Guild Wars 2

The latest subset of changes seem to be headed in the right direction, though it still seems like most people are going to want 20-30 in arcana and 20-30 in water. We have a lot of very useful condi cleanse available to use in water 20-30, which makes it very nice to have. 20 arcana is still almost necessary for Elemental Attunement – that skill offers a ~50%+ protection uptime! That’s huge, especially to the already squishy elementalist. And Evasive Arcana offers a great heal + condi cleanse every ~10 seconds!

We still need more reason to go deeper into the other lines and less reason to go deeper in to the water/arcana lines.

Already posted in the thread itself, but I’ll copy my elementalist thoughts on the patch here:

As a long-time elementalist player, I am a bit upset at the poor quality of choices we’ll now have in our water and arcana adept trait lines. Though I understand and agree with the general direction that these elementalist traits are going.

Water – We need to see better adept water trait options. Soothing Wave is still terrible, and should be dropped in favor of a different effect. Everyone will likely choose Vital Striking(VI) or Soothing Disruption(III) for most scenarios now. We need more options. Better options.

Arcana – Quite interesting. The biggest problem I see here is that staff now have Blasting Staff, scepter now has Vigorous Scepter, but dagger is stuck with the virtually useless Windborne Dagger. Windborne Dagger is crappy, especially in comparison to the scepter and staff traits I just mentioned. Please give daggers a better trait. Or just don’t move Renewing Stamina. At least not until dagger has a better trait option. Also, Evasive Arcana is still powerful enough that it’s hard to NOT pick it up. In all honesty, the 50% healing nerf in sPvP could probably be lowered to 60-70% and then applied to WvW and PvE. This would keep the trait powerful, but it’d make me more willing to not go into 30 arcana.

Fire – Not good enough. I really want to be able to go in fire, and making water and arcana a bit less great helps, but earth and air give a lot more utility. The cleansing fire trait is decent, but once every 40s isn’t good enough, especially considering we have no control over when it activates. Burning Precision needs a buff. Increase the chance on critical hit to at least 75%. Increase the burning duration to at least 1.5s. Or increase the duration to 3s and CD to 4s. Overall, we need more utility from our ele traits.

Air – As a dagger/dagger user, I HAVE to get Zephyr’s Boon, as it allows me to have perma fury. I already have to build with enough armor, health, and sustain so that, as a melee user with the lowest health and armor pool, I don’t die very easily. Thus in pretty much all my builds, 10 air is a must. This could be changed by giving us higher crit rate or/and more access to fury via other trait lines, ideally as adept traits. Fire needs better traits, so how about there, hrm?

Earth – Pretty good. I think the new grandmaster trait is quite interesting, though I see very little room in any build to put 30 in earth.

In regards to weapon skills, a lot of abilities in focus need to be looked at, and lightning strike needs to be nerfed (the minor master trait moreso than the weapon skill). Staff still does very poorly in 1v1 situations, though I’m not quite sure how that could be helped all that much, but I feel that it should be addressed.

Overall, I feel that the changes are, a bit unlike the last couple balance patches, going in the right direction. Great job!

First thing’s first, immobilize stacking is terrible. Please do something about it.

I do think that necromancer’s Dhuumfire and warrior’s Healing Signet need to be looked at and nerfed a bit. On the buff side of things, guardians need more mobility. If they can’t run away, at least give them more options to catch up to their enemy.

As a long-time elementalist player, I am a bit upset at the poor quality of choices we’ll now have in our water and arcana adept trait lines. Though I understand and agree with the general direction that these elementalist traits are going.

Water – We need to see better adept water trait options. Soothing Wave is still terrible, and should be dropped in favor of a different effect. Everyone will likely choose Vital Striking(VI) or Soothing Disruption(III) for most scenarios now. We need more options. Better options.

Arcana – Quite interesting. The biggest problem I see here is that staff now have Blasting Staff, scepter now has Vigorous Scepter, but dagger is stuck with the virtually useless Windborne Dagger. Windborne Dagger is crappy, especially in comparison to the scepter and staff traits I just mentioned. Please give daggers a better trait. Or just don’t move Renewing Stamina. At least not until dagger has a better trait option. Also, Evasive Arcana is still powerful enough that it’s hard to NOT pick it up. In all honesty, the 50% healing nerf in sPvP could probably be lowered to 60-70% and then applied to WvW and PvE. This would keep the trait powerful, but it’d make me more willing to not go into 30 arcana.

Fire – Not good enough. I really want to be able to go in fire, and making water and arcana a bit less great helps, but earth and air give a lot more utility. The cleansing fire trait is decent, but once every 40s isn’t good enough, especially considering we have no control over when it activates. Burning Precision needs a buff. Increase the chance on critical hit to at least 75%. Increase the burning duration to at least 1.5s. Or increase the duration to 3s and CD to 4s. Overall, we need more utility from our ele traits.

Air – As a dagger/dagger user, I HAVE to get Zephyr’s Boon, as it allows me to have perma fury. I already have to build with enough armor, health, and sustain so that, as a melee user with the lowest health and armor pool, I don’t die very easily. Thus in pretty much all my builds, 10 air is a must. This could be changed by giving us higher crit rate or/and more access to fury via other trait lines, ideally as adept traits. Fire needs better traits, so how about there, hrm?

Earth – Pretty good. I think the new grandmaster trait is quite interesting, though I see very little room in any build to put 30 in earth.

In regards to weapon skills, a lot of abilities in focus need to be looked at, and lightning strike needs to be nerfed (the minor master trait moreso than the weapon skill). Staff still does very poorly in 1v1 situations, though I’m not quite sure how that could be helped all that much, but I feel that it should be addressed.

I’m looking forward to this patch. I feel like, with all the nerfs and more diversity, we may see some very interesting changes to a lot of professions, and perhaps even the meta.

Elementalist’s 15 point minor water trait, Healing Ripple, has the wrong heal value on the tooltip. It has always healed for roughly 1.3k, and the tooltip now shows less than 1/100th of those values.

It’s the unpleasant sound of rushing water. It doesn’t match burning speed IMO, and I much prefer the previous sound.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted to jump in and say thanks for keeping things constructive!

The idea right now is to see how the current changes impact the meta, and then do another set of balance in an upcoming patch.

The trait facts were a lot of work, but the clarity they give you guys is VERY good for you. So we wanted to see if that would shake up trait builds at all in order to see how you guys adjusted. Once THAT settles, we want to make balance changes based off the meta at that time. We didn’t want to change all the trait facts and also add in a lot of balance changes on top of it.

We still did a lot of balance stuff, but we were careful not to go overboard with this patch. Just like we learned w/ the Warrior a few updates back, sometimes the meta can undergo drastic changes even if we do VERY little to impact the balance.

We’re planning on doing another round of updates to traits for every class (either changing #‘s, shifting tiers around to make more builds viable, or doing trait reworks), and we also have our eye on a few “apex” builds. But, again we don’t want to shave those too much.

Thanks again for the thoughts and feedback!

Chap + the balance tam

Thanks for the response and explanation, Jon. Given the upcoming events, can you confirm my suspicions that we won’t see any further balance changes before the WvW season is over? Cheers!

FYI, after comparing RTL to hasted burning retreat several times, the hasted burning retreat is less range than the RTL; it’s about 1000-1100 range, wherein RTL is 1200.

Frost Bow would be quite viable if they made the auto attack heal around you rather than (or on top of) healing around where the arrow lands. The heal is quite powerful… but healing around the enemy… not as much. I’d consider pulling it out if it healed me.
Make Frost Fan spread less so it does more damage without having to be up so close.
Lower the cast time on Deep Freeze to 1s; if the ice block duration needs to be lowered by .5s to compensate, so be it.
It also needs a bit increased damage across the board.

Gesamtkunstwerk.6590:

Josh Davis.6015:

Skills like Super Speed and traits like One With Air set movement speed to the cap. The difference between out-of-combat swiftness and the movement speed cap is very small and won’t be very noticeable.

You’ll mostly notice the effectiveness of these skills when you’re in-combat, as you will be considerably faster than someone with swiftness. It will also reduce the effectiveness of chilled and crippled while under the effects of Super Speed type movement buffs.

Hope that clears things up!

I have to agree with the other posters. This was false advertising. What good is 100% increased movement speed if it doesn’t apply to straffing, dodge, backpedals, leaps, evasive rolls. That’s what makes up the majority of combat mobility, not forward movement speed. It doesn’t even apply outside of combat. And it last for 1.5 seconds. This is completely useless. You guys have ruined an amazing idea here. Quite honestly, you’ve made a mistake.

This is an excellent point. This new trait may have supplied a bit of interesting utility if it worked with strafing and what-not. But, as it doesn’t, it’s utterly useless.

We sacrifice our 20 abilities for a very limited conjure. That conjure needs to last longer, i.e. more stacks. On top of that, it needs to be worthy enough to replace our 20 abilities. Our abilities give us damage, CC, healing, buffs, mobility, and more. Replacing all of our abilities with 5 abilities that are painfully temporary and are less capable and largely worse than our normal abilities is far from worth it.

I think buffing conjures is an interesting idea, but if they want people to start using them, they’re going to need a lot larger of a buff, as well as a bit of a mechanic rework. It’s likely conjures won’t be usable until they’re OP, IMO. Then they can be brought down a tad from there.

One of the new ground targeting types that should be added in the upcoming October 15th patch will cause the ability to cast when you stop pressing the ability key, rather than right when you press it. This allows you to hold the key to see the reticule, then lift it up to cast it. It’ll largely solve this problem. I am very much so looking forward to this feature.

The problem seems to lie in the over-randomized matches. The most balanced match ups we ever had were before the randomization was implemented. At some point, they further increased the randomization threshold, allowing servers to fight other servers even more out of their league, despite most servers getting creamed by a server 3+ ranks above them.

What they should have done rather than any sort of randomization system is legitimately fix T1 (and similarly the last tier, for that matter), so that the algorithm doesn’t allow their scores to skyrocket so high above the tier below it. That should have been done before anything, and if T1 still never changed, then a little bit of randomization may have been acceptable.

The fact of the matter is that the top 4 servers on NA are in a level much higher than any other NA server. Any server that fights them gets stomped. And it’s quite frustrating.

DevonCarver.5370:

TheAmpca.1753:

Why don’t we get WXP for capping/defending these.

It’s far too easy to flip them just to farm WXP. One thing that is coming soon is an addition of WXP consumables to the player loot bags, which should make a pretty big addition to the amount of WXP you get from being in the area, assuming you are killing players. As to adding it to the general capping of the points, we’ll have to consider that pretty carefully before we make any changes.

Liquid WXP from player loot bags sound amazing. So, if I recall everything correctly, the two main concerns with granting WXP to capping these points is flip-flopping them between servers for lots of WXP, and zergs being more inclined to take them. To solve this issue, I propose two things:

1) World XP granted when capping is split between players that help cap. Say every 5 people that help cap, the WXP granted to all of them is lowered. So if a zerg of 50+ helps take it, the WXP really isn’t worth their time, but if one or two people take it, the WXP is nice to have.

2) Add diminishing returns to the WXP gained by the capping points. Primarily only to the same exact points, so if I cap point A in borderland 1 10 times in 10 minutes, I end up getting virtually no WXP for maybe the last 8 caps or something.

Cheers!

Endurance regeneration caps at 100%.

RvLeshrac.2673:

Already wondering why the hell I enjoyed any of this. What the hell is the deal with the turtles in World 2 being in unreachable locations? Can’t jump on them alive because I get knocked back by the water. Can’t hit them because THEY’RE IN THE kitten ED WATER, OUT OF RANGE.

Slingshot is the answer.

Much of the mechanics of SAB are buggy and laggy due to the limitations of GW2. I just wish that SAB was designed with this more in mind. The rapids are a prime example of this.

While I welcome a challenge, as others have said, the difficulty increase between W1 and W2 is far too hard. This is the difficulty I might expect out of W4, maybe W3. Certainly not W2. It went from happy happy joy joy to death death lag death. The dart traps need to be made much less subtle, both the trap itself and the killing animation. On top of that, taking into consideration that is is the world right after W1, and taking into consideration the massive amount of dart traps, dart traps should really only deal no more than 3 hearts of damage. The melee assassins need to evade and knockdown less often. Certain mechanics need to give you more than a fraction of a second to react – I’ve had times where I literally could not move my hand to the Shift key fast enough to dodge before getting hit by something that just came onto the screen. And you’re talking to someone who can type >140 words per minute.

There are a few jumps that are unnecessarily hard to make, i.e. where you have to start and land at the exact right spot and you need to move in 2-3 directions mid-air correctly. Then there’s the whip, which feels more useless than ever, as it rarely ever hits things. It’s unreliable, as sometimes it hits things and sometimes [most of the time] it doesn’t, even when I am hitting them in the same exact spot over and over. The slingshot is terrible to aim with. Targeting mobs does nothing. The slingshot is supposed to shoot where your character is facing, but often times this is not the case, and it just shoots wildly, with a mind of its own. Also unreliable.

The zones are very much so too long. A game designer claiming that this remark is player’s complaining about too much content is quite scary. That’s a ridiculous and naive claim. The zones are roughly twice as long as they should be. We would have been much better off if the zones were all split in half, and we had twice as many zones. It takes too long to progress through one zone right now. We can’t stop and take a breather. Which we really need to, as the latest mechanics are incredibly frustrating for numerous reasons already mentioned. I’m sure that simply splitting the zones in half would drastically decrease the amount of players that quit SAB W2.

I was almost near the end of Z2, went AFK for no more than five minutes, and got kicked out and put in the lobby. Atrocious. Now I’m even more fed up with it all, but because I love jumping puzzles and platformers so much, I personally am not going to give up. A lot of people in my situation will. This would have been much less of an issue if zones were half as long.

Overall, I think the designers went a bit overboard with the difficulty of W2, not so much in and of itself but in comparison to W1 and people’s expectations. This just isn’t a normal difficulty curve, it’s much steeper, and that’s not a very good thing, especially considering we have two more worlds. That combined with the limitations of the game engine, as shown in many of the buggy and laggy mechanics of both W1 and W2, though more prevalent in W2, makes for a less than stellar experience.

I hope some of these issues are addressed before this SAB closes. There’s still time to give people a great experience.

Cheers!

http://i.imgur.com/X1I7OUS.jpg <— Screenshot of LFG

I have the same issue. Made within minutes after the headstart started and zilcho. /age says 12 months on the character.

It’s buggy, too. I have numerous characters that were created the first half hour of the first day of the headstart, and I have still not gotten my birthday present. :|

Nice video

FYI, sigil of battle and earth don’t stack. All sigils, even on-swap and on-crit sigils, share the same CD. So if the on-swap sigil is on CD, on-crit can’t trigger, and vice versa. For more info, see: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil

Let’s see…

0/20/0/20/30 S/D Valk/Zerk is the average SD ele spec – pretty good damage and good sustain, while 0/30/0/10/30 S/D Zerk/Zerk is your average SD ele burst spec.

DD eles can do quite well with valk/serk amulet, though DD eles in general are not part of the meta right now.

It’s meant as an inventory space cleaner. The idea is that it takes up one inventory space, lasts forever, and can clear out all the junk in your inventory. It’s a great convenience item.

You can make the stats (sort of) work on a condition ele, i.e. to where you would expect a condition build to be able to deal damage and still survive. But even then, our abilities just don’t allow us to get enough condition pressure.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k34;0J0R0-Y0C57N-Z0;9;49-TEE4;328A2;04;0TZ;1s0-jwmAjwmA1Vt

Burning Precision needs a buff to burn duration and Diamond Skin is just not very good for a grandmaster trait. That’d help from a traits perspective, but we still need our actual weapon abilities looked at as to improve our condition pressure.

To be honest, when this happened to me, I thought my graphics card was dieing. I’ve had one incident a while ago where I had a faulty graphics card driver installation and it completely borked the colors and GFX on my entire monitor. I had to go into safe mode and uninstall the graphics driver, then redownload and reinstall to fix it. This “special effect” in GW2 made the game look very similar to what happened when my GFX driver was borked. I was quite worried. Not cool.

Color blind gamer here! I legitimately can not see the red circles during this fight. After trying around a dozen times, the closest I got was I picked up the first stone and died. I only got that far because I was somehow lucky enough to predict where the AoEs were going to land, and get out of the way in time.

I have found that pointing the camera far up, so I can see the black rain over my head, helps, but the red circles don’t reflect the size of the black rain, so I can be out of it and still die. On top of this, I imagine that it would be increasingly difficult to keep the camera pointed upwards once the battle starts getting more hectic.

All of the other gauntlet fights were quite easy – I finished them all in about 1-3 attempts each. This one isn’t just a lot more difficult, but it’s apparently legitimately impossible for me, since I can not see the massive AoE that one shots me :/. For that, I am quite… frustrated… at the design of this content.

This is very impressive, great job! I look forward to seeing more updates.

I posted this in another thread, but this thread seems more appropriate:

In my opinion, the map needs to be rebalanced quite a bit.

1) The cannon needs to be nerfed in some manner. Either lower the damage, the radius, increase the cooldown/cast time, or/and make it dodgeable.

2) The asura gate needs to have a 1-3s cast time where, if you get hit while casting, it stops. This would make it umpteen times harder to use it to run away when you’re close to death.

3) Something needs to be done about how easy it is to knock people off. A little bit more safety gates could go a long way. This would also make the map more newbie friendly.

4) This one I don’t mind that much, but maybe slightly less glass panels in some areas. This would also make the map more newbie friendly.

5) Perhaps some sort of anti-bunker condition (e.g. immune to stability) should be put on the user of the cannon and left on them for a brief period after they get off the cannon.

In my opinion, the map needs to be rebalanced quite a bit.

1) The cannon needs to be nerfed in some manner. Either lower the damage, the radius, increase the cooldown/cast time, or/and make it dodgeable.

2) The asura gate needs to have a 1-3s cast time where, if you get hit while casting, it stops. This would make it umpteen times harder to use it to run away when you’re close to death.

3) Something needs to be done about how easy it is to knock people off. A little bit more safety gates could go a long way. This would also make the map more newbie friendly.

4) This one I don’t mind that much, but maybe slightly less glass panels in some areas. This would also make the map more newbie friendly.

5) Perhaps some sort of anti-bunker condition (e.g. immune to stability) should be put on the user of the cannon and left on them for a brief period after they get off the cannon.

BlackBeard.2873:

I think the best offensive setup is actually 0/15/10/15/30. This gives you the added 10% dps, keeps your lightning proc on swap, and maintains the water heal on swap.

I would pick either Bolt to the Heart for dps (getting swiftness by using glyph of elmental power, or using signet of air) or zephyr’s boon for some more swiftness/fury.

That being said, arcane abatement is so nice to have while roaming in wvw.

This is actually one of the more interesting trait setups I’ve heard of. I may just play around with it a bit. Thanks.

Nice work. I use any and every type of stat to achieve the right stat balance that I’m looking for.

I’ve done a lot of build optimization, minmaxing, and research on effective health and how certain important yet difficult-to-measure variables, i.e. condition damage received and healing received, hurt/help you over time. My notes, critiqued by many peoples, can be found here.
I actually created a time2death calculator using HTML+JavaScript, though I haven’t had any time to work on it or test it, so it’s still in an alpha state.

While the effective health algorithm is technically health * armor, condition damage and healing can not be ignored, as they both directly interact with health or/and armor in such a way that is not easily calculated as the variable can fluctuate, potentially quite wildly, depending on who you’re fighting, how you’re playing, and how the overall battle goes.
Thus effective health isn’t as important as just building with your play style in mind. How well can you remove conditions? How often and how much do you heal? Etc etc.

In regards to effective power, I usually use the following formula (Edit: formula not algorithm, thanks Zelyhn):

Average dmg: (power * (1 – critrate)) + (power * critrate * (1.5 + critdmg))

When it comes to effective power, while, in comparison to effective health, it is easier to come to a more certain mathematical conclusion as to what’s best, you still have to judge by your play style.
Bursty builds may care about on-crit dmg more while bunker/hybrid builds may care about overall dmg more.

In the end, once you get used to build optimization/minmaxing, you’ll get a feel for what you’re looking for. It’s definitely not as straight forward to optimize for this game as it is in a game like WoW.

As a note these are unofficial patch notes, just simply a preview!

These are the opposite of confirmed…

What’s interesting about DT is you can cancel the cast (via stow weapon) about 80-90% of the way through cast (when the DT appears in the sky) and I’ve found that the dragon’s tooth still gets casted and drops – despite not casting it 100% of the way. Quite intriguing.

Aw, just missed the live stream! I would have loved to participate in chat. Just a suggestion: If you guys could link the builds you’re posting in chat in the video description of the recording, that would be excellent. Thanks a lot, and keep up the awesome job guys!

Some comments:

- Staff is really, really powerful in WvW – in a group. Much of the ground AoEs don’t have a player limit, so you can potentially catch the majority of a zerg in a single CC. It’s also interesting to note that stability will protect a person from static field but not from the chill field (water #4).
For Meteor Shower, each meteor can hit a maximum of 5 people, so you can potentially do a lot of damage to an entire zerg, especially if you use a few meteor showers at the same time in the same spot.
The water field #5 is also extremely important. A well-blasted water field can make or break a zerg-busting group.
Staff is great for tower offense because you’re able to AoE (damage or CC) people and siege on the walls. It’s great for tower defense because you’re able to mass-CC people rushing in.

- In regards to Fiery Great Sword, I’ve examined videos, frame-by-frame, of the #4 ability (Fiery Rush) against a tower gate. It appears to have roughly 60 ticks. If you have max might stacks, one single FGS #4 ability should do about half the damage of a single fire ram. Coming from a single ability, that’s really, really strong.

- I’m expecting some minor buffs to other utilities to make them more useful as to encourage using them instead of cantrips. Maybe more nerfs to cantrips, though that would be unfortunate.

- I’d love to see some new/buffed traits that allow us to make condition builds more viable. For example, perhaps increasing the duration of the burn applied by Burning Precision (Fire V).

- The Grounded trait definitely needs to work on Knockout.

- It’s odd how well the signet-auromancer build synergizes so well with traits and what-not, yet it’s just such a poor build. I’d love to see signets made quite a bit more viable, though I still think that this type of build would have a lower skill cap than one with more active utilities, for obvious reasons.

- Focus… needs to be made more viable…

Overall, I really enjoyed Dragon Ball. For the first couple games. It’s a decent Quake-like minigame, but all of the problems start to get very frustrating, very quickly.

Let’s see, what to start with…

- Lag. Instanced minigames in GW2 tend to lag more than the rest of the game, and this is even more problematic in Dragon Ball. Any lag, even minor, really throws off the entire game when interacting with the lagging character. I’ve seen projectiles do some really odd, frustrating things when I’m attacking or being attacked by someone who is lagging.
Not only should lag in minigames be reduced in general, but people with similar pings should be prioritized together in the same match, as to lessen the “why is X lagging so much” frustration.

- Grouping is very, very powerful. If your PUG doesn’t do this as well as the enemy PUG, you will often end up losing solely because of it. Yet ally dots are nowhere to be seen on the minimap. Allies’ dots and nearby (similar-elevation) enemy dots should be visible on the minimap. This would help a lot of PUGs.

- Health drops too fast. We need more max health. Or we need to regen health when we kill enemies.

- Attacking the same person in this type of game is extremely vital, but a PUG often doesn’t understand this, even when someone is marking targets. Perhaps making it more obvious that someone is low health, such as putting an aura around them, would help this problem.

- In the same vein as the above, with no noticeable effect once I get hit by damage, and no enemy dots on my minimap, and no footstep-esque sound effect a-la FPSs, it is much harder to notice that you’re getting hurt or about to get hurt than it should be.

- The damage buff is blatantly overpowered. It should have only been 2x damage, not 4×.

- Matches with only 2-3 people on each team last too long. The points per kill should be adjusted based on your team’s size compared to the enemy’s team size. This would also help outnumbered teams.

- Something needs to be done about outnumbered teams. Maybe nothing directly can be done (other than the above idea), but ideally someone would be locked out of Dragon Ball for at least 10-20 minutes if they leave mid-match.

- Dodging into the jump pads for a higher jump is not a good mechanic. I dodge into the pad as to escape damage and I get wildly shot up into air and take more damage, not less, because I’m exposed for a longer period of time. Not cool.

- Too repetitive. Do something to better spice up / randomize the game.

I have just updated the github and npm of GW2NodeLib to add three new APIs:
guildDetails: /guildDetails.json
build: /build.json
colors: /colors.json

I doubt they have. In fact, lately, I have been getting better ecto salvage rates, if anything.

It’s all RNG. Sometimes it may seem like you get 2 ectos 100% of the time, sometimes it may seem like you get just 1 ecto, and only 25% of the time. The more you salvage, the closer to the genuine salvage rates your average is.

Thanks for the feedback, all; I’m glad you found this useful.

Because the GW2 API is reliant on itself for certain pieces of information, some of you may find the function waterfall inside of the node module async quite useful. It runs an array of functions one after another, waiting for a callback to be made in each function before continuing to the next. Each function is passed the results of the last. See: https://github.com/caolan/async#waterfall

Here is an example usage of this function I whipped up. The wvw match data is passed to the world name data and that information is combined to get a list of all wvw match-ups by name rather than by world ID.

The code: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/2448260

The devs said in one of the GW2Guru state of the game videos earlier in the year that dueling is on their priority list, but it was below custom arenas and spectating. Who knows when they’re working on it, or if they’re already working on it now.

Also note that it’s not all that unlikely that dueling will only be for sPvP, and not WvW/PvE. (This is just speculation.)

In the mean time, there are numerous custom arenas in sPvP that are specifically for dueling, and when people follow the rules and only duel (count down or /bow to eachother to start), it’s a fun place to hang out and duel peoples.

Hi all. I have put together a node.js module that enables easy access to the JSON API.
You can install it with npm: npm install gw2nodelib
Or view the source: https://github.com/TimeBomb/GW2NodeLib

I’ve added some decent documentation to the readme (see above github link), and the source code is also decently commented.

The library allows you to retrieve the JSON of each of the API pages, and caches it either for the session or in a file, as you can see by the readme.
When I have more time (and assuming there is enough interest), I plan to add more specific methods to the lib, so you can more easily get the data you want from the API.

If you have any questions/feedback/etc, feel free to either post here, PM me, or, if applicable, create an issue on GitHub. Thanks all, and happy programming!

GW2NodeLib

• Language: Javascript (node.js)
• Admin: TimeBomb.3427
• URL: https://github.com/TimeBomb/GW2NodeLib

abasedfear.6051:

Not a necessary addition…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Copyrights

This page is linked at the bottom of every wiki page and states that any content obtained from Guild Wars 2, its web sites, etc. can potentially be found on the wiki, going on to say that the rights, title, and interest in and to this content remains with ArenaNet or NCsoft, as applicable, and not pursuant to the wiki’s GFDL. As such, the license was more than covered.

While the copyright does indeed cover the contents of the wiki article, it is important to note that the API terms, as described in the stickied API Documentation thread in this forum section, are more detailed and thus cover more than what the wiki copyright covers. For example, the API license has details about how you may and may not use the API. “you may use the API’s to make commercial products so long as they are otherwise compliant and do not compete with ArenaNet”

What (I infer) this sentence means is that you can, for example, create a mobile application that uses the GW2 API and charge money for it, thus making a profit, assuming you are compliant with all mentioned licenses, terms, agreements, etc as described by the API terms.

DarkSpirit.7046:

TimeBomb.3427:

Listen to this person. While I have no issue with people testing JS client side scripts, I discourage anyone from releasing anything wherein the client-side directly accesses GW2’s API. If it’s not cached and accessed every single time a user opens the page, you’re sending in far more requests than necessary. This is something where, if too many people don’t optimize their applications, we may start seeing API rate limitations.

The problem with caching is that you have to decide how often to refresh your data. For certain data like the items data from this api, it makes sense to cache because they hardly change. For others like the TP data, they change often and most users would rather not make huge investment decisions based on outdated data.

It is also possible to cache your data through a standalone windows app without a database. My TP app minimizes to a system tray icon and runs in the background, refreshing its data at certain time interval.

As long as the script/app writer keeps in mind to minimize network bandwidth, it should generally be good enough. That said, I think most of the bandwidth problems would come from non-technical users who use Excel to auto refresh their spreadsheet data too often without being aware of bandwidth issues.

You make good points, but in general, unless you never expect to have a sizable user base, it is best to make a single call to the API and cache that, even if you call and re-cache it every minute, rather than making a unique call for each user.

Ruhrpottpatriot.7293:

The api returns a json object which can be read and used by JavaScript.

Samples have been provided in some of the above posts.

@Ice of Dragons: Java script has nothing to do with Java except that one part of the name. It is is totally different Programming language.
Furthermore the back-end part of the API is probably written in one of ASP.NETs programming languages as the backend server is an IIS with version 7.5

Just for clarification: According to the headers, the forums are coded in Ruby, using the Ruby on Rails framework. Not to mention there have occasionally been Rails errors popping up back in the day, and the X-Powered-By header shows it uses Phusion Passenger (and there’s a reference to mod_rails). That being said, the server does appear to be Microsoft’s IIS 7.5, which is an odd choice for RoR (Truth be told, I didn’t even know IIS+Passenger was possible; the preferred choice is Nginx/Apache+Passenger).

Back on topic: While I am busy, creating a node.js library for GW2’s API is on my to-do list.

Also…

As they said javascript is enough to use the API but keep in mind that if you app has more than one user, you wont be able to cache the api result.
To do some caching you’ll need so server side code (ie: php)

Listen to this person. While I have no issue with people testing JS client side scripts, I discourage anyone from releasing anything wherein the client-side directly accesses GW2’s API. If it’s not cached and accessed every single time a user opens the page, you’re sending in far more requests than necessary. This is something where, if too many people don’t optimize their applications, we may start seeing API rate limitations.

I posted an example implementation here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Realtime-Dragon-Event-Status-Script/first

anzenketh.3759:

I don’t think with the information out there now compromises tactics too much. Perhaps a delay would be in order on the query of the data. Reason being It only displays what we have captured after we have captured it. Any active WvW player can get the same amount of data. Planners are contently looking at the maps. Reporting what is/is not taken so we already have this information.

On the other hand what is captured and what is not is extremely useful for Map completer and frees up slots in WvW for people just watching the map waiting for areas to be taken small vary true but there are some.

I do not think they should release any more data in WvW however. For exactly the reasons you stated. This includes what is/is not under attack.

The problem isn’t so much what could be discovered in real-time, but what could be gathered by logging and analyzing sizable chunks of data over a certain time span.

Haven’t tested this code, but something like this should work for PHP (curl is required):

// create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init();

// set URL and other appropriate options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, “https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/events.json?world_id=1001”);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); // so curl_exec returns data

// grab URL and pass it to the browser; store returned data
$curlRes = curl_exec($ch);

// close cURL resource, and free up system resources
curl_close($ch);

// Decode returned JSON so it can be handled as a multi-dimensional associative array
$data = json_decode($curlRes, true);

I sent this by PM to Cliff and got a great response, though he recommended that I post this publicly, of which I think would also be a good idea.

My message to him:

Hi Cliff. Thanks a lot for all the work you have done.

I noticed that you expressed concern in regards to the WvW API affecting balance of WvW.

While the WvW API doesn’t give us access to information we don’t already know, it does give us easier always-accurate access to that information.

I’ve started a discussion thread on my server’s forum, but appears to be very possible to log all of the currently available data on a per-minute interval. That data would be logged to an ideally well-designed relational database, and then that data could be conveyed as useful statistics and information via charts and what-not.

If all goes smoothly, this information could be analyzed by any intelligent person to figure out not just coverage weaknesses and strengths of every single server (identifying PPT of any server at any time), but also insight into the server’s strategy (or lack thereof) by looking at which objectives are taken in what order at what time. This may be just the peak of the iceberg.

You seemed to express an unsure attitude towards releasing more specific information about WvW, specifically the actual real-time events. Releasing this information would make recording and analyzing statistics not just helpful, but dangerously effective.

All in all, I was surprised to see how much details you provide us in the current WvW API. Furthermore, I would argue that the WvW API is already too potentially game-changing in its current form. Giving us much of anything more than just the current score is dangerous, as anyone, such as myself, with the know-how to log and analyze this data could potentially change the game.

That’s my two cents. Once again, I appreciate all the work you’ve done, and look forward to seeing more. I’d love to hear your feedback on what I’ve just gone over. Thanks again, for everything.

Cliff’s response:

Hi,

First off, I’d recommend posting these types of things in the public forum than by private message. If I answer there, I answer the question for anyone who might have it.

When I said that we are being careful with the information we release for WvW, that’s what I meant. That wasn’t a deflection saying we wouldn’t release the stuff you’re suggesting – in fact I think that it would be really cool to release that information.

You’re right that even the information we’re exposing now via the API could cause WvW balance to change. We’re watching to see whether the overall impact on the game is positive or negative. If it’s positive, then we’d definitely consider exposing more information via the APIs.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I just finished coding and styling this. It uses the new API and contains all the events from guildwarstemple.com.

URL: http://jsbin.com/ihuvam/1
JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/8JRCK/

The primary potential issue could be that I’m using incorrect event IDs, or there are certain pre-events that the main event doesn’t change its state for.

Enjoy, and report any bugs/feedback/etc in this thread. Thanks.

Cliff Spradlin.3512:

We’ve added support for CORS to solve this problem. Please refer to the API Changes thread for more information. We don’t plan to add support for JSONP at this time — we consider it obsolete now that CORS exists.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for the quick and effective fix, it’s highly appreciated!

An Application Program Interface allows an application to interface with another application.

Or, in layman’s terms, it lets one application use some of another application’s features.