Guild Wars 2

I know this isn’t the right place to ask but i was excited to get home and try this event, what is going wrong with it?

The earliest we can expect SAB to realistically be worked on ( not return but be worked on) Is after season 3 of the living story is completely finished. Which probably won’t be until sometime around the end of spring 2016. :/

Those poor asuran children

Having quickness increases stomp speed.

Yes, exactly like that. There is a report system in the game for exactly that reason. Don’t clog up support just because anet has decided they don’t care about griefing.

Belorn.2659:

We would need to change several key skills if we want to prevent content from being a joke.

1# Stealth. Dungeons are a joke when parties can just skip content. Smoke fields should be changed into giving vigor on blasts, and portals should be limited to only teleport 1 player inside instanced content and raids. This would remove the requirement of one thief per dungeon group (specific dungeons).

2# Reflects. Bosses are a joke when every attack can just be skipped by a single skill. The fastest DPS ever recorded in game and has been described as a exploit has been caused by reflecting lupi’s attack in Arah, and reflecting negates completely many boss mechanics in the game. Reflect should be changed to only negate the next 3 attacks. This would remove the requirement of one guardian per party.

3# Banners. Instanced content are designed around 5 players and are a joke when two utilities and a single trait contributes the same DPS as if there were and additional player in the party, while also locking the meta to direct damage. Those should be nerfed by 50% to encourage a different meta and remove the requirement of one warrior per party.

4# Zerker Meta. Parties that only invest in damage over everything else make content a joke. Dungeons should inflict different kind challenge, some which require a minimum amount of healing prayer to survive. Some bosses should be immune to direct damage, or do a undodgeable attacks which require toughness to survive.

If we did that and then balanced each class based on their ability to cause damage under the time frames 5s, 10s, 30s, and 1m, we should be able to create content where content can remain challenging and each profession be equally good at dealing with it.

Requiring toughness or healing power is not a step in the right direction but a stop in a different wrong direction.

Astralporing.1957:

CandyHearts.6025:

Aedelric.1287:

That is something you can report them for.

And which report subject heading would you see fitting? Go check them out. None fit. And for good reason.

When you report griefing, don’t use the ingame report tool, take screenshots (or, better, make a video, if you can) and mail support directly. You’d be surprised how often that works.

Therodin.2970:

You can’t ban people for something that a stupid player could be doing without malicious intent. A stupid mesmer could put a portal on the kegs at triple trouble because they think it would help people get back to the drop off point faster. A stupid mesmer could put portal on the jump pad in the hopes that it gets people back to teq faster. You can’t ban people for being stupid.

Yep. But if this is not a single case, but someone keeps repeating this (or, even better, gets caught admitting to griefing on chat)…

Why in our lord mordremoths great green tyria would you suggest people go bother support with claims like this? They have so much more important things to do. I forgot my password like every single time that i accidentally click the password field and erase my saved password. Tickets like the one you are supporting are the reason it takes me like 3 days to get back in.

Yeah i don’t mind every single person in the game being dps but i don’t know how ANET thought reducing the trinity to a single point would make a diverse game.

You can’t ban people for something that a stupid player could be doing without malicious intent. A stupid mesmer could put a portal on the kegs at triple trouble because they think it would help people get back to the drop off point faster. A stupid mesmer could put portal on the jump pad in the hopes that it gets people back to teq faster. You can’t ban people for being stupid.

I don’t think anyone should decide ice bow needs a nerf until they can try it in content that hasn’t been practiced to the point of muscle memory. Linecasting obviously needs a fix because it is a bug but the ice bow itself is not crazy overpowered.

You should find a guild to do guild missions with for your ascended trinkets. Rings from fractals, and amulet from daily laurels. Crafting is the only way to get ascended weapons and armor other than getting randomly lucky. You have to max out a crafting discipline to make the ascended armor associated with it.

If when the expansion comes out, pvp teams with expansion members do consistently better against teams without the expansion then yes i think the expansion is P2W.

I would not be surprised if SAB never returns, I 100% believe they mean it when they say soon. But i also 100% believe when they said they weren’t going to do an expansion model. Over time there priorities change and other stuff starts looking more attractive, so im sure when they have the time to work on SAB something else will look more important.

SAB march 2016! We can do it guys!

My guild and i also talk about this during our runs, , marionette was one of our favorite ideas to be made into a fractal with one person per lane.

boomtap.6921:

I still don’t get what a fractal is.

A fractal (right now before the HOT changes) Is a dungeon where you join and are put into a shard(dungeon path)that is randomly pulled from a list of tier 1 shards. When you go through that and kill the end boss you are put into another shard from a list of tier 2 shards, rinse and repeat in the 3rd shard and then you are placed into a boss shard pulled from a list of 3 boss shards. When you complete the boss shard you have finished one fractal run and your personal reward level will increase if it is at or below the difficulty level of the fractal you were doing. You can only start a fractal whose difficulty level is at or below your personal reward level. If you join someone else’s fractal whose difficulty is above your personal reward level, after killing the boss you will receive rewards as if you had completed a fractal whose difficulty was at your personal reward level.

I’ve seen people say that by making the fractals a static schedule instead of semi random they are coding themselves into a corner when it comes to adding new fractals, unless they add those new to fractals to 100+. Because of the things they bragged about with this system was how you could keep records easily since they will always be the same and always have the same instability. But if they make a new fractal and insert into the list in 5 or 6 spaced out places, it moves everything above it up a few spots which messes up the records part of it and im sure would take some interesting work to keep the instabilities with the same levels.

Tigerlily.3765:

If working as intended the tooltip is wrong. Changing it is inelegant, but I guess it could say something like “heal downed players in target area for XXXX amount.” The “heal” makes it clear it will be reduced by effects that would normally reduce healing.

This functionality is definitely annoying for pvp, and given the massive cooldown I don’t think it should be negated by something as easy to apply as poison. Be that as it may, it is even more annoying in fractals, where agony reduces healing and obviously cannot be removed by condi clear.

YESSSSS, it is so very annoying in fractals where you get agony every few seconds that you stay in combat.

The … adventure? system they talked about would make SAB scores comparable probably. I think that’s what it was called.

because silk used to be worthless, so all at once they made it the most expensive and never adjusted it to be equal later

If you fall and go flat without dieing the super boom box usually gets jammed into your skull and keeps playing. Happens to one of your guys every guild mission, it is awesome

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

I just hope we don’t start seeing a bunch of “didn’t get swamp, reset”

That will be impossible. The new system is: example, fractal 21 will always be swamp and nothing else, 54 will always be ascalon and nothing else, 60 will always be molten duo and nothing else.

I don’t ever buy mini’s, every time sab has been opened i have purchased all the paraphernalia to specifically show my support in the way i thought anet would care about the most.

I disagree with the other people responding, that sounds very annoying and if you have decided not to use an authenticator you should not be bothered ever again about it.

I feel like sab should be worth it money wise to make, there are lots of gem store items they can sell with it/make for it.

Isn’t this setting a bad precedent? I mean now that they have announced raids, do we really want raids that can be completed in 30 minutes or less?

I would appreciate this.

well, all the cool info on this screen seems to make it pretty clear that they have decided to go through with the idea of a static schedule. Good luck to everyone. http://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/game/raids/

there are three letters in SAB, there are three hands on a clock, coincidence? WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

I can’t think of many things that separate fractals from dungeons. There is the “random” factor, instabilities, and i can’t think of any other big differences. The instabilities are usually negligible or broken and impossible(The one that comes to mind is the one where enemies do more damage if they are not directly in front of you) so i don’t know how much that difference really counts. I know with the static system they can rework the instabilities so they are fractal specific and they might become a bigger deal, but they could do that without making the fractals static and each specific fractal could have it’s own list of possible instabilities so each run you had four different ones. So the instability argument is not a very good one. If someone wanted content that they could do quickly that was worth the rewards, they should just do a dungeon, if they are tired of all the dungeons then they should ask anet to make more dungeons, not ask for a different type of pve content to be gutted and fitted into dungeon molds.

I like most of your ideas and really hope that something other than the static fractal schedule is done. I of course don’t know what all HOT will bring but throughout everything new gw2 has brought in the past two years i have consistently enjoyed fractals and i would be sad if my favorite thing about gw2 was changed to an unrecognizable thing.

Coulter.2315:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

My biggest fear is 90% of the people, and instances they run will now be swamp. Pathetic to be honest. Grawl, winter fractal, even dredge to some degree: they are fun to beat with a clever/good team. Now? lfg ‘swamp only, speedclea’, ‘only swamp’ ‘Nothing but swamp, got it? or pkick’.

This is the misconception people need to get over, Fractal 51 will ALWAYS be one particular Fractal, same with 52 etc. You will no longer be able to abuse the randomiser to get Swamp because they are removing the randomiser.

Each level will be a SPECIFIC Fractal (Grawl, Swamp w/e) and a SPECIFIC Instability tailored to that Fractal.

Eg. Fractal 51 is ALWAYS Harpy Fractal ALWAYS with the Instability : Harpies lay freezing traps and have increased range. (this is just an example of how the instability can be tailored to the fractal level to give a different experience)

The randomiser is gone and the Instabilities can now be SPECIFIC to the fractal – they used to be general to apply to anything (because of the randomiser). people always took Swamp for the first (because of the randomiser). The randomiser is gone now.

You might get a shorter fractal every now and then OR you get to Fractal 57 and it is ALWAYS this super challengiing Fractal + Instability combination. They are giving the feeling of progression to Fractals – this isn’t going to help casuals, it will test them.

Also say they include a Meta Achievement that you require for the Legendary Backpiece, they can include Fractal 57 in that Achievement. So even if Fractal 58 is easier than 57 and people can “skip it” to get to higher levels the Meta REQUIRES you to go back and complete it. This lets casuals do a high level Fractal in their lunch break 58 (something anet wants) BUT they need to (if they want the Legendary) go back and do 57 to get it.

These changes give more control to devs and that is the important thing we can take away from this. Its a good new system.

But your only talking about progressing up through the fractal tiers, which anyone who has done fractals often knows is like 2% of your fractal experience. If you enjoy fractals and continue to do them you will probably do many many more after you hit the max difficulty than you will do while progressing through the tiers. And after you hit max difficulty level you will just need to do a swamp in the ranges of 1-20, 20-50, and 50-100 with only one other random daily achievement. So every single day your fractal rotation went from 4-5 45 minute fractal runs a day to 2 swamps and one random fractal.

To the people saying wait and try it before passing judgement: If we wait until this patch goes live before complaining, do you honestly think our chances to get this changed aren’t astronomically smaller after they put it in the game and start patching it?
To the people saying that fractals took too long: There is already quick easy content if you want that, and there has already been great suggestions as to ways to make fractals fast for people who want that and still take a long time for people who want that. ie: 1-20 is one static fractal(perfect for the practice they were talking about) 20-50 is between 2-3 fractals with the first being static and the following ones being random and 50-100 using the old system of four random fractals from the different tiers. You have your cof p1’s and you have your arah p4’s, there is no reason that we can’t keep some of the longness of fractals and just make the early stuff faster.

That is very sad :/ i will really miss the old setup of random fractals and will probably not do them as often under this new static schedule. Not a threat of course as anet doesn’t care if i play fractals but just sad news.

April fools 2016 would be fine with me, but i would also be surprised if we got SAB back that early. I think we are all forgetting about the real victims here though, the poor asuran children who aren’t being trained to fight mordremoth!

So do you think with HOT being released october 23rd, we could get some info on where SAB is on the list of things to work on after that? I’m assuming they won’t be able to work on anything but fixing the problems with HOT until at least a month probably two later. So january 2016, what are the plans to work on?

I would enjoy capture the flag.

Hertz.1309:

Well, I for one hope SAB doesn’t return…Why? because i invested in SAB skins way back..and now they are worth a ton. The longer no SAB, the more i get when i sell. Call me greedy but…I wasn’t that fond of SAB to begin with..might as well make some quick coin of it..

What you have portrayed yourself as is far worse than greedy, Don’t bring back this content that some people enjoyed so i can make more digital currency is an awful thing to admit feeling.

I haven’t seen any official responses and i worry that they are already too far into working on this to change the assigned fractals thing :/

I would not be surprised if SAB never returned. I am sure they can always find something else that they would prefer to divert resources to than sab. The continue coin is still just a bad move on there part. They would not even be losing money, they could just refund gems. And we have gotten up to date info on sab recently, i mean it is up to you whether or not you believe it, but we did get new info. I honestly haven’t loaded into gw2 for a while now and i wish they would do anything cool so that i could reconnect with all my guildies.

sprhavkdogi.9408:

Therodin.2970:

One persons suggestion was pretty good i felt like, they suggested that they start out with this new static idea at fotm 1 and then as you move up they increase until eventually ending up back at the original setup somewhere around 70. That would open up fractals to people with not enough time but would still have the randomness and the extra difficulty that comes with that randomness for people who wanted it at the higher levels

Yeah this was my suggestion. A couple of my guildies and I had talked about having this be a thing when we started studying into the fractal changes. Apparently my idea got buried by other responses, but I’m glad you noticed it. Ya the solution seems simple enough. I know they have the tech to make different levels give different numbers of fractals because before the fractured update. All odd numbered fracs would roll 3 then all even-numbered fracs did 3+jade maw. I feel like using that tech will still allow fracs to be difficult while also allowing for ease of access. As I said before one frac is not difficult when I know what that fractal will be. Oh we’re doing cliffside? I’ll bring a bunch of AoE cleave and/or blinds. We’re running dredge? I’ll just bring my thief. Yes maybe the instabilities could possibly counter these such as stealth lasting half as long or dealing half damage with melee, but I think three years of GW2 has made it painfully obvious that players will find a way to optimize this system so creating less variation on the fractals we run is only going to make them easier for us. Naturally we are going to find the fractals that give us the highest reward in the shortest amount of time.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind easy rewards, but those already exist in dungeons. People already complain that the game doesn’t have enough challenging end-game content. So the solution is to make the hardest instanced content easier? Yes I know Anet is promising challenging end-game content in HoT, but I don’t want to rely on them. I like fractals. I consider lvl 50 a challenge every time I run them on any of my 9 toons with the appropriate ar. Anet if you read this I support what you guys do and I love this game. This is why I’m trying to do what I can to protect one of my favorite things in this game.

So to repost my idea from before (also the TLDR part for people):
-lvl 1-20 fractals we get the one static fractal that was suggested in the stream to allow for players to learn the mechanics
-lvl 21-50 fractals we get one static fractal then one other frac picked at random afterwards to slowly increase difficulty
-lvl 51-70 fractals we get one static fractal then two random fractals similar to what odd numbered fractals did before the Fractured update.
-lvl 71+ fractals have one static fractal then three random fractals almost like they are now. Players will get the maximum challenge out of these fractals and potentially the greatest rewards.

And just like that you have 4 scales for rewards also. I also didn’t mention that 51+ as its own reward tier seems rather large when the other two tiers have 30 or fewer scales tied to them

If something similar to this is not done, i don’t think that i will do as many fractals as i currently do because most of the difficulty for me was not knowing what we were getting. You put it really well that if you know exactly which fractal you are doing you can build your build/class around that.

I am sad about the static fractal shards i liked the randomness of what i was getting. Now it will just be a swamp somewhere between 1-20 a swamp somewhere between 20-50 and then a swamp after 50. And maybe that rotating achievement if the reward is even worth it.

This is a very good question that will hopefully get an answer other than we are not going to add new fractals.

I don’t think i have seen anyone put it in as easy to see terms as this. Swamp for my guild group that do fractals every week, once a week takes about 15-20 minutes. So that means if we wait a week or so and let one of them grind up the levels, He get’s to lets say 76 which is a swamp with a negligible instability. It would only take us 8.6 hours to catch up to him. That is already halfway to 100.

While that sounds great it is against what anet seems to be trying to do. They seem to be doing there best to make fractals easier. They doubled the numbed of levels but cut the time it takes to complete a fractal by 3/4th so it only takes half as long to get to 100 as it did to get to 50. They want newer players in fractals and they even gave them an easy way to do it, all they need is one person with a high swamp level and they could easily get 30 personal fractal levels in a day.

This is a good idea, i am still argueing that in the later levels they should return to the 4 shard business but when that inevitably does not get done, this is something i would appreciate.

I think they should look at the fractal backpiece when deciding how to make the special fractal weapons. I legitimately enjoyed leveling that thing up because of the changes i got. If i spent all those ingredients and it just looked like someone had dipped it in shiny yellow paint i would have been very disappointed. And i imagine the difficulty of getting the new ones will be even more than what those ingredients were worth to me so i would really like it if it did something more than get dipped in shiny yellow paint.

So to the people saying they are happy that they can do it faster, how would you feel about higher levels increasing the number of shards required to complete it? We could argue later over where to increase it but just the act of increasing it until eventually ending up with 1(kind of predetermined scale because always reroll for swamp) and then 3 random shards? I ask this because some people enjoy the randomness that went along with not knowing which fractal you would get next. There is already quick content for people that want it: dungeons. But if they want to make fractals more like dungeons to make it more accessible that is understandable. But there are still dungeons that take a good chunk of time and are difficult: arah p4. So i don’t think it is too much to ask to keep some fractals long and difficult.

There was already content in the game that you could do if you wanted something quick and fast. I understand there reasoning for trying to make fractals more accessible to newer players and just people who don’t have an hour to devote to a pug. But this is too big of a change to fractals, they just do not sound like they will be the same thing after the update One persons suggestion was pretty good i felt like, they suggested that they start out with this new static idea at fotm 1 and then as you move up they increase until eventually ending up back at the original setup somewhere around 70. That would open up fractals to people with not enough time but would still have the randomness and the extra difficulty that comes with that randomness for people who wanted it at the higher levels

I would have just preferred this info like 2 years ago >.>