Guild Wars 2

We only recently uncovered what was causing this, and are working on a fix. The issue occurs when attacking any wide breakable gadget (wall/gate) that is positioned on a diagonal. The volume in which a hit is detected ends up being larger than is intended.

No.

We aren’t changing anything regarding the layout of the map.

Yes.

That said, we’ll be increasing the cooldowns on all tactics by 5-10 minutes. Also, once the scribing costs come down, as part of the april build, we can start looking at rebalancing their actual effects as well.

Fairly often I see it posted that we didn’t make any changes to WvW or the Desert Borderlands map as a result of our Desert Borderlands stress tests. While it’s totally true that we didn’t attempt to completely overhaul the entire map a month or two before the Expansion shipped (as that was definitely out of scope), we made more than a few changes and bug fixes as a result of the playtesting and feedback from those pre-HoT beta events.

I only have the release notes from the 2nd beta handy (which I’ve posted below), but we made similar numbers of changes after each of the three closed beta events.

With that being said, we understand that there are many issues the community still wants to see addressed with the Desert Borderlands and we are still working to improve the map, as well as our other high priorities like bringing back Alpine, skill balance, improving rewards, and correcting population balance.

//Old Patch Notes Begin
General WvW Changes

• Arrow Carts (all types) now require 10 more supply to build.
• Supply camps now auto-upgrade faster.
• Supply depots now are marked on the map.
• Players can no longer rally off of basic creatures in WvW. Only veteran rank or higher.
• Objective bosses now have health scaling based on the number of allied and enemy players in the area.
• Sentries will now mark enemy players on the map for 30 seconds.
• Keeps will now mark enemy players within their perimeter, for the first 5 minutes, after being flipped.
• Shield Generators (all types) have had their range reduced.
• Exotic WvW equipment can now be salvaged. Badge gear yields badges. Tournament ticket gear yields standard exotic salvage materials.

Desert Borderland Changes

• Skysplitter damage reduced.
• Skysplitter now attacks all enemy gates, not just outer gates.
• Fire Keep lord difficulty somewhat reduced
• Air Keep lord difficulty somewhat increased
• Tower and Keep guard damage slightly decreased.
• Some Tower and Keep guards have had their CC durations reduced.
• Gate guard aggro range increased.
• Range to activate the Dolyak Protected Caravan buff increased.
• Certain very large capture points have had their radius reduced.
• Flame’s Embrace shrine bonus now grants 40% increased movement speed, instead of reducing burning duration. It still also grants immunity to lava damage.
• The north supply camp guards repositioned.
• Fire, Earth and Air shrine blessings have been converted into a single blessing that just increased movement speed by 40%.
• The objective walls that only act to block shortcuts have had their health significantly reduced.
• The north keep’s telepads now put a short duration debuff on players that prevents rapidly teleporting back and forth.
• Vista cinematics have been made smoother.
• Repositioned guards at shrines.
• Reduced the number of creatures on the map.
• Added more ranger pets to the map.
• Reduced the number of air turrets.
• Reduced the knockback distance of the air turret attack.
• Rearranged some jump pads.
• Keeps now have interior supply depots.
• Terrain changed in a few places that will open up additional paths.
• Tower cannons repositioned.
• Fire Keep mortars repositioned.
• Champion wyvern reduced to elite rank.
• Improved shrine tooltips.
• The Additional Guards upgrade will now also post guards outside breakable walls.
• Rebalanced the frequency of Oasis event dinosaurs spawning and the number of Power Cores required to turn-in.
• Oasis Power Cores will now ping the map when a new dinosaur spawns, or a player picks one up.
• Oasis Power Cores will now clean up properly after the event completes.
• Earth Keep rock maze control console cooldown increased.
• Earth Keep interior rock maze reworked to be less obstructive when only allied players are present. Half of the rock walls stay hidden until enemies show up.
• Skysplitter now creates camera shake, at the temple, while firing.
• Skysplitter now is marked on the map, during the event and while firing.
• Oasis event now has mapwide announcements and voice overs.
• Nights are less dark.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where life siphon damage was hitting object that normally can’t be hit.
• Fixed some lava locations that weren’t properly damaging players.
• Fixed a bug that caused camp guards to respawn faster than intended.
• Fixed a bug where the Inferno Transform buff would linger after leaving the transform.
• Fixed a number of terrain exploits.
• Added further protections against the elusive untargetable gate/wall bug.
• Fixed a bug where wood walls could not be repaired.
• Fixed a bug where waypoints were available for a few seconds between repel events.
• Fixed a bug where patrols wouldn’t respawn.
• Fixed a bug where supply depots sometimes wouldn’t update properly when empty.
• Fixed a bug where the Fire Keep could sometimes become randomly contested.
  //Old Patch Notes End

Thanks everyone. We’ll be moving resets back to Fridays.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Friday-Match-Resets-Starting-March-25th/

Thanks everyone who chimed in on my previous thread about potentially changing WvW match reset timing. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of bringing back Friday resets, even if that meant it being a little later in the evening for North America.

Starting this Friday (March 25th), the weekly match reset time will change back to Fridays.

• NA resets at 6PM/7PM PST/PDT Fri (2:00 UTC Sat)
• EU resets at 10AM/11AM PST/PDT Fri (18:00 UTC Fri.)

Hey guys, as many of you know, we changed WvW match reset times from Friday to Saturday as part of the Heart of Thorns release. We made this change primarily because sometimes we need to run hotfix builds on Fridays, and with the expansion launch we expected to need to do this more than usual. However we don’t run builds on the weekend, so this allowed reset nights to be safe from interruption. This was a highly controversial change at the time, and as part of the change we agreed to consider changing reset back to Friday, once we were past the hectic HoT launch period.

So here we are, strongly considering changing reset nights back to Fridays, but we have a couple questions first:

1) Now that you guys have settled around Saturday resets, do you still want resets changed back to Fridays? Or at this point, is changing the reset day back to Friday more disruptive than just leaving it as is?

Assuming the community overall agrees that changing reset time back to Friday is the way to go, we next need to decide on the time of day for the reset for both NA and EU players. This is important because eventually we’ll want to do hotfixes on Fridays again, and we won’t want to disrupt reset nights then either. On days that we do run a hotfix on Friday, we generally aim for it to be around 4:30PM PST/PDT, though they can technically happen at any time. We should also blackout +/- 1 hour around that time as our hotfix window, since while we aim for that time, it’s not an exact process.

Our tentative plans are:

• NA resets on 6PM/7PM PST/PDT Fri (2:00 UTC Sat)
• EU resets on 10AM/11AM PST/PDT Fri (18:00 UTC Fri.)

2) Do the above times seem reasonable to you guys? If not, what time do you propose that you believe would please a greater percentage of the community, while still not overlapping with our hotfix window?

*Edit: Corrected the listed hotfix time to 4:30PM PST/PDT, rather than 4:30PM/5:30PM PST/PDT. Thanks Veron.

After investigating, it looks like our recent fix for invulnerable walls was only applied to the walls at Stonemist Castle, and wasn’t applied to effect the other objectives. The full fix will go out at the next opportunity. We also have a solution to the flickering and phantom walls in the Desert Borderlands.

We’ve avoided adding this feature because we don’t believe it would be healthy for WvW. While we can appreciate why some players would want a feature like this, lots of other players only engage in WvW when, upon entering a WvW map, immediately see a commander icon to follow. We try and avoid adding features that can be used to intentionally exclude other players.

Hey, great start with your guides. We’ll keep an eye on this thread, and once you have a few more guides collected, we may sticky it as a reference.

This daily is no longer possible. Yes, we need to fix the fact achievement still shows up as a Daily. The same is true for the WvW Veteran Slayer achievement.

We are looking at adding a way for players to earn Quickloot in WvW as well. We wanted to keep PvE progression (Masteries) separate from WvW progression (Ability Lines). However this means when a new Mastery ability is created, that might also be useful in another gamemode, it doesn’t automatically crossover.

Yeah, this is a bug. We’ve actually had updated art for the map, it’s just surprisingly difficult to update the world map art on the backend.

The chest, containing Proofs, being account bound is a bug. Earning specializations (skills and traits) is intended to be character progression. Ex: If you want to fully train up your warrior, you actually need to play your warrior for some amount of time. I say some amount of time since Tomes of Knowledge have allowed players to bypass a lot of existing character progression.

Yeah, it’s a bug. Working on a fix for it.

Thanks for the report. Fixed in the HoT release.

Per Gaile’s post we’ve had to temporarily disable enhanced squad UI.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raids-Temporarily-Off-line

Hi all,

During this weekend you will have the opportunity to experience the new enhanced squad UI in World vs World! This is a quality of life feature intended to improve the squad experience for both Commanders as well as squad members. It is important to remember that the Enhanced squad UI is still in beta and while we feel the feature is in a position to share with you, we do have enhancements and polish work scheduled. Below is a short list of those areas we know are outstanding.

Enhanced squad UI
• Raid markers are not yet enabled in game.
• Open Squad control – a squad’s ability to self-organize vs. Commander controlled – is not yet enabled.
• As we change over to the new squad format there will be some disruption in the way existing squads work. Disbanding and forming a new squad should help iron out any lingering incompatibility.
• Squad member nameplates (the green rectangles representing each squad member in the UI) can become sized differently between subgroups. Resizing the overall UI should fix it.
• Calling a target (default CTRL+T) is currently squad-wide, but is planned to work per subgroup.
• Subgroup chat is not visible by default. It can be enabled in the chat window’s Tab Options if desired.
• Ability to hide other commander tags is not yet enabled. Currently your squad’s Commander tag will be highlighted when any tag is hovered over to make it easier to identify.
• The ability to see per subgroup and squad total supply count in WvW is not yet enabled.

We look forward to your feedback and we hope you enjoy your time using the new Squad UI.

Anyone who participated in capturing the objective that also has claiming permission for their guild rank will see the Claiming UI.

Agreed. Things are a little too skewed in favor of defense currently and we have a few changes in mind. We want defenders to have an advantage, just not quite so extreme of an advantage.

One of the planned change will be to increase the amount of time it takes for an objective to fully upgrade to Fortified status. So you will be less likely to encounter fully fortified objectives.

Any player may slot upgrades into empty slots. Only members of the guild that owns the claim can override filled slots.

If you aren’t representing your guild, you aren’t counted as a member of the guild in the map. Nor do you count for the purposes of determining claim privileges at a newly captured objective.

Chaba.5410:

Needs hidden cat room.

It may already have such a thing.

We have no plans to add a jumping puzzle to the desert borderlands.

We’re making a couple changes as a result of the lastest testing.

• By default claimed objectives will be flagged for public activation. Guilds can still toggle that permission whenever they want.
• If no guild members are present on the map, the objective will auto flag for public activation.

We are looking into this issue, though I don’t know if we’ll get a fix in before the stress test is over.

BrickFurious.7169:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Hi all,

• Keeps will now mark enemy players within their perimeter, for the first 5 minutes, after being flipped.

Will this mark also apply to stealthed players? And if so, will it actually reveal them too, or if they are stealthed will you see the mark on the minimap but not the player?

The ‘Marked’ debuff will apply to a stealthed player, but the player will only be visibly marked on the map while unstealthed. We may set this debuff to also reduce stealth duration, but wanted to get feedback on the basic version first.

frvwfrtwo.6109:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

• Fixed a bug where waypoints were available for a few seconds between repel events.

Can you clarify what this means exactly? Is this removing the “Spam waypoint in 5 seconds” stuff?

Yes, that’s exactly what that means.

Hi all,

The WvW team has been hard at work since the latest round of public testing. Most importantly, we’ve enabled the new and improved Guild Claiming feature for the test. We’ve also reviewed the massive amount of feedback from the previous test and made a large number of changes based on it. These range from large changes like adding health scaling to all objective bosses and updating the rules for rallying off creatures in WvW, to smaller changes like adding map markers for supply depots and rebalancing guards. I’ve included a full changelist below and this week, during the stress test, many of you will get a chance to see all of those changes in action!

Important note: The client you’ll be using to experience the Desert Borderlands map shares a few common backend systems with our normal live servers. Most noticeably, you’ll be able to see your live-game friends list and communicate with your guild in chat. Please note that if you leave any guild for Objective Claiming testing purposes you will also be removed from that guild on your live account.

General WvW Changes

• Overhauled Guild Claiming feature
• New WvW Objective UI can be accessed by clicking on any WvW objective map marker
• Arrow Carts (all types) now require 10 more supply to build.
• Supply camps now auto-upgrade faster.
• Supply depots now are marked on the map.
• Players can no longer rally off of basic creatures in WvW. Only veteran rank or higher.
• Objective bosses now have health scaling based on the number of allied and enemy players in the area.
• Sentries will now mark enemy players on the map for 30 seconds.
• Keeps will now mark enemy players within their perimeter, for the first 5 minutes, after being flipped.
• Shield Generators (all types) have had their range reduced.
• Exotic WvW equipment can now be salvaged. Badge gear yields badges. Tournament ticket gear yields standard exotic salvage materials.

Desert Borderland Changes

• Oasis event now has mapwide announcements and voice overs.
• Skysplitter now attacks all enemy gates, not just outer gates.
• Skysplitter damage reduced.
• Skysplitter has a new animation, updated audio and camera shake while firing.
• Skysplitter now is marked on the map, during the event and while firing.
• Fire Keep lord difficulty somewhat reduced
• Air Keep lord difficulty somewhat increased
• Tower and Keep guard damage slightly decreased.
• Some Tower and Keep guards have had their CC durations reduced.
• Gate guard aggro range increased.
• Range to activate the Dolyak Protected Caravan buff increased.
• Certain very large capture points have had their radius reduced.
• Flame’s Embrace shrine bonus now grants 40% increased movement speed, instead of reducing burning duration. It still also grants immunity to lava damage.
• The north supply camp guards repositioned.
• Fire, Earth and Air shrine blessings have been converted into a single blessing that just increased movement speed by 40%.
• The objective walls that only act to block shortcuts have had their health significantly reduced.
• The north keep’s telepads now put a short duration debuff on players that prevents rapidly teleporting back and forth.
• Vista cinematics have been made smoother.
• Repositioned guards at shrines.
• Reduced the number of creatures on the map.
• Added more ranger pets to the map.
• Reduced the number of air turrets.
• Reduced the knockback distance of the air turret attack.
• Rearranged some jump pads.
• Keeps now have interior supply depots.
• Terrain changed in a few places that will open up additional paths.
• Tower cannons repositioned.
• Fire Keep mortars repositioned.
• Champion wyvern reduced to elite rank.
• Improved shrine tooltips.
• The Additional Guards upgrade will now also post guards outside breakable walls.
• Disabled Siegerazor until we can solve his incorrect team issues.
• Rebalanced the frequency of Oasis event dinosaurs spawning and the number of Power Cores required to turn-in.
• Oasis Power Cores will now ping the map when a new dinosaur spawns, or a player picks one up.
• Oasis Power Cores will now clean up properly after the event completes.
• Earth Keep rock maze control console cooldown increased.
• Earth Keep interior rock maze reworked to be less obstructive when only allied players are present. Half of the rock walls stay hidden until enemies show up.
• Nights are less dark.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where life siphon damage was hitting object that normally can’t be hit.
• Fixed some lava locations that weren’t properly damaging players.
• Fixed a bug that caused camp guards to respawn faster than intended.
• Fixed a bug where the Inferno Transform buff would linger after leaving the transform.
• Fixed a number of terrain exploits.
• Further protected against the elusive untargetable gate/wall bug.
• Fixed a bug where wood walls could not be repaired.
• Fixed a bug where waypoints were available for a few seconds between repel events.
• Fixed a bug where patrols wouldn’t respawn.
• Fixed a bug where supply depots sometimes wouldn’t update properly when empty.
• Fixed a bug where the Fire Keep could sometimes become randomly contested.

A few points on anti-griefing measures for guild claiming:

• Guilds without Guild Halls will not be able to claim objectives.
• Guilds with the most players at the objective at the time of capture will have first priority.
• Empty guild upgrade slots can be slotted by anyone (who has unlocked the appropriate upgrades), however the owning guild still reserves the right to overwrite a slotted upgrade with a different one.

That’s the plan.

There are 3 levers at each objective, except camps which only have 2 tiers and thus 2 levers.

X T D.6458:

Id like to ask about the other part of todays update, regarding killing players in spaces they are not allowed to be, does that include spawn sites because that would be doubly great.

Rather than being killed, players should always get teleported out of hostile spawn areas now.

I think another player had a similar problem and fixed it by renaming the file to end in .exe

That would be me. It was good playing with you guys today.

We just put in a fix for the generators in EotM. It may just work instantly in existing games, but at the very least it should be fixed the next time EotM ends and resets.

Just to clarifying a few points, since there seems to be some confusion. On Borderlands the 3 capturable waypoints are at Garrison, SE Tower and SW Tower. Garrison is for the home team and then each of the invading teams gets a waypoint at their closest tower. These waypoints can be contested as normal. We’ve considered home team waypoints for the Bay/Hills keeps too, but that’s probably too strong. Keep supply depot max goes up to 1100 at T3, not 500.

Hey everyone, I signed up with Syndictive [Syn] on Sea of Sorrows. Thanks for all the enthusiastic responses! The other adopted devs should be coming along to post their new guilds as well.

Hey guys, I wanted to pop in and make a few points about the siege disabler.

• This is a thrown projectile, and as such, can be countered by abilities that block or reflect projectiles (Shield of Absorption, Swirling Winds, etc)
• It has a ~5silver, 10 supply and 15 badge cost. This cost coupled with the above point, will likely limit the amount that these items are used to important tactical plays.
• Siege is not permanently disabled, the disabler is just meant to open up a window of opportunity. Players may choose to spread their siege out more to be less vulnerable to this tactic.
• As you are probably aware, we are adding Golem Mastery in the same update. This provides a new, viable option for countering a golem rush.
• The traps we’ve added in the past, have seen low use. So we intentionally created this trick to be a bit on the stronger side. However, it’s still hard to say exactly how it will play out in the live game, but if it ends up hurting gameplay more than helping it we are open to adjusting it in the future.

Good discussion here guys. We’ve got our own list of potential future tricks and traps, and while I can’t go into detail on what’s in the works, I can give you guys insight into some of the guidelines we try and follow when creating these.

Specifically there are a few WvW traps abilities that we try to avoid:

• Traps that can instantly kill players. We don’t want you to be able to passively wipe a group by stacking three invisible explosive traps on top of each-other. That said, we are more open to these types of traps as long as there is some counterplay available (like the trap has a visible land mine effect, or gives the group warning to dodge away quickly before it explodes.)

• Traps that summon additional combatants (guards, creatures, golems, etc.) This is more for server performance concerns (skill lag.) While we have exception to this in WvW already, the idea is to avoid making the problem worse.

• Traps that are functionally extremely similar to an existing profession skill. Ranger Spike Trap, Thief Needle Trap, etc. Similarly we probably wouldn’t do a trap that just applies a standard condition to an area (Cripple, Poison, Burning, etc.)

I picked up the Mistforged Axe. I really like a heavy looking axe. I haven’t decided what to spend my last 200 on, but I’m leaning towards the sword for it’s scimitar shape, and either the staff or the trident.

You guys more or less covered the answer, but I’ll clarify.

In normal WvW, the Objective Events DO NOT scale. Though some of the events like the Grub and Tree Spirit DO scale.

In EotM, the Objective Events DO scale. However, the health scaling likely needs some tuning here, as it is set to cap out at around 300% additional health currently. In EotM, we wanted to noticeably reduce (but not eliminate) the advantage a bigger group has over a smaller group. We wanted having superior numbers to still feel important, without feeling like that was almost always the deciding factor in fights.

Nice thread. I don’t know how many of these issues we can feasibly tackle, but I’m sure you’ll see at least a few fixes come from this.

Also, in the meantime, if you turn on Autoloot in options this bug doesn’t seem to occur.

We’ve got a fix coming for this.

We’ve got a fix for this issue coming in the next release.

Agreed. It’s not entirely trivial to change, but it’s something I’d like to do.

This will be fixed in the upcoming release.

Thanks for the report. I have a fix for this in a future release.