Guild Wars 2

My guild formed in the heady days of beta when guesting was assumed (yeah I know) to be one of those mechanics that would be there come release. Because of this assumption we quite confidently created a trans-Atlantic guild with one half on a North American server and the other half on a European one in the sure and certain knowledge that we would be able to meet up and enjoy dungeons and other content together come launch.

We’re still waiting.

Is there a light at the end of this tunnel? Because it’s been quite a while and we’ve seen and heard nothing.

I’m pretty convinced that the Swamp is bugged, in comparison with other fractals it is ridiculously difficult to complete.

A gear treadmill game like WoW manages to turn me off really quickly because as a casual player it takes me a while to get anywhere close to “best in slot” items … more often than not I’m one or two levels down from that. What GW2 gives me is a choice, it takes very little effort to be at the same gear level as anyone else my level; the only grind involved is for cosmetics, and I am quite happy to grind away for cosmetics because I can take my sweet time about getting them and the fact that I don’t have them doesn’t disadvantage either myself or anyone else in terms of PvE content.

I have the “Defend Claw island” permanently stuck in the UI for my alts, it would be very nice to be able to hide it, since I am never going to voluntarily play beyond that point on anything other than my main.

I do hope that completion of the first won’t be required if there is another Personal Story in future expansions, that would be incredibly disheartening.

I don’t play W3 because I don’t enjoy PvP in any form. It’s a shame that because of that I won’t ever see a monthly reward or earn a legendary but I realise that it’s my choice.

When the LFG tool was first introduced to WoW it was great, it actually served to bring the community of the server together as people got to know each other on dungeon runs. Reputations were won and lost by how you conducted yourself, and some lasting friendships were made. Unfortunately the tool then went cross-server and although it became faster to get a group, it ended up being a group with zero accountability, where you would never meet the same person twice in a row and reputation meant nothing. At that point it became nothing more than a numbers game as people stopped enjoying the instances and instead just raced through them to get the tokens at the end. If there was a button at the beginning that you could push to get the rewards then it would have been pushed more often than not.

TL;DR: a server-specific LFG tool is a good thing that helps the dungeon community grow; a cross-server LFG tool will destroy it.

While I do agree with all of your points, I’m afraid that you’ve set yourself up for a fall by claiming to speak for the community. Now watch as this otherwise great thread gets derailed.

For myself, yes I’d love to see new skins rather than new stats, actually I’m rather more likely to grind for a really nice skin than I am just to get an extra couple of points here and there.

Nostromo.4126:

If they just added a heal skill or re-summon outside combat with no CD, I’d be happy a happy camper.

I have recently discovered (recently because I’ve only recently started using minions) that Well of Blood heals your minions and is, generally, rather more useful (not to mention reliable) than the Blood Fiend.

Something I am seeing day in and day out on Piken Square is events at all levels of the game in a stalled state. Unfortunately these events remain broken for days and only get a jump-start when we get a game update. Many of these events are stalled in the same spots they were during headstart so this isn’t a new problem, though how consistent it is I couldn’t say as I only bump into the lower-level ones occasionally.

It would be particularly nice if we could have a more dynamic response to /bug reports so that blocked events could get a jump-start. For example, the Infinity Coil on Piken Square has been inaccessible for several days now because the event chain is stalled at its beginning. While this clearly needs a long-term response, it would be nice to have a temporary response team to move stalled events on so that the chain can advance and the Infinity Coil can be opened again.

Officer of The Grey (Tarnished Coast & Piken Square)

Issues that are affecting our guild right now:

Guesting – We formed during Beta and it seemed at that point that guesting would be an intrinsic part of the game. Do please get a wiggle on and implement this sooner rather than later. This is something that crops up every day in our guild.

Last on – It is demoralising to see a large number of guild members offline and only a handful on. For all we know some of the people on our roster haven’t played the game past launch. All we as officers can know is that people haven’t been online when we’ve been on so we can’t be at all certain who is no longer playing and who is just playing during “dark” hours.

Representing or not – It would be nice if people not currently representing just didn’t appear on the guild roster. Although ours is a social guild, the effect that having multiple members flagged as not representing has a negative (and potentially exponential) effect on the morale of our active members. We don’t want to get shirty about non-representation but the current visibility means that we are having to in order to fend off further disintegration.

My guild have got quite used to me bad-mouthing Logan at every opportunity in dungeons, which made it all the sweeter for them when he suddenly became competent in the Citadel of Flame story and I was forced to acknowledge this but then they are all extremely cruel people.

RakaNishoo.6071:

2) Boss fight, extramally easy. Boss was down to 1/2 hp in the matter of seconds and was constantly under CC (I was playing alone, npcs did the CC). Suddenly the cutscene. Me and most of the NPC except 2, dissapear. One of the NPCs is shouting “Oh no, we can’t beat the boss, it is too hard”. Then the npc is standing in front of the boss. Boss hits it. After a while, another NPC breaks in and says: “Leave her alone”. And stands still. After several seconds, it shoots from pistol. Boss turns and approaches the NPC. Cutscene is over, Boss stands in 1 place, 2 NPC from cutscene in 2 other places. Me and rest of NPCs kill the boss in few secons. Then I saw this scene from screenshot. Sad music. And the txt: “Oh poor sam.” I guess he was supposed to die? But from what if the boss was no threat at all? And why we didn’t rez him? I was rezzing npcs all along the way… and during the boss fight, but not now?

This was, indeed, utterly ridiculous. I just can’t think of a means of fixing it, at least certain other deaths make some sort of sense … this was so poorly implemented that I was too angry at how little sense it made to feel anything at all for the NPC.

I was so excited at the start of this, and excitement about personal story in latter levels is rare as chicken lips for me. Finally! A chance to drive one of the amazing charr tanks I’ve seen in the Black Citadel and in the Gear warband’s “secret-ish” base. But no, what I get is just another static cannon and, as if that wasn’t disappointing enough, it’s a static cannon (dressed like an armoured car) that kicks me out if I change its aim by more than 6 degrees!

Much as I hate to say this (no, really, you have no idea) but WoW implemented the whole tank thing so much better in the Flame Leviathan encounter of Icecrown. Come on! GW2’s mechanics generally blow WoW out of the water, but when it comes to vehicles for some reason the ball is dropped.

I very much enjoyed all of the orders up to Claw island, some very fine writing there and missions that reflected the different “temperaments” of the orders.

Post Claw Island the quality of writing has dropped, while the glitches have increased … and yes, I’ve complained bitterly about Trahearne elsewhere.

Currently only one of my characters has progressed beyond Claw Island, I see no point in participating in something I think is sub-standard. On the bright side, there’s a lot of other cool stuff in the game to engage with.

There is already a timed jumping puzzle in the game.

Well I must be super-lucky because although some Personal Story episodes have been challenging, I’ve found none that required rez-rushing or friends, and I’ve played several professions through to Claw Island (though only one beyond it). I’m not a particularly skilled player either, I’m just tenacious.

Yeah 75 or so should allow you to do the whole thing in one run if you want to do it that way.

Really wish people would stop playing Charlie-large-potato about this. All games are bugged on release, hell most games have bugs years down the line, it’s a shame but that’s the reality of MMOs. Fortunately all you need to do in this case is Google the episode, which directs you to this thread, on which the workaround
(jumping on top of the door) is clearly written.

I’ll be sticking with GW2, bugs and all.

Kolya.8032:

Side note: turrets seem to track the target closest to them. They also can target destructible objects which seem to have a placeholder in the world even when they are not currently present. Combining the two causes some very frustrating situations where turrets are virtually useless unless utilized at near point blank range, or away form where you would ideally have deployed them, so be aware of the environmental impacts and watch what they are shooting at.

This bug drives me absolutely nuts sometimes, while it is quite situational it’s really frustrating when it happens.

As has been said already, the LFG tool was a fantastic help when it was World-specific; you’d get to know people over time and reputations were won and lost. Then along came cross-server LFG and it all went to pot. Gone were the chatty social runs; in came the rush-through-as-fast-as-you-can runs. if you met someone in an instance run it would be very unusual to ever see them again, you weren’t building relationships; the process became just about grinding points rather than enjoying the game.

I earned the pug.

At the moment I’m only running dungeons in GW2 with guild groups, as time moves on I suspect that I’ll start PUGging again … it’s a great way to meet new friends after all.

I really liked all three, there just wasn’t enough order-specific content before I was shoe-horned into the tremendously unsatisfactory “Pact” and all sense of difference was lost.

The key thing I’ve found about the Guardian is that the class is strong in a static fight and weak in a mobile one. As an Engineer I can (and do) kite with pistol & Shield (or sometimes elixir gun which is less ideal for kiting but I love it so much!) for ages, I’ve accidentally fallen into fights that would have turned my Guardian into a greasy smear but which I’ve walked away from with full health. It’s all situational.

As has already been said, I don’t want more just at the moment; what I want is for what I have to work!

Whenever I see this question asked, I always see the response that the Devs are aware of it and that it is a confirmed bug. However I haven’t yet seen a link to any post where an ArenaNet representative has confirmed this. I think it would be extremely useful to be able to link any such response when posts of this nature crop up in the future (and they will, until the blasted things are fixed) so can anyone know where an official response might be found?

I love using the Elixir Gun and will use that along with my turrets whenever possible. Mind you, I do miss the stat bonuses given by my pistol and shield and I’ll be happy when/if they are ever active while using the kit. For the time being I build up a full 25 stacks of +Condition damage and then it’s on with the backpack and out with the hose!

LegionofOne.7138:

Done all of that. In fact, I completed the entire zone, and I’m still 3 levels below my next mission. On the other hand, I’m also too low to begin grinding away at the adjacent zone. So, stuck.

You aren’t stuck at at all, there are dynamic events to do, gathering, crafting, explore your home city, explore someone else’s home city, go into someone else’s starting zone and look at the renown hearts there.

I have 6 alts, all a higher level than you, of different races and professions; I have had no trouble at all with experience on any of them. I can only assume that there is some aspect of the game that you are ignoring (usually that’s crafting and gathering) without compensating for that elsewhere.

LegionofOne.7138:

The chat system is quite frustrating, with everyone using the same channel in the tiny window provided, messages come and go before they can even be read.

You can resize the chat window and, even if you prefer not to resize it, you can still scroll up an d down.

LegionofOne.7138:

I have zero interst in PVP, so no xp that way. I have to disagree that it’s easy to gain experience through the means you described. I found that stopped around level 8. After that, the returns were too low to advance my toon significantly. The only thing I haven’t resorted to is killing everything in my path, which is equally unappealing.

I think you may have said it when you suggested this isn’t the game for me.

I haven’t done any PvP at all on any of my characters so that doesn’t explain the difference in our experiences. So I can only conclude that either you’re trolling (possible) or you’re missing out something fairly fundamental in the way you’re approaching the game.

Well I agree with exactly two of the OP’s points:

Cayden.4587:

Next is all the stuff to do in WvW besides WvW. There should never have been npc events, skill points, vistas, pois, and jump puzzles in WvW. Even things like quaggin and lightning nodes add something else besides players fighting players. I know that this stuff seemed like a good idea but ANET should have taken a page out of the Planetside book and just made the mists an empty battlefield. This would help with rendering, server load, botters, and people being in wvw taking up queue slots but not fighting.

…

ANET took a page out of the Funcom book in their response to the issues. Locking and Deleting threads about botters and hackers, suspending forum accounts for complaining about bugs, ignoring the real issues while trying to make small indecisive fixes that were meant to keep just enough people happy and believing real fixes were coming, and lastly just ignoring the real issues that needed someone to stand up and say hey we got this and here is the plan and this is when it will be done. All of these mistakes have been made before and no game ever succeeds with them.

As someone who doesn’t do PvP, the only time I have ever been to the battleground was during the Hunger Royale event when I could be certain there would be nobody else about so I could look at some of the PvE content. It would be nice if there could be a giant brick wall built between PvE and PvP, sadly I think it’ll be far too difficult to do now so for the time being those of us who exclusively engage with PvE content will either miss out, or will bugger things ups for the people trying to do PvP.

The second point is probably the most telling. On the whole, although I have criticisms of it, I love this game and it is most certainly the best of its kind on the market and I see no signs of quitting; I just hope that they stop with the “bread and circuses” mentality and get on with fixing those fundamental issues that are hurting the game (bots, gold sellers, stalled/broken events) for the people who like it … and also stop treating customer complaints (ie. the locked bot thread) with the cavalier disdain they appear to have thus far.

I strongly advise that you watch this video:

http://youtu.be/g36woC3LJ8Y

It just isn’t possible to level using the personal story on its own; there is good news though, pretty much everything you do yields experience! So explore, do events, renown hearts, gather ore and wood and vegetables, resurrect people you find on the ground, craft equipment, kill mobs, go do some WvWvW … there are so many things that you can do to gain experience that really if you’re finding yourself grinding you are either not aware of the different avenues open to you … or GW2 isn’t the game for you. I don’t mean this to sound in any way nasty or elitist by the way, GW2 plays in such a different way than other MMOs that people often don’t realise quite how easy it is to level.

Ascalonian Catacombs heavy and medium armour doesn’t clip and is actually better looking than the cultural or other dungeon sets if, like me, you go for “functional” over “death-hedgehog.”

I have discovered a way to make the post-50 Personal Story fun for the one of my characters who made the mistake of going to Claw island. Hopefully, for those still working through it (presumably in the hopes that it won’t turn out to be a massive disappointment) my solution will provide a few moments of joy amidst the tedium.

In every episode where there is combat I make absolutely certain that Trahearne, the Hero of Orr, engages the enemy first single-handed, and dies while I stand off to one side giggling; then I go in single-handed and do the job.

It’s petty I know but it’s all I’ve got.

Very glad to hear that the end loot is rubbish, it makes my decision not to progress the bulk of my characters beyond the Order stage much less problematic.

Most of my characters have never met Trahearne and are still contentedly members of their order … it’s going to stay that way.

This should probably be moved to the bugs forum.

That being said, YES, I get this in a ridiculous proportion of underwater fights … seems to be more frequent with sharks for some reason, hardly ever happens with humanoid targets … maybe that’s just me though. Regardless, it happens when I am comfortably hitting with melee attacks, there is clearly no genuine pathing issue at all.

When it happens on dry land, I can usually tell beforehand that an attack won’t work but give it a go anyway just on the offchance (usually I do this when I can see a clear path but it will take the mob ages to navigate it) that it will; rarely mobs do bug out with invulnerability for no reason but it is rare enough on dry land for it not to be an issue.

Wow LoneWolfie you make that sound like such a legendary undertaking. Truly by digging in the dirt, chopping down trees, and then gambling with the proceeds I will prove my status as one of Tyria’s greatest heroes.

While I don’t mind grinding for things, bringing an RNG into the equation makes any process much less appealing. Give me a target and I’ll strive to achieve it, tell me to go play roulette once a week in the hopes of making it big someday and I’ll tell you to shove it.

I had no idea that PvP would be mandatory in order to acquire a PvE (you can’t use them in PvP can you?) legendary weapon, ah well … no legendary for me. I’d already come to terms with never getting a Monthly achievement or 100% map completion, the legendary thing is a shame but I’ll get over it I’m sure.

Personally I’d prefer it if the two aspects of the game were kept completely distinct from one another; not sure why game developers feel the need to drive people to engage in both. The exact same thing happened in WoW.

Kudos to ArenaNet for obfuscating the damage done to the GS-symbols build by re-ordering the skill order. So many are up in arms about which buttons they are pushing, that they have completely missed what those buttons do.

bartoszq.9540:

So giving that argument, when they out-perform any other support, why should they still be able to do same or even more burst/AoE damage? This was and still is unbalanced, they change only one thing in one weapon…

I agree that Guardian is very strong in support, the notion though that they out-perform other professions in burst/AE is frankly ludicrous, and wasn’t changed at all by this nerf. What has changed is their ability to buff their group with Retaliation and to maintain that boon on themselves beyond that period. It is blindingly obvious that you have never actually played a GS-traited Guardian, though perhaps you’ve been handed your hat by one in PvP and in a burst of pettiness want to see us made impractical in PvE to make up for that.

Malediktus.9250:

Reteliation is very weak anyway in PVE except a few niche uses. I used symbols for group healing. They could have just nerfed the reteliation duration on it, instead of the whole skill.

This is bang on the money.

Frankly if they didn’t want Retaliation up full time all they had to do was take the finishing move component away from Leap of Faith … problem sorted, nothing else needed to change.

Still very much enjoying it for the most part, so many aspects of the game that I love.

Things that make me sad are: bots, post-order personal story, and 7 October.

More good than bad in general and I don’t see myself stopping any time soon unless the bot situation doesn’t get remedied.

Yep, symbol-build PvE-exclusive here, Greatsword is useful when soloing in PvE but not my choice for when in a group. So what this has done is impact my soloing experience (presumably because GS symbols were too op in PvP) and not touched any other part of my game … it just seems petty.

It’s an irritating and pointless change and I am now feeling pretty unenthusiastic about going back to him. Most of my time is spent soloing so a nonsensical nerf to that has really sapped my enjoyment of the profession.

Played it once, not going to bother again. My PS ends at Claw island.

I have no idea why anyone thought it would be a good idea to merge the two, PvE and PvP are like oil and water … they do not mix.

So sad to see yet another game nerfing PvE builds for PvP reasons.

For goodness’ sake split the two! Guardian greatsword used to be quite fun for soloing (though I wouldn’t bother with it in group play) now? Well I’ll give it a go but it’s not looking good, maybe I’ll find another weapon combination that hasn’t been nerfed because it’s somehow super-useful in PvP.

As to the Mesmer, it seems to be well known to everyone but the team doing this “balancing” that the profession is strong in PvP and weak in solo PvE … and yet they too get a nerf.

If there’s a problem in PvP, fix it in PvP; please don’t drag PvE into it.

So what I’m seeing here is legitimate players being given warnings from ArenaNet for reporting botting activity, while the bots themselves are gradually taking over every event-hub in the game with apparent impunity.

This is a beautiful game, it eclipses every other game on the market in pretty much every regard; and yet it is being made gradually more and more unplayable by these packs of bots. All the while we see nothing but empty promises and warnings from ANet.

Well I guess we’ll see come the first expansion how badly the lack of response has hurt the NCSoft revenue stream. Shame really because all it would take is a few humans to at least manage the problem on the ground while the developers come up with a more robust solution.

The above channelled skills (one in pistol main hand, the other elixir gun) seem either to work as one would expect or, quite frequently, to do no damage whatsoever. There is no obvious terrain reason why this should be the case and there is no “obstructed” message, the skills just do no damage at throughout the entirety of their use.

The tooltip states “Creates a bomb when you dodge” but it doesn’t appear to, in all the time I’ve had the ability not once have I seen a bomb appear following a dodge.

I am (reluctantly) playing through the personal story with one of my characters. With the rest, as soon as I see the words “Claw Island” appear that’s when I stop engaging with it. The cultural and order aspects of the personal story are (generally) fantastic (especially the Charr ones) but pretty much as soon as Trahearne is introduced to non-Sylvari characters (who have to put up with him much earlier sadly) it all goes to pot and I start skipping scenes and falling into a “just give me a fight and some loot” mentality which, given the beauty of the early game is a terrible shame.

Well in the past week things have got worse on Piken Square with regard to bots, not better. So whatever ANet is doing, it’s not enough. The thing is while it’s a fine idea to collect data and develop a means of identifying and removing bots automatically, that sort of thing takes a while; in the meantime what we could really use is some warm bodies touring the zones, using the human ability to recognise bots and deal with the things. Just employ some folks on a temporary contract to fill the gaps while you work on your long-term solution. Ideally of course we would have active GMs in each world keeping an eye on things but as that doesn’t seem to be the path you’ve chosen to take, at least give us a temporary human presence to deal with these things.

If you look at the NPCs wandering around the Black Citadel you will notice that their armour is beautifully tail-adapted.

Given that you can see the instanced PoIs from outside the command core, it boggles the mind that people have so much trouble with them.

Horn clipping means I haven’t displayed my helm since character creation, and the later versions just remind me of judoon … and not in a good way. Though the monocle on my engineer looks properly bad-kitten so thankfully I don’t have to wear any of those ridiculous muzzles!

Tail-clipping is a constant irritation for both my heavy and medium charr characters (I didn’t make a light armoured charr specifically because of the tail clipping) with only a few armour types where this isn’t an issue. I find myself glaring jealously at all the NPCs in the Black Citadel who are wandering around with their tail-adapted armour like they own the place.