Guild Wars 2

Having played for a little while, reaching level 80, gathering some ascended gear and generally being able to destroy veteran mobs with ease (usually), I can say with some objectivity that I am no longer a push-over. I can clobber a bunch of monsters without breaking a virtual sweat.

Yet, those monsters don’t seem to get that. They just keep coming mindlessly towards me, as dozens of their comrades fall to my fire. That’s understandable if you’re fighting destroyers, husks or risen, maybe even jotun and ogres…. but bandits, pirates and separatists, who must surely have at least half a brain and some desire to continue inhabiting their mortal coils?

Surely, if you’ve seen me wipe out ten of your buddies in painful and horrific ways, you might be inclined to pause for a monent and consider i) running away, ii) running to get reinforcements, iii) sneaking around to attack me from behind, iv) anything other than a head-on rush?

Even with the lower animals, it would be useful to be able to scare them off. I don’t always want to fight. Sometimes I just want to be left alone. Putting a wall of fire in front of hyenas should, you would think, give them food for thought. But they just run through the fire like it’s a two-for-one sale at the bite-the-adventurer’s leg store.

I don’t know what to suggest for this. I’m certainly not advocating any great overhaul of the AI. Maybe just a little randomness where upon attacking a creature, there’s a small chance that it might choose to flee rather than attack. Maybe upon just entering a creature’s air-space, have a chance that the creature is not interested in fighting or biting (maybe it just ate a previous adventurer). Or, especially with humans, randomly run for re-inforcements or attempt to stay out of your range. How about a white flag I could carry to show intelligent creatures “Hey, I’m just passing through. I got no beef with you.”

Whatever’s easiest. It would help make the game even more immersive.

The forum’s acting weird today and not letting me quote other posts (I am logged in) so instead I’ll just copy and paste here.

Newteck said: “He spoke about not looking at a bunch of health bar during a combat”

I haven’t seen the announcement but this part relates to something I’ve suggested before as an option (at least, I think I have. Maybe I haven’t yet but should.)

Sometimes, I like to look at a bunch of health bars in combat, if I’m in a supportive ele role. I’d like to know which of my allies is down on health so I can heal them. At the moment, you can only see the health bars at the side of the screen (if they’re in your party, and in a big zerg they may not be) or by looking directly at a player which is hard to do in the middle of combat. If I press Ctrl, or have the option to see player names enabled, I want to see their health bars beneath their names. That would allow me to keep an eye on their health and the action at the same time, and be a better support.

I dont’ know why the forum won’t let me upvote your post, Illconceived, so I’ll just write here that I really like your idea with displaying browsing items differently from unlocked items (perhaps display them in gray). Good one!

Agreed – a greater control over particle quality/number is needed.

Well, you see, Charles used to be Charlene…

I get that there’s only so much dialogue that can be put into a game. There’s going to be repetition and usually that doesn’t matter. But there are some places where it becomes glaringly noticeable, and rather annoying:

1. Most merchants say something when you interact with them. This may seem immersive the first time, but after a while not so much. Some merchants are blissfully brief (“you got gold?”) but others are too chatty (“I’ve seen your face in my dream”) or downright sanctimonious (“life is a trial. Coda the judge, Coda the jury” or Myani’s “I hope you’re here you help.” Actually, Myani, no. I’m here to have adventures and kill monsters. The helping is just incidental.). Could we get a setting to turn off merchant speak when we interact with them?

2. Some of the merchants seem a little sleazy. After a while, being told by a merchant that he’s “got what I need right here” makes me want to plant a lava font under him. Again, a setting to turn them off would be awesome.

3. Merchants chat with everyone who interacts with them, and in a location like the bank, you can get a line of dialogue triggered every few seconds. You hear the same set of four lines of dialogue that an npc has repeated several times within a minute. Could we get an option to not hear the merchant speak to other players when they interact with him?

4. What about a timer on a line of dialogue that prevents it from being re-used within ten minutes? When I was dealing with the merchant in the SW there was some guy nearby who kept repeating every 20 seconds for several minutes: “if the modrem can attack the mother tree in the grove, they can attack anywhere.”
I get that this is serious news. It’s all he can talk about. But sometimes, I prefer the mordem. At least they’re quiet.

I’d like to suggest the following:

1. When perusing the wares of a merchant, such as a weapon merchant, it would be useful to know which of the items you’ve already unlocked without having to tooltip over each of them. A little tick or something beside the name would make things so much easier.

2. When opening a recipe book that offers you a list of recipes, it would be great to know which of the recipes I’ve already unlocked, so I don’t get the same one twice. A little tick beside the name, perhaps.

Seigfried.5938:

the maximum performance preset doesn’t even set lowest settings. You will notice that shadows will be on “low” instead of “none”.

Good point. I wondered about that too. Although, ‘Low’ just draws a fuzzy black blob under you and seems to be a neglible performance hit. I checked my fps with and without it and it didn’t seem to make any difference, so I left it on ‘low’. Looks nicer than ‘none’ actually, though certainly nowhere near as good as the high quality shadow.

The other setting that’s weird is the last one: character model quality. “Best performance” set this to lowest, which draws all characters with the same model, a cowled tunic person. That may be the least intensive, but it’s practically useless since you can’t tell one person from another. I change this to ‘low’ but I wish the current ‘lowest’ setting was actually ‘none’ (or maybe ‘generic’) and ‘lowest’ displayed the actual model but maybe without any additional stuff like legendary effects, footprints, minis, backpacks, etc. I’ve seen other people ask for a setting to turn off legendary effects. Maybe this could be the way to do it and give us the best usable performance.

Dinks.2478:

+1 agreed. Rewards needed to be redone. Adding levels, yes. Nerfing fractals into casual mode? no, anet really needs to stop catering to the casual plague on MMOs.

Casual ….plague….?

Ouch. And I thought we had something.

Hi,

There’s something odd about the scepter’s air 1 for an ele – I don’t know if it’s a bug or my misunderstanding.

Air 1 is a straight-line lightning beam to your target. It has some effective range (900? 1200?) but it’s actually able to hit a target way beyond that range, although that doesn’t do any damage to the target or cause them to aggro.

That’s kind of useful, I guess, if you want to point out something far away to someone. But it’s confusing because you can’t tell if you’re doing any damage unless you see some white numbers popping up, and in the heat of battle with all the pretty graphics flying you can’t always see them.

Air 1 does have a red bar below it when you’re supposadly out of range, but the bar is misleading. It seems to turn on when you’re over 360(?) away from your target, but you can actually damage/aggro outside that distance, when the bar is red.

The option to limit AOEs to your max range is great. It would be useful to have a similar option on air 1 to either limit it to it’s max range or at least for the red bar beneath air 1 to accurately tell you when you’re in range. Or if you’re shooting something out of range, pop up some red text on the screen ‘Out of range’ that seems to happen for other skills/weapons. Air 1 already displays ‘Obstructed’ if something gets in the way of your beam.

Also, when you don’t have anything selected, air 1 still fires although it goes nowhere. It’s a waste of an action during battle. If there’s nothing selected, it would be useful for it to just not do anything or pop up a message like ‘no target selected’. Or, if it must shoot, at least shoot in a straight line in front of you, so you could use it like a laser beam, waving it around the battlefield.

Just some thoughts. Let me know if I’m missing something.

(P.S. It’s also funny how the lighning shoots out of your hand where you grip the scepter, rather than the tip of the scepter as you might expect. But given the work required to change this….not worth it. Funny but fine as is.)

I understand where you’re coming from, OP, but as a casual (and fairly new to MMOs) gamer the fractals have always been an interesting but daunting part of the game. As someone else here said, more flexibility would help us casuals get into fractals more. Hopefully, this will work out for both of us.

Todd.6573:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

“We just managed to get our first reproduction in studio for this issue”….?

I’m glad.. but three days just to walk your character into the water?

This post is the textbook example of 0 understanding of how games work.
The following information could shock you, so grab hold of your table or something else that is stable:
Not everyone has the exact same computer components and installed software that you do (Gasp!).
Meaning not everyone (Like me) has or indeed has ever had that issue.
So next time, instead of the snooty response in an area where you lack expertise, try giving them your specs and describe how and where the issue occured along with any circumstances that might be relevant.
Thanks in advance

This post is the textbook example of 0 understanding of i) I already apologised for being snooty hours before your post, ii) I already posted my specs hours before your post, iii) I have expertise in this area.

So next time, instead of a snooty response to an arbitrary and obsolete post, try reading the entire conversation.

Thanks in advance

This is already being discussed in the post ‘Underwater black screen’. Anet are investigating and requesting specs. That post should answer your questions.

I’ve been watching my combat log to try to improve my techniques and it seems like the damage values shown are scaled to the area. That’s understandable but hard to compare between areas. It would be great if the damage could be shown as two values: scale and unscaled. For example “You hit ooze for 123 / 789 damage.”

Also, the combat log reports that I damaged myself when i used mist form. This is confusing, but if it must be treated as incoming damage, then at least it shouldn’t display when you have the ‘incoming damage’ option in the log turned off.

Actually, it would be great if the log could be a separate window too, so I can have chat running on one side and the log on the other, instead of having to switch between the two. If wishes were fishes..

This should probably be merged with the ‘underwater black screen’ post now, where Anet have communicated that they are investigating and have asked for GPU specs. I’ve provided mine and I’m pretty sure my laptop might fall into the sucky range too lolzertank. You’re not alone.

David Saunders.3258:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

“We just managed to get our first reproduction in studio for this issue”….?

I’m glad.. but three days just to walk your character into the water?

Yep! Too busy farming sarcasm for this response…

GPU specs plz

Not sarcasm, just frustration. But I apologise. You do have a great game, and it’s because it’s so great that something like this, which jars you out of the experience, got my feathers up. I’m eager to get immersed again in the game world. Specs provided in a separate post.

“Did that 10 times, 5 minutes ago, all normal.. so what??”

From what others are reporting, this covers multiple versions of Windows, multiple graphics cards and even cases on Macs apparently. The core issue appears to be that the graphics quality setting isn’t staying at it’s specified level, which seems more bug than environmental issue. It may be that a change in quality would go unnoticed on higher-end systems, which might(?) explain your success.

In any case, in the interest of resolution, which we’re all interested in, my specs are:

Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 10240)
Intel Pentium N3530 @ 2.16 Ghz
4096MB Ram
DirectX 11.2

“We just managed to get our first reproduction in studio for this issue”….?

I’m glad.. but three days just to walk your character into the water?

There’s an option in the Friends window where you can set yourself as being invisible instead of online, in case you want to play without being bothered. Is that option on by any chance? It’s at the top-left, above the friends list.

“How in the world was this broken?!”

MY. QUESTION. EXACTLY.

“nvidia released new drivers a few days ago – did you update? Maybe that’s the problem? and compensation.. oh please!”

I was kidding about the compensation. Well, half kidding.

In any case, when there are numerous posts and comments by numerous people over several days clearly indicating that the last patch broke something fundamental and it isn’t specific to a person or a graphics card (mine’s not nvidia btw) comments like that boggle my mind.

@Ardid – YES! “Been there, done that… and that too.” I want that title.

Totally agree @Yalora – the light armour is aweful. I’m an elementalist, wielder of the very forces of nature, not one of the Village People. I don’t want to wear a dress or bare my mid-riff.

Oh, and when a company screws its customers around, they sometimes give them a little something by way of compensation. For example, a couple of mystic forge stones. Just a thought.

Same here, on all points. It’s been a couple of days since the bad patch and it continues to astound me that i) it hasn’t been fixed or rolled-back, ii) that nobody noticed the rather glaring problems before releasing the patch and iii) that Anet doesn’t seem to understand the importance of communicating with its customers. Please, Anet. At least try to make us feel like you’re doing something. I was enjoying the game over the last 90 days since I started. Is the honeymoon over already..?

That’s not just WvW. This patch seems to have broken a great many things all over the place. I wonder if that hotfix is anywhere closer to being deployed. Enquiring (and frustrated) minds want to know.

I’m experiencing this and all the other issues posted since this patch. It’s astounding they could break the game so fundamentally and not notice.

I’ve been really enjoying the game so far (despite masses of lag in places) and couldn’t understand some of the vitreol for ANET I’ve seen on the forums….. but after this patch I’m starting to get an idea why some people feel frustrated.

Same issue. Every time I enter the water the screen goes black and freezes for 10 seconds or more. If there happens to be a danger in the water then I’m dead when the game comes back.

Apologies in advance if this has been raised before. I looked and couldn’t find it mentioned. Just wanted to suggest a few little things to the devs that wouldn’t be too hard to do but would make the game even more fun than it is already:

1. A setting to disable the prompt on salvaging rares, which gets tedious when you’re salvaging a lot. Keep a prompt on salvaging exotics.

2. An additional option when right-clicking in the inventory to sell immediately on TP at the default price, without popping up the TP screen, useful when you have a lot of items to sell.

3. Maybe an option to disable an NPC speaking to me when I talk to them? When I talk to Miyani at the Mystic Forge to buy some stuff and she says each time “I hope you’re here to help.” it sounds a little …. naggy. I’m also tired of the bear telling me that “Life is a trial” and the Sylvari at the bank repeatedly telling me that they remember my face from their dream.