Guild Wars 2

I agree. I would like to see this or a shortened CD, or a ‘move while blocking’ mechanic that the gear shield has. I think shield skill 4 is quite underpowered and should be evaluated.

That reminds me. If possible, tables with chairs where the ‘interact’ causes the player to sit! This will be awesome for guild halls and player housing if it’s ever implemented.

1) Use a mouse. Touchpad affects your precision greatly and being able to aim your camera precisely makes it far easier to complete any JP, especially difficult/timed ones. Furthermore if you use the arrow keys to move and turn you are making a grave mistake in that you have no ability to precisely control the speed and direction of your turning. Use the WASD as your movement keys and the mouse to aim your camera.

2) Estimate jumping distance. I always categorize jumps by a fractional term. A ‘full’ jump will be for the maximum distance. The hardest jumps and ones that throw most people in for a loop are the short jumps like the candy cane poles in the Winter Wonderland JP (I would say to jump from candycane pole 1 to candycane pole to is a 1/4 to 1/2 jump). Practice 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 jumps outside of the jumping puzzle if you are having trouble making these tricky jumps.

3) Camera control. Controlling the camera is your best friend. The best way to control the camera is to hold the ‘right mouse button’ down to rotate the camera. When I am playing a jumping puzzle I keep it held down at all times while moving because I am constantly rotating the camera. It’s much faster and more precise than using the keyboard to rotate your player or the camera.

4) The diagonal jump. There are two kinds of diagonal jumps. The one that I would recommend when you want to save time is while aiming the camera, to perform both a sideways and forward movement while jumping. This means that you will jump diagonally left or diagonally right. This is a trick maneuver that will allow you to make jumps where the camera might otherwise be too slow to rotate in that direction or if you need to make a quick juke to the side without affecting the camera orientation too much.

5) The ‘other’ diagonal jump. A highly situational technique. This one is better for precisely controlling distance and takes a long time to set up. First of all, lets assume you jump 24 inches forward. And you need to get on a ledge that’s 14-22 inches. If you jump 12 inches (a half jump) then you will fall short, if you jump the full 24 inches then you will jump past the platform and fall off. The solution would be to perform a 3/4 distance jump which is tricky to pull off. The OTHER solution would be to jump at a diagonal angle if the platforms allow that. Jumping at a diagonal angle will shave off distance depending on how sharp the angle is. This principle helps during one of the final jumps (the jump onto the really thin candy cane near the very end).

MehWhatever.1248:

1) 500 people is not enough to (commerically) justify a Linux version.

500 signatures on a petition doesnt mean that it’s all the people that are going to play GW2 on linux. Most of those signatures are probably from existing GW2 players who are booting into windows just to play GW2 (note: I’m one of them, but I havent even signed the petition because I didn’t hear about it until now).

Furthermore, commercial games being supported on linux is big news in the linux community — especially a AAA game like GW2. Most likely if ANet made a client for linux it would show up on all of the popular linux news sites and other tech sites like slashdot, and GW2 would get tons of exposure and people willing to drop $60 on the game that there are fewer choices for (Windows gamers are exposed to tons of MMOs and other AAA titles, whereas linux gamers have fewer choices)

Am I the only one here who thinks ANet has the right to make money off of content which they are constantly updating? GW2 isnt like most AAA games where you buy it once and you get what bought but not anything else. Or like most MMOs where you have to pay 15-25 dollars a MONTH just to play — at least ANet is constantly serving new content (which costs money to develop) and you guys are complaining that you cant get everything for free, like attempting to make money is some kind of underhanded trick they’re pulling. Umm NO. Dont be a tight wad you dont have to put any money into GW2 if you dont want to but dont go crying to the message boards if you get less trinkets than people who are.

ANet please dont accomodate players that are terrible at JPs by making holiday JPs lame, boring and easy. The majority of your community can actually play timed JPs and finds fun in the challenge of them.

As far as I know you can’t. If you transmute anything it immediately becomes soulbound. There are no ways that I know of to unbind something thats soul or account bound.

You can craft them via the various weapon making professions or you can buy them from the trading post.

It could work. I see it as being more like an engineer. The 1-5 skills would be either weapon skills or monster skills depending on what monsters you have transformed into in the 7-0 slots. Additionally there could be several different ‘tech trees’ for the monsters

• Ferocity – Traits that increase damage output or radius
• Infusion – Skills that increase monster condition damages and offensive effects (like CC)
• Presence – Skills that increase the player or monster’s mobility, range or stealth
• Survival – Skills, passive abilities and active ability buffs that contribute to a monster’s survival or healing skills
• Transformation – Skills, triggered effects and cooldown reductions that trigger on or otherwise affect monster tranformations

Elite skills could be temporary transformations into powerful monsters, the summoning of minions, dimensional gates or effects caused by the player channeling his monster abilities.

Something that cute couldnt possibly be evil. Where do I sign up?

Those are not the only reasons. I have, for example been targeted by the dredge powersuit for simply dropping buffs/heals on my teammates via elixirs while running buckets — or firing a single shot of my rifle at it, even though the other teammates are being far more aggressive whereas a minority of other bucket runners can get away with firing shots while running buckets

Mossman seems to prioritize (1) guys that are down (2) guys that are healing guys that are down or defeated (3) me because I throw grenades at him and his wolves. Despite meeting none of those criteria — or not meeting it as ‘hard’ as my teammates. Ashym’s squire (Charr Fractal) also seems to have similar mechanics of beating on the weak and downed players and the people healing them.

Legendary archdiviner doesnt have any predictable aggro mechanic that I find. He switches targets very often and seems to slightly prefer to hit things in proximity to himself and doesnt really care much about finishing off downed guys.

Those are the ones I know because I fight them so often, so I know how their aggro rotation works more or less. So it seems to fall outside of those reasons. Generally though it seems that enemies seem to prefer a type of aggro mechanic that others dont. I could pull a big mob in the charr fractal and so long as there are tanks to intercept them they will stop caring at all about me and attack the tanks right away whereas a boss like Mossman will be much more tenacious (while still getting quick jabs in on close players).

Yeah, the pets need to be unbound, definitely.

As a spokesperson for the Asura Portalworkers Union Local 128, I have to say that we are with ya on the train for this one.

If this demand is not met I may have to consider proposing a ballot to my members, to determine wether or not some form of industrial action should be considered!

RNG-ception.

Oh and they fixed the problems with RNG with the fractals. If you dont get a ring, you now get a special token. If you collect enough tokens you can use it to buy a ring of your choice.

That said, I kind of agree with you that RNG can be bad (like the guys that cant get rings even after doing like 20 dailies on FotM — thank Dwayna they fixed that by introducing pristine relics). I just think you’re overreacting a bit to this one. Just play to have fun, dude. Who cares about all this crap. When holidays are over then you can farm orr/dungeons or whatever you do to get gold and buy the things you want if you can’t get em during the holiday event.

Yeah, I mean after all the events are so dreadful and boring that you might as well farm orr right? I mean what is the point of having a snowball fight or doing jumping puzzles or playing musical bells unless you make a profit amirite?

Most of the skins on the TP can be bought for the gold you would make in 20 to 30 minutes of farming Pentinent/Plinx/Tar Ele+Fish Oil event chains on Cursed Shores, stop being such a baby.

I believe that’s one of the flaws of that map, actually. A slow hard drive/connection could mean that the player never actually gets a chance to start because the puzzle timer goes off while he is still loading.

Anyways, try defragging your hard drive and see if it helps (it helped me when I was experiencing that problem).

digiowl.9620:

Honestly i feel that Anet could buff heals across the board in PvE, but leave it as is in PvP. Anet seems to have a vendetta against bunkers in sPvP that ends up making anything but perma-swiftness glass cannons pointless in PvE.

Bunkers were fairly abusive in low-level PvP in GW1 because of how unkillable they were, so I can see why ANet would have a vendetta against bunkering/healing. I do think that it really makes healing a ‘not worth it’ stat unless you’re willing to sacrifice a lot of a stat to gain only a modest boost to healing. That said, most bunker builds in GW2 are high vit/tough builds that are kitted with survival skills (reflects, knockbacks, etc) — self heal is not even really a factor. I think ANet could modestly bump up healing coefficients along the board (especially ‘other person heal’ skills) without having a negative impact on the game.

One of the reasons I picked Asura as my first character was because I wanted to wield a HUGE rifle. It wouldve been comical and awesome.

I can see why weapon scaling is done but small weapons are darned near invisible on Asura.

I agree, the bloom can be quite over the top. I appreciate the ‘ethereal’ effect that it can sometimes introduce and I appreciate the use of bloom on things that are supposed to be bright — but bloom on players and NPCs can be a little over the top. I don’t think that the mother tree is supposed to hurt my eyes whenever I hover over her.

I imagine if they make turret HP scale with the player’s HP, they will balance it out by capping the player HP to 18k or something.

They would then probably follow it up by fixing the bug that causes thumper turrets to be useful.

Runcore.5107:

Wintersday jumping puzzles seems to be designed for 5-6 years old players. Its too easy and reward is trash. Im was disappointed by these easy puzzles and more disappointed by reward from chest. This puzzle is totally not-comparable with Clock Tower. Tower was REAL challenge and reward was great.

I agree! Please don’t make future JPs any easier than they are now! I will gladly fail nearly 200 times again (like I did with clocktower) if it means that the puzzle is engaging and the reward is good!

Please, please, please make first person view available. I think it would grant a more immersive feel to the game, help out in areas where camera zoom/angle is a problem and furthermore help to be able to see other players better and more detail (like perhaps see what a Charr looks like from my Asura’s point of view)

I understand how the textures on GW2 only seem detailed because of how zoomed out the camera is but I will tolerate blurry close-up textures if it means that I could see the open world a little better from the point of view of my character.

I have an asura with big floppy Yoda ears. They are the favorite part of my asura, especially when he emotes (I love the cower animation)

‘Juvenile Golem’

Still, it wouldve been nice if ANet increased the +healing coefficient a bit to allow +healing builds to provide some nice off-healing instead of giving every engie the ability to heal decently. I don’t think this would impact PvP in a ridiculous way like it would have in GW1 where some players so heavily bunker built that they were practically impossible to DPS down for players who didnt know the ‘tricks’ to do so.

Toy rifle skin would be nice! I think most of the toy skins are ‘meh’ except for the princess wand skin (not my taste personally, but I appreciate that it has a design aesthetic that some players would like to keep). A toy rifle skin could look quite interesting.

I agree with the OPs criticisms. That said I still think that the wintersday JP was fun. You don’t want to grind it for fun as much as you do the clocktower (after beating it) but it’s not a bad JP.

Account.9832:

Zero Angel.9715:

No timed aspect (or a very generous one), allowing the player to jump the puzzle at their leisure.

And keep everyone else waiting? The puzzle is timed, so other people can’t start before the flakes respawn, and they won’t respawn until the timer ends.

Oh won’t you think outside the box a bit? You are assuming that the current timing mechanics will remain the same indefinitely. Programmers and game designers can be very creative at coming up with solutions to those problems. For example, in order to mitigate some of the issues with having the whole team stacking together on the clocktower JP, they split it up into 3 different smaller teams for the Wintersday JP and implemented a more forgiving timer. Staggered wait times or even no wait times by beaming the player directly to the start of the puzzle are quick solutions to the ‘problem’ you present. There are probably even more creative ones than that, but those are the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

Anyway, there are already puzzles with different difficulties in the game, just as there are dungeons with different difficulties, world bosses with different difficulties, mobs with different difficulties, etc..

Should there also be difficulty selectors for all those things?

No. All world JPs by nature have their own levels of difficulty and nobody is compelled to do them except for the fun and challenge. You are not missing out on any limited-time rewards by failing to do a world JP and the loot is crappy anyways. The only thing you might possibly miss out on is getting the achievement for completing all JPs, but you have practically forever to do them all anyways if you are so inclined — and the achievement only matters to people who love JPs (like myself) or are just huge completionists.

What’s the advantage in having 3 different versions of the same content, with slightly different timers, instead of having 3 different puzzles, presenting different challenges?

It’s not like this is the only jumping puzzle in GW2. And I bet most people asking for an easier version haven’t done many of the other JPs in the game.

The advantage of course is less content for ANet to have to design. Asking ANet to design 3 different JPs for holiday events is asking a lot, they’re either going to have to expend twice the effort to create 3 seperate JPs (assuming the re-use of environmental assets) or have to compromise on the quality of each JP. I would rather have one higher quality JP than 3 low quality ones, or try to get them to expend an unreasonable amount of effort.

I believe the aggro mechanics depend on the monster’s AI. From what I understand different monsters have different ways of calculating what they prefer to attack. Some monsters will prefer to attack squishies (lowest armor rating), while others seem to prefer to attack those who do the highest amount of combined DPS on the mob they’re with and still others like to hit the ones that are applying boons to their teammates. As an engineer I do find myself being targeted quite a lot by certain bosses (like The Mossman). It’s comical how far out of the way that some bosses and mobs will go to try and kill me and I use that to my advantage by kiting them for the team and letting the team do the majority of DPS, while applying self-heals, team-heals, buffs, and rear attacks on whatever is chasing me.

Exactly. You won’t have a problem getting the achievement as support unless you have a complete aversion to running the gift when necessity demands it.

The idea of selectable difficulties is a good one. Some players are just terrible at jumping puzzles in general, let alone timed JPs. This goes doubly so for touchpad users (argh! get a mouse already!)

Just put the players in different instances.

Scale 1: Tourist mode.
No timed aspect (or a very generous one), allowing the player to jump the puzzle at their leisure. Offer low-rewards but enough to make the player feel rewarded for exploring the puzzle.

Scale 2: Standard Difficulty
Timed puzzle. Difficulty level similar to the current jumping puzzles, with a daily reward being offered and then rewards for re-completing the puzzle scaled back to existing levels.

Scale 3: Hard Difficulty
Timed puzzle but with less forgiving time (similar to the Clocktower JP where you couldnt waste time in the early puzzle). Potential for more random events to occur (like how the presents pop prior to the snow boulders part). Daily reward, but also increased reward for recompleting.

Bonus Idea: Staggered wait times.
If we look at the last 2 holiday JPs. You’ll notice they have some aspect which imparts a sense of urgency to the puzzle. Collapsing platforms and creeping miasma are good examples of this and failing the puzzle early in the puzzle immediately takes you to the puzzle’s lobby. So my idea is this: Stagger the wait times. If a puzzle normally has a 2 minute wait time from start to completion and someone dies right away, then have the next set of waiters start while the first group is halfway through. Fail out the players who fail to make the checkpoint and start the next group. In this way you have 2 groups in the same puzzle at the same time, but one of the groups is on the ending leg of the puzzle while the other is just starting the puzzle. This would effectively halve the wait times and allow ANet to make longer JPs without pushing wait times into ‘absurd’ territory.

The best way I found to get around the issue of big players blocking the view of platforms is to either be far ahead of them (by going super fast and jumping like an endboss), or even more easily to let them get slightly ahead of you so that their big bodies arent blocking your view of your character.

The timing in this puzzle is not nearly as unforgiving as it is in clocktower so you can waste a tick or two standing still to let the big guys get ahead a bit.

I’m an Asura and I approve this message.

I hear the UHH! lady quite often when playing on my human lowbie and using the crafting stations in DR.

Hologramx.6402:

I could clear Griffonrook Run without any problem. Zero frustration. Because it is not timed so it is really fun. I could even stop anywhere to view the great scenery created by their artists.

I thought that if you do it with the bomb, you only have a certain amount of time to get the bomb to the sealed chest before it explodes.

I know you can get the achievement without carrying the bomb. But doing it with the bomb is an exercise in frustration. It took me 3 or so times to get to the end w/o bomb — but I also attempted GR over 200 times with bomb before giving up in frustration. I guess it wasnt worth the effort and i’m glad that ANet does not require you to do it with the bomb for the achievement.

I think that the inquest are tolerated because they sometimes provide useful services or knowledge to the politicians and citizens. Most asura know that they’re an unethical organization but my guess is that they’re tolerated because of something that they provide to the citizens or politicians (I scratch your back you scratch mine, kind of deal).

Also remember that the asura have intellectual values and one of those is of being a meritocracy. If the inquest have all of these advanced knowledge, techniques and inventions acquired from unknown (likely shady) means, then would they ignore all this potential knowledge in order to take an ethical standpoint? Somehow I think that they would be less inclined to do so then, say, the Sylvari.

Account.9832:

I think I know why they removed it. But I’d like to see the Official Justification™ anyway.

Please. Enlighten us.

Vaelic.2497:

the point of a winter event should be FUN, not frustration….

Some people find fun in challenging things. If you make them too easy then it’s not fun, it’s boring. Spending 10 to 15 minutes plinking away at the jellyfish beast is easy AND boring (the issues have more to do with its extreme HP pool than it does with its easiness, though reducing its HP while increasing its challenge level would be a good change but I digress)

Jumping puzzle was ‘fun’ and not really frustrating because there are few ‘cheap’ deaths. Everything can be mitigated by skill and perhaps practice (and NOT using a touchpad).

Clocktower was fun too and even MORE challenging than this, but it was also frustrating because of how everyone got ‘stacked’ together so that you had big players (charr, norn) blocking the view of smaller players for like 1/2 of the puzzle which lead to a lot of cheap (frustrating) deaths as well as the camera issues caused by using a more ‘overhead’ camera perspective to try and mitigate the player stacking problem. That said clocktower was fun once you learned to deal with that frustrating element of it.

My personal ratings for the Halloween and Wintersday JPs:

Wintersday JP
FUN: 6/10
CHALLENGE: 5/10
FRUSTRATING: 3/10 (automatic 2 for the waiting duration)

Halloween JP (Clocktower)
FUN: 8/10 (It’s a 5 till you learn to deal with the frustrating aspects, and would be a 10 without them)
CHALLENGE: 8/10
FRUSTRATING: 6/10

Griffonrook Run w/bomb (normal JP — added for comparison)
FUN: 3/10 (would be a 6 without so many ‘cheap’ deaths)
CHALLENGE: 9/10
FRUSTRATING: 8/10 (sometimes getting hit without a chance to dodge accounts for at least 4 frustration points)

“Whoever thought a government run by pirates…”
“ex pirates >:( but I get your meaning”

“ah! monsters!… ghosts!”

“what. out with it. the legion calls.”

It’s easy to implement, simply replace his voice files with the ones from the Treaherne on the german version of Guild Wars 2. Although I do not understand german, I believe this will improve his voice parts by several orders of magnitude.

Alternatively, during Trahearne parts you could have the audio system play that sound that plays whenever the in-game audio crashes.

I know gw2 doesnt offer much in the way of being able to bind anything else than what’s in the controls menu, I do find some binds helpful for convenience.

For example: My mouse has 2 extra ‘shoulder buttons’ that i’ve set to ‘about face’ and ‘heal skill’. The heal mouse bind has been quite useful because I can heal quickly and easily without having to worry about mashing the wrong # key, but I havent found the ‘about face’ bind to be very useful and am looking for a replacement.

What are your favorite custom key settings?

Maybe some of us like knowing which characters can outrun centaurs.

On a more serious note, varying up the voice clips a bit would help. I haven’t got sick of my asura’s voice acting but I do tend to tire of being constantly reminded about humans that can outrun centaurs (I imagine theres some classes that are constantly using swiftness, which causes that voice clip to play incessantly)

Oh I see what the intended purpose is now. And yeah for scenario 3 that wouldnt make sense since a delayed landing would mean that you couldnt use it as an escape tool at all. But I do like the idea of double tapping jump shot to do it with a stomp at the end whereas single tap only makes you do a long jump.

Do you use fast cast ground targeting? I find that this is useful for a lot of ground attacks — when combined with unlocked camera you can even nade targets directly behind you, and I would imagine jump shot behind you too (to deke your opponent).

Also snowball war is a really fun holiday activity. So thank you ANet for doing it. I think that the new game modes arent as great as the halloween ones (and boy were the halloween ones fun) but they come really really close.

Vorpal.4683:

I thought the achievements were very poorly designed.

I have no idea why someone would play a support class and heal your own present carrier when you could just let him die, and score the present yourself, and get an achievement.

Why do we have solo achievements in a team game?

WOW man. I play support all the time, and I was able to easily turn in multiple gifts incidentally, and I almost always let another player get the gift. Thing is if you’re really playing support then you’re gonna be backing up the gift carrier with heals or causing slips or turning into a giant ball of snow — but theres gonna be times when the gift gets knocked out of his hands or you’re the first one on the scene and the best thing you can do is to pick up the gift yourself and run it further away and maybe even right to the base.

Like come on guy, play it for a few hours (you have like a week to rack up a couple of hours in snowball war) and you can easily get the achievement. You don’t even have to change your playstyle much to run gifts every once in awhile and once you get the achievement you won’t even have to worry about it again. So stiff up a lip and get it done.

That would be cool. But it might cause problems. Let’s take this scenario:

(Scenario 1: Max range remains the same)
What would happen if someone wanted to perform a jumpshot+stomp at maximum range? Well normally they would just target it to maximum range and get the full benefits of the stomp. But with your new mechanic (hit again to do a stomp), if someone wanted to perform the jump shot to max range, they would have milliseconds to get the timing right otherwise there would be no extra stomp and no extra damage. The timing is complicated further by the nature of internet lag. If your connection lags by 100ms higher than the allowable average then what might happen is the second button press might not register in time and you won’t do the stomp.

(Scenario 2: Increase Jumping distance overall)

This could be bad as well. While it would buy you more time to do a stomp at long ranges it would create an exploit in that the player would be able to make jumps that they would normally not be able to make if they do not use the stomp. This is already present and engineers can already use jump shot to reach some places that they shouldn’t be allowed to reach via normal jumping. However the situations where jump shot is useful for this are not really varied, and so not ‘game breaking’, not to mention that nerfing the jump radius of jump shot’s current form would really have adverse effects on the skill. However if jump shot had an increased jumping distance/radius then it could cause numerous problems with engineers exploiting that property to ‘cheat’.

(Scenario 3: delayed landing)

This could work. What would happen is that the player performing the jump shot would linger in the air for a little longer at max range giving him a few hundred precious milliseconds to perform the stomp. I don’t know what the side effects might be, but I that would probably be the way to implement it.

I’d like to add my name to the petition. Makes no sense that it was ‘fixed’ since it was a feature that people liked and caused no harm to the gameplay at all.

Anyways, ANet is not the ‘bad guy’. I think someone just got overzealous about things being ‘correct’ or thought that newbies would get confused by being able to preview unequippable armor, or alternatively it was an unresolved side effect of being able to preview weapon and armor skins.

I’m confident that it will get fixed in the next major update (perhaps the post-winterday patch) — ANet has already proven good faith by implementing tokens (instead of pure RNG) for fractal rings and implementing numerous other suggestions by the community.

So much knowledge for ME!

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Zero Angel.9715:

“I feel 180 centimeters tall!”

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

I feel 2 meters tall!

That’s more like it!

Given the recent nerf (well, technically fix) to super elixir, I think that having tried it when it was buffed that it made the engineer great for seconding his role as a healer and otherwise increasing the survivability of his teammates.

I would like to request that a compromise be reached between the recent nerf and how strong super elixir was when it was mistakenly buffed in order to augment the engineer’s utility as an off-healer.

The best way to do this, I believe is to increase how well that healing scales with most skills, most notably super-elixir and perhaps regeneration abilities (like tossed elixir h, healing turrets, etc). This would add further versatility to the engineer by allowing them to see a real difference from equipping armors and accessories that increase healing power (usually at the expense of attack power).

Care must certainly be taken to ensure that it does not cause problems with bunker builds in sPvP, but if that care is taken and healing could scale a little better I think that would go a long way to making the engineer what it is supposed to be ‘a highly versatile class’.