Guild Wars 2

How does their explanation cover multiple chests by same account? Or the letters of influence? Why don’t they run batch job and upgrade all heroic editions to new SKU so people who have old SKU but no beta key would be equally benefiting?

Why are we being told this hours after it went in effect?

No beta tests (either), DD (upgraded after purchase), guild leader, old account. No chests.

I won’t lie – I am not too keen on heroic chests falling out of the sky with no rhyme, reason or warning.

Now to see what ANet does about it.

General considerations re: stacking

1) In multiple cases stacking on top of each other (or walling for that matter) is no longer optimal, people do it because ‘its how we always did it’. Look at Alpha – most people still stack on it even in p1 and 3 where cone AE would only hit one person if Alpha was surrounded instead of being directly stacked.
2) Stacking allows pulling groups of monsters into a tight bunch for easier cleaves. Unless monsters are rooted in place or hit so hard/fast that multiple mobs are guaranteed to wipe the party, this isn’t something you can get rid of easily.
3) ANet is no longer working on dungeons (to the best of my knowledge) so nothing short of exploits will likely be fixed

More specific considerations re: constructive suggestions
1) AI is an issue across the board. Having monsters dodge from AE would be nifty, but it is likely going to cause more issues than solve
2) Collision eats resources. This will require a lot more data to be processed (to see if the positions overlap), which is taxing. Furthermore this can be used for griefing and/or exploiting.
3) Then there will be a simple calculation – is the clearing of the dungeon worth the final reward? Yes – people will speed clear, and nothing will change. No – you lose about 50% (if not more) dungeon population, and get a fallout on boards.
4) Once again, this will simply have people ask whether complete clearing of trash is worth it on reward per unit time basis. If no, people will keep speed running. If yes, people will stack pull almost all trash and AE it down.

Bottom line – Does stacking and skipping NEED a fix? If so, is it worth risking applying a fix that might break more things that it will fix in a game mode support for which has been largely discontinued? I don’t believe ANet cares enough about dungeons to do something like this.

Mesmer, Necro and rangers are generally classes that (IMO) require most improvement. So I am voting ranger or necro.

Most famous necromancer shout: “FIIREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
Followed by necro exploding.

P/P was always a very awkward setup as thief pistols are condition based but unload is power based.

I would recommend changing unload to some sort of condition damage as well (or at least moving portion of damage to condition), and waiting for what hopefully will be a long range specialization.

Current necro – minimal group support and mediocre damage
Current status of necros in groups – not wanted

Necro specialization – unknown
Future status of necro with specialization in group – unknown.

Look on the bright side – it can hardly get much worse for necros.

Eh, well…sad to say but let’s be honest. Dungeons and fractals are supported but not really developed. And at the moment introduction of things like Chronomancer will not break them – it’ll take clearing from 10 minutes to 7 minutes for an organized group.

Chronomancers can improve team play but the organized team content is barely present in GW2. In the grand blob of things, chronomancer will not do much. And based on what little has been revealed, it will likely be a fairly high skill ceiling specialization, reducing the effective yield of an average chronomancer to almost 0.

It’s required to unlock a trait. I am certain that at least some of the newer players or alts would join a group if you advertised it in the LFG tool. Map chat is rarely the place people go to for HoTW group.

I like the concept of the Dry Top as an anti-zerg map. However between a really strange layout and the fact that a 10 person semi-afk zerg can ruin all the effort by simply coming to a wrong event and scaling it is really annoying.

F5 shatter – increases damage by 33% for each phantasm shattered. Duration of buff 30s, recast 30s? Might be a bit overboard. Lets try again.
F5 shatter – applies quickness to mesmer, 10s per phantasm shattered, 30s recast.

This is better, but with boon sharing this will make time wrap completely obsolete. Still this will make gameplay quite a bit more dynamic. Unfortunately this will likely make mesmers a required party member (along with guardian for their symbols), which ANet will probably not go for.

Megaservers should prevent overzerging. Only thing that worries me if the map is designed with zerging in mind (like Tower of Nightmares was), or an anti-zerg map (like Dry Top is). That might get annoying either after the initial huge wave subsides (or if you get a half empty megaserver), or when everyone tries to do the events horribly upscaling it (like Dry Top).

Honestly, at this point my PvE hope is that elite specialization will make mesmers viable in PvE. My concern is that the current trait layout feels like it was populated using blindfolded dev with a dartboard.

I am worried about ANets track record on what are considered broken classes. Developers seem to only look at fringe cases – the best case scenario. Sure, mesmer with 3 phantasms up can do excellent damage. But how often does that actually happen? Theoretical limit is high, but in practical application you can almost never reach it. This was similar for conditions. But this bleed stack will do 100000 damage over 100 seconds, thats 1k dps! Its amazing! Why are you complaining? Because 1) it takes 30s to get the stack up and 2) by the time the stack is up the target is dead.

The game was designed to be fast paced, but neither conditions nor phantasms go well with fast paced combat as they have long build-up times and can be removed with relative ease. Most condition classes can use direct damage and perform adequately. Mesmers are hard-tied to illusions for damage.

I hope AMA will prove me wrong, I really do. But I am not holding my breath.

Hayashi.3416:

Zerker builds that used traits in ‘offensive’ lines like the DPS warrior will now suddenly hit less hard since they’ve had the equivalent of having their weapon forcibly converted to Celestial with the base stat change..

This statement is actually incorrect from the prespective of pure direct damage. See my back of the hand calculations above. Even if you are in the offensive lines, part of your stats are allocated to condition damage/duration which you will lose. These will be converted to zerker stats on the armor, giving you a slight damage boost even in this scenario.

They might streamline the MF currencies. Turn them into a single currency (perhaps even redesign the MF interface and make it an actual currency and not a bank clogging set of items).

insanemaniac.2456:

Zania.8461:

So the change will allow you to specialize more into a chosen field. Zerk armor will actually be even more beneficial (and usually no less suvivable) than before. The loss will come from things like condition damage/duration/boon duration/HP whatever you had from traits (other than power precision ferocity which you will experience net gain in).

as a zerker engi, i will gain 74 toughness and vit at the expense of some power and precision because i dont get any tank stats from my trait lines. similar for ele.

If you are specced explosives/tools/firearms, and use zerker armor, you will gain power/precision/ferocity at the expense of condition duration and condition damage from explosives and firearms trait attributes.

Doing some math: Currently you gain 1600 attribute points (primary and secondary) from traits. 74×5=370 (only primary stats and class mechanic is getting increased). This leaves ~1230 stat points being destributed across the entirety of armor set. Primary stat gets 50% more than secondary stats, so about 360 360 540 (not quite, but gives a rough estimate).

So the change will allow you to specialize more into a chosen field. Zerk armor will actually be even more beneficial (and usually no less suvivable) than before. The loss will come from things like condition damage/duration/boon duration/HP whatever you had from traits (other than power precision ferocity which you will experience net gain in).

Eh, with regards to the skill points. If you don’t use MF, they will be just sitting on your character anyway. What’s the point of having 400 skill points on a char that you can’t use on anything since you already have all the skills? Fairly certain only skill point dump right now are the MF materials. In the current game skill points are way too abundant, so I don’t care what ANet does with them.

With regards to traits, I certainly feel you, OP. The change they are making IS good, but it really makes people who made their characters between the trait revamp and HoT pay a lot more (in either time or gold) for their traits. But I highly doubt that anything will be done with regards to it other than a ‘tough luck’ statement.

Looks like mesmers will still be depending on illusions. Unless their new shatter skill is +30% to damage per illusion shattered, mesmers are still going to be pure support in PvE. Going to wait until tomorrow to pass judgment, but at the moment not holding my breath.

Purple Miku.7032:

EDIT: Basically, default to GS + sword/focus and on the occasion you get a boss with a large hitbox, swap the sword to scepter. Don’t use hammer or staff in combat, hammer is really annoying because it makes it hard as hell for the eles to keep blasting fury/might due to the light field on its autochain and also if you use hammer its third hit is so slow… it doesn’t have horrible DPS if you can continue autoattacking without ever getting interrupted, but if you have to stop before your third hit connects it’s absolutely terrible.

IF you have an elementalist, and IF the said elementalist is actually blasting fire fields in combat, I agree. Most PuGs, even at higher levels, do not. At the earlier levels, probability of finding a field blasting elementalist is somewhere near the probability of finding a meleeing mesmer or ranger.

For an optimized group hammer is subpar due to field overwrite. For a PuG, hammer is (usually) the preferred weapon. If you aren’t planning on running a preset group I would recommend carrying both and expecting to use hammer a lot more than GS/S (or GS/M. Not horribly relevant in this discussion)

The following is a personal opinion of a person who mainly PuGs fractals.

Main weapon choice is hammer/scepter+focus.
Hammer does reasonable damage and gives AE protection. Blast finisher is a bonus. Good CC for the occasion you need it. Focus gives blind + block which can be absolutely amazing (ran out of aegis, back out, switch to scepter, range for 10s, use 5, switch to hammer, hop in melee, should have at least some aegis back up by then too, so can stay in melee).

If you land in a good group, use UC which will result in doing competitive damage even with hammer, or swap to S/GS for max damage.

As mentioned other weapons do have their uses, and should be carried for specific situations.

In reality the biggest importance of guard is defensive utility (aegis, blinds, reflects) which you can provide with any weapon combination.

It is really not surprising that some people will have an excess of luck considering you can buy it in a variety of ways (from buying blues/greens on tp, to salvaging ectos to buying containers that can drop them). After hitting the cap the luck income remains (even if through daily), but the sink disappears.

Only reasonable solution I have that would get rid of excess luck without breaking too many things is making it tradable. As you can already indirectly buy it (see above), this solution should not break anything.

Since when do you get sales tax refunds?

Bottom line is simple: as long as players are rewarded for failure, only a small fraction will learn.

Sadly with the mentality of cramming large number of people into zones (ie Silverwastes), individual skill gets washed out, and some people stop trying. Cap Silverwastes at ~30 people, and suddenly everyone has to turn their brain on. That is one of the reasons why I liked the Marionette – the groups that went in had 5 people per boss.

As far as teaching people, you simply need to lock them into small room with Subject Alpha (path 2 so AEs + burn) and put a 1min survival time countdown. Teaches both condition cleanse and dodging.

This is nowhere near as easy to do as one might expect. Too many variables to track, and too much subjectivity in relevance. This guard kept stability for the group up. But did the instance require stability? How does one weight individual abilities against each other to see if they are meaningful? People will find the way to pad their score and you’ll have warriors who drop banner of discipline on constructs instead of swapping to something useful, because it still adds points to their score so they can boast about it/get rewards.

At best, you will create a subset of population that will try to improve some metrics, like damage. Certainly good start, but it can cause people charging into fights just to get a few more hits in just so they can boast about their massive damage later. Or load utilities that improve the score more than ones that would contribute to the encounter.

Bottom line, while I agree that there should be incentives that would teach the general population to improve, the rewards idea seems like a lot of work and produces a lot of balancing issues. Something that ANet is very unlikely to get into. That, and the whole ‘play as you like’ crowd of nomad 15kap staff guardians who are sure that their contribution was meaningful.

On the upside ANet already made a few attempts at this. First the Marionette, then the majority of PS2 actually required to engage the brain on the first run through (which caused a lot of ‘too hard’ outcry). Need more stuff like that, and Lidari-like events. Get the personal skill up, make people have situational awareness, then they will be more open to developing their group skills.

I think all those ‘consumables’ should go in a new character sheet tab called ‘services’. One has to admit that current use of the service consumables is very unwieldy – they take up a lot of space, and can be a real pain to move around if you play multiple characters.

Other things I’d like to add:
Ingredients tab:
Vision/Lesser vision crystals
Doubloons

Currencies:
WvW tournament tickets

I am sure that it’s still in the queue. Right behind the engineer’s hobosacks and mesmer damage. So maybe by the time GW3 comes out.

I am well aware that my views do not sit well with a large portion of the community, however I do think that this is a good place for discussion.

I am perplexed why people think that more members = better or that inviting more people should be promoted. I agree that it should not be discouraged, but forcing a small guild to grow will very often destroy the community the guild started with. I do not see why larger blob = ‘better guild’.

I am all for any checks and balances the developers are willing to come up with to prevent the exploiting smaller guilds. But I want them to be viable. Currently guild with <15 members is not considered a guild by ANets standards. If that’s the case, fine. Then either require 15 people to form a guild, or give a big message upon guild creation ‘Guilds with less than 15 people are not real guilds and can’t participate in the entirety of guild content’.

EDIT: Iason Evan, I would be perfectly happy with your suggestion. However it would be fair toward all guilds, and as you can see from previous posts, people believe that larger guilds need additional benefits.

If your guild is so obsessed with efficiency of getting rewards that it won’t take a new members if it will slightly reduce the efficiency, perhaps your guild does not have a healthy community to begin with. You literally require rewards to keep your community together.

DDO has scaling and has plenty of social guilds. If people enjoy each others company, they will not have an issue in helping each other, even if it slows down the loot generation slightly. But I guess helping each other isn’t what guilds were meant to be about. It was about loot.

So yes, currently smaller guilds don’t get as much loot. But at least members there have attachment to the guild stronger than their desire for loot.

It would be nice if a middle ground was found where rewards would not depend on the size of the guild, so people would not feel that they have an in-game reward for hanging out with people whose company they might not enjoy.

I feel that authors of the article are looking back on their small guilds through rose colored glasses.

You always have guilds of two types, social or goal oriented. If you want raid gear, you will be in the second, if you want to socialize with friends, it will be first. If you wanted to raid with friend, then you needed to build up the social guild to the size necessary for raids, risking to destroy the guild as larger population often means larger amount of friction between members.

Small guilds were as bad then as they are now. In EQ (since it’s used as an example) you needed a fairly large number of people for plane raids (originally). Then Trakannon, Yelinak, Aten Ha Ra…Plane of Time (72 person raids, woo). A guild of 5 to 15 had almost no place in the raiding scheme.

So GW2 is no different. If anything it offers you a way to stay in social guild where you are friends with everyone, while also be in a large guild that allows you to get the rewards. You can still do smaller group content (fractals, dungeons, roaming teams in WvW) with your firneds, and swap to large guild only when you need something like triple trouble or commendations.

I am not saying that guild rewards are done well in GW2. Far from it. Scaling should be added. It has been done before (DDO), and (IMO) it worked really well there. I suspect that it is simply more effort in balancing than developers want to do.

While I agree that the UI on the box should be reworked, one should always make sure that you are picking the item you want, even if it means closing the box and checking the item names.

I am not sure if submitting ticket will work, but as mentioned, you can try.

On the upside, you have a piece of heavy ascended armor which is worth more than medium. If you ever decide to play war/guard/rev, you will have a nice piece of armor ready for them when they hit 80!

People always take path of least resistance. If a hard mode with no improved rewards is implemented, the proportion of population who will run it more than once will be miniscule. Considering the amount of effort it would take to implement and maintain balance in the said hard mode, I simply don’t see it happening.

The issue is that most bosses (and events) don’t scale harshly enough to prevent zerging. That is most events seem to scale to a certain point, and then either stop scaling, or scale too softly. This results in people bunching up into enormous zergs and getting through event with auto attack. World bosses are prime examples of this.

There is however a very good precedent for a map that is quite anti-zerg. Dry Top has a large number of events that scale absolutely brutally. Doing the bugs solo requires clearing spawns twice, doing it with a full zerg can make the event go through the entire day cycle and include a whole bunch of champs.

So the developers have to tools and know how to use them. At the moment they are simply not interested in utilizing them past what they have done already. I guess the events that ‘bring population together’ to press ‘1’ is their aim.

The issue with this is that the larger the group, the less individual build/spec/skill matters, so people realize that if their contribution doesn’t matter that much they can just AFK. Or run as a nomad’s staff guardian. In the end, you teach players that this is what they need to know to get through content. And then they go into something like fractals or dungeons and make other people very sad.

Problem is that with probabilities so low (yes, even 10% is low, much less 0.5%), number of samples needed to arrive to that value increases dramatically. That is while some people might get lucky get the skin the want in 20 runs, others will still not get the skin they want after 2000. Even doing a daily 38 fractal this could easily mean no skin for several years. Not reasonable. Especially considering the fact that pristine fractal relic currency already exists and does not have enough uses.

Instead we are getting fractal level increased past 50 and another RNG chance of getting a ‘pick your skin’ chest. I just don’t see it. Why not start adding fractal armor past 50 and add skins to merchant for something like stack of pristine relics? Ok, I do see it. More work, have to design an extra armor set. Let them keep playing the roulette.

EDIT: If you want a never-ending hamster wheel, I guess fractals as they are right now ARE your thing. I am a strange person who wants to be able to see some progress toward my goal instead of playing a RNG game where ~40+ minutes of my time is used as an entry fee.

I suspect that no, the new areas will not have the mixed nodes. From the information released, ANet is determined to have people go back to lower tier areas (can’t blame them for not wanting large chunks of barely populated world).

Although I am not sure how hordes of node farmers make the world more lively. In the best case scenario, the new dynamic event reward system will make the lower tier areas filled with more people. ‘ANY EVENTS?!?!’ in general chat will be even more common as people scramble to farm things like silver doubloons.

Well, there is a good reason why the chests aren’t affected by MF. That’s simply due to MF inflation seen over the last 2+ years, and the desire not to have it break the economy.

With regards to the OP, there is a simple solution. Make all the champ/bag containers be masterwork in quality (chests currently spawn on rare+). For world bosses, I suspect you are stuck with the chest though, since I don’t think the ‘construct’ bosses leave a lootable corpse.

Meta builds are usually mathematically best at accomplishing the stated goal in an idealized setting. It is up to the player to tweak the said meta build to accommodate the usually non-ideal situations. They are an excellent starting point for customizing your character/build. Very few people actually run the meta builds, and those are largely restricted to pre-made groups (where idealized conditions are met) and the people who are too afraid or too incompetent to change the build to fit the situation at hand.

They need not be simple. Engineer’s meta rotation is a prime example of something that makes me cringe.

I actually found this far easier on zerk elementalist than almost any other class (guard, mesmer, ranger). With massive AE damage (including frost bow) you only go through a couple of healers spawning entire fight as your AEs both charge the sword and kill off the statue. Shorter fight – less chance of being blown up by the flame or feared. For utilites I had arcane shield (stunbreak + in case you know that blue ball will get you for some reason), 25% movement speed (you CAN kite the kitten balls of flame) and frost bow for massive AE.

Still I fully agree that flames exploding you with no warning just by spawning on top of you was very annoying.

Q1: How comfortable are you playing your guardian?
Q2: Are you planning to PuG your way to 50?

If A1 is ‘comfortable’ or better, and A2 is no, then zerk all the way. Otherwise I would have a set of zerk armor and a set of PVT armor. Depending on the quality of group (and your personal performance) start with zerk and swap in PVT piece by piece to reach the necessary survivability for each group.

I have found that in 1-20 you often need to swap in PVT gear as average skill/experience level of players is relatively low. However starting from high 20s I had only few instances where I had to swap in any PVT pieces.

I didn’t have sound on but got a fairly strong headache. Fairly certain that in my case it was due to straining my eyes from sepia and the washed out monochrome colors.

rapthorne.7345:

As it’s being brought up in like 8 different threads without anyone actually reading the solution, to disable the sepia colour filter people are complaining about, simply disable post processing in your in-game graphics options.

This will have the side effect of removing effects like the green tint from necro deathshroud, but hey

Thank you, this is appreciated. Was getting very real headache from straining my eyes.

Well, we can kill off some biconics. We can also sacrifice a whole bunch of innocent sylvari (because you never know when they’ll turn). Possibly sacrifice/kill some of the DE. Um…burn down the Grove/Pale Tree? Have Mordy attack capital cities? Introduce some random buddies and kill them off 2 story steps later?

Just some ideas!

bob.5680:

Ah, but after that first year of “free” (nothing is really ever free) upgrades, we will then have to pay a monthly service charge to run Windows 10 (I believe) on new installations. For this reason, if no other, I plan to avoid Windows 10 like the plague. Even for the systems that I could upgrade it on for free during the first year I plan to pass.

Actually a very good point. It looks like the subscription model will be similar to Office 365.
Right now Office 2013 is ~$140 one time purchase
Office 365 is $70 per year.
50% license cost per year. Considering that office stays reasonably current for a fairly large time (2003 vs 2013 have differences, but basic functionality is the same, which is what most people use office for), so over a decade you will pay 400% more using subscription model than using one time purchase (reminds you of GW2 and subscription MMOs, yes?)

Likely Win10 will run under similar model, which (I hope) will create a large push in open source OS development.

I find that tearing (even minor) creates far larger impact on my gaming experience than the difference between 60 and 90 FPS (which I highly doubt I could even tell apart in a double blind test).

Toxsa.2701:

It’s like we’re hereby showing you off mesmer’s new specialization: just one new elite that grant quickness to himself with 100% up time!

While I agree with your assessment of Revenent’s situation, I wonder if 100% uptime self-quickness would actually make mesmer overpowered. For sustained DPS in PvE, I have severe doubts, especially if specialization removed the use of phantasms.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Hell, my R9 290X is maybe going to get full Dx 12 support. It is still unknown. Even though it has the latest iteration of GCN. At least until 3xx series launch later this year.

Based on the quote from the second article “Like NVIDIA, AMD has preemptively announced DirectX 12 API support on all its GPUs based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture (Radeon HD 7000 series and above).”, I sincerely hope that Rx’s will have full support. Hell I am still sitting on my HD7950 (very little reason to upgrade), and hoping to benefit from it.

With regards to Win10, I will refrain from upgrading to it until either 1st service pack or expiration of the free upgrade period (year since release?), whichever comes first. So far waiting for first service pack has payed off – original products by MS are usually too raw.

Actually the strategy of the fights like that is fairly low. Whats worse trinity based raid content can obscure a large number of fairly poor players, even in the top guilds, because certain roles require minimal amount of blood flow to the brain. Developing the original strategy by top end guilds usually requires a few initial runs to gauge the the possible strategies, after that it’s purely execution. That is making sure that healer #34 does not fall asleep and miss pressing heal button on the tank, and DPS #12 presses correct buttons in correct order to do maximum possible damage without drawing aggro.

Strategy in MMOs is limited by design. They are simply not strategy games. For raids the main difficulty is organization and having large number of people follow the strategy. For individual/group content organizational requirements are lower, but players don’t have raid leader coming up with strategy for them and need to do it themselves (at least early on, then it’s farm mode in either raids or groups). So you trade difficulty in organization for difficulty in individual ability to adapt. IMO Marionette actually tried combining them (both individual skill mattered and the map organization) but due to low average skill/gear level the bar was set too low.

They read too many Elder experience scrolls already, that made them blind in the first place!

Call me a jerk, but this is why I bring my guardian to fractals. I want to make sure that extremely important party-wide support provided by that class will be present and actually used.

Simply by switching your main weapon to hammer (perma protection for everyone in melee range w/ extended symbols) will likely allow you to mitigate more damage than your heals would have healed for the vast majority of the fights. Adding aegis rotation (for some reason I’ve noticed that most ‘support guardians’ never use their aegis rotation) will help your entire party avoid even more. Reflects is a double whammy with damage avoided by party + damage done to the enemy.

Guardians have so many tools to help party mitigate or avoid damage, that it’s really sad when only tool used is ‘healing’.