Guild Wars 2

Khisanth.2948:

You could get the elder wood from malchor which already resets hourly and sell that to buy the flax seeds. Every 5.6 Elder Wood tree is equal to the VB flax farm.

I have no idea why people loath the idea of doing this sort of thing so much; we are in a game with a reasonably healthy economy, so you can do anything to farm almost anything.

Hate cutting things down? Kill world bosses, sell the loot and salvage, buy flax. Hate zergs? Complete map events, sell the loot, etc.

Nothing forces you to farm directly for the thing you want for almost everything, and that’s really, really good. The few things that you can only get account-bound are actually more painful, and I wish they were unlocked, because the flexibility of “sell for gold, buy with gold” is so useful!

…and this thread is why I, personally, want an infinite bank access contract: put all this junk into the bank, use one slot to get access to it. Also the currencies, random collectibles for missions I have not finished, etc, etc.

JustTrogdor.7892:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

probably worth throwing four bits into the mystic forge, to get a different random, but salvagable, exotic armor from it. might hold the last two until you get a couple of other exotics, or some karma ones or whatevs….

The gear from the L80 boost can’t be mystic forged.

stabs self in face

Alec B.8905:

let’s hope that we can see the under used get changed to used again, the "overpowered"get SLIGHTLY NERFED plz do not stomp the certain skills into the ground which will cause the community to get mad, and lastly let’s hope anet goes in depth when looking at things to change in the class.

If there is one thing you can be absolutely, definitely, positively certain of, it is this:

No matter what is changed, people will wail, cry, gnash their teeth, and generally be unhappy about the changes.

They will claim that many things were nerfed INTO THE GROUND!!!!11!1.

They will claim that classes are “dead”, and others were “overpowered AND buffed”.

They will do these things no matter what.

(often, at the same time; it’s fun watching “guard OP, nerf guard, says the thief”, and “thief OP, nerf thief, says the guard”, threads concurrently running…)

Palador has great advice. I’d suggest sticking with Sylvari, Asura, or Charr initially for races: they have more interesting and different stories than the Human or Norn do, I think. Plus great voicing.

I also had the very strange experience that GW2 was the only MMO that broke away from my “normal” classes: I usually love what the match for guardian, and ranger, and thief, but in GW2 … nope. I <3 necromancer, though, and that’s something I usually dislike in other games.

So … don’t assume that what you liked elsewhere is what you will like in gw2.

You are too late for the balance patch — at least two or three weeks too late. These are not done overnight, they are done well ahead, tested thoroughly, bugs fixed, and then finally released to the public when anet are confident in them.

(note: having a million people hit them can turn up bugs that all the internal testing in the world didn’t, which is why sometimes they get revised quickly. before someone objects on those grounds.)

Anyway, beyond that, this isn’t a bug. It’s certainly something that many players feel to be true, but: to convince the developers you will need to, at minimum, show that this is caused by something more than simple player prejudice.

Probably the best strategy for that, now, would be to collect raid logs from DPS meters, and aggregate them at large enough scale to get a good overview of performance. Then show that GS reaper is unable to perform adequately compared to other classes in the real world.

Sadly, I don’t actually think you will have much success there, though: the anet developers have access to this sort of information internally, and no doubt spend a great deal of time looking at both player perception, and the reality of performance, and use both to inform the balance patches.

Since we should assume they are not incompetent, that means that the corollary to “this is not buffed in balance” is “because performance in the real world is comparable to other classes and specs”.

(if you do assume they are incompetent, I’d strongly suggest finding another game: staying will just lead to more frustration on your part, and we play games for fun, so … that’s a sign it’s time to move on.)

Lots of different things were having network trouble for the GW2 servers last night, but if this persists for you: the TP is a website, accessed from within the game. Check if your firewall or something is blocking access for it.

The tool used to display it in-game recently changed, so if you whitelisted something before, look for “coherentui_host.exe” trying to talk to the web; that’s the thing that’s used.

FWIW, I just went and ran around Ascalon for a few hours doing map completion, and had no connection problems. Tried Rata Sum again, boom, instant d/c. So… yeah, it’s a strange thing, but not uniform. Maybe that sort of work-around helps others?

ANet use cider, which isn’t wine, though it is similar, in their current beta mac client. Sadly, since cider is literally a dead commercial tech, that’s probably part of why the change to building a new mac client happened — but also, nothing is gonna change in the current one.

turnkey.2196:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

turnkey.2196:

Anet, are you ever going to admit that the problem is on your end? Are you ever going to acknowledge the problem? Are you ever going to at least tell us you are working on it? Do you care? Do you play your own game? Do you get disconnected?

You know that the problem actually isn’t on their end, right? It’s a network transit provider upstream from them.

It’s definitely possible that some-but-not-all ANet employees do get disconnected (and they definitely do play their game, just like we do) by this issue, but … since it isn’t their network that is busted, they are not able to just, y’know, flip a switch and fix it.

Anyone routed through the pain point in level3 suffers like this. Anyone who isn’t, like me, and an awful lot of other players, doesn’t.

It sucks that your traffic runs through a problem spot on the Internet, but … really, honestly, it’s not that ANet have a broken network.

Clearly there is a problem, yes? As a multi-million dollar company, perhaps they could invest some time in to fixing it. Even if it isn’t “in their building” you would think they could take the time to find someway to solve the issue.

…and I’m sure they are: their sysadmins are probably talking to the helpdesk at level3, trying to get them to fix the problem, because it is hurting anet.

At the end of the day, though, other than ask nicely, what can they do — it’s not like they pay level3 for that transit, or else this would hit everyone equally. They don’t have a lot of leverage, any more than you or I would if we called level3 and asked about getting it fixed.

So… it’s a nasty situation, because it’s a third party unrelated to you, me, or anet, where the problem lives. Ever tried to get one of those fixed? It sucks.

It’s perhaps worth thinking of this more as “players who purchased the core game, prior to HoT, got the advantage of playing the game earlier than people who waited for HoT.”

I mean, you could wait for xpac 2 to come out now, then buy that and get HoT for “free”, provided you don’t mind not playing for six to twelve months. How much $$$ is waiting that extra time worth to you?

probably worth throwing four bits into the mystic forge, to get a different random, but salvagable, exotic armor from it. might hold the last two until you get a couple of other exotics, or some karma ones or whatevs….

Mmmm, yeah, this is hitting me also. Doesn’t seem like packet loss, and interestingly, I lose connection to Rata Sum, my (Asura) home instance, and the Brisbane Wildlands, but not in Lions Arch. So… that’s a thing?

Yeah, apparently it works in wine 2.0; I have literally no idea how they managed that, and have not looked at the detail.

I have heard a rumor that it’s because some-but-not-all win64 apps use the particular register, so the ones that don’t will work fine, but I don’t even know. I’ve just gone with real windows for running gw2 as well, TBH.

Caedmon.6798:

Can you show 2 screenshots with the difference in fps with using this command and having it disabled.Pref in LA or any other place with alot of people around.

Note: this will absolutely, positively not help FPS on anything except for wine.

Okami.7049:

I agree with the above two

…I’m also hoping that now DPS meters are blessed, we start to see some aggregate stats of real-world performance in raids, too.

That would add weight to claims to positions in raids, if we perform adequately, or to calls to improve the class DPS if it really is that much lower than others in practice.

Bonus fact, since Illconceived has the basics: none of the in-home nodes that you can purchase are really worth it from a strictly financial point of view. Just like the gemstore salvaging things, it’s less expensive to just do stuff in-game without buying them.

That said … I own all of the above, so clearly financial min/max-ing isn’t the only thing in play here.

Sledge Stone.9017:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

cough this is an event that requires attention to the mechanics. if half your players die to the jump attack, I’d suggest that you study the mechanics, then explain them to participants before the fight starts.

This is the approach used to get successful triple-worm kills, and is really the strategy to employ for anything that is, y’know, not just “run in, hit it some, win”.

And thats exactly what I did. But with a pug group everyone ignores the information presented to them and keeps tapping 1 with a ranged weapon expecting a win. -_- I’ll get this done I’m sure, probably with my guild next time they do AB at a time I can participate in.

I think the issue now is new players rushing in on the LFG trying to get a mastery point but still not knowing what a CC skill is or when to properly use it. Even if they know what it is they probably already smashed the button on cool down prior to the breakbar becoming available to break. When HoT was first launched I bet this boss was beaten all the time. But now a year+ later VP is generally ignored and doesn’t scale correctly for the size of groups that now attempt it.

Mmmm. My solution to things like that is to ask for help from my guild, which usually gets me enough people to clear the thing. (That’s how we got the Balthazar HP, too, which is also … not fun.)

Good luck. I hope you get it in the end!

WoW does this. It does not solve the problem you think it solves. The limits you request do not solve the group matching problems you think they solve. Sorry.

Henrietta.9315:

Hi guys!
I have ran across two individuals afk farming Air Eles in Malchor’s Leap.
As always, I tried to whispher them in order to check if they are actually afk or not but when I clicked on their avatars and chose ‘whisper’ no /w option appeared in a chat. Shortly, I can’t whisper them even tho I click ‘whisper’ on their avatars :P

So can you disable whispering in a game or are they using some fishy stuff to disable it?

Thanks in advance!

If you think they are doing something wrong, just use the in-game system to report them. There is absolutely no path on which your whispering them has a better outcome than making that report.

If they are actually AFK farming or whatever, do you really think they will stop because you whispered to them? Seems … unlikely.

If not, you just insulted them. That isn’t likely to end well, even if they don’t respond to you at all.

Yseron.8613:

For someone in your office with an already configured machine and the gw2 project installed it should take only one hour or two unless the project is in such a state that you cant touch it anymore without risking to break averything.

A couple of hints from someone who is a developer, but not at anet:

If it really took two hours to write the code the first time, that would imply on the order of twenty hours of first round testing, plus four to six hours of bug fixing on my part, minimum.

It is incredibly rare that even “interaction free” code works out of the box … and this is about the opposite of interaction free — it changes something very, very core to the way event scaling is handled in GW2.

Second, not only did you make assumptions about how easy it might be to do this, which neglected the full cost of a change, you followed up by insulting the developers.

That’ll never, ever, EVER be the best way to convince someone to do anything except treat your idea with contempt because, honestly, why would anyone respond to your calling them stupid, and bad at their jobs, any other way?

Ghost.8357:

Is there anyone at all that’s able to answer this query?

for similar issues, a developer said they are have a fix internally, and it should be out “soon”. since it isn’t yet launched, we can assume that it’s held up in testing or something was found buggy about it, so we need to wait for it to be fixed first.

(after all, we really don’t want another round of bugs with this.)

Amaimon.7823:

Khisanth.2948:

Those are from the rifts. You need a rift stabilizer to trigger the actual event to start.

well, whatever they’re from, they’re preventing me from seeing actual events

They are “actual events”, you just don’t know how to do them.

I’m not certain this was the right design choice on anet’s part, but ultimately, “I don’t know how to do X” is not the same as “X is buggy”

I keep hoping that anet will introduce something like a “eight hour restart” on map server instances or something, so that at least these get kicked out a few times a day or whatever.

It is much, much more likely that you would see an upgrade to DX11 or DX12 than work on what is, in essence, a useless option on all supported platforms. Which almost certainly isn’t going to happen either.

So, unless their new macOS client uses wine under the hood, and wine still benefits from that in 2.0, neither of which seem likely, I’d say you are kitten out of luck here.

Absurd.2947:

They haven’t even acknowledged [anet servers causing lag] yet, fixing might take a while

…that is probably because in every case people actually look, it turns out to be an issue in the level3 network, which is not part of either ANet or your ISP, but does sit between them.

At this point I’d certainly consider submitting another ticket because … that’s oddly long.

The most common suggestions are trying a repair of the client files, deleting the local.dat file, or deleting gw2.dat and letting the whole thing redownload.

Not everyone reports success with this, but it’s probably worth trying in that sequence.

padreadamo.3986:

I play on GNU/Linux; similar to Mac. My game doesn’t crash at all, But my friend who plays on Mac has major issues with the client. His game crashes all of the time on mac client. I’m gonna try and convince him to post here. I recommend what others have stated… use Wine.

Until the native macOS client — which is being actively developed but is not yet even beta quality — is released, wine 2.0 with the 64-bit GW2 client is definitely the best option on the mac.

The biggest cause of crashes was that the ANet one is the 32-bit client, and that has serious issues with memory, which wine has no influence on either positive or negative. Since the 64-bit client works, that’s definitely going to be at least a /bit/ less crash-prone.

Hazzaargh.5176:

Ive been having the same issue for the past few days, tried playing again today and it seemed fine for a while as opposed to kicking me out a minute in but the same problem seems to be happening again…

Sounds heat related to me; does a warmer computer correlate to quick or slow failures?

Vaedric.4581:

False prophet above – fwiw it seems to be a ‘kernel panic’ issue. I have the same problem.

A “kernel panic” says one of two things have happened: one, you have some sort of bad driver, or two, you have a hardware problem.

Try a macOS reinstall, and failing that, consider using the warranty support if you can, since it’s only going to get worse from here.

turnkey.2196:

Anet, are you ever going to admit that the problem is on your end? Are you ever going to acknowledge the problem? Are you ever going to at least tell us you are working on it? Do you care? Do you play your own game? Do you get disconnected?

You know that the problem actually isn’t on their end, right? It’s a network transit provider upstream from them.

It’s definitely possible that some-but-not-all ANet employees do get disconnected (and they definitely do play their game, just like we do) by this issue, but … since it isn’t their network that is busted, they are not able to just, y’know, flip a switch and fix it.

Anyone routed through the pain point in level3 suffers like this. Anyone who isn’t, like me, and an awful lot of other players, doesn’t.

It sucks that your traffic runs through a problem spot on the Internet, but … really, honestly, it’s not that ANet have a broken network.

Lithril Ashwalker.6230:

due to some kind of error i cant open a support ticket to post this at all. so i have to post it here.

however i try to log into my revanent “World of Warcrap” and it says i cant play until i do a name change…why must i do a name change when others have the name poop etc and crap in their name? i do not understand? there are people with SATAN etc as well.

my account name is Lithril Ashwalker.6230

There are really two questions here. The first is why you cannot have the name “World of Warcrap”, which is … well, I guess you probably do need it explained in small words, since you asked…

…so, the answer is: because that name is rude and insulting. You should avoid using names that insult people, places, or things in future. It also includes what is considered a “swear” word, which are not permitted in names in GW2. You should avoid using names that contain “rude” or “swear” words in future.

Your second question is: “why are others allowed to have similarly awful names, but I got a name change forced?”

The answer to that is that this is enforced at two places: one, some “against ToS” names are banned during character creation, and the second is that name change enforcement follows reporting.

So, someone disliked your name enough to report you for it, and the GW2 support team agreed that it was an awful name. This is why you were forced to change your name.

The people you see with names containing words like “poop” have either (a) not yet been reported, or (b) are waiting for the name to be reviewed and a change handed to them by support — since there are humans in that review loop.

Finally, the reason that you can create a ToS violating name that is later changed is the Skittenhorpe Problem — ANet decided that it was better to allow some violating names than block some non-violating names at character creation time, and so, they are only forced to change after they are “noticed” by someone.

BeatingYou.2834:

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, I usually leave a reply to let you all know you weren’t just typing for no reason but forgot!! I am leveling a ranger currently and then will use the boost for an alt. Or maybe a main if it turns out I don’t like ranger

FWIW, I ended up using my boost at level 79.5 just for the gear and stuff, and didn’t regret it.

Well, OK, turns out I did use it on the wrong class, but whatever, it took me a month of playing it to figure out that it just didn’t quite do it for me. I didn’t regret using the boost, just that I was so slow to listen to that tickling feeling that I wasn’t enjoying the class mechanics as much as I should…

bearshaman.3421:

One thing I will tell you now, every forum is gonna have someone complaining about pretty much every aspect of the profession. That is just the nature of things. Most people who are enjoying the class are too busy enjoying the class, so you end up with all the unhappy people doing the bulk of the posting. So don’t base anything off of that.

That said… this site is referenced pretty heavily for dps rankings for raids.

http://www.qtfy.enjin.com/dps#Ranking

I would suggest checking that out if dps is your biggest concern. I’ve been told it’s maintained by one of the more serious raiding guilds, and they maintain the information and the builds for all classes. Have a look.

Edit: You will note that ranger’s strongest dps build on there is the condi build. This is largely because they have several skills that dump a high number of stacks right off the bat, so there is less of a buildup phase like is often the case with condi builds.

It’s also worth noting, any time you reference the qtfy DPS rankings, even their most realistic efforts are based on fighting the training golem.

Back when I did a bunch of simcraft work around WoW, we’d call that the “patchwerk”, or “tank n spank”, boss. You might consider those numbers for curiosity, or to see how different skills or skill sequences performed on the same class, but you wouldn’t treat them very seriously.

In practice, DPS was significantly influenced by, eg, the need to move to handle mechanics. A class that needs to root for 1.5 seconds to throw an attack out, and can’t move or cancel it, is going to have lower DPS in the real world than a class that has full mobility while still running the “rotation” correctly.

So, while those numbers are not flattering to necro, I’d also submit that in practice the delta in the real world isn’t likely to be quite so big. (Plus, it’s all single target; since real fights involve adds and target switching, those can also change the picture. Not always in the favor of a necro.

You might try the “looking for” forum to see if there is a raid training guild in there, too.

Simple: it was made possible to trade so that you, a raider, could sell a relatively low supply item to other players, non-raiders, who might want it, and make yourself the $$$ from raiding.

I’m sorry you can’t use it as a way to show the magnificent size of your kitten though.

OriOri.8724:

Alga.6498:

I’ve always and I am still hoping for a cleansed Orr map for the players who have already defeated Zhaitan.
And of course newer players and characters have to do everything again..
But, why can’t they create a cleansed, re-build Orr in a different instance?
That would’ve been awesome,

Instancing nightmare. What if I want to go to preZhaitan Orr for events or to help a friend? What if I’m in postZhaitan Orr and a friend who hasn’t done PS wants to join me? Logistically its just simpler to add a new map instead of split them up. Also, splitting a map up into multiple instances will split the population on those maps drastically, making it much more solo play than it is currently.

FWIW, WoW instanced zones heavily during Mists of Pandaria for this, and it caused significant amounts of player confusion and pain in the early days.

Once everyone had advanced to the endgame, it settled, but … you never went back into the older things without finding someone to magic you there, or a couple of fixed NPCs for porting back.

It … also didn’t work great. Like the LS1 approach, it turned out not to be a good solution to the problem, which is one of the fundamental problems facing MMO design today: how the heck do you maintain a changing world AND avoid losing access to older content, and/or disadvantaging new players.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Rauderi.8706:

Well, it’s not really a “lake” anymore. :P
(Because ANet doesn’t want to have underwater anything as a reminder that underwater skills especially Revenant are unfinished)

…as a reminder that underwater combat, especially the 3D positioning parts, are actually pretty terrible given the vision and movement controls of MMOs available today, so it’s not really much fun for anyone.

Fixed that for you.

Speak for yourself. I – and I know many others – love underwater combat (and exploration even more so) in GW2. It has kinks, but it isn’t the 3D positioning or controls that’s the main problem.

The main problem is the skill and trait balance, the lack of switching traits between above/underwater, and the lack of skills/weapons options.

It might surprise you, but … I love it to! I really, really hope we get a substantial underwater story section, or even expansion! My favorite places in WoW were the underwater zones from Cataclysm. I really enjoy getting down under the water in GW2 as well, and I’m glad there is still underwater content being released.

I also recognise that for most people, the 3D nature of the environment is a significant part of the problem, and that it is a hard problem to solve. I actually spent some time talking to people actively trying to solve this, even, because I was curious to know.

Yes, skills could use some improvement, and so could switching, but at heart the issue is that for most people the positioning of enemies in the 3D environment is a significant problem, as is range estimation, and to a smaller degree, movement.

If that was solved — you had mostly enemies not-too-far off the horizontal plane — life would actually be much better.

Hey, he is still a baby, and a foolish one at that. He’s, like, 16 or something, right?

Flailing around is probably the best he can manage, between bouts of hormonal sulking.

Vayne.8563:

And yet I did this today with people and the gliders work perfectly. You have to walk into the spouts (they’re not updrafts) and if you walk into them they work every single time. Naturally once you’re in the air you have to press space bar.

…and this different mechanic to what we were trained over four HoT maps to do … sucks. It makes me sad.

It’s not inherently wrong, it’s just super-confusing, and easy to, eg, see people try and jump in because you normally jump-glide-updraft to get in the air.

So, yeah, people mistake “I don’t know how to do it” for “it’s broken” all the time — see the rift stabilizer “events” that people assume are broken for the same reason.

cough this is an event that requires attention to the mechanics. if half your players die to the jump attack, I’d suggest that you study the mechanics, then explain them to participants before the fight starts.

This is the approach used to get successful triple-worm kills, and is really the strategy to employ for anything that is, y’know, not just “run in, hit it some, win”.

dragonsage.4172:

I completelyunderstand you as i myself had this problem a few months before; i think you might want a combination of RACE and CLASS as both can give you unique support roles. For the class i would revomend silvani who can drop heling pods and turrets whilst for the class i would pick ranger as ele is usually more centered aroun aggro.

(sorry 4 the bad spellings)
Hope this helps a little

It’s worth noting that while racial skills exist, they are deliberately tuned so that race is not a significant factor in performance — which means, essentially, that they will always be less good than class elite skills.

Fractals, which could easily be called “dungeons without ‘personal story’ tied to them”, are probably where you should look…

FWIW, I had a similarly slow experience trying to get the Harvest Cascades part, while it seemed that New Loamhurst and the other town were constantly being attacked and defended…

Most likely cause is that other events in the zone mean that it’s not retaken, and until it is retaken on your map, defending it can’t happen.

Vaedric.4581:

Hey thanks for all your replies.
FWIW I looked into wine 2.0 for another RPG but it ran very sluggishly.
Honestly it looks like Bootcamp is my only option. At this point I can’t even get a freshly downloaded GW2 to install without crashing. And this is after multiple runs through Onyx and other utilities. Seems to start a ‘kernel panic’ every time.

The fact you are using third party quote-maintenance-unquote utilities suggests there is a chance that your OS crash issues are related to some damage one of them has done.

I’d suggest reinstalling macOS in place using recovery mode, and avoiding tools such as Onyx in future. This may or may not resolve the problem, but it’s a solid shot.

RAB.7682:

I seem to get tons of crashes from gw2 every time a new HOT map comes out, and tons of people start playing the game again. Likely has something to do with their servers not being able to handle the higher load of players online.

It’s more likely that a client crash is related to local issues on your computer, than the server — which would simply result in the client reporting that it lost communication, and everyone on the server falling off.

Using a 32-bit client is known to have memory management issues that can lead to crashes when there are a large number of active players. Check you are using the 64-bit client.

FWIW, others report that wine 2.0 can run GW2 64-bit client fairly well; check the forums and/or reddit for reports. You may find that a useful stopgap.

Note: even the “realistic” DPS benchmarks at qtfy are on the target golem, which means no effort avoiding death, doing mechanics, etc.

It is extremely likely that the ANet team use numbers based on real world performance, in raids among other places, to balance classes. They do actively boost underperforming weapons routinely.

So, while it isn’t impossible that GS reaper isn’t as good as other options, it is also highly unlikely that the overall performance of the class with it is that far below everyone else.

Well, I found it useful as a backline support healer in WvW, spending a bunch of time throwing healing on my own team, and minor damage and disruption at the enemy.

Ultimately, though, you don’t give up ranger to be a druid, so you can absolutely just run a core build (which is all DPS focused) in those game modes, if you wish.