Guild Wars 2

Of those three, warrior is the only one that PUGs who feel that copying quantify, a raiding guild, is the only way to success will accept.

However, all three are competent and capable of completing the content.

so, it depends if you want to find a regular, sensible group to run with, or if you want to try pugging raids with random people.

OriOri.8724:

Well there have been a few leaks that have mentioned a major profession overhaul will hit before the next expansion. That leak correctly predicted seaweed salad getting nerfed, but it also got all of its predictions about LWS3E5 wrong, so who’s to say if there is any legitimacy to it at all?

Didn’t it cover the new (second) elite specs, rather than a profession overhaul? Anyway, if it is guesswork, guessing that seaweed salad — which is a terrible mechanic for actual gameplay — isn’t that hard a guess…

Dromar.1027:

I personally think they did it for two reasons. The obvious one is to try and make axe compete with GS and the other is to make the upcoming profession seem more enticing to the player base as a whole. This is probably why casting speed was targeted and not direct damage; it affects gameplay as well as damage.

I’m pretty sure that any theory that starts with “anet made the game suck so that…” is pretty likely to be wrong.

Now, your first might be reasonable, but it’s much more likely that they felt it was just too fast — like headbutt — and so they slowed it down a little to allow better counterplay.

BadSanta.6527:

Any one else think that those nerfs mostly to espec are just in order to make the new one to shine?? What’s iS your thoughts about the balance patch in general

I’m absolutely certain that someone else shares your rather cynical world view, and so believes that anet are deliberately “destroying” something in order to make something else looks good.

The reality is that the patch seems like a balance patch: it adjusts various things that are not working as desired, moving some classes up, some down, and focusing on how to make underused skills and traits more usable.

My biggest thought was, in fact, that it was surprisingly information about why a number of those changes happened, compared to many games balance patches.

Since you didn’t define what “major profession improvements” would be, the question is unanswerable.

If you do define what you mean, I’d venture to guess the answer will be “no”, because it sounds like you imagine some sort of radical departure from the current state of things … and that’s not real likely to happen.

So … WoW did this, with “reforging”, allowing you to move around stats on gear.

The end result is that it changed from “get gear” to “get gear, visit a website to optimise, reforge to match what it says”.

For the game, this will lead exactly to the same thing: people will put stats in the “mathematically optimal” couple of builds (hi, vipers and berserker) for PvE, and a tiny handful more for WvW and PvP, with only trivial variations.

Alvaro.5270:

So, like 0% chance i guess, thats sad.

Yeah, it’s one of those decisions made early that are so baked in it’s close to impossible to change them later on. Sometimes that ends up being regrettable, but done is done…

Siska.8102:

Of course in other game modes…wvw for example, we call “wiggling”—— “moving” “rotating” “don’t stand in the bomb and cast”…

Nah, it’s different: this is literally wiggling back and forth without changing position any more than is necessary, rather than actively moving around during combat. It’s more like if someone was busy trying to make sure they took one step left, then one right, in wvw to ensure their buff… which isn’t gonna work out good for you.

Carighan.6758:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

This already exists in the form of masteries. It will further exist in the form of a second elite spec, expanding each class to have three main “forms” of play associated, not just two as we have today.

You wrote “three” and “two” accidentally, instead of 2 and 1.

Only two classes regularly use their non-elite spec, and even for those it’s a very specialized thing just that the use case is more common, narrow as it is.

Elite specs are a ginormous power creep compared to base classes. Base classes are factually outdated now.

No, I did not “accidentally” write those numbers, I quite deliberately wrote those numbers.

Aside from the fact that your two following statements are contradictory (“two classes regularly use their non-elite spec”, and “base classes are factually outdated now”), your considering them “outdated” does not mean they do not exist, simply that they are not what you choose to use.

Which is fine, you are welcome to your choice of builds, etc, but please, don’t try and insinuate that I somehow misspoke in support of your thesis.

The most common cause of these crashes are out of date things in the rendering pipeline: DPS meters, sweetfx/gemfx, VoIP overlays, performance monitoring like RivaStatisticsServer or Afterburner, etc.

Remove those, and see if the problem persists.

It still does exactly what it says on the tin: submits a bug report to anet, to which they will not respond directly. (Plus, unstated, it also includes technical details such as which map shard you are on, location, etc, which make it better for reporting, eg, terrain problems.)

Anyway, both of the things you name probably fit under “terrain” or “dynamic events” in bucket. Just use whatever is closest if you can’t find something exact.

Don’t forget the “blocking progress” checkbox, if it does.

Memphisjz.1405:

This bug has been in the game since launch, and i assume i am one of the few noticing it due to my set-up.

How to replicate:

- Set windows default audio device to your headset
- Set Guild Wars 2 audio setting NOT to windows default, but specifically choose something else like your speakers.

Every sound in-game will play through your speakers as expected, but whenever a cutscene starts in Living story, part of the sound will play though the headset. (i think the sound effects + dialogue goes through headset but some parts remain on the speakers)

Very annoying, as i always have to hurry to pick up my headset whenever a cutscene starts.

This is not my experience: I get the same, correct, audio device used each time, and can even switch from headphones to speakers, or back, without encountering this.

That suggests it may be something particular to your machine or configuration causing it. It would probably help if you gave details of that, such as how the headphones are connected (eg: classic analog jack, USB, etc), what your selected sound output device is in gw2, and in windows, etc.

Fuzdom.6493:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put in an option to SKIP cutscenes AFTER 1 toon has gone through the story mode events!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You should create a new thread, rather than making a comment in an unrelated thread, to request this. Also, the general discussion forums are the best place for this sort of suggestion — it’s not a bug, even if it’s not working as you would like it.

Dukotje.4382:

can i suggest to fix this problem, and please for the love of god make the new epidemic projectiles blockable/destroyable/reflectable??? its just straight up spreading deseases in any type of competitive game mode…

The new version gives significantly more warning about when epi is going to land on you. That allows you to prepare for the result much better: hold resistance, get ready for condition clears, transfers, or healing, etc.

Legit Prep In.5893:

Maybe also think about why we engis ALWAYS detonate the turrets instead of keeping them.
Having a single-use enforced overcharge on them does exactly the opposite of what you had in mind with the recent changes, noone will have a turret out at all anymore.

It is my observation that engineers routinely leave turrets, especially the healing turret, out without detonating it. Anecdotes are just that: our observations are too small in number to know what engineers “always” do.

The developers, on the other hand, do have actual numbers for how many engineers fall into the “always”, “sometimes”, and “never” buckets for their turrets, and can compare them before and after this change.

Instead of arguing about what “everyone” does, you should focus on why you think the change fails, explaining that, as well as describing whatever you think a better situation is, and why (and how) it would make the game better.

CalenDB.2376:

Please fix this! SweetFX no longer working…

That is a SweetFX problem. Any software that hacks the rendering pipeline is potentially broken after a patch, and it’s absolutely unsupported by anet.

(Also, technically, against the ToS, not that SweetFX is likely to cause you any trouble or anything unless it ends up being usable to see through walls or something.)

Same deal as DPS meters, VoIP overlays, etc, etc.

Ravere.8415:

Also, can no longer epi down-states. Don’t know if that is intentional or not.

Pretty sure that changed for WvW a couple of patches ago, or at least something did, to avoid huge condition bombs from downed players. It might have leaded to the few down-state pve mobs too, if that is where you experienced it.

One other difference of note: you can dye some gliders, but you cannot dye any back items.

Sister Saxifrage.7361:

You’ll find more informed opinions in the Ranger forum. But since you asked, condi has higher potential max DPS. A segment of the playerbase likes to translate this into “condi is the only acceptable spec, power is garbage”, but having the mostest meta build won’t save you if you can’t do a rotation, use your CCs, dodge, or stack.

So very much this! Many players significantly undervalue skill, and overvalue small mechanical differences, while they would typically get significantly more improvement by playing a little better than by changing up spec or class.

Until you are literally the best in the world, it’s really, really not that important what spec you choose, compared to how well you play it. So, go with what you enjoy.

I’d <3 that myself. They are very decorative.

Ashantara.8731:

Oh geez, you are being serious? There is no (not a single one!) modern professional company in the world that doesn’t automatically back up all their server data. It is a constant process, there are several back-ups being made as you play. Hence it is impossible for ArenaNet to “lose” anything.

hahahah, oh, sweetie, that is so adorably cute that you think that.

Seriously, though, I can tell you that you will happily find companies with hundreds of employees in the IT industry — let alone outside it — who don’t have backups, don’t have working backups, or don’t have complete backups. Probably more often than companies that do, honestly.

It’s … a depressing fact that our industry is really really kitten at that. Sad but true. Though at least marginally improved by the increasing prevalence of “cloud” services that will provide better support for data recovery than most small and medium businesses manage.

Speaking of which … have you checked your backups actually restore and work recently? It’s a good time to be sure that you get the data back out correctly, not just that you put it in…

malachi.7503:

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

Yeah, I think gw2effiency does pretty much all that…

well, it does list my profiles completed recipes it doesn’t really highlight what’s missing, I have to have a second page open and compare the two lists. Which is fine, in practice it does solve my question, but I was hoping there was one site that did a comparative data scan without me having to do it manually basically but its ok.

You could request the same “locked / unlocked / all” toggle that various other collections have from the author of gw2efficiency. they already have the data, so it might show up fairly quickly. I certainly found them very responsive to requests.

Sariel V.7024:

Amaimon.7823:

community effort or not, I’m often surprised at how fast this goes, because sometimes they announce a cat, and within half an hour after the patch its on dulfy, I wonder if it’s because they’re announced, so people make a char filled with all kinds of food, and then visit the cat in the hope something fits.. ?

I think this has to be the case. How else can you account for someone having Rainbow Cake for one of the latest cats?

Once you know the pattern, it can’t be that hard to figure out the next one. It’s not like it’s been completely different types of items.

Also interesting: there is at least one achievement or something tied to those rifts, as yet undiscovered, according to the developers. So not everything is instantly solved. (Though by this point I’m starting to suspect that perhaps it never will be, because it is some “primer” level sort of thing…)

RoseofGilead.8907:

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

Koolaidius.2580:

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

that can be easily fixed just go to options look about halfway down the first tab and you will see it. check the box and see everyone’s health lvls

I’m not seeing this option anywhere.

look at the bottom of this pic where it is marked in red is the one you want. also in checking that box will turn it into a number format . without all the other stuff your seeing now . sadly to say this is about the best you can for now hope for to fix your problem .

“Show simple condition floaters” doesn’t make everyone’s health bars appear above their heads or disable ally names.

O_o Rose is absolutely right here. All this does is turn off the “condition” icons next to their damage ticks, so instead of seeing “<torment> 216” you see “216” for your condition damage on the target.

Sylent.3165:

I can’t seem to find the article now but I read in the next expansion they are finally adding end game progression similar to how Diablo 3 has legacy levels and eso has champion points.

Does anyone know if this is actually true? I would be so incredibly happy if they actually added this to the game. I’d finally have a reason to do events again!

This already exists in the form of masteries. It will further exist in the form of a second elite spec, expanding each class to have three main “forms” of play associated, not just two as we have today.

If you mean, becoming mechanically stronger, such as Diablo 3 style “paragon points” which you spend to increase damage output and resistance, etc, then I certainly hope it does not happen: progression via increased strength is indistinguishable from resetting a character to level one and announcing “hey, for the new content, why don’t you just level up again, eh?”

Which is to say: the lack of vertical progression, which this would be, is one of the main advantages of GW2 compared to the competition. Giving that up would not be desirable, because it substitutes grinding back to the same power level you had before for actual gameplay.

https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a good guide to using that tool to track down where the problem is happening. good luck!

The most common causes are incompatible “things” in the rendering chain. That I know of so far include:

Out of date memory reading DPS meters.
RivaStatisticsServer
AMD Afterburner
Mumble overlay

There could be any number of others though; something changed in the creators update that causes the combination of gw2, those overlay things, and the newest whatevers to end in a crash as you describe here.

Khailyn.6248:

Dadnir.5038:

If reaper’s touch was an axe skill… wait why not a Greatsword skill?

If reaper’s touch was like mirror blade should we start farting butterflies like mesmers? Honnestly I wouldn’t be against this skill creating an horror next to the foe to use the efficiently the rebounds. (thought one of the main issue of this skill is probably the boon it give which is absolutely not motivating)

We do have a monopoly on locusts.. >>

I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Sigmoid.7082:

Neither does firebrand but that’s apparently another support spec. Named aren’t all defining.

There is nothing stopping it from being a condi spec with support abilities in shroud or utilities. Support is also a very broad term.

…and, notably, almost all the support in the game comes from doing your normal DPS rotation with a little attention to how it throws around buffs. eg: PS warrior, chronomancer. Even druid, really, if you substitute heals for DPS.

Daddicus.6128:

I’m thinking about getting a legendary weapon. I read the wiki page (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_weapon), but I have a couple questions.

First, it appears that it doesn’t matter what legendary I choose, I can later change the stats any time I want (outside combat). So, what are the differences or advantages of one over another?

Second, do the older generation legendary weapons allow use of the new stat combinations (like viper)?

It’s worth noting: you can’t change the type of legendary. So, forge a legendary staff, and only classes that can use a staff can wield it.

I’m sure that was obvious already, but just in case someone new reads this and is confused…

vaidd.7902:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I’d suggest that a PS Warrior — that is, “Phoenix Strength”, which shares might with the team, plus banners — is also in the “support” bracket.

Really, though, I feel like the “support” role question shows a misunderstanding of how the game actually plays out, in that nobody is “just support”; everyone does DPS.

Sadly it might be the case, I am a support player in other MMORPGS and have done in every game i have played.

Though the normal stance is to assist with an understanding of how the game operates.

My core ethos in a group when i play is not to be top of meters but fore-fill a role that will help the group complete content, so in your wealth of knowledge, what category would you put this under in GW, so i get the terminology correct?

Support is still the right term, it’s just not nearly the focus it would be in other games. For example, PS Warriors bring lots of group support, but much of it comes as a side effect of their doing their regular DPS.

Likewise, you will see occasional references to tanks — frequently cloth wearing mesmers / chronomancers — which are a thing that happen in raids, but nowhere else in GW2, and they fill a vastly different role to tanks in most MMOs. (eg: they occasionally get chased by the boss, while avoiding damage, rather than being full time “keep attention on me, and mitigate damage” people who keep the DPS free to DPS.)

I hope that helps you understand where this is coming from: it’s not that support doesn’t exist, it’s that support is mostly a side-effect of doing what would be considered a DPS role in other games.

(Druid, as healer, is about the only non-DPS-focused role that brings substantial group support to the table, without much DPS focus. Not that they don’t hit the boss too, but they are much more built for healing and buffing. Everyone else has that by side-effect.)

LONGA.1652:

The one shot mechanic is always a pain. I don’t know if A-net does enough play test on this collection.

I think it more likely they intended the difficulty, as with some of the more painful jumping puzzles, than it was a failure of testing.

apharma.3741:

Who’s Zinn?

What’s a MOX?

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Zinn

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Well the leather farm is doing something.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

Yay, no significant difference from pre-episode values!

And a hilariously ineffective buyout attempt on April 28th? I wonder…

Yep. And it appears that the price will only continue to fall until people stop farming it with their engineers. Supply has tripled within the past two weeks and buy orders have fallen by 40%(?).

I think the April 28th attempt was someone trying to make a point about the price issue. I could be mistaken.

So much for the “challenging” portion of it, right? Why bother waiting for an organized run of the one-shot-KO track when plopping an unorganized farm gets the better rewards?

But so far, this is just a market blip. Maybe the engi farm is finally putting a dent in demand, but it’s still not significantly different from the beginning of the year nor the price drop between mid-January to mid-February, before the episode released.

FWIW, I think there was a huge amount of pent up demand for leather that would take significant time to eat through, so even if the supply increased significantly, demand was high enough to keep it static.

Not to mention all the people farming the leather and just keeping it for personal use, because that’s time rather than money to meet the same demand. Once they get past that, it becomes more likely they will sell, and consequently we will see a significant lag between more supply in the game, more supply on the market, and finally prices starting to drop on the market.

Djinn.9245:

If 5 people can kill them, that isn’t very “legendary”.

And I think they must be too weak because when one pops I can’t get to it before it’s dead even if I drop what I’m doing and go straight there and it’s only in the next fort over (not 1/2 map away or anything).

Now, that’s a much more legitimate complaint; perhaps they would benefit from raising their starting HP to reduce the risk that they die before players get in position and trigger them to scale up.

(Though I’d prefer to see it still possible for five players to kill it, or even one fairly patient player, just to avoid them being unkillable content when the map is less busy. Assuming that ever happens, since SW seems to be pretty robustly persistent…)

Major Domo.9250:

A large variety of selectable, user-controlled skills that were mostly on short cooldowns made the GW1 pet feel less like a ball-and-chain and more like an actual animal companion. Above all else, I’d like an actual pet UI that gave more options than eat, stop eating, and use your SINGLE special skill.

It is discouraging that the pet system is the only profession-specific mechanic that a notable number of players want to have as an on-off toggle.

WoW had the exact same thing; I think the simple answer is that people want a pet AI that can read their mind and react based on what they know, not what the pet AI can know. When they don’t get that, they curse and wish that it went away, without the rest of the class following.

I’ll also note that WoW had four skills, where GW2 has one, per pet, and also had exactly identical damage from every pet, and still got this sort of limited selection going on, which was sad.

I think the ideal solution is to make pet damage identically equal, or limit it to a very small number of cases (eg: X single target damage, X*.66 to three targets cleave), and then reshuffle the special skills across families.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

No, they do count as Daily Map events; or, unless recently changed, they did. I would certainly never use a Rift Stabilizer to travel to a map. That would take much longer.

Well, I use it to travel to dry top when I want the jumping puzzle, because it saves hoping for a port and avoids the annoying climb… but yeah.

It counts as event completion on the map, for everything that counts for — both the daily event completion challenge, and for map bonus progression.

BlooDyliCious.5824:

Better scaling would mean they actually scale.

You are incorrect: they do scale up as the number of players attacking increases. Since your basis of your comment is false, the rest of it is irrelevant.

ArchonWing.9480:

I gather that it’s very hard to write multithreaded programs. Since I’m not a programmer, I’m just going to assume as such.

Yeah, it’s one of the hardest possible things, and it’s also one of the things that the software used for writing software has the least help and support for at this point. Like, the tooling that saves you from a lot of mistakes in single threaded software is great … but doesn’t exist for multi-threading yet.

Worse, going back and turning single threaded stuff into multi-threaded stuff is even harder, because there are all these hidden assumptions about the order things happen in which just don’t hold true as soon as that second thread is there…

(Plus, the bugs are super-subtle, as in, they only occur by chance, and the side-effects usually show up somewhere different. It’s the worst, honestly.)

Vesuvius.9874:

Zaklex.6308:

Two words: Dhuum or Forgotten.

That’s three words…

…and isn’t the two word variant, “Forgotten Dhuum”, much more compelling as an idea?

Chyanne Waters.8719:

It would also be nice to have the option to see weapons wielded or even alone in that window from the gem store

You should be able to do that by either visiting the wiki and finding the chat link, or by using the wardrobe tab available anywhere your bank and material storage are.

It’s not nearly so convenient as directly from the gemstore, but it at least is possible.

Ben K.6238:

There is without doubt a problem with pet balancing – there are too many pets that don’t contribute anything useful to many builds, and some don’t contribute to any at all. When was the last time you saw anyone use a boar pet, for example?

I suspect the answer to that question is comparable to “when is the last time you saw someone wearing armor with defensive stats”, eg, maybe in pvp, most likely in wvw.

Sartharina.3542:

Sounds to me that he just wants level upscaling?

That, or just eliminate levels entirely. I’m actually pretty happy with the idea of that, but I feel like it does pull guide rails out from new players … and having seen my partner go through the start of the game, for the “I don’t have ten years of MMO experience” player, the game is really, really hard to figure out with level 10 stuff, let alone all the level 80 complexity…

JonasBL.8270:

Thanks, I didn’t know/kept track of that cap (might have heard about it, but as I’m a casual player, was thinking I must be waaaay from any cap. Thanks, this was indeed the case but this is a bit unluckey for me, as I like to play some PvP on my restricted online time, but now I will have to turn to PvE if I want any progression of my acount.

Increased achievement points are a kind of progression, sure, but they won’t have any material effect on your ability to play PvP or whatever. The other rewards from the daily, including gold and reward track progression potions, should show up exactly as before.

So … it’s not really necessary to “progress” AP at all…

You should be able to join the map any time other than at the very end of the cycle, when it is disable to prevent people jumping in without contributing for loot at the very end.

Katastroff.1045:

Maybe they secretly added bugs to the game?

O.o

More likely there was something corrupted in a build, and they rebuilt the game or asset to correct it — thus, a “no changes” maintenance build. If y’all had the damaged version of whatever, it corrects itself and on we go.

Save your gw2.dat file somewhere else, delete and reinstall, then exit once it starts downloading the data. Move gw2.dat into the new app, restart the launcher, and you should be able to avoid redownloading all the assets.

Plastazote.7914:

I thought all we knew was that it was a scourge with a torch. We might be able to imply burning because it’s a torch but do we know it will produce torment and be support?

We know nothing for certain, beyond what we saw, which was a picture of a desert-like cloth around the head, and suggestive of sand background. Could be anything.

Condition damage with bleeding certainly feels thematic with sand to me, but it’s not really like that relationship needs to make much sense. I mean, berserker == literally catching on fire is not … traditionally what people associate there.

Y’all are welcome to ping me in-game if you see me, and ask. I’ll generally be quite happy to open rifts for people. (Though, more often, I open them in passing because they advance the map reward counter…)

Linken.6345:

or you could have slowed down your dps, any reason you dident?

…but but but… stopping hitting something? Isn’t that, like, against the rules of online gaming? I think the online gaming police come and arrest you if you do that as a courtesy to others.