Guild Wars 2

This is really disappointing. I was hoping to run around in combat with a parrot strapped to my back.

Since the buff to support skills and traits (signet stat bonuses, banners, aura traits), shouldn’t these be buffed back up to where they were before?

The aura traits now all give +150 to their stats in an AoE, while the % traits still only grant +5% of one stat to another. But… in order to match the stat bonus of an aura, the user has to have 3000 (!!!) of the converted stat, and it still only gives it to the user, not to their allies.

The % conversion traits used to convert 10%, which seems a lot more in line now…

Now that we know more ascended gear is on the horizon, what’s going to happen to stuff that doesn’t scale with stats, and only with level?

Ranger pets, minions, temporary summon skills.
Structures (engineer turrets, sylvari leaf turrets).
Mesmer illusion health.

Basically anything that can be summoned will get obliterated even faster than it already does with ascended weapon stats, and damage-dealing summons and structures will be even more useless.

From what I’ve seen the overcharges are working correctly, though the healing turret’s is sometimes heavily delayed.

What you might be seeing with the rocket turret is that it actually changes its attack pattern completely when overcharged. It fires indirect rockets way up in the sky which come down and deal AoE burning damage and knockdown (it’s actually pretty powerful), but it starts firing slower.

I tested this with all turrets in the open world, and tested rifled turret barrels. Rifled turret barrels correctly applies +15% damage and extra range, but the damage is still halved after the first shot. It’s not an enemy skill either because I tried multiple types.

Yep, turrets are still completely broken.

When you plant a turret, its first shot deals damage roughly on par with the tooltip. Then all shots fired after that deal half damage.

How can turrets still be screwed up after all this time? This is getting absurd. These skills have an impressive history of crap:

First, traits didn’t work.

Then, that was fixed but if you used a ground-targeted turret it didn’t inherit your traits.

Then, that was fixed but turrets started randomly ignoring your traits.

That was fixed, and now all turrets deal half damage.

What the hell is going on with these skills? Their behaviour is completely wonky. Is there a plan in place to actually look at these and properly fix them once and for all?

It seems like they’re testing mob stats against level 80 characters or something, regardless of the zone’s actual level. It happened with AC (introductory dungeon my kitten ) and it happened again with these krait explosions.

Stat budgets for boon duration and magic find do seem to be buggy or something. For magic find the bonus over all armour and weapons appears to be 3% no matter what the stat budget of the slot is, whereas crit damage (a % based stat) scales based on the item’s budget.

I just searched to see if anyone else noticed this and found this extremely old thread. Sadly, I just bought the full Karma Lyssa set for my thief and the six piece bonus is STILL broken. I reported the bug and I’m dragging this thread back from the depths because the full set costs like 240k karma so it’s absurd that the set bonus isn’t even implemented. It does not give me boons with any of my elites, thief or Sylvari, whether I’m in combat or not. Extremely disappointing.

WvW is basically PvE where there happens to also be players that want to kill you. So, like PvE, having more levels under your belt will also make you stronger. You do get scaled up but it doesn’t close the gap entirely. A level 10 with some basic gear has virtually no chance when pitted against a level 80, even if they’re only wearing blues.

I’m thinking we’ll get Tengu as a playable race whenever Crystal Desert opens up, and along with it we’ll get a Tengu-flavoured profession.

I’m thinking it’ll be a heavy armour, mid-health profession to round out the soldiers.

Profession: Brave
Style: Kind of a tribal warrior (thing the Caromi and Avicara tengu warriors from GW Prophecies)
Weapons: Daggers, 1H swords, warglaives (new), 1H axes, shortbows, shields.

Profession mechanic: Spirit. As the Brave stays in combat, a bar gradually fills from 0% to 100%. The more enemies that are near the Brave, the faster it fills. Veterans will fill it faster than normal mobs, elites will fill it even faster, and champions and legendaries will fill it fastest.

The bar has four skills that light up at 25/50/75/100%. Casting a skill drains the amount of that tier from the bar, and each Spirit skill has a separate cooldown.

Spirit skills and the Brave’s utilities would be geared mainly towards fighting back against enemies that target you. Some utilities could be:

Shimmer (Combat): Reflect the next melee attack to hit you within the next 3 seconds. You also apply bleeding and gain retaliation.

Flight (Cunning): Gain stealth (3s) and leap to the target area, spending all energy. If the destination is lower than your current altitude, you gain vigour and your next attack confuses the target. If your destination was higher, you will block incoming attacks for 2 seconds after landing.

Wasp Nest (Combat): Channel for one second. For the next three seconds, you catch all ranged attacks. When Wasp Nest wears off, you launch all caught attacks back at their sources. Landing a kill with Wasp Nest grants you Fury for a short duration.

Insanity Pinion (Tribal Medicine): Confuse yourself severely and gain Fury and Might. Your next three attacks stun foes and each hit rips all boons from your target. When Insanity Pinion ends, you gain regeneration for each boon ripped.

Bad Blood (Tribal Medicine): Bleed yourself severely and remove all conditions. For the next few seconds your attacks inflict severe bleeding and you cannot be poisoned, burned, bled further, or confused.

Disagree. If people can turn off level scaling at will, it means they can steamroll stuff and that opens up the possibility of griefing and trivializes dungeon encounters. The argument of disabling your rewards when the zone is much lower than you is self-defeating because then you have no reason to be there…

It also opens up a bunch of other cans of worms and dev resources would best be spent elsewhere:

- How do you handle parties of mixed people who are scaled / unscaled?
- How do you stop unscaled players from easily harvesting nodes? All a level 80 has to do is hit a level 70 zone while unscaled and nothing will be a threat to them.
- How do you stop unscaled players from effortlessly achieving 100% map completion on level 70- zones?

There are far too many problems with this idea. Besides, as it is now downscaling hardly removes the sense of progression. Go into an area 20 levels below you and you’ll still have a far easier time than you did when you were at the zone’s level. I think downscaling is in a sweet spot right now. It clips your wings enough that you have to watch your back, but you still have a huge power advantage.

Bastion.2457:

Tulki.1458:

Uhhh you might want to revise your reward. Apparently the gold buyer detection algorithm is lazy and will automatically and permanently ban accounts of characters that receive large sums of gold in the mail with no investigation. So you might end up getting the winner banned.

Don’t be a turnip. I work for a massive MMo myself, and that’s not in any way how things work. There are literally thousands of things going on in the background to monitor unusual transactions, and tonnes of criteria, aswell as appeals when incorrectly actioned.

It continues to amaze me how people think the people running these insanely complex and fantastic works of art are bottom dwelling braindead morons. These people are very very smart, very well educated, and while they make mistakes, they don’t run things on simple algorhythms. These games are literally running on an entire language of complexity above that which the playerbase in general could never understand.

Thank you for stating you work on -another- MMO (not this one), which is a fancy way of saying you have no knowledge of how this one works. Also, this happened to Dulfy, a well-known player. Automatic ban with no investigation.

Uhhh you might want to revise your reward. Apparently the gold buyer detection algorithm is lazy and will automatically and permanently ban accounts of characters that receive large sums of gold in the mail with no investigation. So you might end up getting the winner banned.

There’s a bunch of stuff in the game that doesn’t scale at all with stats. Is there any plan to make these skills somehow scale with gear so they don’t become less useful as more ascended slots are added?

- Passive signet stats / other level-based stat buffs
- Necromancer minions
- Ranger pets
- Turrets
- Any other skill that summons allies (e.g. thieves, Warband, Hounds of Balthazar, etc)

Also, most stat buffs follow the formula of a (10 + level) bonus to a stat. This is linear, but gear stats grow exponentially with level, which means a higher level cap will very quickly rule out these abilities. Is there any plan to properly scale these skills as new gear is introduced? Or are they just going to fade away, which can already be seen with exotics?

One thing I noticed while going back to previous zones as a higher level to do jumping puzzles is that the chest rewards are randomly all at the level of the zone or randomly all at my level, and it seems like a really strange decision.

Jumping puzzle difficulty doesn’t decrease if you come back to the zone as a higher level character, so why do the chests for these things often contain zone-level loot as opposed to loot scaled up for my character? I went back to Metrica Province as a level 7X character and did Goemm’s Lab, which is gruelling no matter what level you are. The result? A couple blue level 14 pieces and one green level 14 piece.

I can understand why drops from mobs are only sometimes scaled, because this way you can’t lock yourself out of lower level drops and at the same time you aren’t getting fantastic loot from easier enemies. But when you’re dealing with chests it’s a different story. You’re putting in a lot of game time (i.e. Goemm’s Lab) with the chance that all of that game time will be rewarded (chest rolls scaled drops) or none of it will be rewarded (chest rolls zone level drops). Jumping puzzle difficulty is static with level, so please scale chest drops 100% of the time.

I think the cooldowns are fine as long as they make regular minions able to regenerate outside of combat. That one problem alone is preventing me from wanting to create a necromancer, because being a minion master is my main draw for the profession but I don’t want to have to pay upkeep with them. The non-elite minions are fragile enough that out-of-combat regen would not break them. Furthermore, the stupid thing is that I can literally just swap the summon utility out for another one, then swap it back in and resummon the minion at full health, so why don’t they have out of combat regen anyway?

I think it’s fine as it is. If you felt just as weak in downscaled areas as you do in areas at your core level, the game wouldn’t have much of a sense of power progression. If I go back to an area that’s 40 levels lower, I don’t want to go around one-shotting everything but at the same time I do want to feel quite a bit stronger there than I was 40 levels ago. Besides, you only get about half the rewards from events. It’s nice since you can kind of choose the difficulty you want when you play and get appropriate bonuses. If everything was the same difficulty it would be super lame.

… not to mention there’s nothing stopping you from stripping your armour off and going commando if you want a challenge.

Since the recent “fix” to the overtuned drop rates, I’ve found no dye in about 10-12 hours of playing, when before I’d have found quite a bit more than that.

Can we no longer find dye?

William Fairfield.1428:

Hello Mitch,

I am sorry you are having trouble overcoming some of the encounters within the Fractals. Allow me to give you some pointers that might help you overcome your obstacles.

The Dredge Suit Boss, while being a bit beefy is not ‘immune’ to damage when he is not Superheated. He just takes normal damage during that time. The superheated buff lasts for quite a good amount of time, and allows for ample time to move him to the next bucket.. To achieve this easier.. have your team stay in the 180 degree arc you wish to go in. The bombs he throws can be reflects as well. If you have the ability to do such within your class.

As far as the Colossus, I assume you mean Cliffside, which the chest seal gave a team I was running with quite some difficult as well. So we developed a strategy.. We allowed 2 people to be the hammer switchers, and we clumped up to the left of the seal just outside of fire burn reach.. We would kill the heretics and then the hammer weilder would charge in, smack 4, then run back to the group and drop the hammer.. then the next guy would grab the hammer and do it again.. Then switching back and forth as stacks dropped for those two.. With the others running cover.. Talking with your group is the step to overcoming these encounters…

As for the Swamp issue as really the only thing I can tell you there would be to use a speed boost and jump often.

I hope these tips will help you in your travels.

Good Luck

William, the big problem is that these tips are never available for people who are actually in the game.

If you take a fresh group of five people who have never seen, say, the swamp fractal before, then they will have no idea what to do.

There is an arbitrary wisp reset timer.
There are arbitrary wall spawns.
There are arbitrary traps.
There is an arbitrary champion drake.
There is a randomly spawning Moss Man who you’re not supposed to fight.

Nothing in the fractal indicates why any of these things happen or when they happen. The only way to know is by leaving the game to read the forums or to have someone who’s done it before. Do you see why this is a problem?

The same thing happens with the snow fractal. Oh, you have to light the big fire and not fling torches at the wall that the event says you have to destroy? Not very intuitive. There’s no real link between the fire and the wall, and nothing indicates that Sons of Svanir will infinitely spawn while the fire is lit, nor that they will CONTINUE to infinitely spawn while the fire is lit AFTER the event is complete.

Aquatic fractal? Sure, let’s let the players find out that they’ll be one-shot by fish if they don’t touch the pretty lights. Trial and error deaths are terrible design.

The same thing happened with the Lost Shores one-time events. There simply wasn’t enough guidance inside the game. People had to read the forums to know what the heck is going on and how to get to the event.

Short answer: It doesn’t.

This is like saying “Well you have some good baseline gear. And then there’s these really super expensive items that cost 200g each. They take a long time to get so to bridge the gap we inserted a tier between the two that costs 100g each.”

Except the problem is, it doesn’t bridge a gap because you blow resources on the middle tier first. All it does is make it take longer.

I find it completely baffling that people who DC’d can’t walk back through the Fractals portal and get warped to their party’s checkpoint. It’s a massive oversight that has ruined all of my level 1 runs and I haven’t been able to progress to level 2. Now I’m basically screwed over because all the groups I find are above that and won’t invite me.

GW2 is going the way of gear grinding with absurd mats for ascended and legendary items.

Unfortunately for this game, WoW does gear grinds better. I don’t know why there was a sudden rush to beat Blizzard at their own game. It’s obviously not working.

I don’t understand why Anet didn’t give Ascended gear the same stat potential as Exotics. Choosing to make Ascended gear have a higher item level makes zero sense, aside from encouraging everyone to get up to the next tier. They could have avoided this whole fiasco by not making it more powerful.

Leviatana.8107:

I think the reason is that it’s meant as a aoe cc for a few seconds and if that added a bleed that increased on condition damage that could be overpowered in some eyes. Towards me this rather feels like a balancing thing rather then a bug that is involved in the elite skill. The reason it doesn’t cc longer then a few seconds in PvP is probably in someway a diminishing return.

It’s not intended. The tooltip scales with condition damage. The real effect does not.

If you do the math on this utility, you’ll find that it’s absolutely terrible.
From the wiki (and in-game), it reads:

Summon a frost spirit that has a 20% chance to grant bonus damage to nearby allies.
Percent damage increase: 10%
Duration: 60 s

The expected long-run damage increase on someone who is buffed by this spirit is (20%)*(10%) = 2% bonus damage.

This assumes three things, all of which are a stretch:
1) It’s only a 2% increase in that member’s damage output if they are completely devoted to raw damage and not condition damage, which the spirit doesn’t affect.
2) The member has to stand right next to the spirit for the whole duration.
3) The spirit isn’t killed (it will be killed).

What about the passive? Super short-range AoE chill. Ticks for a 1 sec chill every second for 5 seconds on command, with a delayed activation not unlike F2 pet skills. This means the chill can effectively be broken by applying a pointy object or bullet directly to the spirit’s face.

How is this okay for a utility skill? You will never notice the effect of this spirit.

Lol. Of course it matters. 20 stacks of bleeding over the duration and not a single one is scaling with condition damage? That’s a pretty huge deal, on the order of thousands of damage.

This elite skill still doesn’t actually benefit from condition damage at all. It always inflicts base bleeding damage, making it pretty worthless for rangers that build condition damage…

I don’t see why not… spec into the precision tree and pick up the thrown traps trait, and stack condition damage on gear. Pack the spike, flame, and poison traps. Tada, massive AoE bleeding, burning, and poison.

I wanted to play necro for the minions. When I found out that minions don’t regenerate health out of combat, I quit shortly after. It’s so stupid how I’m at more of an advantage for the next fight if my pet dies than I am if my pet gets left at 20% health.

It’s silly when people claim that’s because Guild Wars 1 necro minions degenerated. In GW1, it was like that because you could equip one summon skill and conjure multiple minions with it. It was to put some resistance against necros who try to maintain armies. In GW2 it’s totally different. One pet = one utility skill. It’s capped, and most pets are easily killed as it is. Let them regenerate out of combat.

Honestly, I’d be more inclined to use them if they regenerated HP out of combat like basically every other summonable in the game. They’re fragile enough that this change wouldn’t have a huge impact beyond making minion builds more fun… and minions are aggressive enough that you probably wouldn’t end up with cases where a necro runs away from combat in pvp and their army regenerates.

This is kind of crazy. I tested it in WvW against a level 80 black bear with 0 points traited into condition damage. Then I invested 30 points into condition damage (+300 cond. dam.) and the tooltip bleeding damage went from ~8k to ~12k. The skill did the same damage against the mob, with the same equipment, buffs, and everything.

The skill applies 20 stacks of bleeding and yet none of them are affected by condition damage. :/

Does anyone else notice this? The bear and raven (possibly others) Norn racials feel incredibly sluggish. Their skill animations seem to take twice as long as other skill animations, and activating two skills in quick succession causes the first one to cancel out and only the second one to fire off. This, coupled with the limited duration makes these skills really frustrating to use.

Also, the new way weapon kits save autocast skills doesn’t apply to shapeshifts, so I have to manually toggle my normal attack to autocast every time I transform. Also bad, again due to the limited duration.

Ravnodaus.5130:

Tulki.1458:

There seems to be a lot of problems archived at the top of the list based on pet skills “not being affected by ranger stats” and such. That’s because they aren’t supposed to be.

THE PROBLEM: It’s not that the pet’s stats aren’t functioning. It’s that the pet tooltips are displaying values based on the ranger’s stats instead of the pet’s. Please correct the bug list with this information.

What is your source for your understanding of what is, and what isn’t “supposed” to happen?

Invalid answers: “Just cuz”, “Because I think so”, “I pulled it out my kitten”

Valid answer: A GW2 printed or archived source.

Try this: Pets have their own stat pages, including all four primary attributes, condition damage, and healing power. Rangers have a profession-exclusive attribute (beastmastery) that is used to raise their primary stats, with major traits to enhance secondary stats. Why the heck would their stats scale with your base stats? That wouldn’t even make sense. Furthermore, all pet base stats are much higher than the default 916 at level 80 to make up for gear which they don’t get.

Pet stats ARE working as intended. This is an issue with tooltips all being based on the Ranger’s stats. If you up your beastmastery attribute or give a pet the traits that boost condition damage or healing power, you’ll notice that their performance in those areas improves (and they are displayed in the pet’s stat page too), but the tooltips do not change. If you then improve your own stats, the pet’s tooltips wrongly scale up to them.

No it’s not a GW2 “official statement” that you so demand, but pets are obviously NOT meant to scale with the ranger’s base stats. If they functioned like that, Anet would never have given rangers the beastmastery stat.

Another point for 1H sword skil “Illusionary Leap”:

If you use this skill while out of the illusion’s leaping range, it does absolutely nothing (doesn’t even summon the illusion) and goes on cooldown. I don’t know if this is really a bug or by design, but it’s pretty strange that you can blow the skill and have nothing happen at all.

It’s inconsistent with some other illusions, like the duelist. The duelist will actually stick to his target and continue firing if they move around, so why won’t the illusionary warrior move into range before leaping instead of failing instantly?

This game isn’t GW1 so it’s bizarre that people would use an excuse like “well minions didn’t regenerate in GW1!” The degeneration existed in GW1 because Necromancers in that game could potentially run around with droves of minions. You can’t do that here.

As for the utility argument: If necromancer minions don’t regenerate out of combat simply because they’re utility skills, then why do racial utility summons regenerate out of combat? For example, the Norn wurm summon is capped at 45 seconds yet still regenerates out of combat, but the more permanent Necromancer wurm will not regenerate. It makes little sense, and it’s a hassle when you end combat with a minion that has 10% health left, especially because you would have been better off had the minion died instead.

There seems to be a lot of problems archived at the top of the list based on pet skills “not being affected by ranger stats” and such. That’s because they aren’t supposed to be.

THE PROBLEM: It’s not that the pet’s stats aren’t functioning. It’s that the pet tooltips are displaying values based on the ranger’s stats instead of the pet’s. Please correct the bug list with this information.