Guild Wars 2

Hmm. I may have to sell off my remaining supply of Dragon Coffers before the price crashes again then.

Well, we’ll find out what the druid is within the next couple of months one way or another. At least there’s an end date on this one. Most of us have things in GW2 we’re waiting for that don’t have an end date.

I would say the hardest one is probably Troll’s Revenge if you’re not on a mesmer, or Not So Secret if you are.

lordkrall.7241:

I think it is simply a matter of him going on vacation and thus have vacation clothes on. They didn’t expect to be shot down and having to fight out of the jungle after all.

I didn’t look too closely into the nobles’ deal so this may have been answered – but if they’re going on vacation why are they with a Pact battle fleet?

Oh, man. I’ve done that with Swoop too many times to count.

There was a time in that fractal with the giant statue where I was on that wooden walkway “staircase”… the one with all the traps. And also a lot of… I think it was harpies, something like that (I don’t play a lot of fractals so my memory is foggy). One of them was annoying me, so I decided to give it a thump with GS 2.
…except I had sword equipped. And there isn’t a lot of room for error up there.

There is a reason why “bearbow” is so often seen… it’s brain-dead easy to play and still quite effective on typical PvE content. It’s not going to give you good DPS, and that’s precisely why you will be looked at sideways if you bring a bear into a dungeon, but it works.

DPS is also why it’s not advisable to go bow only in a dungeon – it’s not as good as the alternatives, but nonetheless it does show up in dungeon builds because the #2 (rapidfire) and #5 (barrage) skills give a lot of DPS while they’re up. You then switch to your other weapons – usually sword/axe or greatsword – while they’re on recharge.

I would actually recommend having something other than a bow as your swap even in general PvE though – you can close in to melee if you want to squish things fast, and pull out the longbow while your pet takes the heat if it’s a little more dicey. But by all means you can use a longbow. It’s great if you’re feeling lazy.

Shortbow is probably not worth your time though. It doesn’t show up in a lot of good builds.

Azure Prower.8701:

Until SAB returns. You must feel our pain!

I’m kind of in both boats. I’d like to see SAB return, but not for the Super Banana. On the contrary, the only thing that would make it acceptable is if I were allowed to go open-world PvP on other people’s minipets.

Then the noise would be totally OK. Because Guardian Hammer-4ing it into the nearest wall would more than make up for the offense.

Palador.2170:

ANet wants the choice to not have a “right” or “wrong” answer, that’s why racial skills are fairly weak most of the time.

Yeah. I do wish there were a “win-win” though – some way that race choice is not going to make-or-break without the skills almost all being trash. Subtle differences are overlooked by most players already – dungeon runs might not want you if you’re the “wrong” class, but I haven’t heard of them booting charr characters for taking up too much screen space.

That said, I’d gladly take blocking racials entirely in WvW and “serious” PvE (fractals, explorable dungeons, maybe even raids) if they could be fun again when I’m just messing around in open-world PvE.

I’m probably going to focus mainly on Stronghold. Haven’t really felt that excited about the specializations since of my two main classes… well, Druid isn’t out yet and I felt like I didn’t really “get” Dragon Hunter. But I have had fun with the new PvP mode.

It’s definitely got its strengths, but in a zerg it’s… yeah, just another body really. Zerg vs zerg it’s hard to do anything much. I’ve typically had my best moments trying to hold/take capture points (hard to avoid traps in that situation) or in small groups.

Although the very most memorable moment was against a mesmer who was wandering around inside an outer keep… when he was under pressure he’d drop a portal exit, stealth, escape, and portal back in. The second time I saw him do that (when he already would have known I’m running traps…???) I dropped a stack of traps and a bonfire on the portal… and he came back in anyway!
Stealthed, though. I thought it hadn’t worked until I saw him appear on some stairs about 900 range away… already downed. Was all but over then.

I don’t usually reserve space specifically for it, but thanks to Signet of the Hunt I swap skills routinely in WvW anyway… so if I see a mesmer or thief coming in by themselves and have had time to properly wake up, yep, Sic ’Em is going on there.

My own personal “#RangerProblems” is that I still can’t figure out how to get a hawk to reliably activate swiftness off nearby ambient creatures without hitting them and forcing me into combat. Oh well.

Though, I uh… don’t know if this thread is about those sorts of problems. Seems like it’s mostly a celebration of people who are doing it wrong?

What would possibly have worked is if… well, the pet AI was written by someone who thought they were going to play the GW2 equivalent of RoboCup with this thing. Try to make it guess what the player is doing and what they need, how to best keep themselves and the player alive given the enemies they’re currently facing, all that kind of stuff.

Yes, it would probably end up playing the game better than about half its owners. So?
(Okay, one concession – give it a leash so it won’t AFK farm for you.)

I remember the trait unlock debacle well, but there’s a pretty big difference in usefulness to new players between unlocking traits and bulk-whispering a bunch of random strangers.

Miss Lana Too.5794:

Instead of trying to put limits on accounts making it impossible to whisper people until <x> is achieved, how about suggesting an option that we can choose to use. That way no one is affected unless they specifically go out of their way to change a setting.

Because they all have holes in them. The privacy options people have suggested thus far filter various layers out until you get to a “general public” – people who have no actual relationship with you, and you’re basically given the choice “allow ALL of them or block ALL of them”.
Thinking about the private messages I’ve received that I was OK with receiving in the past, that would block a fair chunk of them. I really only want to switch off PMs from actual spammers, and I would be more interested in applying a heuristic to do that instead of assuming everyone I don’t know is a spammer. If it’s one I could turn on or off in privacy options, that’s fine.

Edit: Also, I’m not advocating banning all whispering until something is achieved – just bulk whispering.

Yeah, if swoop runs into any obstacles or sudden drops it doesn’t work so well. You can keep some momentum if you weapon-swap at just the right time but I have trouble executing that consistently.

Monarch’s Leap is relatively consistent, but it’s not an ideal gap-closer since you have to waste time cancelling Hornet Sting first.

Are traps any good at all in SPvP? They’ve worked out OK for me in small fights in WvW, but I might just have been fighting, um, novices.

Captain Unusual.9163:

I know enough about programming to know that this sort of bug arises when something completely unrelated was fixed.

Uhhhmm… maybe if the code is spaghetti, but otherwise, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. It can be something that seems unrelated but actually isn’t, as well, though. It can also be a new feature or improvement that doesn’t work properly in some situations.

For instance – and I’m just making this up here – imagine if they recently added a tweak for observer mode that, when you’re spectating a Ranger, tries to line the camera up to get the pet in the field of vision too. They might have added an additional class somewhere in there to take care of the details of that. When you switch to something else that isn’t a Ranger, that class is no longer needed so it gets de-allocated… well, say that the de-allocation isn’t done properly and it causes memory corruption. Then you can get a crash. But it’ll only happen when switching away from spectating a Ranger.

There are probably a hundred other ways you could have these sorts of crashes that coincidentally only apply to spectating a specific profession as well… programs of the size of GW2 get very very complex.

Even if someone at ANet is working on other playable races they aren’t going to announce it this far in advance. They’re not even done announcing stuff for HoT yet – the next expansion is news for another time.

As for kodan and quaggans specifically, well, never say never – there’s always some way to make it work; the only question is how silly you have to get to do it. They have a few issues which limit how high they run on the prospect list, of course – less so kodan, which are probably still top three anyway.

I would give it 5 seconds flat before someone uses that on people in a jumping puzzle…

I mostly use the shortbow on condition builds – it’s not awesome for that but seemed the most appropriate swap for axe/torch as a main weapon set. Has a good cripple on it and the bleeds stack up a fair bit if someone else has the target distracted (don’t try forcing this in dungeons, your party may not be happy).

I’m not sure it synergizes well with berserker gear though. Longbow deals enough DPS that it’s hard to top.

But… condition appears to be a valid Ranger build for dungeons now: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_A/T_Condition

How long do typical spammer accounts live for? If you can’t mass whisper people on an account with less than 100 hours’ playing time (if you need to at all, for that matter?) then the problem might be solved. Or at least mitigated. You can get a bot to AFK for a few days so there might need to be some progress/AP gating as well.

And if you’re a new player, you don’t need to be mass whispering people in the first place.

…did you pick your account name just to say that? :P

I’m probably going to just stick all my free dye unlocks in the bank for the time being – not really sure which dyes I want to unlock but this gives a good path to them that doesn’t cost more than my characters’ combined net worth.

Only one? Then a griffon. Particularly the one that delivers mail or an owl griffon (doesn’t have to be the legendary one from Tytone but I wouldn’t say no ).

Tiger is the next one up though.

Yeah, it didn’t look like Bonfire did. Maybe these tooltips are still in need of fixing…

Since a trapper has damage from multiple condition types, Bursting may give the better DPS increase… though it’s also something like 30x as expensive. Since this is an ascended weapon I’m talking about though, perhaps I should just suck it up and pay for it.

I like Hidori’s idea, or at least something along similar lines. Many totally legit whispers I’ve had have been from people I don’t deal with on a regular basis. A good chunk are on my friends list or in one of my guilds, but there are those people that aren’t as well.

One thing they have in common, though, is that they do actually play the game. And they also probably don’t send rapid-fire PMs to everyone within sight. So a restriction that takes advantage of things like that might be all we need.

Haven’t been able to find a great answer for this.

I’m trying to figure out a sigil for a torch (trapper build) and am looking at the superior sigil of smoldering… but am not sure whether that additional duration actually increases damage or not. To make it worse, using the build editor in the PvP lobby, it seems to indicate that the figure for Throw Torch increases, but not Bonfire.

So, if anyone knows – would it be useful or just a waste of time/money?

The mystery tonic formula creates a batch of 5 – and costs about 80 silver (the other components for the mystic forge are of negligible cost). So you’d get 4 wolf tonics for 80s, or 10 for 1.6 gold. I don’t know what the karma cost was before, so that may still be more expensive, but 16 silver a pop didn’t break the bank for me.

Of course, I did already have a level 400 artificer. And sadly there are no shortcuts since mystery tonics are also account-bound…

Yep. And they can jump, too.

It’s kind of like playing Okami.

Nike.2631:

Instead we’re pretty much seeing them in t he order they figure them out, meaning the ones that need the most time to resolve are getting the least time in open review.

True, but on the other hand, it also means these classes are having more time spent on designing them. That’s probably worth the trade-off, since they can get some idea whether the spec is going to work from in-house testers – it’s not as good as a public test but the resulting quality difference seems like it’d be less than if they rushed something out that they weren’t reasonably confident in already.

The black moa chick is one of those rare things that actually looked better in GW1… they’re kind of googly-eyed in GW2.
Though I’m not sure any of them are black specifically, on second thoughts…

Yeah, it’s been asked a few times. We still don’t know – ArenaNet hasn’t detailed their specific plans for the ranger (or druid, in particular).

Jokubas.4265:

I’d agree that Norn got hit the hardest though. They were introduced as these heroic giants. Each Norn could take on a whole army all on their own, and each was a legend. Their “army” was just a handful of people. Now Norn are treated as just another race that is no more powerful than anyone else (this makes sense for gameplay, but is a problem for lore characters).

Yeah, I think ANet made a pretty big mistake when they characterized the norn the way they did in Eye of the North. Those sorts of features were never going to make it through the gauntlet of game balance without being obliterated.

Figured I might as well get around to posting this one…

Race: Charr
Sex: Female
Class: Ranger

Description: The shoulder pieces on the Sneakthief armor skin float a little too high off the shoulder – from many angles they are pretty obviously floating, especially during e.g. idle animations (see screenshot). Using the aviator memory box it gets even worse – they appear to be coming out the character’s ears. I figure some kind of gap is pretty much inevitable but I’m hoping it’s at least possible to reposition/resize this one so it’s less obvious.

those noises, they gnaw at my soul…
make it stop

pretty sure the people using them know they’re annoying too

Evon cared about the citizens of LA so much he shut off the portal he was evacuating his goods through before they could follow him.

Mordremoth’s anti-air defenses don’t seem to be highly magical – they’re mostly limited to “attack it with massive plant tentacles”. The only reason that tactic worked on the Pact was because Trahearne was an idiot and had them flying way too low.

It’s very hard to do attack supersonic jets with tentacles moving at that speed, especially since they don’t fly at 150 feet, but more like 20,000. Even if it weren’t, there’s always cruise missiles. And modern warheads – even the non-nuclear variety – can have pretty incredible firepower.

I don’t think Mordremoth’s minions would have a prayer.

Sunshine.4680:

But can see it now, Butterfly dark elves all dyed black with those gaudy black wings and giant over sized twilight sword running around.

Wow, I hadn’t thought of that. Quadruple wings… that would be pretty funny. The flappy dragon wings would probably look worse because of all the clipping, though.

Wow, that’s… that’s incredibly ridiculous.
(and awesome)

Treading a fine line with the lawyers here though!

I have to admit, after I got to the “charr on motorbikes” bit, I didn’t really see anything else. Mostly because I couldn’t really see anything else.

Haha, that’s great… nicely done!

I always knew my charr’s shoulder armor was a bit floaty – but this raises it to a whole new level!

Ear level, to be precise.

DarkWasp.7291:

Resurrecting fallen allies – I’m not saying we’re the BEST at it, after all, Warrior does have Battle Standard. However, if you’re a ranger and find that SotW and QZ are charged and ready to go, you can quickly rez a downed party member up before the CCs and damage get out of hand.

I probably should have realized that QZ would accelerate revives a long time ago, but inexplicably didn’t. Thanks for the tip

The dueling thing does tend to throw me off. I don’t particularly want to interfere with people who are dueling, but it’s not always as obvious as I’d hope. And I wouldn’t be happy if I got attacked by a roamer and an ally passed by but didn’t bother to help out either, so I don’t particularly want to inflict that on my own allies, so… wagh.

There have been at least a couple times I recall that that was a problem – didn’t recognize any signs that a fight was a duel and then interfered unnecessarily. Once was in the hylek camp at the south of EB, and once was on a BL on the north-western dolyak path. The latter, we even had a guy say something like “stop it’s a duel” but myself and the other folks going past went tunnel-vision and didn’t notice what he said until it was too late. Did feel bad about both occasions and started looking more carefully when I observed just two people fighting, but on the other hand that means I might hesitate when someone actually wants help and waste vital seconds. And I’m not a particularly good PvP player and probably won’t be much help if that guy goes down.

This thread did bring some clarity though: both those duels that I remember were in bad places and near objectives. The fact that I seldom see duels might indicate most people who play them started holding them where they won’t be disturbed, which is a good thing.

I’ve played both. They’re both good, though I have to admit I’ve been finding my ranger more fun lately – but maybe that’s just the Fiery Dragon Sword of Fire.

I’m thinking if you blocked racial skills from WvW, you could probably make all the transforms (even Snow Leopard, probably) and the Mistfire Wolf summon permanent duration and it wouldn’t even break anything. Most of the skill-replacer elites have tradeoffs, and even the summons have opportunity costs compared to other elites (profession elites are usually going to help you more than a permanent Mistfire Wolf).

I am not at all very good at dealing with thieves, but the group thing does surprise me – that’s generally my answer to them. As long as enough people have ways to snare or strip stealth, you’re going to pin him long enough to smash him eventually.

…you know, he’s almost literally all of those things.

If that happens I am probably going to have to make a caesar salad side out of Caithe. Just so you know.

Sure, I was disappointed. There is enough other stuff in HoT that I definitely am not writing it off though – we’ll hopefully get a better game, and can figure out the race stuff later.

Though I do still agree it needs to be later. I don’t know if it was Colin’s intention, but he seems to have accidentally brainwashed a legion of people into thinking that races are pointless, when… hey, there’s an awful lot of stuff in the gem store that is purely cosmetic – not even lore – and they still make it, right? Nike and the poster I’m quoting below already identified how you would avoid the PS problem.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Some folk have been pining for Tengu since before release, and have been waiting and waiting and waiting for ArenaNet to introduce the Living Story steps required to bring the Tengu into the war.

It’s true… 9 years and counting

Hmm… this sounds like we are getting new PC voice for the expansion? I should probably have seen it coming, but it’s good to hear. It’s been a while.