Guild Wars 2

I do wonder why PvE content is gated behind PvP upgrades, along with the rest of the thread. To me, it would surely make more sense for these updates to fall into, if they had to be level 5 of anything, Politics or Architecture, maybe Economy for the missions which will reward with Gold gain etc.

If we were talking WvW events or bonuses, perhaps, yes (seeing as SPvP is a level playing field, although new guild armours there would be nice), but at the moment this is effectively penalising those players who have not delved into the PvP side of the game.

I am a member of a large guild (which could easily afford the upgrades) and a couple of smaller ones with fewer than ten members, many friends who don’t get online to play all that often due to university etc. Gating the missions to this extent means that I will be unable to complete guild missions with my closest friends, and will encourage players to ignore smaller guilds in favour of larger ones, furthering the problem for small guilds as time goes by.

I’m now facing the choice of which guild do I spend time/influence on – the one with my friends, or the one with a population to afford to run guild missions, even though I may be left out as I am just one out of more than a hundred, playing off-peak.

I will reserve final judgement until after I see how the implementation works post update, but I am very sceptical at the moment.

I agree that this would be something nice to see at some point. I don’t think it’s a huge issue, and it would mean extra work that isn’t _strictly necessary, but it would be nice for the races to have turrets that more accurately reflected their race, as opposed to them all looking identical.

I certainly wouldn’t say it was a priority though.

The Save the Merchants event is still frozen on Tarnished Coast at least. It was consistently frozen of Piken Square too, and it’s been like that since shortly after launch as far as I can tell.

I know it’s not as simple as writing a bug report to fix these events – these must be the really sticky ones – but it would be nice to get some response from the Devs at some point about the remaining bugged events and to know they’re still being worked on. As it is, it’s starting to feel as though they have slipped under the radar.

I think more emotes would be cool. I think that joint emotes such as lip kisses would be pretty much impossible, but an air kiss would be workable.

Not to mention some of the other emotes that are “missing” from GW2 (in that they don’t trigger an “unknown command” response but there is no emote attached). Full list of emotes on the GW1 wiki here: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Emote

Shanna.4762:

Valento.9852:

I think the devs are just sad you keep asking for Cantha/Elona/whatever instead of enjoying the already built world. lol

Who says we aren’t??? We also want to see Cantha & Elona in the game, too I highly doubt they are SAD about anything. We’re playing the game and are enthusiastic about it’s future aren’t we?

We’re sad because we don’t have Cantha yet adn there’s a chance we may never. The Developers would probably like to go back but they need to have a strong case that the fans want it so that they can justify the time and resources to overcome the cultural sensitivity barriers.

I would say that everyone making a fuss and demanding to go back is in a roundabout way what the developerswant. We love the world they have created in GW2, but we also love the world they created for us in GW1, and we want to see how they can translate that into a GW2 format.

What happened to the Kunnavung, what happened to the Jade Sea and Echovald Forest? What about siege turtles and the giant city? What about the rest of the continent we never got to see? What would it be like to see the Jade Sea as an ocean again – would there still be lumps of jade underwater, or the sunken remains of Luxon settlements? And what of the Echovald Forest? Have the trees started to take back the settlements of the Kurzicks? We know the people were conquered but what of the places, and did the people fight back? Is there a dragon that we don’t know about, a Jade one perhaps, whose magic was tapped into to cause the Jade Wind in the first place?

There are so many possibilities for Cantha, which is, after all, where humanity on Tyria supposedly originated. I love the world ANet has created in GW2 and I don’t think anyone here is making the argument “It sucks, give us MOAR.” We’re simply saying that because we love ANet’s world so much, we want to see the other places they have already put a lot of time and love into creating for GW1.

I haven’t seen this topic come up in a while, and I was wondering if it’s something that is in ANet’s radar or something that has been pushed to the back or forgotten about.

For those that didn’t play in the BWE, there used to be a hi-res screenshot option which took screens that looked amazing – but there was occasionally a bug which made the images rather boxy, or put lines through them, especially underwater.

Still, the quality of the pictures was amazing, and for my experiences, most of the time they were far, far superior to anything I have been able to replicate via other means (I take all my screenshots now through the Steam client, but other people have changed the filenames and such.) The hi-res screens also had the advantage of automatically hiding the UI, meaning you could take some really good action shots without having to stop and hide it manually.

For a comparison, click and see the difference in the two screenshots of my character from Beta. I would love to be able to take screens like the first again.

I would love more trousers for light armour female sets, and yes, trousers without that skirt flap for heavy armour.

But a greater variety of true skirts would be nice too. If I can’t have trousers can I at least have more proper skirts that don’t have an enormous bustle at the back? So many seem to, or are open at the front, and it really seems to pin you into one of only a few types of style. The details on all the armour sets are different, but from only a little way off there are about four or five skirts that blend into one. It seems that the only distinctive light armour designs are the really skimpy/“sexy” ones, and that’s a real shame.

Do Want.

This would also fix that currently rather amusing lecture room in the Priory, with all those NPCs sitting at desks, every single one clipping in what looks an incredibly painful and medically serious way…

I just wanted to add my voice to the fire, really. I loved Factions, and Cantha, and really want to go back!

I understand the cultural sensitivity needed, especially after a post up-thread pointing out some of the implications, but that could be said of a lot of things in a lot of games. And that it has been a problem in the past does not mean that it is an insurmountable issue! So much dedication has gone into making GW2, and into meticulously designing the elements of it, from art, to sound, to mechanics.

The fanbase wants to go back to Cantha, to see what happened, and how things are now. As Heinel pointed out, the lack of contact with the continent and the 100 year gap gives a lot of license to change things and remove the potential to offend while still letting players return and explore some amazing locations. If the problems before were in part the mixing of different Asian cultural identities but still leaving problematic and recognisable parallels, surely the passing of time gives an opportunity to straighten those out? Cantha is a large place, with plenty of room for multiple cultural identities to coexist. Much has changed in Tyria over the intervening centuries, it would be perfectly natural to suppose that Cantha has evolved considerably as well.

I’m one of those players who is desperate to go back. I fell in love with the landscapes and the art style. While I’m a westerner myself, so don’t really know where things are “wrong”, I don’t see how it would be impossible to present a version of Cantha which is acceptable to everyone. So much attention to detail has been put into other areas of the game, it has to be feasible given enough time. And while I would love to be able to visit sooner rather than later, if it’s a choice between never going back and waiting a little longer, I can wait.

Just let us go back eventually, please! My GW1 main was a Ritualist and my character in GW2 is her descendant and namesake, and she’d love to go “home” someday! (Also, fitting a refurbished Ritualist into GW2 would be lovely as well. Just saying…)

I love the elementalist, though it is frustrating to play at times in comparison to, say, a Guardian or a Thief (my other two “mains”). While I’ll happily admit to running a highly non-optimal build (5-20-5-10-30), as fun as it is to dice continually with death there are times when you want to reach for a burst of power and it’s not there, because mostly utility skills need to be those “quick, flee!” type skills.

The chaotic nature of the Ele is brilliant. I even love the mad-crazy dicing with death, those fights where you walk away and think “Sweet fluffy kittens, how did I survive?”

Having said that, it’s also a very unforgiving profession which demands a lot of attention, and will reward you less for it than a lot of others, in terms of loot and xp for effort put in.

Yeah, I’ve had this issue. I have Windows 7 (eek, I think it’s 64 bit) on a PC and a laptop and I’ve had the issue on both.

I tend to launch GW2 from steam as a shortcut (though I didn’t buy it through Steam)
but I have had the problem after launching from the desktop as well. I’ve noticed it more though as Steam won’t close with GW2 running.

THe only problem I can see with that is when larger guilds come together for group events and suddenly you have hundreds of little gold dots to track…

Saying that, as a member of a few, smaller guilds, it would be a great feature to have, seeing as we’re usually too big for one party, but not always big enough for two.

I really like this solution. I’m not a programmer, so I guess I can’t say how much work would be involved (and maybe there would be a lot) but I know I would certainly take that as my monthly patch over a one-time event if it meant being able to play with all of my friends.

It still prevents WvW exploitation by requiring a fee to change WvW servers, but allows the international community to play as intended, and as implied by the build up to the game’s release.

I like this idea a lot. At the moment my friends are attempting to transfer, and the windows in which they can are very brief and unpredictable. It’s especially concerning as we are crossing region, so we want to be able to play together after the cut-off of the 28th, at which point guesting won’t be a viable option either.

But at the moment, players have been able to essentially “guest” with players from different data centres while on overflow servers, or in dungeons. So functionally, people playing together is clearly possible.

My suggestion would be for the “International server” to not be so much a real server as a permanent overflow area which people can meet up in without being limited to high traffic areas and times, or instances.

Seeing as the NA and EU are going to remain separated when guesting is implemented, as a halfway measure would it be possible to create an “international” server which people from any region can transfer to for guesting purposes, without a WvW matchup?

The idea would be that it is for people on either datacentre to mutually guest to, for the purposes of PvE. As such, it wouldn’t necessarily have a resident population, much like an overflow server works now, but would be available at all times for people in different Data Centres to be able to PvE together outside of an instance.

I don’t see how it would be functionally any harder to implement than Overflow servers, seeing as players from NA and EU can play together on those. All it would do is offer a permanent flag for people to head to, specifically for PvE grouping. And seeing as it would only be for cross data-centre guesting, ping and other matters shouldn’t be quite so bad, if everyone else is guesting the “regular” way.

Something like this would be utterly invaluable to the RP community though, as well as international guilds.

I know a lot of people in the RP community are and will be greatly saddened by this news. Many people were eagerly anticipating guesting to play with friends on either side of the Atlantic, assuming that this would be included since GW1 allowed it.

The community already struggles somewhat with a lack of official recognition, and it’s a shame that we are still going to be fractured by this when outside the game it is relatively close knit, with players switching between servers at the moment on free transfers.

I was planning on making a thread about this myself. I loved the hi-res option, and I do still miss it. At the moment I’m using workarounds to slightly improve the resolution of the screens I take, but it’s just not the same.

I also miss the automatic UI removal that it did. It allowed for action shots to be a lot more simple to take than messing around toggling it on and off manually.

Is this something that will return at some stage? I don’t have a 3D monitor, and can’t because 3D can make me have seizures so the stereoscopic screens option which seemed to replace it might be a nice option but is worthless to me. I’d love for the hi-res option to make a return at some point, even if it’s a little down the priority list at the moment.

Well, you can use the fountains to be invisible for 5 minutes. I’ve seen enemies run straight past me when I was in that mode, and it lasts long enough to get you through it. No, it doesn’t stop AoE griefing, but it would help you slip by some of the mokittengeted attacks.

(ninja’d – that’s what I get for not hitting refresh before I type my reply I guess)

The targets are not new but some of the other additions seem to be. I’m not surprised you didn’t notice them though. They’re kinda out of the way

I did it first on a human Ele with the trait boost.

Then on human Guardian and sylvari Thief without boosts. It’s much easier after the first time, because the stress is gone

Something that is worth bearing in mind: this is not all that Halloween has to offer.

ANet run their events in stages, typically with map and loo changes coming a few days before the main part.

The book you recieve at the end of the “quest” chain mentions a second volume, the Halloween event has been advertised as being in four parts. Colin has said things get really exciting on the 28th at midday PDT. The stats on it are bad because it’s probably not really meant to be equipped, just saved as a component for later I expect.

This isn’t all that ANet have planned.

Personally I would like more “cool” armour sets which are deliberately not “sexy”.

So far there are a few, but where are the trousers for caster females? One pair of harem-style trousers with cut-outs?

I’m all for more armour, of a mixture of styles, but at the moment I still would like to see greater parity between male and female armour sets.

You have to cross the line for it to cause daze. I have noticed that occasionally foes seem to cross it without being dazed, but in battle it’s hard to see if I’ve just laid it down super close but not on top of them, or if they’ve crossed in the short period after I cast but before it activates.

The thing I would say about the elementalist at the moment is that they are crazy fun, but at higher levels (Orr and in PvP) the skill floor is very high, let alone the ceiling.

This isn’t solely the profession sucking. Quite probably we do need a bit of a buff somewhere, but it’s hard to see where at the moment as we’re still waiting on a list of bug-fixes as long as your arm. Traits don’t function properly, skills don’t last as long/do as much damage as they should, CC skills fire off incorrectly, etc.

I would say that for now, it is exceedinly challenging to play an Elementalist in a competetive format, and other, less skilled players on Warriors and Thieves in sPvP will most likely do better than you, yes. But, when the devs get round to the “look” at Elementalist they have promised, if we all sit and put on our puppy dog eyes hopefully Elementalist will be a bit more of a rewarding profession to play.

At the moment, a handful of players are excelling at PvP. In PvE I see a lot of Elementalists in low-level areas, but signnificantly fewer in areas like Orr. This would support my theory that the difficulty curve kicks in with a vengeance in the mid to upper levels when the Risen appear and can out-kite players. For now, playing past that will be fun, but expect other professions to out-perform you with noticeably less effort.

Take a look at the bug list though. Those are all things which should not be happening, so those are all things that hopefully will stop happening at some point, and will dramatically improve the playability at higher levels.

I’ve actually taken to logging into GW2 via steam so that I can use the Steam interface to take screenshots. They’re not fabulous, but they are higher resolution than the ingame screens.

Pretty please ANet, give us our hi-res screenshot option back!

@Isilia: I think Sharpe was simply making the observation that more than half the forum is full of threads saying “Elementalist is underpowered” “Elementalist has a problem” etc, so, thinking the problem is with the player entirely rather than the profession is a mistake.

Because, frankly, compared to the other professions, it’s pretty easily apparent that Elementalist has problems. I believe it was a more rhetorical: “How did you miss this fact when clicking on the forum to make your thread” kinda post.

I’m on Piken Square, and there’s generally a good community. It is the unofficial Roleplaying Server as well, so you will also encounter IC conversations in the world at times, particularly in Divinity’s Reach. (Though of course not everyone is a RPer, and no one is going to mind if you don’t want to join in!)

In terms of population, things have settled down a lot now, and I tend to only see overflows in major cities at peak times such as Saturday nights. I also seldom have to queue for WvW, and when I do, it isn’t so long a wait.

Scaling isn’t there for you to be able to gain XP in lower areas (though it’s an awesome feature).

It’s there to stop high-level characters spoiling the area for other people by one-shotting their way through all the mobs and events. Whether you intend to spoil things or not, that would be the end result of optional scaling.

I don’t see this ever being a feature that is implemented I’m afraid.

I really don’t like this idea. Screen flickers like that give me motion sickness and would make the game all but unplayable for me.

If it ever was added, it would need to be on a toggle with the default setting as “off”.

All these things were in GW1, but didn’t make it into GW2 for a variety of reasons. Corpse exploitation is a lot harder in a persistant environment where you could have many people whose skills all rely on exploiting that same corpse.

As for armour and weapons, there are several armour and weapon skins furhter on in the game which suit this aesthetic.

In terms of Lore, Necromancers are not by default “evil”. It’s a valid type of magic that just exists in the world. In GW1, one of the types of skills that Necros had involved sacrificing their own health to access powerful healing skills which could benefit allies as well as themselves. The magic itself is considered a natural, neutral thing.

Does Necromancy have a tendency to attract more than an average number of creepy, evil types? Well, yes. Yes it does. And it also creeps people out in its normal usage because of the whole “raising the dead” thing. But it is acknowledged by most people as an acceptable branch of magic to be schooled in, even if it’s kinda weird, and in GW1 there were regulations and Necromancers kept an eye on each other to keep themselves in line. One GW1 quest involves hunting down a rogue Necromancer and putting an end to it. The quest is given by another Necromancer.

In short, Necromancers have a higher than usual tendency to attract or be perceived as creepy/evil types. But the school of magic is not in and of itself evil. I actually think that it’s a nice change – it’s quite dull for it to always be the same “evil” thing that limits how you want to perceive your character.

The thing about corpse scouting is that it’s not just the other side who can do it.

Thus, it is not an unfair advantage IMO.

The bugs associated with it were targeting ones for skills. As you looked around, many skills fired off in the wrong direction, causing them to miss. There were/are also issues with targets switching mid-fight meaning you end up attacking the wrong mob.

Until they fix those other bugs, they’ve removed the smoothing so that these issues are “fixed”. I’ll take a slightly jerkier camera over impaired combat effectiveness for now, certainly.

I do agree that a toggle would be nice when these issues are fixed, but for now I definitely feel they made the right move.

If you press F11 you have the option to bind a key for this in the control panel. It doesn’t have a default key though.

I miss the 1st Person View. It was much easier to take good screenshots of the environment when you had that.

I actually prefer a lot of the male armour skins to the female ones. Personal taste I guess

Vapour form doesn’t always reset your downed bar to halfway. I don’t know what’s the bug – it doing that or it not doing that, but sometimes mine resets and sometimes it doesn’t.

I find that Whirlpool comes and goes. Sometimes the animation cuts out halfway through its duration, sometimes it’s never there, sometimes it’s fine.

I haven’t especially noticed a correlation with other skills being activated either, and since reading about that, I have tried using it without those skills, and it seems buggy then too. I haven’t done as much underwater stuff today though, so can’t say with total accuracy.

Having a filter for armour types would be good too. It’s nice being able to filter out head armour, but then I’m still left with two thirds of them being no good.

I like the Trading Post, but yeah. It still needs some refining.

Guys, they were working on the Halloween event before launch. (From a twitter comment about the Mad King’s VAing.) It’s already in the pipeline, along with future content to stop people getting bored with the game and leaving.

Because, really, content needs to keep coming in an MMO, just as the bug team need to keep patching out bugs. There should be another patch tonight/tomorrow morning in the EU, and if it’s anything like the last one, a LOT of bugs will go with it.

Just be patient. It’s much better for game stability that they pick a patching timetable and stick to it, as opposed to constantly patching here, patching there, and making the game unstable all the time. We had daily patches to start with, now we’ve moved onto weekly ones. At least wait until the next patch (that they’ve been working on all week) is out before you start panicking.

I actually really like this idea. I play elementalist and I would definitely say my playstyle is very different underwater by necessity.

I don’t know how workable it would be, but I’d certainly not complain if they implemented it.

I can totally get behind this. As long as it is kept for out of combat switches, it should be okay – we have a little arrow to switch skills above their slots, why not one for weapons too?

Having things such as interactive chairs and additional animated emotes would be lovely.

So far the world is beautiful, but it feels as though we can’t grab hold of it.

I don’t know that we necessarily need RP servers as such, though it would be nice to get some recognition from the developers that RPers are here and welcome in the game. In a game which encourages interaction and immersion, it seems a shame that there hasn’t been one mention of the idea of Roleplaying from the developers.

Echo.7634:

1. do NOT facetank. DODGE!
2. Dont use fire.
3. Dont use a staff.
4. Swap elements. Water has some healing, its not much but it may save your life.
5. Take (and USE) DEFENSIVE skills.
6. OMG Toughness !
7. OMG Vitality!
8. Learn mobs agro range. IF you get downed #3 when it comes up may let you move far enough that you can move out of the agro range. You can then 4 yourself back up.

So you want to dps…thats great. Yeah, power for more dps is great. Yeah precesion for more critical damage is great. Dead DPS do 0 dps.

FAR FAR FAR too many run around with their staff casting fireballs at everything. They don’t move, they don’t dodge, take only DPS skills and then wonder why they die so much. Just run around for a few minutes and you will pick them out.

While that’s true to an extent, on your staff observation I really think that no profession should come with the caveat “Yeah, you can use this weapon but it’s no good.” Same goes for “Don’t use X” “Only spec Y”. If the other options aren’t working at all, they are not working. That doesn’t mean “don’t use them nub”, it means “balance is needed here”.

They shouldn’t go too far and OP the Ele. But they should make more than one or two builds workable outside of niche situations. If the Ele is about versatility, there should be a versatility in the builds that work. It’s playable now, but it’s still a little underpowered to my mind in that area.

Westley.4716:

Elric of Grans.7684:

Nick Danger.9821:

Elric of Grans.7684:

…I am not sure that many players are calling for the Elementalist to be dumbed down…

I see a distressing number of posters saying the ele is either broken (no amount of effort/skill lets an ele match an ‘easy’ class) or that it takes significantly more effort to achieve the same effect as some other classes.

I see these folks then call for ‘fixes’ for the ele (ie make eles easier). I can’t remember seeing any of these folks calling for ‘fixes’ for the ‘easier’ classes (ie make the ‘easier’ classes ‘harder’) as their preferred method for achieving balance. Have I missed these, and if so, do they outnumber the ‘make eles easier’ posters?

When challenged, folks can respond in several ways, including expending the effort to buckle down and improve their game, or expending the same effort to complain to have the game made easier. Bringing the ‘easier’ classes up to eles level is the former, advocating bringing the ele down is the latter.

Sorry, I honestly do not understand your post. No, I have not seen anyone calling for the other classes to be nerfed, but that has absolutely nothing to do with my statement that I do not believe the majority of Elementalist players want the class dumbed down. Changed? Yes, but change is not dumbed down. Fixing bugs does not dumb the class down. Improving synergy does not dumb the class down. Boosting underpowered skills does not dumb the class down. The majority of complaints about the class are asking for it to be improved, but retain all the complexity of it. I think I have see two or three posts asking for it to be dumbed down, in amongst hundreds of posts suggesting changes.

This. I’m honestly fine with the complexity of the class, but I do want to see several of the skills brought up in damage potential. Specifically staff; I’ve seen lots of Ele’s do fine with Sceptre/Dagger, or Dagger/Dagger, but staff skills just SUCK, being permalocked to a “support” role because our damage potential is atrocious. Let the spec determine the role, not the weapon.

I agree. PvE and WvW player here. I love playing Ele, and I love the staff skills – the variety and potential versatility of that weapon is great. I know my skills, I know how to play ele, and I’ve taken on multiple mobs and squashed them, so I know I “can” play Ele.

However. To play normal PvE, not even in Orr, or to play through a lot of the Personal Story, I need backup to shine. Going out solo I have to be focused and really careful all the time, or I’m dead. I don’t mind that in areas like Orr – you shouldn’t be wandering around twiddling your thumbs there. It’s a little galling though to know that I am kittening myself by using the weapon of my choice.

I have actively avoided using anything other than staff, because I like the staff playstyle, and other professions are capable of picking their weapons based on that preference. I caved eventually and tried the ubiquitous dagger/dagger, and yeah, I can see how it would be stronger against single foes once I learned the skills. The thing is, I don’t want to play the same Elementalist as everyone else, because it’s the only version that works. I want to have the choice we were promised, that professions could be played differently with different weapons, and I want to be as effective compared to other professions at level 80 as I was at level 20.

I don’t want a cakewalk. I like the challenge of knowing that if I mess up, I pay for that mistake. But I don’t like feeling that I’m reaching for something at higher levels that was there before. It’s also annoying when my Warrior friend says he was able to solo his PS up to the last mission, and I get floored ~20 seconds into some of them because the balance is off. If I can’t complete content which is arguably solo content solo, that tells me something is wrong somewhere.

All the major DE lines seem to be frozen up now, not moving forwards or back.

The southern line seems to be hung on a bugged Dolyak which is standing in the camp while the NPC repeatedly asks where it is. The middle line has hung on “the ship is sunk”, and inland, the NPCs are waiting for reinforcement from the south before taking on the temple of Balthazar, which isn’t happening (because that Southern line is bugged out).

Minor events seem to be triggering as normal, but the major ebb and flow part is at a standstill, which makes progressing through the area rather frustrating.

It’s been like this for a couple of days now, and it’s a shame to keep hopping back and seeing everything exactly where it was before.

People want to be on worlds with high WvW scores because of the passive benefits that score offers to players in terms of crafting and gathering bonuses etc.

So people transfer to those worlds so that they can access them, and then hop back to be with their friends.

It’s frustrating at the moment that the limit is in place, but eventually guesting will be implemented so that people can play with their friends. Hopefully soonish. The roleplaying community is split across two servers at the moment, and it would be nice to be able to guest over to each others’ counterpart to take part in events.

Well, look at it this way. If half the population go back to WoW, does it matter? If GW2 is enough to draw them back for an expansion when the MoP shine wears thin, who loses?

Not me, certainly. WvW queues will be shorter for a start.

These people have paid their money. This isn’t a game where if you stop playing for a couple of months, ANet lose out in a big way. You play, and you can either keep playing, or put it down for a while and come back when you feel like it. That’s the whole point of a subscription free game.

This was added as a cash shop option in GW1, so I would expect it to be added (eventually!) to GW2 as well.

It’s certainly something I would want!