Guild Wars 2

Swamp is fast and relatively easy providing you either roll Bloomhunger, or have a moderately competent group. The speed and ease of Swamp is also less group composition dependent than Uncategorized (Harpy) or Urban Battlegrounds (Charr). I didn’t even mention Aquatic Ruins (Krait), because no one likes underwater combat.

What part of the fractal do you find to be difficult, and can you describe your team setup? I’d be glad to help, and I’m sure others would too.

TranquilInSpirit.6291:

I’m kind of glad that you can’t just afk half the time in melee anymore. It’s actually a CHALLENGE now. Almost got a solo done on Guardian today but I got double bubbled.

I think the ranged autoattack not hitting in melee, but still being used, actually added some pretty great tension to the fight. Instead of simply not doing anything, the boss was constantly doing animations, and you had to watch carefully to see if it was an animation you would need to react to, or one you could completely ignore. Similar to how Phase 1 is, where you need to watch for and ignore the locust summon.

If they want to make Lupi harder, a good way would just be to reduce the cooldown on his other attacks, fix the bubble so it tracks players again, and fix the ranged autoattack so it behaves how it used to behave.

Also, as a Guardian, you can basically still “AFK” “half” the time in melee. Plus if you’re still getting bubbled that frequently after the bubble fix, I would suggest that you probably never soloed Lupi before the change…

For a full party: using the “normal” strategy. Keep fire lit, burst source to almost phase get warmth and then phase, run around houses, kill any aggroed Elementals, rinse and repeat. You won’t wipe if everyone plays well. Thinking about it though, this might actually be somewhat slower than your suicide strategy, and is definitely slower if you do end up wiping or near-wiping at any point.

For low man: run back to the ice wall campfire ooc spot during the blizzard, work on killing necessary elementals on the way back, ooc again, repeat as many times as necessary.

As I understand it (never rigorously tested, so this is basically just a hypothesis), the source won’t spawn new elementals until the specific ‘old’ elemental that spawned in a particular spot is dead. I have come to form this hypothesis because it appears as if untouched elementals after a phase don’t have a new elemental spawn in that spot during the next phase. Of course, I’ve never tried to draw exising elementals far away and then phase the source, which would need to be done in order to try and falsify the hypothesis, and which would also need to be done to answer your question.

Use the LFG tool. Find a group in 5 minutes or less.

Great news!

It’s sad that the fractal became bugged, but it’s great that you guys have acted quickly to mitigate the issue caused by the bug, and the best part about this is that you’re actually communicating with us about it.

Here’s to hoping there’s more timely and direct communication in this manner on other issues.

14s of stealth: http://imgur.com/BprwBya

19s of stealth: http://imgur.com/2UKwiV3

Fractal drop rate research in terms of rares: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2s35nz/fractal_rare_drop_research_potential_problem/

The amount of rares is decent, but not really that good IMO. Compare it to what you can get in a world boss train in the same period of time, and it’s really underwhelming especially when comparing difficulties and the fact most of the world boss train can actually be spent AFK instead of playing the game.

Tentonhammr.7849:

Do any of you guys use OBS to record videos? If so, what settings do you use? Just did a quick clip for a discussion in another thread and realized the quality looks like kitten. Resolution down-scaling is set to none (1920×1080) and upped the quality balance to 10 in Encoding and didn’t really do much.

I use it for both recording and streaming.

My recording settings are:

Encoding
NVENC
Quality Balance 10
Bitrate: 20,000
CBR disabled

Video
Base resolution: 2560×1600 (downscale factor 1.5 w/ bi-linear filter, 60 FPS)

Advanced
NVENC preset: bluray disk
Encoding profile: high
Use CFR=True

You do really need to tweak the default settings a good bit to get good quality recorded video from OBS. But it’s doable. Consult the OBS documentation.

Please stop necroposting.

Jerus.4350:

Honestly I have no idea why we ever do 38, but we generally do it when we have someone who can’t do 40’s yet because of AR and is still leveling up their reward level.

Looking at the list I still need to do a lot of the levels as I simply haven’t done them. Did a 46 the other day and that was actually pretty fun.

37 is the answer. The instability is “No effect, except Mai Trin regenerates an insignificant amount of health in the cannon phase”.

Very impressive.

I hope lupi gets fixed, though.

The bubble used to track its target. It seems to no longer do that at all, and is instead simply used on the location the person was when they triggered it, which means it misses nearly every single time, instead of how it was before, where it literally hit its target every single time.

Rising Dusk, I know it was introduced in an earlier patch, but I think that Lupi’s bubble attack should be on that list as well. His phase 3 AoE attack seems to function more accurately as well (same time as bubble broke), so it might be a good idea to note that so they don’t change it back (although I wouldn’t necessarily mind them changing it back, either — it’s a slight difficulty increase, after all). Unless you’ve already sent them something about this.

Your PRL is stored in a database somewhere. It ought to be trivially easy to access that PRL value and do something with it upon talking to the merchant. There shouldn’t be any complications here.

Theives are brought primarily for their Interrupts/Defiance Management (the one you missed), DPS, and Stealth. Blinds on trash mobs are also invaluable. They also bring lots of blast finishers.

There are also the obvious niche situations (or more common situations outside of organized runs) where other utility they bring (like extra dodges + condi clear from agility signet) or could bring is pretty valuable.

Andraus.3874:

Is your computer temperature overheating? How is your internet connection? This usually occurs from lag or over heating.

There’s a bug when (sometimes, randomly) after viewing guild history, your whispers are delayed in showing up on your screen.

It’s been around for a very long time.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’ve tried to get pugs to kill the boss with one lava bucket. Hilarious wipes ensue. Nice work, I’m curious how that ele teleport thingy works at the gate near the start.

The second pressure plate?

Literally any teleport will work (Thief SB#5, etc.). You literally just stand anywhere near there (i.e. the gate to the drill room) and target anywhere in the general area near the pressure plate, and you’ll blink up. Easy peasy.

Zenith.7301:

Meleeing mossman on a pug is a very bad idea as is meleeing archdiviner p2/3 at fractal 50 also in a pug. Everything else you can melee.

Because PUGs who apparently cannot melee mossmann or archdiviner are totally capable of meleeing the rampaging ice elemental or dredge powersuit. Makes sense.

Kronos.2560:

I think being able to pick which fractal you get would be really cool, but unless they did a complete overhaul with balancing it would be the same 3 base fractals and boss every single time. I can’t say I enjoy some (cliffside for example) as much as others. But I would personally prefer that fractals didn’t turn into CoF p1 speed runs.

Just do a dynamic balancing of rewards. You could use a bunch of different metrics to help with that, but one of those would be how many people pick a certain fractal. If 90% of players pick Atherblade for the third fractal because it’s laughably easy, and only 2% of players pick Volcanic, Volcanic should have a lot higher reward than Atherblade. You can dynamically rebalance these rewards (lets say, daily) as per a formula as the variables change. You’ll have some volatility at first, but eventually things will settle down pretty nicely, and even people looking for exclusively for efficient runs in terms of rewards/time (which might happen if rewards ever get significantly increased? Who knows.) will have a tough call to make on which fractal to choose.

You could even tie this into the daily system (if people could pick what to choose). Instead of “Daily 1-10 Fractal” you could instead have “Daily Snowblind Fractal”. Heck, one of the draws of the daily could be something like 50% increased reward for that specific fractal.

At the very least, the spawn timings could be changed.

To make it so that it’s not too hard for new players, figure out how long it’ll take some random level 35s to kill a burrow, and compare this with the current between-burrow spawn length (if they think the event is well-scaled to level 35s). If it takes x seconds to kill, any y seconds to spawn the next, the ratio is x/y.

Keep the x/y ratio constant, but adjust it based on burrow kill time. Maybe cap it at the current amount it is for teams that are very slow at killing burrows.

This won’t hurt low level or bad teams. All it will do is allow teams that can kill a burrow in a second to have some less wasted time.

Even better, don’t even keep the ratio constant. For very fast kill times, dramatically decrease the timer until next spawn.

Change your underwater skills to things you’d never in a million years dream of equipping on land. This will “fix” your bug.

Maybe one day in the extremely far and probably nonexistent future, ANET will find a proper way of dealing with on land and underwater skills, perhaps that allows you to change both from the hero panel at any time, and perhaps that also prevents said bug from occurring.

It gives aegis to nearby ally members for a short time after you use the command skill and it strikes the target. The area of effect for aegis is centered on the target that it hits, and is not a very large area so you need to be in or near melee range to actually receive Aegis.

Servers don’t exist anymore guys. New megaserver shards are created literally all the time.

This event just has a (seemingly) absurdly high frequency of bugging. Just buy the trait.

Like every other existing bug that does not relate to the gem store or living story, it has a near-zero probability of ever being fixed. Because of this, it’s probably a waste of your time to report this (and most other) bugs.

Feel free to message me.

My NA account is an Arah Mentor in [Noob], and so is my EU account (should be easy to find either – Zui.####).

I’d be willing to teach you some dungeons on EU.

For the last fight, bring Indomitable Courage (i.e. Stability on F3 activation trait), Shelter, Stand Your Ground, Hallowed Ground, and Wall of Reflection. You’ll be able to provide stability for the whole duration of the fight if you use your stability skills appropriately. Use Wall of Reflection when fighting the Golems, due to the fact they have some projectile attacks.

I would suggest 45005 GS + Mace/Focus for the whole fractal. Sword is also acceptable, but Mace is better in a lot of fractal situations, including this one. Mace provides better multiple target damage (Mace 2 can be pre-cast before nearly all trash fights and it hits 5 targets), Mace 2 and the third strike in the auto chain help keep scholar bonuses up (better than hammer protection, at least in good groups), and versus various hard bosses the block on Mace 3 is fantastic.

Today is Monday. Again. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-is-3-5-people-to-kick-still-in-the-game/page/2#post4821745

Gaile Gray.6029:

Thank you for this info. I’m confused, too!

Let me see if I can find out more about this on Monday. Oh heck, I’ll send an email now… but probably wont’t be able to post until Monday.

Now that we’re two weeks past when you suggested an update would be available, can we please have an update?

Or can we at least get a “we will not be commenting on this matter any further because [insert reason here]”?

People already tried this idea. It flopped.

Just use fillers from your guild and/or friends list. Random followers you don’t really know or ever play with if you’re desperate.

It’d be nice to maybe get a firm ruling on this, as I’m sure there are people out there who are planning to work on / are working on arah p2 current meta records, and there’s a substantial time difference between both methods.

fishball.7204:

Been pugging on my 1k AP alt account in NA and it’s been great, no kicks or anything heck I even joined a zerk ping gear and it was fine lol. Obviously I’ve been avoiding the 5k+ AP groups but yeah I’m not really seeing the toxicity :S. Maybe I’m just lucky.

You’re on NA. People seem to care less about that stuff for most dungeons on NA, or at least take enough time that you can explain why the AP is low before you get kicked. Or maybe you’re just lucky.

On EU, my <1k ap account literally gets instantly booted. I pre-type a message about why my account has low AP so I can send it right after joining, and sometimes I don’t even get that sent before I’m kicked out of the party. I’ve even been kicked from an all welcome AC story pug on EU (and I was level 80 at the time… lol). Maybe I’m just unlucky.

How about an animation library type project for bosses?

Get people to record clear video of each attack a boss has, and just make an edited video with something like the name of the attack and other associated info for it, then some video clips of the attack (ideally from different angles/distances), then info for the next attack, video clips of the next attack, etc.

It’d be more work than screenshots of major attacks, but at the same time it’d be way more useful for people trying to learn boss tells.

Serval.6458:

spoj.9672:

Obviously because theres no fear that lasts as long as deep freeze.

If you really wanted to, you could use 40% condi food and the 30% from Strength traits to get “Fear Me!” to 5.1 seconds at close range, and then up to 6s with runes/giver’s weapons.

Gimping your DPS for a slightly longer CC than deep freeze is silly. Especially if you need to spend a utility skill slot in addition to food/runes/weapons. Deep Freeze is already on something that’s fantastically good anyway.

Rainmaker.7594:

I just leave the group immediately if somebody tries to do this, because they’ll likely want to WoRsploit Lupi too.

Anyway, I think this can be fixed by ANet fixing the position of that bone wall. based on the size, it looks like it should be closer to Belka, near the post where the risen reset when you hide behind it. The other bosses with bone walls have the walls where you can’t just run around it to break it.

What do you mean insta-orb? I’ve always been able to see her launch her orb. Sometimes it goes up so high that you might’ve forgotten about it by time it lands on you though. But I’ve never had it just randomly and instantly pop right on me.

And I also view this as an exploit that shouldn’t be allowed. Some want to pass it off as just disabling her teleport, but by doing that it allows easy positioning to avoid being knocked into the barrels – a major part of the fight.

Projectiles target where they predict players will be at the time of the impact. Careless players very frequently get knocked back, and rush back to Belka. The game estimates that they will be at Belka by the time the projectile would land, and thus you get a projectile that instantly explodes and kills them and anyone else standing at Belka.

Of course, sometimes (rarely) even if you’re close enough that she shouldn’t use the orb, she uses it and it instantly kills you, or similar (rare) assorted bugs with the orb that don’t make any sense at all.

dominik.9721:

And how do you explain that in teamq both teams crash at the same time? Further my friend was “offline” and got 3 crashes , though
Not to mention that a lot of people got also crashes doing their general daily runs with guildies 5/5 so I doubt that there was also an evil person who whispered them for no reason.

TeamQ is easy to explain. If there’s a chat code that crashes anyone who sees it (presumably including the sender), someone on either team must have typed it in map chat, thus crashing everyone.

And I think you’re seriously underestimating the no-life trolls of this game and the internet in general.

Wethospu.6437:

So how does this bugging actually work? If it happens very easily then there is no point disallowing it.

That “exact same thing” argument could be used for bugging lots of bosses. The way I see it, more stuff there is going on, more chances to show some skilled gameplay.

You run past the bone wall that’s near the ‘entrance’ to her area. When it breaks, she becomes locked at her first teleport spot and all the pots reset. You will go out of combat as you run back in (if not suffering from burning). You can repeat this to get out of combat and regenerate health during the fight, without Belka’s health resetting.

It’s very easy to not bug her. Bugging is a deliberate choice.

It’s perfectly acceptable IMO. All it does it make the boss a bit faster. As for low-man record runs, you’d have to check gw2dungeons solo ruleset for solos and (I think) duos; for trios (I think) and up, it’d just be the regular restricted or unrestricted rulesets used, AFAIK.

You can still easily solo her without doing it. It’s not even really harder, just longer and more tedious.

On a Warrior, for example, you just hide behind the objects when you get low and use your condition clear. Then you stand there and regen life, being aware of her teleport order and moving if she’s going to teleport somewhere that will hit you (or just not going totally afk and reactively moving… whatever). When you’re back at nearly full life, go out and engage her, and watch where you stand and where you might get knocked back to.

On a PW thief solo, you could just save your F1 for when she teleports. Don’t stand in obviously stupid places.

Et cetera.

Or, you could range her and make it even easier, albeit at the cost of making it even slower still.

Literally, it’s the exact same thing. Just longer (a lot longer for some classes) and much more tedious because she moves and lots of pots ignite.

Very related to Fractals & Dungeons.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-is-3-5-people-to-kick-still-in-the-game/first#post4800637

I wonder if we’re ever going to get any kind of straight talk about the kick threshold change that appeared in the patch notes but never put in the game, and then stealth removed from the patch notes.

Or am I just crazy for expecting such basic communication?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Thank you for this info. I’m confused, too!

Let me see if I can find out more about this on Monday. Oh heck, I’ll send an email now… but probably wont’t be able to post until Monday.

Any official updates, now that we’re one week after the Monday you thought you could update us on?

I’m obviously not in the business of approving records, but it seems to me that streamed video with a known time it was streamed, but with no f11 is about the same as prerecorded video with f11, but with no known time it was recorded.

Obviously, someone could record a past meta record run with no f11 and then stream the recorded video as if it were live, but it’d be just about as easy to photoshop an f11 on a prerecorded video, so this comes down to the ‘trust’ aspect of records IMO, and there’s really no reason not to trust this.

It’s supposed to damage one target, and heal 5 nearby targets. Working as intended, although I do agree the tooltip could be slightly more clear.

Minigrump.4961:

weird question here. about 3 days ago my group of friends (people that rarely do PvE content) did a level 1 fractal for the daily. When we got the grawl fractal, and got to the shaman, the shaman bugged and only did the bubble phase once. anyone know why this happened?

Someone probably applied Chill to him. The bubble skill has a cool down, and if you have good DPS and perma chill, you can have him only bubble once even at 49/50. Should be much easier at level 1 due to the lower health pool.

Wethospu.6437:

I was thinking of making images like this for every fractal. What do you guys think?

I also updated Snowblind guide: http://gw2dungeons.net/SNOW. Please let me know any tips and tricks which might be missing!

That’s fantastic.

I would suggest numbering or labeling the camp fires around the source, or at least differentiating the northmost fire somehow, so that it’s easier to specify or otherwise more apparent that’s the fire most everyone regroups at.

dlonie.6547:

frifox.5283:

Arah p2, EU, “experienced only”, waiting for pugs to make the trash run…
- http://i.imgur.com/HZCLMsd.jpg

Oh man, if they had that much trouble with the spider run…how’d it go on the way to Brie?

My guess? “Get out of combat! I fell down in the wrong place during the boat skip!”

dlonie.6547:

What are those rocks, btw? Never saw that before.

It’s a Guardian skill, silly

PM sent.

khani.4786:

Zephyra.4709:

It’s still been 2/5 for me when someone requests a kick. Is it supposed to be 3/5? Meh.

I was wondering this too…how are people seeing 3/5 to kick someone. It has always been 2/5 for a kick.

In official patch notes, ANET said they changed it to majority required to kick, with the example of ‘now takes 3 to kick in a 5 man party’.

Then they removed that from the official patch notes, without so much as a word.

The actual kick threshold never changed.

So some people read the notes, and believed them. Eventually, these people are discovering the notes lied. Some of them are even going back and being like “HUH? THIS WAS IN THE NOTES! I KNOW IT WAS THERE!” and being very confused when they can’t find it in the notes, nor any mention of anything like it there. And some people read the notes after ANET changed them, and are confused about people who think/thought it was changed.

And the two groups of people when discussing the kick threshold can get very confused and think the other group is crazy if they don’t know what actually occurred.

ANET could have prevented all of this with better communication. Just a single post reply to the original notes saying that [insert change here] was in error (while editing it out of the original notes, but ideally just doing strike-through or something) would have been enough.

I’m bad. So bad: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-is-3-5-people-to-kick-still-in-the-game/first#post4789291

Gaile Gray.6029:

Let me see if I can find out more about this on Monday. Oh heck, I’ll send an email now… but probably wont’t be able to post until Monday.

So, any official updates?

Arietta The Broken.1875:

Just tried it now and it seems like it’s fixed? :|

Did they fix any of the following things about the cannon phase?

1) Camera randomly going into ceiling and killing you

2) AoE circles most unreliable in the entire game

3) Timing from circle drawn to damage impact highly variable (maybe this is actually a “feature”, but it’s a stupid one IMO)

4) Cannon phase gets progressively longer. Definitely a feature, but… making time gates a bit longer for no reason? kitten that kitten.

5) Cannon phase exists. Poorly designed and uninspired time gates suck.

Rising Dusk.2408:

If they have the superheated debuff, then any attack interrupts their heal. If they have no Defiant stacks, then any CC can interrupt the heal regardless of if it has superheated.

This is correct. To add: the heal on the non-superheated powersuit cannot be interrupted by CC if used when it has stability after the ground-pound (which is what gives the stability).