Guild Wars 2

Did you happen to see your combat log to see what ate all that health? It looks to me like you were lagging, and the enemy mesmer had already shattered on you, but it didn’t draw on your screen until after you were downed.

I went to the pond today and spent 15 minutes wandering around it and mapchatting – saw no rifts or rift events, so I have no way to get the initial stabilizer. Do we know if that content has been disabled at this point? (I didn’t realize how long it had been around, if it -is- disabled, I missed it with the chaos of the US election)

I would expect it’s 7 whole days (e.g. 168 hours), and not tied to server reset – and the display is just showing ‘full days’ rounded up (or won’t show the hours until it’s <1 day).

At first I thought you’d just inadvertently answered a question I had – you’d identified the only reason that still exists for guesting – but upon review, it doesn’t support EU<—>NA. My primary guild is on another server (still NA though), and just this week I was trying to figure out why guesting still exists – and I couldn’t find a reason, since you can’t participate in WvW when guesting.

“Guesting allows you to temporarily change your associated world, thus affecting one of the factors affecting which instance you are placed in. It does not allow you to play for a different team in World versus World or to guest from NA to EU or vice versa. Due to the megaserver system, most players will never need to guest. "

Sorry about your inconvenience – if you still have significant time left on those last 24 hours – you might put a request in to support to move you back or remove the restriction just this once.

Edited because I apparently can’t read things I myself quoted from wiki.

At least make it an option for party (and hopefully squad), but this – a thousand times this.

Pifil.5193:

What would the game display if you have one heavy armour skin and 5 light armour skins equipped?

As I understand it – you have a wireframe for each weight class, and the armor skins are designed around that wireframe. When you put on an outfit, it (presumably) changes your character model to the weight class that was used when designing the outfit, and applies the outfit skin.

So, if you wore a heavy armour skin and 5 light armour skins, it would look like one of the 3 following:

• the heavy armor skin looks right and the 5 light armor skins look distorted (heavy mesh)
• the heavy armor skin looks wrong and the 5 light armor skins look right (light mesh)
• everything looks wrong and distorted (medium mesh)

Obviously, it wouldn’t make any sense to load the medium mesh in the above example – but there also isn’t a “right” way to do any of the others – something is always going to be distorted/clipped/misaligned/ugly. It’s not simply a case of clipping issues, you literally could have a warriors platemail chest piece stretched all the way to the ground because it’s applied against a medium armor mesh which has an implicit ‘cape’ (I don’t know how textures are mapped or how misalignment would behave in the engine, it’s more likely it would just be mis-sized and look “wrong” but still be vaguely recognizable as a platemail chest)

Short of being able to select your mesh, and only being able to apply skins of that weight class, there really truly isn’t a good solution to this – that’s basically what they’re giving you with outfits. Now, that said – unless outfits have their own meshes (and I do not know) – they should certainly be available as individual skins for the weight class that they were designed around – however, that would invariably kitten off people who own the outfit and don’t play a character of that weight class, and the only way to fix it would be to make the other 2/3rds of the mesh skins, and then address any potential clipping issues (which they handily avoid with outfits as well)

FWIW the ‘giant head’ at the end of the trailer looks to be this (which indeed is not yet ‘in game’ though there are models):

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Leviathan

I just ran into this problem – and got lucky and was able to fix without a reset – i ran back a distance and tried to engage some oozes through a crack in one of the walls – seemed to somehow trigger the next wall lowering, or managed to move Aurene enough. I may have just gotten lucky, or they may have set a workaround to move Aurene after X minutes of getting stuck – but killing all the extra oozes that had generated was still faster than resetting.

If you’re going to stand on principle in direct contrast to the games mechanisms in place to accommodate what it is you want to do, it’s going to be a longer journey.

You’re right – leather availability is pretty abysmal – and they made way too many things require a lot of it – but the unfortunate solutions to it seem to go against your principles – so, either stick to your guns and enjoy the long ride, or acknowledge that your theoretical 1500 leather from the TP would have zero impact and will go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. I won’t be seeing any news posts from ArenaNet announcing they’re retiring the BLTP simply because Yasi.9065 doesn’t want to support it.

FWIW I can’t imagine how much worse I, as well as the game world at large, would be if everyone just vend’d mats. 15% is steep, but it’s a hell of a lot better than “farm everything you need yourself”.

I believe the April fools “thing” will be a SAB festival going forward – they did SAB, bobblehead and airplane, but brought back SAB last year and it was really well received (and I gather they put a fair amount of effort to bring it back). I don’t know if that was officially announced, but I thought I recalled something about it being recurring now. I suppose you could consider it one of the festivals?

The reason why you cannot preview different weight pieces of armors on a single character at the same time is due to the fundamental incompatibilities. I agree with that – it is NOT worth the effort of trying to make a light chest piece work with a heavy pair of pants – the skeletal frame of the two armor weights are too fundamentally different, and it just won’t work – it’s not a case of “looking a bit odd” – at best it would look like a tumor of cloth or metal, at worst weird clipping and black holes of textures and – just – please let me stop thinking about this. It’s not an option.

That said – while I would certainly personally love armor proliferation – let a thief wear FULL light armor (no mixing), and it would be many hundreds of times simpler to do than trying to fix everything – I cannot fathom the UI/UX hot mess that it would require and would be experienced when someone tries to change a single skin around from their base weight class to a different one. “All piece of armor must be of the same weight class” errors galore, icons next to equipped skins to indicate their weight class, or selecting the weight class at the top before reskinning all pieces of equipment. Cats and dogs living together – anarchy!

Honestly I just want a long time player who is insanely rich to get one of these and unlock as much of it as possible with gold/tp/achieves, and show me just how short that list can get.

Yeah, I don’t disagree there – the intention isn’t to allow someone to shortcut content on alts. This would be more to take anything that is “account bound, soulbound on equip” to simply remain “accountbound”. If there are concerns about some impact to the economy because suddenly people aren’t buying a new set of exotic gear for their alts, or this somehow devalues ascended gear, then making a way to reset something that was soulbound (due to equipping) to accountbound for a nominal fee.

I think the complaint is that he cannot delete this character slot because then he loses access to the precursor – so he’s stuck with this character until he’s able to complete all the other aspects of his legendary prerequisites and craft it.

While I agree that removing soulbound has serious potential repercussions, I would be in support of having a mechanism to either convert soulbound to accountbound (honestly, they should’ve gotten rid of soulbound ages ago), or if that’s unacceptable for some reason – have a mechanism to transfer soulbinding to another character. Make either of the above processes something that has a small fee in gold or mats, and you’re not impacting the economy in a negative fashion (e.g. you’re not juggling gear between characters when each should just have their own set).

I once crafted a celestial greatsword on my thief, only to find it was already soulbound to my thief. She couldn’t even wield a greatsword. I put it in my bank and contacted support, never heard anything back, and eventually just deleted it when I needed the slot. It was only exotic, it wasn’t wupwup, so it was less stressful to just be done with the whole situation than keep seeing it. A precursor would be another thing entirely.

PI doesn’t encourage braindead spamming – it rewards thieves attacking braindead skill spammers and thereby dis-incentivizes braindead spamming. If two braindead spammers come against one another, and one is a thief spamming interrupts, then yes – they’re going to win – and their enemy is going to think twice about finger jamming all their skills and L2P.

IMO PI was fine as is – tho I haven’t run with it in ~2-3 months, so if there was a tweak I missed… my opinion is invalid.

So, to summarize:
1) yes, you can use on a reskinned backpiece (since it only cares about the base item)
2) yes, you will have to reskin again afterwards (spend those transmutation charges!) since it’s effectively resetting it to the base item.

Wiki unfortunately doesn’t say – I’m curious as well – but in reading the wiki , it brought up another question: does it only reset equipped items, or one of each type in the inventory of the character? I’d hate for someone to lose infusions in an item sitting in their inventory, not equipped, that they had no idea it was going to affect.

Consume to emit a pulse of magic that resets one of each type of Blood Ruby gear in your inventory. This will destroy any infusions socketed in those items.

I think it makes sense in concept that you’re not going to push someone who’s on the ground out of the way unless you’re also lifting them – friction and gravity and all – and the skills that perform launch seem to mostly match this, e.g. an upswing from a hammer, etc. Mesmer is the only class that doesn’t appear to have access to it in some form, though you may need to choose a specific elite or weapon to get it on most classes. I’m not sure thiefs elite is viable for this purpose either, as it looks to have a launch of 0. So, 7/9 have it

Revenants and Engineers seem like the most likely candidates to be using it with any regularity, as Revs will have it as their elite w/ herald, and engineers have access to it like up to 6 ways.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Launch

As a thief, I find the easiest way to get someone downed off point is to simply defeat them. I will agree though, that I get jealous when I see a downed player get knocked off point.

If they release new stuff you can get with candy corn, its price will likely go up. If they don’t, then its price will plateau once halloween starts (read: market starts getting flooded) and then go down until the end / after the halloween events.

If you have the inventory space, sit on it so you don’t have to buy it back for more than you sold it – if you don’t, or need the money – sell.

FWIW I’m sure they’ll add something new that uses candy corn, but it may not be something enough people desire to combat with the sudden influx of supply that halloween will bring.

Edit: seriously? The contraction for do not + comma + its = censored? That’s an overly aggressive regex /filter if ever I saw one.

Absolutely agree – I have full control over what my character looks like, but my name is entirely dependent on what names have already been taken – too often I get through character creation and then get frustrated 20 names deep and type something silly.

Locking in the name during character creation (they already lock names for 24 hours after deletion, so presumably they can lock a name during the creation process itself, perhaps with a timeout). Then I can choose my face/hair/etc. to match what name I’ve settled on, rather than choosing my look and finding an open name to match.

Maybe include that it’s already soulbound in the prompt? I can’t say I’ve ever had this problem, though.

I have had the problem of my inventory rearranging itself when I swap weapons – particularly if I have no overlap between my 2 weaponsets, and swap in a single 2 handed weapon for a main and offhand, one of them always ends up in my “churn” inventory rather than down in my fancy bag for gear. I’d love the ability to earmark inventory slots for “gear swapping” and it just be out of the rotation, but any gear I swap out (not simply unequip) ends up there.

GW1 sort of had this for weapons, because the 4 weapons you could swap between were separate from your inventory (if memory serves, it’s been a while). I guess they really just had 4 gear loads instead of 2, but it was enough that I didn’t find myself swapping weapons from inventory nearly as much.

Perhaps I’m just OCD about my inventory though, I like to know the weapons are in a certain place because that’s where I look to for swapping, I don’t want to use the search to find my weapon when running between bosses/content.

In any case, the concept of swapped gear going to specific ‘locked’ inventory slots (especially if those slots were blocked from merch/salvage) would effectively solve your issue as well. Yes, before someone says, I use invisible bags and I am aware of the fractal boxes – neither solves my issue of the occasional pistol or dagger landing in my backpack.

I can appreciate they won’t want to do it because of the metabolic primer, but it would be nice to allow the food to stack up to twice its base duration – e.g. pop two foods at 30 mins and get an hour, but additional food beyond that doesn’t raise it past 60 mins.

They won’t, though – and for good reason – good luck designing a UI for this that doesn’t have people enraged because they popped two foods, saw it stacked, and guzzled a stack of foods before realizing it wasn’t doing anything else for them. I guess they could use the same mechanics as the fractal potions e.g. “can stack up to X times”, but that’s really over complicating things.

I feel your pain, the timer suggestion is probably best if you -need- to have your food up.

AP is not a competition.

The leaderboard, by its very nature, makes it competitive.

Solution: have another column on the leaderboard for ‘normalized’ AP (only counts AP that’s achievable by any player today and on into the future, e.g. doesn’t include the historical stuff, nor temporary stuff like the beta PVP map achieves going on now) – sort by that per default. This of course becomes tricky if/as they “retire” stuff that wasn’t in any way flagged as temporary, and normalized AP becomes this awkward sliding scale that fluctuates (but would at least do so consistently – if yours goes down, everyone elses did too).

People who are in the top w/ historical achievements are still competing, new players know the actual target they can reach to compete. Everyone’s happy, no additional work beyond calculating/tracking the normalized AP, and people who have historical achievements still get ‘awarded’ for that by being on the leaderboard.

Alternatively: just get rid of the leaderboard.

nickhimself.2739:

While I don’t have kids, I’m in a similar boat. I work all day, and after I come home and my wife and I get dinner cooked, finished, cleaned up, and then we go about our evening bedtime routine of showering and whatnot, we each get to play from 8pm – 10:30pm. That mostly means I have enough time for dailies and not much else. The weekend at least allows us to play the entire day, so if I’m so focused I can grind out an entire WvW reward track… but still, the Spirit Shard return is pretty dismal.

I really envy you guys who’ve been playing for so long because this isn’t a problem for you.

FWIW – I started doing an unranked game of PVP for my dailies, and win or lose that’ll cover at least 1 if not 2 of my 3 daily items (sometimes all 3 if I win) – add the queue time and that’s ~15 minutes of gameplay, plus another 15 for looting home instance, guild, and grabbing a quick vista or similar – and my dailies are done in 30 minutes. It lets me get my daily then work on doing something productive, like getting mastery points. Unranked isn’t toxic like ranked (or if someone toxic is there, kindly remind them it’s unranked), and it can be pretty fun – plus, PVP reward tracks! (the only rewards other than WvW I can get now that I’m mastery-point blocked)

Protip for HoT owners – jump to bloodstone fen and do magic gathering while queued, you can get 2 of the 4 dailies in < 2minutes (aerial skills + magic gathering), just make sure you’re on solid ground when you map into PVP or you’ll plummet to your death when you come back.

Keep in mind that HoT at launch was a little more dangerous for solo/roaming than it is now – they toned things down (I don’t know if it was numbers, distribution, or toughness of mobs) – so if that was what turned you off, it’s not a problem in Maguuma anymore – but it sounds like this “metal” area might be revisiting that level of danger.

I’d encourage you to try revisiting Verdant Brink et. all, preferably on a busy night or weekend so you can see some of the meta progress and have people to work with to get masteries / hero points. The specializations also definitely improve your survivability, but you need to get those over time of course (I’m still shy some masteries because I’ve not grinded hard on the adventures)

The points awarded for the bell should either be static, static + bonus for other held points, or should scale regardless of bell history.

I do agree though that I could see a problem with a protracted team fight allowing 2 bell caps in a row, and if they’re sticking with the fixed timer there’s really nothing to be done about it. You’re either stuck having some cutoff where it resets, or you’ll have this problem.

That said, if you’re fighting for the bell for 3 whole minutes – it seems (likely) that no points have changed hands in 3 minutes, and someone’s already got a pretty hefty lead – seems like too much bunkering and not enough cap/decap.

What about reducing bell cap value over time, rather than increasing? First cap is 75, then 50, then 25 – total of 150 points (same as a lord kill) but the motivation once you’re down to 25 is to prevent the other team from getting 75 (or 50)? You still run into the potential problem of a double cap at the start giving a team 125, but at that point they’ve basically exhausted their points and now they need to focus on caps and still have motivation to prevent the enemy from ringing the bell.

(FWIW I’ve got salty sea dog and I’ve never even seen the 4th bell until after the match is over, and I think starting at 100 would be a bit obscene)

The addition of might stacks makes having p/p as one of your weaponsets more viable than before. All weaponsets are viable for PVE content, though, tbh. I tend to use p/p as a set in fractals as well, but for raids you’re not going to want to go p/p.

So, it’s viable – but it wouldn’t be the first ascended weapon I crafted, if you catch me

Your confusion may be because LS2 episodic content was basically coming every ~2 weeks, so you needed to be logging on fairly consistently – it sounds like you missed the first period of 2 weeks, and maybe stopped before the last episode so missed that one as well.

Never heard of it such a thing – perhaps it was a misinterpretation of the fact that crafting speed is increased as you craft more of the same things (e.g. if you refine something 100 times, it doesn’t take as long as it would take cumulatively to refine 1 of them 100 times, it ‘speeds up’ as time goes on).

Don’t forget to include guild crafting bonus in addition to the ‘usual’ consumables e.g. heroic / item booster – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Enhancement:_Critical_Crafting

The problem is that there are lots of situations around everything that’s going on – just because you capped a point with 1-2 other teammates doesn’t mean you didn’t actually do it alone and they just happened to show up for the stomp/decap/cap. Tracking all that is certainly possible, but figuring out how it should all impact scores is dreadfully complex.

You can’t do it by raw numbers though, because if you just keep spamming aoe damage to a bunch of enemies but never get anyone downed and are contributing nothing to the overall conquest game mode, you shouldn’t be rewarded. Then again, if you’re aggravating 3 enemy players over one point, and keeping them busy, your team should be getting easy caps on the other points – so you are contributing.

It’s all so situational, I pity the poor developer who has to try to balance out personal score.

I think donating straight from inventory will cause some frustrations – normally when you initiate actions in your inventory, it’s for your direct benefit – you use/equip something, deposit it on your bank, or are selling it on the TP (which has further prompts to confirm this).

Donating to a guild treasuring is a one and done operation, you can’t revert that, you can’t remove items – this is part of why you’re able to donate account bound items, because nobody can remove from the guild treasury, it can only be spent on guild upgrades.

While I agree that it would be good to promote donating to guild upgrades (it’d be nice to make some way to reward this, but it’s basically too late at this point) you don’t want to do so at the risk of frustrating your members. The only way to ‘protect’ oneself from this if someone was stocking up on something the guild needed, for their own purposes, would be to rep another guild or not rep a guild at all, which loses out on any guild specific benefits (wp discount etc.) as well as is just unfortunate in general.

I’m totally in support of having an option in the guild menu to at least see what’s needed by the treasury (even if you can’t donate from there, though that would be nice) – and indicating the items in your inventory that match that (essentially, what you get when you talk to the treasurer in GH). What would also be nice (though would probably be too computationally taxing to warrant implementing, thinking from a server load / refreshing cache standpoint) would be to indicate within your inventory directly if an item is needed by the guild.

Let the masses farm resource nodes from a mobile app, we’ll lose our jobs in no time!

If it’s a HoT legendary, afaik those don’t drop from the forge – so that’s all about the collection.

Otherwise – you need to make a decision – do you:
1) have the gold, and want the legendary: buy it
2) not have the gold, and are fine losing all your gold: try to forge it
3) not have the gold, and not fine losing your gold:
3a) farm to get the gold, then do #1
3b) do the collection to get the precursor (but use tools like the gw2 wiki and gw2efficiency to determine if it’s actually cheaper to go through that process rather than simply sell the mats and buy outright).

If you don’t have the gold, the legendary journey may be a good focus/distraction while working towards getting your precursor, but doing that journey won’t be anywhere near the most gold-per-hour you can put your time into – though, hopefully, it will be a fun process – which is apparently the point of the game, someone once explained to me, many farms ago.

Thanks – I know how unpleasant everyones day has been, and I can imagine it will be longer yet.

One thing I did want to mention is that if something was on sale and was purchased during those two hours, someone might not have enough gems to purchase it again and await the refund – which could cause some negative feelings that they need to “buy moar gems!” in order to get in on the sale. Depending on how much caffeine is still in the proverbial pot, extending the sales from today into another day might be appreciated. (I’m actually a bit confused why this would happen, since anything that was on sale when the new client dropped should presumably still be on sale for the rest of the day, I thought gemstore rotation happened midday at the same time as patches, and did not to coincide with for e.g. daily resets)

Forums suggestion, apologies to mods if this is the wrong area to put it – but someone who was annoying could waste both our times arguing that it’s a sufficiently large UI grievance as to be called a bug. I’m not that someone – shove this where it best fits.

Sometimes there are longstanding issues/threads, or many threads merged – so you’ll have a thread with 20, 30, or even 60+ pages. The thread has the icon to indicate that an ArenaNet employee has given an official response – but there’s no easy way to ‘peruse’ through those official responses.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Legendary-weapons-6/first is a simple example of a charged topic that has two such responses on the frontpage (okay, one response and one post author), and may contain other official responses throughout. Probably does.

Being able to go through these, and potentially having links to the forum pages where these responses are, would be very helpful for someone joining the conversation late (who, in all likelihood, is going to read the first official post then hit reply). Giving them a way to read all official responses may improve some of the conversations, as many people won’t read all X pages.

If it was reflecting, and a guardian skill, then it was https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wall_of_Reflection. If it was just absorbing them, and/or it was moving with the Guardian – then it was what others have said.

I particularly liked the earlier comment “btw guardians don’t have reflects at least not using reflect wall.” when the utility skill is literally called wall of reflection.

Have you ever tried to block smoke? Ever tried to dodge a bullet (let alone one fired from somewhere within a cloud of smoke)?

(throwing out options here, not saying it’s the best) Alternatively – if pistols are a close range precision instrument (taking away our +150 range trait was so cruel, it didn’t even make it match the range of many base attacks!) – maybe they ignore pets/summons (players?) if not targeted, and hit the enemy that you actually have targeted? Certainly Ricochet or piercing would be preferable, but anything is preferable to a ranger or necro just cycling their pets out as meat shields on tight spaces and choke points where I can’t actually change my angle of attack.

I’m 100% behind the autoattack being tweaked though (thematically, especially for two pistols, though that would be a change to the dual wield mechanic they’re unlikely to entertain), it’s only barely more damage to a single target than the SB trick shot, at 3/4ths the ROF, and everyone knows that plinking a single target with the SB is only useful to fill in the time when you can’t weapon swap or spend initiative.

I had another thief in PVP last night who had a single main-hand weapon equipped (dagger or sword, don’t recall) and I couldn’t tell if he was a complete noob or a troll, but it did get me thinking that with how limited that makes you, they should really make the single-wield #3 have some powerful effects, just to offset the limitations (or change the stealth attack). Might be interesting, anyway.

I will say, AP aside – the mastery points rewarded from the achievements are what was confusing to me – I assumed it was a hat-tip / bonus for participating in the beta, giving a few bonus mastery points from trying stuff out – but looking here and poking around in game, I gather that those are/were only for the beta characters, to advance their mastery?

That’s something I can’t trivially test, though – MPs are account wide, but they don’t exist outside of HoT… so I can’t verify it like one can with AP.

I’ve finally convinced my wife to replay the personal stories (we’d beaten it once, but she doesn’t like to group beyond w/ me), and we’ve been having fun with it – but after fighting through numerous bugs in these later missions (I fell down next to the stairs in “A Grisly Shipment”, and Maeva got stuck in the floor well above the hold after we reloaded – though thankfully she still gave out charges, then we got stuck in an endless painful battle because we both disabled the mines in “Armor Guard”), I expect we’ll reach victory or death this weekend. I really hope I don’t need to tell her “sorry, we can’t finish this – even though it doesn’t require a party anymore, the anvils and the shields don’t work, so it’s literally impossible to complete”

I won’t pretend to know why the anvils and shields could suddenly become uninteractive, but other than Maeva getting stuck in the floor – none of these bugs seem like they should be remotely involved to run down. The mines can just be interactive for the mission leader/owner (like every other interaction has been, ever) – the seam in the wall of the stairs is an atrociously simple clipping issue with the map.

Please, fix the final mission soon, we’re actually looking forward to tackling it w/ just 2 people!

If this weekend has shown them anything, it’s that they shouldn’t be waiting until the xpac to release this kind of change. This weekend they did a double XP and massive sale on new accounts, and there were tons of account activation issues, preventing the new players from joining their friends who begged them to come, and enjoying the double XP. Those that did get in, were stumbling through this ‘new’ unlocking system that’s been in place these 9 months. Except norn characters, who couldn’t escape the lvl 1 instance unless they knew what guesting was and how to do it (a retired feature that’s still available) because a very recent change to the event was broken and not triggering, preventing progression.

The cardinal rule in software development is to NOT make any changes right before a big demo or influx of users – get the changes tested and live a few weeks beforehand, iron out the bugs, reduce the negative impact on players. We’re all alt-o-holics, make some changes and we’ll give them a run through. Many of us have been here from the beginning, and have played characters through the various incarnations. Some of us might even be willing to not pop a insta-lvl-20 birthday scroll (though probably fewer than you’d like!).

Lastly, thank you for changing this – how it is now, as you’ve seen, is widely disliked. There’s no logic to why a specific trait is unlocked from a specific event. I understand trying to get more players out and about, and I think the new dailies do that better (though some certainly dislike them) – keep this kind of “active server” stuff set to bonus things that people want to do, not one-time unlocks that they feel they have to do.

( I actually think the leveling progression itself was badly changed as well, even before you add traits into the mix- it’s become much too slow and stilted, I don’t feel heroic before at least lvl ~20, so it’s a good thing I have birthday scrolls! )

While I understand why they have crafting professions tied to individual characters (from a lore/rp standpoint, they’re different people) – a change like this would be nice because it would also prevent minor little things like my thief creating a celestial greatsword for an alt, a weapon my thief cannot even equip, but is nonetheless soulbound to her.

I’m still trying to figure that one out.

I can see how this fight would be frustrating for people who aren’t used to active defenses – many of the posters (and myself) are thieves, and we’re used to moving our camera and managing our dodges.

One thing I will say, is I was doing this in a 2 man team the first time – and I managed a bad combo of dodging next to an exploding plant, and thrown back into the claws, and went into downed state – and suddenly the boss was much easier. The dragon only focuses on the instance owner, so my teammate was able to run around and just ignore the deadly area around my corpse, while the dragon continued to blindly claw at my shredded body.

Up until this point I had thought the dragon was just very aggressive, but once I was down, I realized it was just targeting me – which is actually really frustrating from a gameplay standpoint. When the best thing for me to do for my team is run into the corner and die, and stay dead, the fight is clearly broken. Once I’d spotted the mechanics about the fire and explained them to my teammate (I certainly had the time to figure it out!) I managed to use a revive orb and have it end just after a swipe, and I was back in the fight and we were able to finish things out together quickly.

I’m not sure what the decree is at GWHQ as far as whether LS chapters should be solo-able the first time through, but I bet most playtesters are either on the higher end of skill (from playing the game day in), designed the mechanics themselves, had them explained to them before playing, or are playing in small teams. This encounter didn’t seem to scale up in difficulty for teams, but IMO was clearly designed for a team. Soloable, yes, but designed for a team to complete.

ArenaNet: Please don’t make me lie dead in a corner for a few minutes because it’s the best decision for my small team.