Guild Wars 2

Killface.1896:

Yep just stay in melee and autoattack and grap a coffee or somthink it gonna take few min to take him down

This is what I did. Got into melee and hit autoattack. Got up, took a dump, grabbed some coffee and came back in time for the end.

LinseyMurdock.4165:

SpyderArachnid.5619:

I’m talking about the recipes to make the items. Gift of Souls, Gift of the Moon, and Gift of Spiders.

In game, players are saying to make the recipes it takes 100, not 10.

I am looking at Recipe: Gift of Souls, Recipe: Gift of the Moon, Recipe: Gift of Spiders, Gift of Souls, Gift of the Moon, and Gift of Spiders. Both the items and the crafting/mystic forge recipes themselves. No where does it say it takes 100 instead of 10. Players talking in game are incorrect based on the bad information from the update notes.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Someone makes a typo, we bring it up. A forum mod/dev reads it and thinks ‘this can’t be right…’ and emails the appropriate people to confirm this is a typo. They take a while to email back because busy with other stuff/out of office/forgot to have outlook open, then a day later the reply comes through.

That’s right! In this case, the issue of “players think this is too expensive” was raised to the coordinator of the team that worked on this update. He then raised that issue to me, the point of contact for all rewards. I said “Holy monkey face, that’s not what it was when I reviewed that stuff! Poop! What happened!? We gotta fix that asap!” and started an email thread about how to fix it, who should fix it, when we could get it into a hotfix, if we should kill switch the recipe to prevent anyone from doing it before we fix it, and discussions about pulling data in case we needed to do a refund for any poor souls who might have already done it. Then we asked the designer on that team to get in the fix and start working it through the approval process to hotfix it. It was at that point when the designer said “but it is already at 10 on Dev, not 100”. We verified that was the case in the Live code and I immediately hopped on here to post that it was a simple update notes typo while the community team worked to update the update notes. I think a days turn around is actually pretty good and I am very pleased that it was not a problem in the code, but rather a simple update notes typo.

Everything is a process. We work really hard to listen to our playerbase and be responsive to their needs. Time is always a mitigating factor and even information takes time to move from one place to another.

This is good news. If I hadn’t read this thread, I never would have known it was a type-o in the release notes. (I dismissed the grind outright when I read it was 100k).

You know what would be a good idea: to use the bulletin-post system in the forum (the one that appears at the top of the page goes away after reading) to let everyone know of the type-o in the patch notes.

This is 100% off-topic.

" Once you have completed the A Sweet Friend meta achievement, you’ll be rewarded with a Mini Candy-Corn Elemental. This living candy corn is exactly what Tassi needs to complete her plan! Return to the Nolani Academy Ruins in the Black Citadel to finish out the story arc. This is a repeatable multiplayer instance which requires at least one player to have finished the meta achievement. Get ready to glaze!"

From: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-guide-to-blood-and-madness/

This should be in the game, not on the web site.

Dahkeus.8243:

Runes of Lyssa cleanse condis. They also don’t require you to be fighting a mesmer. =P

I don’t understand why you are comparing them as if they are competing against each other.

Good point. Lyssa does cure conditions.

However, Lyssa only gives boons for 5 seconds. Consume Ectoplasm gives boons for 10 seconds.

I never stated Consume Ectoplasm and Lyssa runes are competing against each other. In fact they are complimentary to a alarming degree. Steal+Elite (Lyssa Runes)+Steal can give a thief 20 seconds of all boons over a 45 second span. That’s an incredible uptime. In the past one could have possibly argued that a Necromancer’s “Corrupt Boon” was a hard counter, but that utility has since been nerfed.

Consume Ectoplasm still seems out of place when compared to the other abilities that can be stolen.

When a thief uses his Steal ability on a Mesmer, he receives ‘Consume Ectoplasm’, an ability which gives the thief All Boons for 10 seconds, and I think Stability for 3 seconds.

This ability is much more powerful than the 6 Piece Runes of Lyssa bonus, and doesn’t even come close to matching any ability a Mesmer has.

Overall it seems very out of line with the other abilities a Thief can get from Steal.

All,

I think we all agree underwater combat is not going to happen for pvp in the near or distant future. I think it’s time ANet put the bullet in its brain and removed all underwater combat from pvp, including Capricorn.

Nonbeing.5234:

Thedenofsin.7340:

It would be helpful if the “ooze love” buff appeared over a player’s head during the Slick and Sparki encounter, much like it does in the ooze escort encounter.

It does. It goes from player to player (randomly, as far as I know), but it’s definitely there. Players just need to pay close attention to their own heads during that fight, and if they have the “ooze love” icon, they need to focus on kiting.

As for general feedback, I agree with you, this is a fantastic dungeon, and I’ve had several extremely fun runs doing it (although they were always with guildmates, and always with Teamspeak – voice communication is so important in this dungeon).

I’ve completed it maybe 3 or 4 times, and all I’m missing is the “Grounded” achievement (that electric room… oh how I loathe it).

But this is definitely the kind of quality content I would like to see more of in the future. The Taco update was frustrating because it required an entire zerg to coordinate (and of course overflow/AFK players could randomly ruin that at any given encounter). This update, on the other hand, is so much more fun, because it offers a great opportunity to bond with a handful of friends.

I don’t remember seeing the buff overhead. I do know it appears on the bar. If so, then I retract my statement.

Agreed on Taco the Funless.

Overall I really like this dungeon. It has good atmosphere and the encounters are pretty fun and different.

This is a breath of fresh air compared to the most recent updates. :-)

I have, however, had more bad runs than good. These mostly stem from players who are either impatient, or do not value the importance of coordination in this dungeon.

If there were some way to have pug players learn the mechanics (and that coordination > dps) more smoothly than the “rage&quit” ooze escort encounter, I think things would go better overall. Last night I pugged it with 4 players that never did it before. Before each encounter I typed out all the specifics and emphasized that these fights were not a dps race. We cleared the ooze escort on our 2nd attempt, got Slick to about 5% on our first try, and beat Slick+Sparki on our 3rd try and 1 shot MechaOakzilla.

It would be helpful if the “ooze love” buff appeared over a player’s head during the Slick and Sparki encounter, much like it does in the ooze escort encounter.

Good stuff – the dungeon really isn’t that hard, and, once you learn that 90% of the dungeon isn’t a dps race, it goes much more smoothly.

I’d be fine with ‘strongly discouraged’. My guild is a bunch of old farts who have better things to do than try to scam guildies out of a few copper.

Gaile, can you clarify a little on this rule? I can’t find anything in the Rules of Conduct (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-rules-of-conduct/) or at the top of this forum which states raffles are disallowed in-game. I can’t even find language which closely resembles it.

50/50 raffles are a great and fun way for guilds to build up their bank.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Kline.9561, a lot of the tips/suggestions you make in your post are things that are big focuses for us. The good news is that some of that work is spread out over several different teams, so while it might take a while to develop, we have a lot of great features coming to help with barrier to entry, etc.

As for monetization, that’s a bit more difficult considering we already give a lot of the things that can be monetized away as we don’t want to have a huge barrier to entry in PvP. If you have suggestions for stuff like that, feel free to share!

Here’s something you could monetize on:

Patsy: Mini Pet. Follows you around. Bangs on coconuts. Carries your banner. Customizable backpack skin.
If you don’t know of whom I am speaking, look here: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070903144949/montypython/images/9/9a/Gilliam_as_Patsy.jpg

I’d drop serious coin for a patsy.

Here’s how you could make it work for PVP:

For new items and/or mini-pets, tournament winners get them for free and before they are released for sale in the gem store.
Items/pets are released in the gem store a few months later.

DevonCarver.5370:

Yaro.3251:

The idea of outmanned buff is to give enough incentive for more people to join the war on the losing side. Not to make those who are already on the map stronger – that would be unfair.

Whether these incentives work as well as they thought to be by developers – I don’t know. Only thing I know is buffing any side of the fence combat-wise, be it losing or winning one, is unfair. Orbs kinda blow in this regard.

Even more specifically, the original intent was to make it so that players had some little boost to playing even though you might be getting beaten. The main reason to not make it overly beneficial is that it creates a disincentive to have a full map of players at that point, which is where the balance comes in.

What’s wrong with making it a scaling buff, inversely proportional to the % by which the team is underrepresented?

Allie Murdock.8152:

xD

That’s a great mentality. You do realize that if there’s data that people like GW2 PvP, and it gets more popular, that it could = more resources? It’s cool though. If you don’t want to watch, you don’t have to.

That seems somewhat somewhat disingenuous. I think we all agree the right way to generate data which indicates more people like GW2 is by actually getting more people to like GW2.

Mastruq.2463:

I like the encounter and all, but that post goes beyond your usual fanboi into straight shill territory. Do you work for Ayzenberg or a similar company by chance?

Indeed. That poster is a straight-up shill.

The Tequatl encounter is not properly designed for GW2. If you design an encounter for upwards of 100 players, then the encounter:
– should be relatively grief-proof – i.e. a small minority should not be able to destroy your chances of winning
– should require little to no communication, or, alternatively, the game needs to have mechanics to support efficient communication for 100 people
– should scale down for overflows. If you design the encounter for 100 and your server can only handle 130-150 players, then the overflow encounter should scale well down to 30-50 players

You make a super-hard open world event that requires coordination of upwards of 100 people with:
– little-no downward scaling
– no accurate timers for the event
– no in-game mechanisms to allow coordination of 100 people
– a low population cap such that people are likely to be placed into overflow
– a mechanism such that the overall success of said group hinges primarily on 6 players
– rewards which are disproportionately low for the effort required to succeed

Liadri the Imbalanced, Stupor Annoying Box, Tequatl Sucking… it’s clear the development team needs more time than they have to produce quality content.

ArenaNet needs to pull back on the reins and slow down the rate of releases until they can reliably produce quality content.

StinVec.3621:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Final encounter with Scarlet:

At 10% health, Scarlet performs an kitten -pull maneuver, which drops the party to 1% health, mezzes everyone and makes her invulnerable.

Scarlet gloats, going on about how she will change the world to her liking…blah blah blah.

Suddenly she stops, makes a choking sound and grabs at her throat. Her head explodes, leaving two arms jutting out of her neck. The arms quickly reach down, grab the torso and rip the body asunder. Only a bloody mess of Scarlet remains, and, standing in her place: the Mad King.

“Ta Dah! I love making a memorable entrance!”

That’s a little too “Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat”y or too “Neo in the Matrix hallway scene”y for my taste… Though that would really fit in with Anets pop culture references.

OK, how about…

She gloats, then exclaims, “Before this is through, I will be a God!”
Suddenly Mad King appears, grabs her and slams her around 3 or 4 times.

“Puny God”. :-P

Lesh Prince? /15

Final encounter with Scarlet:

At 10% health, Scarlet performs an kitten -pull maneuver, which drops the party to 1% health, mezzes everyone and makes her invulnerable.

Scarlet gloats, going on about how she will change the world to her liking…blah blah blah.

Suddenly she stops, makes a choking sound and grabs at her throat. Her head explodes, leaving two arms jutting out of her neck. The arms quickly reach down, grab the torso and rip the body asunder. Only a bloody mess of Scarlet remains, and, standing in her place: the Mad King.

“Ta Dah! I love making a memorable entrance!”

96%. Yak’s Bend off hours

BobbyStein.2315:

We’re planning to put Living World story summaries into game UI, but I can’t say when that system is coming online just yet. (It’s a more complicated system than that, by the way, but one component of it will include some of these story details.) Regarding something that bridges the releases more clearly, Design will have to continue to work closely with Marketing to hit that sweet spot. Inside the game, we’ll continue to explore ways to do this in various forms (cinematics, conversations, lore bits, etc.).

I realize that, for a lot of people, the LW release stories don’t feel connected. They are, but we’re not always making that clear to players.

It’s been 12 months, Bobby. No one cares about getting a ‘system online’, or other excuses. I have not seen one post from the player community where the someone finds the story cohesive and/or compelling. It’s a giant mess. Get on the keyboard, put at least some of the pieces of the story together and hit the ‘reply’ button.

Fish or cut bait.

That should be the name of this event.

I’ve tried this on my server 3 times now (Yak’s Bend), and I’ve never even seen them remove more than 3-4% of the boss’s health.

Why does this event not scale?

Why does this event go off if there are not enough people on to even make a dent in it?

Why would you make something that requires such large scale coordination without even having the mechanisms in-game that allow for said large scale coordination?

Why did you not beta test this?

Seriously, this event absolutely sucks. I’m never coming back to it.

That’s the second massively disappointing Living Story release in a row.

ArenaNet needs to command an all-stop on their Living Story teams, and have them get together and fix this mess.

Then one day I was pickin’ at some food,
And up from the ground came a bubbling’ crude…
Oil, that is…black gold….Texas tea

I logged in and started playing through World 2 and I was told I should go get the slingshot because that makes playing much easier. So I went back and grinded for the slingshot.

Then I played until I reached the trees and could not get past. So I went back and played until I found the candle.

Then I went and played until I reached the impassible ice wall, and realized I needed to buy the torch thing. So I took a look and realized it costs more baubles than I cold hold. So I realized I needed to grind and buy the wallet so I could grind and buy the torch.

Then I stopped playing. If I wanted to do an 8-bit grind, I’d go play Final Fantasy. Grinding isn’t fun. kitten, you can’t even finish infantile mode without getting the torch.

No thanks.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Ranger
Sick ‘Em will now apply ‘Revealed” to enemies they target. We want to introduce some counter play to Stealth (players have asked for that for a while), so we thought a pet “catching your scent” might be a cool way to insinuate some anti-stealth into the game.

Excellent! Finally some counterplay to Stealth.

More please!

You have 114 years of playtime on your berseker warrior?

JonathanSharp.7094:

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

How about: Hire more people.

If you guys really sold 3.5 million copies, you guys must have at least 10% of the sales in cash reserves remaining. That should be enough to hire 10-15 more developers for at least another year.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Thedenofsin.7340:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Congratulations, you’re now learning what was mandatory in older videogames!

Congratulations, you’re wrong.

That kind of stuff was not mandatory in older games. If I needed an item to progress, I had to go get it. That usually meant running a dungeon or completing puzzles or what-not. I didn’t have to go grind out money over and over.

Actually, certain things you DID have to pay for in the older games…I’m looking at a certain Castlevania game as an example. <_<

I played 1,2,3 and 4 and only remember 2 ever giving you the options to buy upgrades. But you never had to grind for them – by the time you came across the upgrade you had enough hearts to get it. And the upgrades were not mandatory to progress. Hell I finished Castlevania 2 in about 6 hours on my first play through without grinding for anything.

Chrisplosion.3756:

How dare they not hand you the level on a silver platter, those kittens! Dwayna forbid you have to actually do something to progress.

Make it a skill-based check and not a herpa-kitten -I’m-a-grind-monkey check. Heaven forbid they make you actually have a modicum of talent and not hours to kitten away grinding currency.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Congratulations, you’re now learning what was mandatory in older videogames!

Congratulations, you’re wrong.

That kind of stuff was not mandatory in older games. If I needed an item to progress, I had to go get it. That usually meant running a dungeon or completing puzzles or what-not. I didn’t have to go grind out money over and over.

I didn’t have to grind money to get my weapons in Zelda, or my keys in Adventure, or my power-ups in Mario. This is just dumb.

I have to buy all of this crap just to get past W2-2?

Are you serious?

It was annoying I had to go back and farm stuff to get a bomb. Now I have to go back and grind coins to get a wallet just so I can go back and grind enough coins to buy a torch?

No thanks. That’s not fun, that’s just a PITA.

The VoD always seems to take forever to playback, and it periodically stops to buffer.
Is there any chance someone is going to upload these to youtube?

It appears as though the runs through SAB are account bound: chests are rewarded once per account per day.

However, all the items you purchase are character bound. So, if you want to run SAB with more than one character per day you are put at an even greater disadvantage.

Can someone explain how this seems fair and/or balanced?

Josh, don’t take it hard. I view the core issue here more as a difference in the intention of SAB itself.

I cannot speak on behalf on the entire community, but I believe I do speak on behalf of the older players here. We look at SAB as a fun trip down memory lane: a fun retro-style mini-game within GW2 that allows us to relive those old 8-bit days as we remember them (here’s the key part) through rose-colored spectacles.

Don’t look at the extra work as “waste” insomuch is that it was just more than what people were expected.

SAB is a kind of nostalgia, and nostalgia is very powerful. But, nostalgia needs to be handled carefully, and doled out in measured doses.

As a kid I remember my parent’s taking my down to Skip’s Hamburgers, where we’d get these great little burgers that were cooked on the griddle, wrapped in a paper napkin, and served with crispy fries and a cold milk shake. When I think back on that time, I think of sitting down with my family and how delicious that little burger and shake was. I don’t think back on the 15+ minute wait in line to order, or the mosquitoes or the crappy little uncomfortable plastic tables I sat in. Nor do I think back on the 20 minute drive back and forth. Nostalgia is the best 5 minutes of that 1+ hour experience: a burger and a shake and a good time with my family.

SAB is that little burger; it’s that trip to the beach, the walk to the candy store, or the time you spent playing Matchbox cars in the driveway.

Keep that thought your mind when you’re designing World 3.

Gaile Gray.6028:

norris.3901:

I to have hit this a few times, I don’t want to comlane more just add that maybe you could have a email verify ever time you buy gems to prevent fraud

That’s an interesting suggestion, Norris. I do wonder what would happen if someone’s identity was stolen, or if both his/her game and email were hacked. Couldn’t someone then run up huge amounts of purchases against the desire of the real account owner?

If that were to happen, gem purchases would be the least of their concern. And in either case, those gem purchases, whether $100 worth or $5000 worth, would have to be reversed.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Not to minimize your complaints but here’s my take.

1. The zones are too long

You are complaining about too much content.

2. Jumping on a flower can throw you into another flower and kill you

You can be more careful about the direction you are facing when you land on them.

3. Crocodile hit boxes are too little

You need to use tactical stratagy to find the spots to hit the from, just like old platform games.

4. Too many enemies on all maps

Learning where enemies are and how to thwart them is part of the process of progressing in old platform games.

5. World 2 spike traps are not fair, especially when you get to places where there are lots of cheap ones.

They are all visible. The darts shoot out of dart boxes. The assassin training grounds are meant to teach you to carefully observe your surroundings.

6. World 2 does not have nearly enough checkpoints and repeating the gong run is painful

The gong run is painful. I’d like to tap that difficulty spike down.

7. World 2 – bringing the fish from the fountain, up the temple – too difficult due to lots of cheap spike traps

Not sure what you mean here. If you are talking about the dart traps, there are none in the fish temple.

8. World 2 – clouds are invisible unless your brightness is at 0.

I’ve tested on a variety of monitors and haven’t seen this problem.

I could go on and on and on. Normal mode was made far too hard.

You may be right. I think it’s too early to tell. Some number of people hit a little resistance and quit and come to complain about it. And some number hit that same resistance and are inspired to overcome it and they are in the game right now doing that. I don’t have a good sense of those numbers are right now. I’m more than happy to adjust it when I have better data to work from. Thanks for your feedback.

All that feedback leads me to the same conclusion that’s been mentioned numerous times before: This is content that was pushed out without being properly beta tested.

I’m really curious if SAB was thoroughly tested with a Norn or big Charr. In fact, I think it would make sense to exclude Asura during the testing process. SAB is significantly easier when run through using an Asura.

Jon,

The majority of the arguments I see regarding game development, refining and skill splitting share the same root cause: lack of staffing/funding to execute in a timely fashion.

What I struggle with is understanding why ArenaNet appears to be so inadequately staffed/funded.

I don’t really know what the operating/development costs are for a game, but if GW2 did sell over 3.5 million copies, that’s approximately 210,000,000 in earnings. Even if 90% of those earnings were spent to cover the publisher, salaries, distribution costs, hardware, overhead expenses, taxes and a year of post-launch salaries and overhead, it would seem to me there would be enough money to easily keep another 20+ developers/engineers/artists/testers to handle the additional throughput required to support more frequent changes and the like; at the very least, keep another 20+ on through the first year post-launch.

Again, I don’t know the numbers, but it seems like there was a management decision to immediately curtail the staffing post-launch to levels that were simply inadequate, given the game was effectively pressured to release early (thank you, WoW: MoP). As a result, the number of post-launch bugs/issues was far higher than anticipated, requiring more maintenance than projected.
It seems as though you guys have been struggling to recover from that ever since.

Grump.7069:

So, let me get this straight… You want anet (americans) to SACRIFICE their own labour day to update the game with the SAB release just so other americans can play SAB on their own labour day DAY OFF.

You almost got it straight. I want them to SACRIFICE their own LABOR Day to update the game with the SAB release just so I can play SAB on my own LABOR Day off.

Yup, that’s what I want.

Like changing the trebuchet payloads to birthday gifts or the quaggans dropping slices of cake?

You know, since even us grown-up kids get that day off.

:-)

Bura of Pacra.1589:

And just like most 1v1 situations, this rune set is pretty much moot in a zerg vs. zerg battle.

Epidemic says hi.

DevonCarver.5370:

We will not be changing WvW ranks or WxP to be account bound. However, we are going to be implementing a host of changes that should make this seem less like some sort of punishment(a categorization I disagree with entirely) and more of a character progression system.

I thoroughly disagree with this this decision and assessment. World XP points and ranks provide players with perks as a result of playing WvW maps with a particular character.
As such, a person who enjoys WvW and playing only 1 character can have a significant advantage over another player with equal play time, but having played 4 players. If this is not punishing a person for enjoying profession diversity, then it is rewarding a person for eschewing all other professions when playing WvW.

Rift implemented a character progression system, called Planar Attunement. It rewarded “points” to a max-level characters as they “progressed” (basically earned more XP) through the game. This points were spent on slight character bonues. Planar attunement points where character-bound.

Several months after its inception, the Rift development team realized this approach really encouraged players to focus on a single character, rather embracing diversity. They then changed PA to be account-bound rather than character bound.

Considering new alts are a potential source of revenue for GW2, why would you consider implementing, or maintaining in this case, a progression model which discourages profession diversity?

Quite frankly, I cannot understand how anyone can see the current WvW mastery system to be anything other than punishing to people who enjoy playing multiple professions.

John Smith.4610:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

But make no mistake. If you didn’t make your Gold from the Queen’s Gauntlet, or Champion farming, you’ll be left behind in terms of wealth. That’s why it’ll be interesting to see how Anet responds to this.

This is incredibly hyperbolous. In the last week, the median player earned less than 3 gold in the new content (that’s discounting all players who earned less than 1 gold).

What was the mean and the 3 sigma?

kamikaze kane.1063:

Basically the title. The reason they should do this is because players like myself, who have multiple 80’s, cant enjoy them the same in wvw, specially when i have a character thats already at like 70 world ranks. i would only ever want to stick with one chaaracter in wvw because thats the character with the higher wvw rank, but if i want to play a different character, i have to start over again which can get annoying to rank up with

YESYESESYESYESYESYESYES

Ever since the most recent patch, the frequency of WvW loot bags has been noticeably lower.

I believe this is a bug. Please acknowledge.

Reference thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Nerf-in-WvW-loot-after-the-patch-intented/first#post2591527

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You read that in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, didn’t you?

I admit, I did.

and I laughed. :-)

good info

I think Ostricheggs hit the nail on the head regarding the problem with Spirit Rangers. However, I see thieves right now at nearly the same level as Spirit Rangers. Let’s look at what they bring to the table in tPvP, besides their terrific damage output:

Group Stealth allows a team to invisi-zerg assist train down a player, often times giving a team and instant +1 player advantage. There is no counter play to stealth.

Stealth + condition cleanse gives thieves the most survivability in the game, bar none. As a result they are practically impossible to assist train down. There is no counter play to this.

Shadow trap, et. al, give thieves so much mobility that, on most maps, they can back cover a point while simultaneously pressuring another. They can almost literally be in two places at once. If they aren’t back covering, they can back cap (or far cap) just as easily. The counter play to this is to split your team 3 ways, which not very many team comps can support.

Shadow Refuge resurrect is more powerful than Signet of Inspiration and Signet of Undeath, combined. 1/4 second cast time and a 60 second cooldown for a near guaranteed resurrect. Without exaggeration, it is 10-20 times easier to pull of a Shadow Refuge resurrect than a Signet of Undeath resurrect or a Signet of Inspiration rally. The only way to counter it is to use a non-targetttable AoE knockback/pull before the stealth stacks more than 2 ticks. Let’s not forget it also heals and can proc Regeneration.

Thanks! I’ve added it to the list.

I’ve noticed this as well.

Living World

Con: There appears to be some kind of bug with the Liandri fight and queing.
Thread with pictures here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/jubilee/Oozes-aren-t-going-away-Queue-stuck