Guild Wars 2

Why don’t they just put a timer on the achievement instead of watching the same thread get made for months because their resets aren’t transparent? This is what happens when you rely on sources that aren’t your game to dispense information about your game. Turns out the best place to put that information is actually in your game.

Thanks for posting. I had a good laugh at the Yak’s Bend thief who’s apparently been playing long enough to farm up a legendary but hasn’t the slightest idea how to play the game still. Unreal.

neverborne.4736:

Holy crap… good catch. I’ve felt that this skill was messed up too but couldn’t put my finger on it. Yet another reason to be depressed while using longbow.

Please post this in the bug section!

I did, both in our sticky and on the official bugs forum shortly after I updated this.

Given that I worked QA for so many years I’m a little embarrassed I went so long without really looking into what was happening. In my defense my “main” was an Engineer at the time. :P

If the player takes the trait Eagle Eye (20 Marksmanship), the activation time of the Longbow skill Point Blank Shot (skill 4) is increased from 1/2s to 3/4s. This appears to be a bug as none of the other skills’ activation times are modified by this trait, nor is any such increase indicated in the trait’s description.

Bumping because I have found the root cause of this, and I feel a little foolish. Not one to not be able to own up to my own mistakes, however.

From what I can tell, this has never been “fixed”, I’ve just been changing my traits.

The actual bug at play here is this: the trait Eagle Eye (20 Marksmanship) incorrectly sets the activation time of Longbow 4 from 1/2s to 3/4s. Removing the trait fixes the issue.

Edit: Found the cause of this bug and am updating accordingly:

Eagle Eye trait (20 Marksmanship) incorrectly increases the activation time of Point Blank Shot (Longbow 4 skill), from 1/2s to 3/4s.

Not a bad idea, I suppose.

Someone seems to have noticed this thread in the past and corrected it a few times, though.

Bumping this to say that it’s been broken… again.

I feel like you may want to investigate your Perforce (or whatever other system you’re using) because with how many times this has happened it seems like someone’s committing build changes that has this error in it locally.

Uhh… u wot m8?

Was talking about this skill with a friend of mine today and we thought it would be a more interesting trait if instead of having an ICD, it triggered every (X) times a kit was equipped (not stowed). Basically you’d get a buff with no duration every, say, 4 times a kit was equipped that, upon the next kit swap, would trigger the appropriate spell.

The heal should be fast, because it can be interrupted in many ways. The entire point of it being fast is to be a significant counter to the threat of being killed in downed state via damage instead of stomp. Working as intended.

A small patch was just deployed; while not in the patch notes, Point Blank Shot has returned to the appropriate 1/2s activation time. Thanks again.

Still wrong. Wasn’t in the patch notes either.

I wanted to bump this because not long after I created this thread, it was corrected in a minor patch and set back to 1/2s.

Unfortunately, with the Wintersday patch this skill is again incorrectly set to 3/4s which makes the skill much harder to use correctly.

You’re surprised they nerfed grenade 1? It was way out of line with the rest of the 1 skills in the game. Find it hard to believe people are surprised it got nerfed.

Jon, thanks for the information. I’m sure a lot of people are glad to hear this.

While on the topic of Longbow, though – do you know if the 1 skill was corrected? The tooltip states 3/4s activation time, but the skill has always used a 1 1/4s activation time. If it is not a tooltip error but rather a functionality error, then the Longbow is doing significantly less DPS than intended.

Am I going crazy, or was Point Blank Shot on the Longbow previously much faster? It shows as 3/4s casting time in-game. The wiki lists it as 1/2s.

Is it intended that there is no 75 Fractal Relic cost Offensive Infusion on the FotM vendor? It seems that Offensive Infusion slot is currently disadvantaged compared to Defensive Infusion rather arbitrarily.

BurnedToast.3781:

The ones I have a problem with are the vet egg layers.

Uncleansable conditions? check

If you’re talking about the hatchling conditions, those are removable by dodge rolling which shakes all hatchlings currently attached to you.

Strodor.6051:

Gender change is going to be included within one of the kits, when they were accidentally added you could see what they did.

Was re-naming part of any of the services when they were briefly visible?

toomuchtatose.6874:

There’s a rare piece, once you got the complete set of Memoires.

I only remember a blue (Fine) and a green (Masterwork) back piece from the Mad King event.

krookie.6378:

This Agony condition worries me. Especially the part of the blog which describes how you won’t be able to progress further unless you have an X amount of defense against it.

It’s just going to exclude people from content.

I’m not really feeling this new direction. No sir.

It’s not a new direction, this system already existed in Guild Wars.

While I am not a fan of the stat boost over exotics (not because I care that there is a tier above exotics, but because the WvW aspect of the game will be affected by the tier discrepancy), everything else about the armor is just stuff they already used in the previous game. Not sure how that is surprising.

This game really does have some of the worst Tab target functionality I’ve seen in a modern MMO. I’ve targeted stuff that is almost entirely out of screen space when there are 6-10 monsters directly in front of my character and in the center of screen space.

There is no excuse for Tab targeting to not have center screen space prioritization at a minimum. I don’t need to target the stupid thing that is behind my character out of LOS when there is something in the middle of my screen that is in LOS of my character.

Sounds like RNG working like it always has to me. Since we’re doing little but piling anecdotal evidence, I’ll add that my salvages this past week have been well above average.

Rfreak.6591:

While I partially agree with the lack of main weapon builds, you have to also consider we also got an extra 4 skills on our toolbelt.

This is something I feel I’ve addressed already, though I don’t think I did a very good job of managing brevity so I don’t blame folks for not having read all of it.

The short version though is that essentially every class mechanic brings with it extra skills; that isn’t really the unique element to the toolbelt that separates it from, say, the four extra skills a Necromancer has in Death Shroud. The value is supposed to come from the power to directly change those four skills, something no other class can do.

The problem – and what I spend most of my time trying to highlight in my previous posts – is how the toolbelt fails to achieve the goal due to how it is intrinsically linked to the core utility slots and the kit system simultaneously. So long as the kit system encroaches on the utility slot resources while being responsible for our weapon skill deficit on the base level, this will remain true. Basically, instead of attempting to balance out the skill deficit before it hands you the ability to customize your build (something that the Elementalist core mechanic successfully accomplishes), our deficit simply lingers and the designers hand you the pieces that don’t fit together and say “here, you manage it” – except the players are left to make exclusionary choices where other classes make no such sacrifices. The result impacts the way the customization of both the toolbelt itself and the utility slots negatively due to the pressure exerted on the player’s judgment to fix the skill deficit as a priority over slotting skills that they may actually prefer to use.

I suppose it is ironic that it is the Engineer that is handed a bunch of dysfunctional systems and left to figure out how to make them work. Who says role playing is dead?

Depends on how you are built gear-wise. I run Superior Sigil of Strength. It’s worthwhile to get a spare pistol to get a stack of Corruption or Bloodlust up then swap, until they make the stack disappear when you remove the weapon (I expect this to happen on Thursday’s content patch), since that is basically a free sigil slot right now. That said, I also expect Strength to get an ICD on Thursday, so it may be worth your time to just wait until the patch to see what changes are made before you invest any gold into superior sigils.

Faction.4013:

ShadowPuppet.3746:

While these linked images do give some credence to these claims it still does not confirm specific changes to any class in particular.

Thats been my stance this whole time! You should see the Reddit page here. The summary of the picture in this article is absolutely HYSTERICAL!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12wne4/according_to_jon_peters_profession_part_of/

How the kitten do you get those conclusions from the picture in the link?!

The screenshot isn’t the source for the summary, it was just the only one people provided as proof that he was there. Other folks were standing right there and heard the same thing. With all the forums it has been posted in here, Jon would have spoken up if there was intentional misinformation being offered, because they would be twisting words he actually was saying there in the Mists.

Kashien.6278:

I just dont see how your able to kill the adds quick enough from path 1. We have extremely good dps, and even then, we couldnt take them all out before another group showed up 4 seconds later, for boss 2’s adds that come into boss 1’s room.

When my guild did this path in explorable a few days ago, we didn’t even kill the adds. Mind you, we died once the first boss died due to the accumulation of them (not to mention a few times after trying to learn the rest of the instance), but we figured it wasn’t worth the trouble when we realized they simply don’t stop spawning. For the second boss, we fought right by the door and the spawns would not aggro before they began to run down their normal route, and the ones we trained to the boss simply reset by the time we got to the ramp. The only trouble there is dealing with the singularities, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than dealing with any add spawns. Everything past that point should be doable by any group.

On a side note, the fact that there is no waypoints in this path is a joke. Quite frankly this path is one of the worst pieces of content I’ve come across in Guild Wars 2; it is really in a sorry state that is not suitable for a live build.

jukkou.5102:

I entirely agree with you that we should all be equivalent at a baseline, but I’d like to offer my thoughts on possibly why a-net decided to make kits function the way they do now…

Thanks for the response.

I think we seem to agree that ArenaNet makes the assumption that the Engineer is playing with one kit equipped as sort of the “baseline” in regards to the class. It seems pretty much directly implied by the removal of the weapon swap feature that the other classes (sans Elementalist) have by default.

What I am trying to highlight as the dilemma specific to the Engineer is that very idea; that the balance of the class revolves around a choice that must be made post-foundation in regards to a character template. The comparison made of a zero-kit Engineer to say a Warrior that refuses to weapon swap actually highlights the core concept as to why I think this is a fundamental flaw; the Warrior’s has to take a reductionist step through gameplay to reach a deficit that the Engineer begins at before build choices get made.

Now, that concept in isolation – in a different game, or different set of systems – is not necessarily a flaw if the other unique mechanics of the class worked as a moderating force that counter-balanced that deficit at the foundation level. The problem, then, comes when we apply the idea to the Engineer specific systems and find that this does not happen.

Let’s examine the toolbelt in detail so it’s clear what I mean by that. We have four additional skill slots that are accessible at any time (sans transformations), and these four skills are determined by what we place in the heal and utility slots. Basic stuff; the important thing is the last bit, as it tells us that the value of each individual slot is wholly determined in the build creation process and not before. There is no inherent value in the mechanic until we make a selection in the 6-9 slots.

It’s not until we get to that step where I think we see the effects of this system being flawed in the Engineer’s case. The heal and utility slot skills are a precious resource and I think everyone will agree are some of the most important choices a player makes. The Engineer, unlike the other classes is tasked with solving a the deficit we mentioned earlier with these four slots on top of trying to select from them a set that fits their gameplay style. This negatively impacts the balance of the individual skills that make up those categories because they have to provide not just their own stand-alone value as a utility against all the others (compounded by their linked, uncustomizable toolbelt skill value) but against the need to take a kit to dig the class out of that skill deficit we started at. That first utility slot has a completely lopsided value until a kit is chosen, especially when we consider it still provides equivalent toolbelt power compared to the stand-alone utility skills.

In my opinion, it’s in that step where the Engineer is constrained from really providing that flexibility that the class seems so close to achieving. Too many pieces have to fall in line with resources made too scarce by additional limitations specific to the Engineer.

Compare this to the Elementalist, the other class that shares our limitation of weapon slots. Their unique system – the elemental attunements – works as the counter-balance on the foundation level, and never encroaches on the value of resources that make up the utility slots. Because of that, they don’t start at that negative deficit, and they get to make the same value judgments between utility slots on the merits of each individual skill, just like any other class.

The result of our class mechanic instead is basically a force multiplier of our utility slots. Since we still have the same resource limitations as any other class when it comes to utility slots, build variety suffers as the additional pressure to spend in a way that counteracts that deficit pushes players in certain directions; that is the kit dilemma. It’s a negative force that works against the total number of builds players are willing to carry, and personally it feels limiting when the I think intention is for additional flexibility.

So, I have been playing the Engineer since head start. While I love the aesthetic and general design of our individual skills, the one thing that has stuck out since the beginning as problematic is the kit system.

Engineers are limited to only one weapon set on the basis that they are capable of choosing one or more kits that we can swap to; the benefit being our kits do not suffer only a 1 second cooldown rather than 10. The problem I have with this is that if we choose not to select any of these kits, we are left with the fewest number of abilities of any class in the game at any given moment, including the toolbelt skills.

This doesn’t inherently sound like a problem when you consider that we also are capable of having the largest number of abilities at any given moment if we take the opposite path and equip a bunch of kits. Here’s the catch – their existence as replacements for core heal/utility slot skills skews the relative worth of the rest of the skills that are not kits but fight for the same slots. If I take a skill that is not a kit – particularly in the utility slots that contain offensive cooldowns – I take a hit in the amount of skills I am capable of bringing into combat. More importantly, I am pressured into taking one of these kits because my class inherently starts with less combat skills than any other class due to lacking a second weapon slot, which places additional pressure on my utility slots.

Ultimately I find myself wondering how much this mechanic actually benefits the class. It strikes me that the Engineer has a baseline disadvantage that the core class mechanic does not serve to offset by default like it does for the Elementalist. In fact, the toolbelt skills themselves are skewed in value towards the kits as you still gain 1 skill in the toolbelt whether you take a kit or a utility.

There is too much pressure when constructing a build to take a utility slot kit simply due to the lack of baseline functionality compared to the other classes, and our class mechanic actually adds to that pressure when it should act as a moderating valve. Essentially, I think the “baseline” Engineer needs to match core class functionality in a zero-kit situation and currently it does not. The result of this is that build variety and flexibility suffers, and for a class that is designed around adaptability, I find this a pretty frustrating limitation.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since being disappointed by P/P pure conditions. Something like 10/30/0/30/0 with H, FT, B and one other elixir. Take Juggernaut and HGH. Pair with Rampager’s with some Carrion’s to suit your survivability needs. Seems like it could be really strong.

Are the other races even trying?

Level 80 Noble set uses the same model as the Eagle Eye Goggles for the helm slot.

Yeah, there are still a bunch of unclear tooltips left over from beta (particularly bad on Ranger traits, but we have a handful too).

I’m pretty sure Elixir R removes one condition per field tick, not all at once.

Wasn’t there supposed to be a system that prevented a player from queueing for WvW for their destination server until the current match had finished? It currently doesn’t work.

No, I have transmuted my Krytan armor multiple times.

I really think pet abilities all need to be instant cast and balanced as such. Ranger players already have a portion of their in-combat micromanagement eaten up by monitoring pet health and positioning, I think it is unreasonable to also make them try and account for long cast times on pet abilities on top of pet positioning to try and land something on a target, especially in PvP. Currently there really isn’t a single F2 pet ability that “feels” right because you feel completely disconnected from pressing the button and receiving your bacon. These abilities should be used in moments of opportunity, and without them being instant I don’t think they’re ever going to feel right from the player’s end.