between “floors”.

Sure, but this doesn’t help. You still doesn’t see paths and ways to a point of interest, if the entrance is on a different level than the point of interest. It’s even worse: the map changes as you walk. Underground areas are uncovered in part while you walk through them, but you only see your current height uncovered. If you walk down, the upper area behind you is covered again and the next lower part in front of you is uncovered. You never see the whole way, the whole level. Especially for added semi-levels that lay between the switchable floors of the map. Draconis Mons has tons of these semi-levels.

It’s as you have printed 3 big paper maps of Draconis Mons on your desk and about 100 independent small scrap pieces of paper where the semi-levels between the big paper maps are scribbled. Totally chaotic.

I don’t quite understand, why you rack your brain upon something that’s game seller’s sole task. There are employees at Arenanet who are paid for this. If they cannot come up with something useful and profitable, it’s nothing we, the customer, can do about. It’s not our task. Our task as customer and gamer is to buy stuff and play the game and have fun with playing the game. The shop is already as greedy and evil as it can – it doesn’t need become even more greedy and more evil.

My main problem with this kind of map is if the entrance to an area is on a different level than the point of interest of this area shown on the map. If you design a map and provide a minimap, but the map has full 3d geography and the minimap is only plain 2d, you provide an incomplete guide to the map. In this case, no minimap would be better for me than a minimap that leads me the wrong path.

This seems an engine limitation from the start and applies to the whole game. For rare events, we get arrows pointing the way we should go to progress the event. But to be able to navigate a map like Draconis Mons or Tangled Depths, we need many more arrows on the minimap, if the minimap should help instead of confuse.

Better would be a 3d-minimap. The last game I played with such a 3d-minimap was Doom 2016. It’s probably not as beautiful as a paper map-like appearance like now, but certainly more helpful.

If it is so easy and clear as you write, well, why do threads like these constantly pop up since HoT release, where people write about their problems, which are all the same since release? For you it might all be easy and clear, but for (too) many people it seems not, and that fact is proved by the pure existence of these threads. A non-issue would generate none of these forum threads.
Don’t look at the design itself, look at the people how they deal with the design. They clearly have their problems with it.

Vayne.8563:

You need exactly six mastery points to do the hot story. You can get six mastery points without EVER doing anything like an arcade game.

You get one mastery point for finishing the first story. It requires you train basic gliding. That means the mastery point you get is the mastery point you use. You need five more. There are more than five mastery points marked on the first map that you can get just from communing with them.

The problem with this is: you don’t know any of this, if you just started HoT. It’s not self-documented, it’s not intuitive. You just spend your available mastery points randomly. You don’t know which points are easy to get and which are impossible to reach with basic masteries.

They are all spent, when you realize for what you should have spent them in the first place. Which is probably halfway through the story. But now it’s too late to ask or to look into game documentation: the easy-to-get points are spent. Now you have to go after the tedious points to just make up for your wrong decisions.

I, for example, leveled all masteries evenly, because the first levels required the least XP and the least mastery points. My reasoning was to get the most levels with the least effort. That the first levels are the most important. And that the last levels of a mastery was only for the 24/7 power gamers as time sink. I was completely wrong. But I realized this only when it was too late and I was required to retrieve the harder mastery points. How I struggled to get them. It made me not visit HoT any more for perhaps a year.

Usually, that is the departure from the game for a player. I am still around only because I have real life friends in my guild I wanted to continue to play with, so I returned after a 2 month pause, and I returned to play mainly Fractals, not HoT.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Did you play the original GW NIghtfall as an Elonian character? When you get to the story quest “And a Hero Shall Lead Them,” Elonian characters need to attain the General Rank in the Sunspear Rank Title Track to qualify to continue the story. Depending on what you did prior to that point in the game, that might or might not be more involved than getting a particular Mastery.

I played GW Nightfall with my first GW1 character almost 9 years ago, and I remember it well. I activated every shrine on Istan, I made every quest on Istan. When I was required to have some Sunspear rank, I simply had it. The game was designed in a way that when I play all the available content, my character level and Sunspear rank was just right. I didn’t have to explicitly farm XP or rank points. If you didn’t had enough points, you could look for quests you skipped – available content you skipped or did not find until then.
That was good design back then. It made you searching for and playing through the contents once. Perhaps cleaning a map once more to catch up with the points if you skipped too much, but not grinding stuff over and over again like in GW2.

Ask three friends and you get three different answers.
If there were less wrong ways to go, it would help. The game is open at the wrong places.
And yes, of course you can play without leveling masteries. But it isn’t fun. And players play the game for fun, I suppose.

The problem with leveling the masteries for casual players is information that is not available at the time of decision. Consider that casual players aren’t expected to level all masteries. Consider the game recognizes this and thus is designed in a way that there are important masteries and not so important masteries. Consider the game provides enough easy mastery points for the important masteries.

But how on earth should a new player, a casual player, know which mastery is important or not so important? How on earth he should know that completely maxing the gliding mastery is very important and has a deep impact on his gameplay, while not even starting Exalted Lore isn’t closing too many doors. This is not transmitted by the game. A new player simply starts every mastery, because he doesn’t know the impact.

It’s made even worse by the game messages while playing HoT maps: “you need xyz mastery to eat mushrooms, to use this item, to talk to this NPC, to open that chest, etc…” The player is confused deliberately and is made leveling the wrong masteries.

So It gets slower and slower while he levels all, then the easy mastery points exhaust, and in the end he isn’t able to reach something like Ley Line gliding.

At best, masteries are tedious to get. It’s a timegating mechanism to stretch the player’s playtime, not a mechanism to provide the player with fun content. As they are in HoT, I never felt the promised “progression” associated with them. I always saw them as obstacles I was required to overcome before I was able to have fun.

The aspect of obstacle got less bad in the new LS3 maps, because the required XP are not very high. But the idea to earn the XP and mastery points for a mastery in exactly the same map where you need this mastery is what made me abstain HoT for almost a year.
I feel progression if I can level and progress something to be able to advance to the next game area. If I don’t level some ability, I would perish in the next are, so I level that ability in the previous area.
But the current mastery system is as you enter a level 80 area as level 10 toon and are expected to earn XP in that combination. You perish. As level 10 toon in a level 80 area where everything is so hostile that you cannot advance much from a outpost and survive.

I acknowledge that there exist people who need some leveling goal, some grind mechanics to keep him busy in the game. I am not that kind of person, and I know many other players like me. I like to move to the actual content the game provides. I found 1 year of stuff to do without touching HoT. I really didn’t need this artificial progress of mastery grind. Thus my suggestion to be able to buy out the masteries with real money. And real money is what you want, Arenanet, or not?
I made real progress in the fractals for example, where I learnt how to become a better player. That was fun, and that was real personal progress. But leveling masteries is nothing I call progress – it’s only a huge sink, where you simply unlock some locked obligatory game features that should be unlocked from the start.

That’s exactly what I will do. Wait until a month after release and see what the community will write. I’ll especially search for mentioning of grief mechanics like the huge item grind in HoT, the masteries grind, the locked-away mastery points. If there are mechanics that come out as in HoT, it’s my departure from GW2.

Don’t get me wrong: HoT gameplay on the 4 HoT maps is nice and fun. But only after you maxed the masteries. Which was no fun at all. Absolutely none. Hated every second of it. Don’t want to have it again. If there is an edition at an additional cost of 20 Euro that comes with pre-maxed masteries, I’ll buy it immediately.

I actually use 800dps for my mouse sensivity. 3200 is much too high. I have a Logitech mouse (G700), and with the Logitech software it is possible to set up different profiles for every game. So it is no big effort to change settings just for GW2.

I don’t enjoy the map. I literally get a headache when I try to find all vistas and points of interest. You see the unmapped points, but they are unreachable. It’s as bad as Tangled Depth, only much langer, longer walks, more time wasted.

The minimap sends you on a fool’s errand: you think you reach the south poi by walking that certain way, because it seems the same height. But it isn’t. Is it above? Is it below? But there is nothing. So you must search youtube for the way. That’s not how I like to play a computer game.

Taimi is safe. Childs cannot be killed in a teen-rated AAA game.

She is probably allowed to die from a disease, but not in combat. Not from violence. Not even a god can kill her. The notion of political correctness is the higher authority and makes this impossible.

I am very sensitive to motion sickness (the symptoms you describe are my own), and for me the game was very bad at release, almost unplayable, but playing got better and better with some updates in the first year or years.

Currently, it’s perfectly playable without any symptoms. It’s not the mouse acceleration that is your problem, it’s the fine tuning of some settings. The acceleration was tuned down very much after release and got really good: not too much, not too less.

You might need to tune some settings within GW2:

• in the general options, locate the “Camera” part. Tune the the rotation speed according to your mouse speed.
• tune the field of view (the wider the less motion sickness, but be careful: this also lessens the fps, and less fps means more motion sickness. See below. A good balance of all the parameters described here is important)
• increase collision sensitivity. This makes the camera zoom in/zoom out during running much less, which produces motion sickness. But be careful: fully activated needs more CPU power and may take away fps.
• disable Camera Shake (very important. this makes me literally vomit almost instantly).
• in the graphics settings, activate vsync. Screen tearing that comes with disabled vsync produces motion sickness, because it makes the screen wobbly.
• turn down your graphics settings so that your fps is constantly higher than 50. Even better, 60 fps. Allow it to drop below 40 only in big zerg fights. The higher the fps the smoother the game runs, and the less motion sickness it produces. For me, 50 fps is the limit for motion sickness. Here, you must sacrifice quality for fps, so you don’t get sick. Not getting sick is more important than graphics quality.

Additionally, the higher the fps the smaller the latency for mouse and keyboard actions. That makes the game run less laggy and makes it appear less as being drunk. This is what you think is the mouse acceleration, but it is in fact mouse and keyboard latency. The rotation speed is also playing a major role in this. Too high and too low produces this “drunk” effect that makes you stagger. It’s very important to tune your rotation speed according to your mouse speed.

About mystic coins:

Probably a dilemma for the market specialist at Arenanet.

There is a saying that “the market is always right”. If I look into the price history of mystic coins, I see that it developed to the current price steadily with no spikes. So I assume the demand is greater than the supply for all the time, otherwise the price would decrease and not increase.

It doesn’t matter if coins are hoarded (and the demand is driven by the desire to hoard) or if the coins are requested for consumption. Either way the coins are withdrawn from the market and can be considered as “consumed”. Be it really destroyed or permanently kept away in some storage.

The item seems to have become a trader item. As long as this is the case, and the supply and demand stays the same, the situation will not change.

I see only one way out: increase the supply to a level that it’s not possible to buy it away into storage. Then the price will drop immediately to the ground and stay there, because of 3 things:

- the demand decreases, because traders withdraw to buy it as speculation object
- the supply even raises more, because traders try to sell their stock before it is worthless
- the supply is permanently much higher than the demand, so the price drops and stays down

As consequence, a huge part of the cost of items that are created through the mystic forge is permanently gone, because the supply cannot be reduced again – the whole spiral would start again. So the price stays down. It’s in Arenanet’s hands to decide if this is acceptable or not.

Make yourself familiar with how to acquire things. There are good and efficient ways to get stuff, and there are wrong ways. For example, buying black lion keys for gold→gems while in need for gold is a complete waste, because you need huge quantities of chests to open to get something rare.
If you play a lottery, make yourself familiar on how often you must do these, how much money you must sink into these to get something valuable back. You will always find that the return is less than what you spent. So don’t play lotteries. Ever. The black lion chests are lotteries.

The keys/chests are made for people to buy gems for real money and waste them on the keys. Not for spending your precious gold. They are made to siphon people and make them spending hundredths or even thousands of dollars/euro on this lottery. No sane human with a sense of what money or gold is worth is buying these.

I propose that you get full berserk or viper armor, weapons and accessories. Try playing with that. If that doesn’t work for you at first, exchange a few accessories with some defensive ones, for example soldier to get a bit more health or toughness. Accessories (esp. Rings) are the least expensive to change around.

Over time, after you get familiar with playing with lower health, change back to the offensive ones and ramp up your damage.

I started this way with my elementalist. For heavier encounters, for example higher level fractals, I used a soldier staff instead of a berserk staff, and one soldier ring. One day, I forgot to change to the defensive ones in one of the more difficult fractals and had no health problems at all, so I never ever again used them. Running 100% offensive even in the highest fractal levels since then.

The following is true for PvE, not WvW:

Did you try running full offensive equipment in the past, or do you only think what would happen if you do? I’m asking, because a long time ago, I was thinking like you myself and equipped my squishy elementalist with much defensive stats to make him less squishy. It was an awful experience. Enemies took so long I went down from the accumulated damage anyway.

I thought about quitting the game, and to show that the whole combat mechanics was borked, I got full berserk equipment and expected to die even a lot sooner as glass cannon. I was under the impression that with even less defensive, I would die almost instantly. I intended to ragequit the very moment I would die as glass cannon.

But to my surprise, the exact opposite happened. Enemies went down a lot faster, so I took much less damage than with defensive equipment. I survived every time, I survived every fight. Suddenly, playing was fun! I got downed much less as glass cannon than with defensive equipment.

The combat behavior of the enemies also changed. I was targeted much less. As far as I know, this is connected to toughness. The less toughness you have, the less you are a target. Suddenly, my ele was free from attack most of the time. For the first time in his life, he was able to deal damage! No struggle for survival any more – I was fighting the enemies instead.

So I recommend that you try full berserk or full sinister/viper according to your build first, before you take too much damage potential away with defensive stats.

Rauderi.8706:

Braham …yeah he’s Braham. There’s chunks of forum dedicated to his brand of dumb right now.

Just as I read this, I feel Braham is some kind of Taimi reversed. Taimi is a child that is smart, acts not childish (very much) and appears more mature than you expect from a child. Braham is an adult that doesn’t appear smart, acts childish (very much) and not mature at all. He is the real child in our team.

Djinn.9245:

When someone who is the equivalent of a NATO Commander decides to work with people, he can’t just pull some college student into his group without people asking questions (normally). And what would really happen is that the Asura would deal with the situation. Whether that would end up better or worse isn’t what I’m concerned with.

You are an agent from the Arcane Council, aren’t you? You report to Phlunt. You have as much imagination as the Arcane Council: none, apparently. For you, it is not RIGHT that a 15 year old child builds his own golem and designs part of the logistics behind the fight against an elder dragon. For you, it cannot be what MUST not be.

But, it is written in the script. There is precedent in (fantasy) history. It fits the story. It doesn’t violate nature laws or story continuity. She has a nice personality and a fault that balances her ingenuity.

There is one thing a child of this age is missing in comparison to an adult: the sense of responsibility. The ability to see the consequences of own actions and take responsibility for it with all consequences.

Because of this, in real life, you don’t want a child in a serious business. But in our story, we are not in a serious business. It’s all fantasy. If it were a serious business, we ourselves would not enter the jungle and approach Mordremoth without any clue how to defeat him. Remember: we found his weak spot as late as in the last mission. Instead, in real life, we would set up research about the elder dragons. Something the Arcance Council and the 3 orders do, and the Inquest. For years.

But we are the heroes, we go straight into the fight. And we win. That’s because we are the heroes, and Taimi is part of our heroship. Because of that she is as believable as we all.

In this regard, she is even more believable than ourselves as pact commander: Taimi in fact does perform research before she requests actions. We instead, we always went straight into action. We are the pact commander and let the fleet perish in the jungle – that’s nothing a commander with any responsibility would let happen in real life.

Djinn.9245:

You find it believable that a young asura who hasn’t finished school yet is allowed (by her people AND the Commander of the Pact) to join a team in the field battling dragon minions? Nevermind the danger to herself, why would anyone choose her over any number of more proven “geniuses”?

She is believable. She is as believable as, for example, Wesley Crusher from Star Trek TNG, who is a wunderkind as well and saved the Enterprise in that series more than once.
It’s all fantasy, of course. Real life is different.

What? Taimi is our sunshine. If not for the dragons, for her alone I would walk through whatever she sends me.

She (and Canach) are the best developed and believable current story NPCs. Essential. They have depth, Canach even more. The others are somewhat flat in comparison. The really annoying couple (Marjorie and Kashmeer) were “nerfed” already in LS3, so all is ok for upcoming events. At least as I see it.

No problems here with the Creators update. I don’t run any overlay, optimizer, tuner, booster, beautifier, whatever tool. All this stuff only weakens your system stability. Useless junk, snake oil.

Just windows and the game and other apps. Works. No bluescreens, no crashes. Never. Neither before the update, nor after.

There cannot be a “service pack” file that updates gw2.dat to the current version because of the structure of the gw2.dat and its update process.

The gw2.dat is something like an image of a filesystem. Or a zip file. It contains an archive of compressed files that are copied together to save space, and it contains an internal directory of all contained files.

If you start the game client, it connects to the update server and asks the server for the list of files of the current game build. That list also contains the required files for each map of the game.

There are essential files that are required globally, and local files that are only needed for some maps.

Now the game client builds a list of files with the difference of the essential files and the files already in the gw2.dat file. Then it downloads the essential files that are missing. This is what happens when a game update is released.

Next, when the player enters a map, the game client builds a list of files with the difference of the required files of this map and the files already in the gw2.dat file. Then it downloads the missing files, and after this has been completed, the game enters the map. This is what happens every time a player enters a map.

You see, you never need the complete game. You need the essential files and the files required by the map you visit. For every player, these are different files, because they visit different maps.

So any “service pack” required to update any game client to the most recent data must contain all essential files, because you never know how old the client is you want to update. And it must contain all map data, because you can never know which map players used to visit whose game client you want to update.

So this “service pack” must contain the whole game. Every bit of the data that is stored in gw2.dat file. So you essentially don’t need any service pack – you can transport a complete gw2.dat instead, and replace any older or smaller gw2.dat with it.

I know, you are asking for the difference of a complete gw2.dat of the current game build and the next game build. Not any game client, but only the last and the current. This is what you call “service pack”.

This is a very narrow thing. Sometimes, game builds come 2 hours after the last. Such an archive is only good for people who store the complete gw2.dat, and only for people who login almost daily and keep their client up to date. How many service pack files do you want to keep?

Then there is the thing with the sound files. You only download the sound files of the language you set, even if you download with the -image parameter. Nobody ever has a really complete gw2.dat because of that.

You can resolve all this of course, but it’s work the dev’s don’t really have to do. We already have an update mechanism over the network that works. We can already transport a complete gw2.dat and copy it to a different PC. Development time on a third way is simply wasted and better invested on new interesting things that are not already present in any other form.

A friend of mine is stuck also: fauff.5086

If you could unstuck him, he would be grateful.

A friend of mine has a map result popup permanently on his screen after he tried to enter the niflhel pvp map. Still visible after map change or logging out and relogin.
He isn’t able to play with this permanent popup.
He contacted Support but that has not answered.

If someone from support looks here, please free his account from the pvp queue:

fauff.5086

Starting a guild and even inviting the first 10 members is easy. Not easy at all is keeping the guild alive for a longer time period. From every 10 newly invited members, only 1 is still active 1-2 weeks later. The others are gone. Inactive. Not logging on any more. This is not your fault! This is a natural thing in an MMO that happens for everyone.
Your everyday struggle is to invite new members to keep your member count, so the guild can be a source of collaborative play.

This is your daily struggle to keep the guild from falling apart until the guild developed a group of core members who are online (almost) daily and will not leave. This could happen perhaps 6 months after founding the guild.

A good organization of the guild, for example appointing the right guild officers, or operating a voip (Teamspeak) server, or performing guild activities, helps keeping all together. But it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is to keep the active member count. Without that, the guild is dead immediately.

How sad! Many thanks for making every minute of my Guild Wars gaming a visual experience. You created new original things; things that did not exist before. Your artistic hand will be missed. Without you, Guild Wars will not be itself in the future.

Wish you all the best.

If you just bought and started GW2 and ask yourself if HoT is worth buying: you should have it already on your account, because since the release of HoT more than one year ago, HoT is included in the base game already. Since its release, HoT “is” GW2 – if you buy HoT in the first place, you get the base game just with it at no additional cost.

If you picked an obsolete GW2 offer without HoT, you made a bad deal.
If you don’t care about that, buy HoT: at the current discount price 50% off it is a reasonable price as addon to the base game.

Here is another update. 2016 was not a good year for Guild Wars 2, at least not for his forum. The players went hot on HoT, but lost interest quickly and thoroughly the year that followed.

It’s only the recipe, so it isn’t probably that bad.

But you can change the stats of ascended armor (exception: doesn’t work with the aqua breather) and weapons in the mystic forge. See here

So you can pull any stats from a chest, or craft an item with the cheapest stats, and then change it to the desired stats – Yassith included. There was a time where crafting a piece with Hronk’s stats and change it to Yassith afterwards was even cheaper than crafting Yassiths directly. I don’t know how it is today, but the prices are probably still in the same range.

Dragon Stand is not empty, considering the fact that we just did it with a guild just a few days ago with many co-players.

You join and play an active map that way:

• new maps are created every 2 hours. Look into some timer website for your local time. For me, it is xx:30 every even hour, for example 20:30 for Central Europe.
• 10 minutes before the new meta-cycle starts (i.e. xx:20), go to the map and join a commander. Find him through the lfg tool.
• At exactly xx:30 everybody is downed and thrown to a new fresh map. Now join the commander in his map.
• As soon as the squad has joined the map, the commander will probably leave and 3 new squads should be built. This is the most difficult part: 2 other players must tag up as commander. Join one of the squads. All players should be distributed evenly on all 3 squads
• go to your commander, stick at him, and begin playing the events.
• in case you didn’t immediately find a map where 3 commanders tagged up after the new map was created, look in the lfg for a different map. Join one of the squad there. Your chances of success gets lower the more time elapses after the map started. xx:30-xx:35 is the best time, xx:40 gets difficult and after 00:45 you will probably not get a map any more that is populated enough.

This item has a special name, special forging mechanics, and a special inventory icon. Other than that, it’s not better than any other ordinary amulet that can be bought for 30 Laurels (or other trivial amount of currency) from a vendor.

If worn, it doesn’t have any visualization. You can wear this 400-gold thing just like a 400 Karma accessory, it’s just the same visualization: none.

I can only imagine that there were completely other plans at game release for amulets/accessories, and this is a leftover from that plans. The only shiny thing on that item is the inventory icon that absolutely nobody will ever see.

The survey is a bit incomplete: For example, I tried raiding but stopped very soon without any kill after I detected that I cannot fulfill the time requirements of group finding, training and trying. This answer was available only for people who answered that they did not try raids in the first place.

My gear is meta, my skills are ok, I would like to do it, but it’s simply the time requirement getting started and getting into I cannot fulfill. As far as I see within my friends, not few of them have the same status. In contrast, getting into fractals was easy and fun because of the tiered difficulty system, we are all playing T4 fractals without any problem.