Guild Wars 2

FenrirSlakt.3692:

digiowl.9620:

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Zalladi.4652:

While they can be very annoying when there are two, they really do add to the realism of a ‘siege’. There should be many things trying to kill you in a siege, and it should really make your character start dancing a little more often.

This!

I felt like one of those action movie protagonists getting chased by lasers.

With the irony being that they didn’t do camera control lock because it would make the game too action-y…

They really need to make up their mind about how action-focused they want the game to be.

What do you mean with camera control lock?

Being able to control the camera without the need to hold a mouse button down constantly.

Someone on Reddit found a setting for it in the EOTM test client. and Peters entered the discussion to state that they considered the option during development, but found that it made the game too action-y for their tastes.

Makes me wonder if the targeting issues some have are a result of that code not being properly disabled in the release client.

Astralporing.1957:

Zalladi.4652:

While they can be very annoying when there are two, they really do add to the realism of a ‘siege’.

Realism may be good in simulations, but too much of it in an entertainment can kill the fun. This is the second case.
Yes, i agree, that with Scarlet having complete aerial superiority, heavy machinery and overwhelming military presence in place (which is not realistic, by the way, but let’s not concentrate on it) most of the rescuers should die within seconds of entering the city (and any zergs should be wiped out from above with aerial barrages within minutes of forming). I’m also sure that noone (or practically noone) would actually want to play the “Omaha beach” scenario where you are one of the frontline grunts bound to die so that the next waves can deploy in slightly better safety.

Best i can tell from the NPC chatter, we are replaying the time right after the cutscene over and over. Meaning that we are not trying to retake or rescue stranded survivors as much as we are trying to help with the initial evacuation and defense.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Zalladi.4652:

While they can be very annoying when there are two, they really do add to the realism of a ‘siege’. There should be many things trying to kill you in a siege, and it should really make your character start dancing a little more often.

This!

I felt like one of those action movie protagonists getting chased by lasers.

With the irony being that they didn’t do camera control lock because it would make the game too action-y…

They really need to make up their mind about how action-focused they want the game to be.

Always lovely when you down a courtier and it pulls in a veteran roamer with two more courtiers in tow. Or perhaps a nearby Nimross or whatever those ettin summoning, DOT field spamming kraits are called (even “better” if it happens to be a veteran). Impressively ANet seems to have managed to crank the annoyance level of the basic ember design to 11 with those kraits.

Ayrilana.1396:

Jeff.4680:

Why is it every patch has to require a zerg to play?

I guess it’s cool for everyone else, but personally I can’t even play this stuff. I’m on a university network, and my university hates zergs. I mean, I can’t even get skills off or talk in chat. Crazy lag. No, it’s not my frame rate.

Really getting nostalgic about Guild Wars 1 instances… :/

I quite sure this has been stated in the thread but I’m going to say it again. This living story does not require zerg play. The zerg mentality is completely player driven. You actually have a much better chance of succeeding if people spread out so the different events do not scale up.

Yes and no. May have taken on a life of its own at this point, but it was sparked by the introduction of the invasions and the champion loot bags. This combination provided a incentive towards zerging to scale the events up so that more champs would spawn and so produce more loot bags.

I fear that the only way ANet can break this mentality is by very overtly make less rewarding to play as part of a zerg. This perhaps by stripping out mob loot and making all loot gains be based on how quickly a event is completed.

Also, they need more achievements that tie directly into the main goal of the LS rather than the side events.

CureForLiving.5360:

I think ANet might need to start rethinking what role dodging plays (and perhaps combos as well, since they’re practically useless in zerg content as well or basically anywhere else) and start to better design the combat style around that.

One would hope so. But i constantly find myself thinking that the game is built from engine up for 5v5 SPVP, and the PVE is a mechanically crude addon because NCSOFT would not ok a MOBA.

Dee Jay.2460:

It’s design like this that drives everyone towards Berserker gear.

What’s the point in stacking survivability when mobs hit you for such ridiculous damage? At least with Berserker’s you can hit them back equally hard.

ANet went heavy handed with their manifesto. The basic attack pattern of mobs is to make everyone have to dodge, so we get to experience the “active combat” they replaced “tank and spank” with. Never mind the whole “no trinity” thing…

DanteZero.9736:

1. Champion molten protectors: normal variations aren’t bad when people organize to pull and kill them outside of their ring of fire, but you can’t do that with the champions because of the defiant stacks.

Perfect storm of unintended interactions between mob design and event scaling that one.

The worst part is when it pretty much vanishes in FX smog and you can’t see it or the circle it dropped. All you see is your damage numbers suddenly going 0.. 0.. 0..

Beldin.5498:

Raising health and / or toughness so that mobs live longer in a zerk is ok, raising damage not really since players don’t get more health in a zerk.

Raising damage would be less of a problem if we could herd or in other ways control who the mob targets.

The aggro code right now seems to have this absurd piece where a elementalist in soldier is considered a juicier target than a warrior in zerker.

IndigoSundown.5419:

aspirine.6852:

I can understand they need to hit hard, but the health. omg the annoying amount of health these mobs have,

While I understand this complaint, I also understand the counter-complaint, “Mobs melt too fast in the zerg.” Mob health is a scaling issue, and sometimes this might mean that you are the only one attacking a particular mob.

I would not mind it taking long, if i just felt sturdier when bunkering up. But because of this “active combat” gimmick, everyone, bunker or zerker alike, have to dodge. Except zerkers actually dodge less because the mob dies faster.

At the core of this is that our skill sets are balanced for SPVP, but mobs do not play by SPVP rules.

Orpheal.8263:

• Amount of Enemies, very simple. so more players r there, so more enemies do spawn lettign them become reinforcements

They tried this at launch. Events simply turned into loot farms for whoever could spam the most AOE the fastest. I watched GS warriors and staff eles camps the mob wave spawn at shelter gate because of this. If you were a split second faster at hitting your AOE, the ground would sparkle before you.

Oh and btw, mobs already prioritize anyone in down state and those trying to help them back up. They just do it via normal damage rather than finishers.

ANet sadly designed mob behavior around solo and small group (dungeon) fights, not the mass brawls we are facing in the living story. All their basic attacks follow of roughly a spike every 3 seconds.

During normal fights you are supposed to spot these spikes via tells. But during mass brawls those tells are obscured by other mobs, particle FX and similar.

Vets are a bother at level thanks to their big health bar. And at 4 levels above they easily turn into walking walls against anything but a full zerker GS warrior or guardian playing buzz-saw. And the six help you if they come en mass…

I suspect it is a fix to the issue of someone taking a short dip and seeing their elite go on cooldown. With the other minion skills, you retain the minion if the skill is slotted both over and under water.

Had a run in with a wading pool in LA the other day while fighting a molten event. Just deep enough to trigger water combat. That would result in said elite going bye bye…

Charming Rogue.8071:

Not enough reward for helping downed players. I’ve had multiple occasions where I ressed downed players only to go down myself (because for some reason you can’t cancel ressing with dodging). And in that situation I’ve been left to die several times by the same people I’ve just saved.

A person can only take so much. After a while you just say: “Alright, enough. There’s no reward for me ressing you. Why risk it?”

Tap a direction, then dodge. Yep, killed me plenty of times (hello launch day thaumanova reactor bridge) before i got that drilled into my fingers. And i would love for Anet to change it so i can hit dodge directly. I guess all their QA staff use double tap to dodge…

Sounds like we may have a tengu rebellion to look forward to…

Turrets are pretty much overcomplicated. They are static and needs to be babied thanks to their overcharge mechanic.

Drop the detonate, drop the overchange, drop the pickup, and reduce the recharge on the utility skill. Make them more like wells, symbols or banners, and less like static pets or minions.

I liked it when i could pop into elixir gun to get a point blank super elixir, or grenade kit for a point blank barrage. they could have retained those and bumped it up a tier, rather than completely reworking it.

Heal-o-tron seems to be pulling some magical technobabble at the start there. Replace sub-aether with something more technical and you could pull the same line in Star Trek.

Start of the golem race?

I could have sworn there are scouts near the entrances that give such a overview when spoken to. But yeah, the rescue readout could have shown a rescued/needed rather than just the current rescued count.

Sneakier.9460:

rezzing aint for everybody, in LA i only rezz ppl 1500 away from the npc spamming AoE and if they in downed state

Am a zerker ranger, if i stop in the wrong time in LA zerg events, i get sniped in 2s

Don’t even have to be zerker. I am running mostly soldier on my engineer, and i often see my health globe go from 100% to 25% is the space of a second. This because some mob off the camera edge just did some kind of spike attack.

This started to be a problem with southsun and the karka, and it has gotten worse since. Never mind that just about every mob spam CC like it was water during a rainstorm. Stuns, dazes, knockbacks, knockdowns, kitten hard to get a heal in there unless your profession of choice happens to pack a skill that both break stun and provide stability.

The mobs are perfectly designed to challenge a solo or small group via their damage pattern (dodge/block/interrupt the spike or take a beating!). But come a zerg and it all goes downhill fast because looking for those tells become virtually impossible.

And the aggro behavior is not helping. Some mobs ping pong around, other sticks to a single target like a insect to sugar, but they all seem to congregate on anyone trying to get out of down state.

In essence the AI and mob designs are suited for small scale skirmishes and dungeons, not open battlefields.

If ANet wants us to continue fighting open wars, we need suitable aggro or the ability to form body blocking formations (pretty much the norm until the advent of the musket) and some way to pull wounded out of harms way that do not take up a utility slot. And by the six, stop dropping mobs at random around the event center!

I just wish that the counter would show the next tier of rescued, as that may get people to rescure more of them if they have not read the patch notes fully.

Psientist.6437:

I like the content, just think it is straining the scaling mechanics and dead foe credit dueling.

As best i can tell, the scaling can happen in 3 ways.

1. level. Event mobs seem to quickly hit L84 (the max before you start to see glancing blows).

2. rank. veterans, elites, champions. And even a single veteran is a solid step up from a normal mob in terms of how much damage they can take. Makes those ranked up summoners very nasty to deal with…

3. mob count. larger zerg, more mobs spawned.

1 seems to happen independent of 2 and 3, and is quickly topped out. 2 and 3 seems to interact to a degree, where multiple lower rank mobs are replaced by a single higher ranked mob beyond a certain treshold.

Question is, how is this scaling triggered. As best i can tell, it is based on the number of characters within a certain distance of the event point (defeated included). And with the number of overlapping events that can happen in LA, that can quickly lead to “interesting results”.

I was guarding the ogres out east when a wave of toxic krait spawned. Every last one of them was veteran rank, and all were L84. And at least a quarter of them were summoners, meaning that we were soon facing down ettin hallucinations and overlapping AOE fields.

While it may be because of culling, i didn’t count more than 5-10 characters in the area (myself included). But this happened up the slope near the inn, and i suspect a “defend the rally point” event was going on up there. End result was that the event scaling may have taken into account the zerg just beyond view.

Morfedel.4165:

Where is that gate anyway? I can’t recall.

West edge of the map, next to the diving platform.

If you hang around the fort when the miasma hits max, Kiel will come in with the airship and pull Magnus and the rest of the NPCs out.

Yeah, it makes just about zero sense from a continuity POW. But thats a MMO for you…

Smooth Penguin.5294:

NYG.2568:

My problems with the overflows is …why do we even have home worlds? Most events unless lucky your playing with mixxed servers. Its hard to get the party your already in on the same Overflow let alone most of your guild. Disticts were the way to go as in GW1. Or why not overflows of the main containing people of the same home server which is just the same as the districts. Then if those get filled mix match the servers.

In GW1, different Districts were the Overflows.

I do believe you could pick your district…

Do wonder if the servers could handle spawning a guild specific overflow, and prioritize putting people from that specific guild there first.

As long as the loot is DPS based rather than event completion based, the aggro is pretty much RNG, and the mobs pretty much pop in around the edge of the event area, zerg is the only way to fly.

Sadly the “spam AOE everywhere” is as old as the game. It was going on during event farms around shelter gate in cursed shore, and it is going on now. And the zerker meta is adding insult to injury. Run anything “resilient” and you can bet your behind that someone with a GS will spin by and flatten that vet you have spent the last 10+ seconds barely denting. And then you turn around and come face to face with a elite summoner…

cortin.9174:

For events where mobs come in waves, I’ve also not gotten credit several times. It’s so random I have no idea what the problems were. I was there along with everybody else killing, healing, reviving, etc..

Only killing, and maybe reviving, counts…

Then again, things either don’t die at all or die within seconds of spawning during the events.

Elricht Kaltwind.8796:

skullmount.1758:

Delvoire.8930:

Well… it’s a good thing they held off the release of the patch for 5+ hours to get all the kinks worked out…………

I wouldn’t really complain. At least it has less problems than Edge of the Mist did.
Aetherblade balance might have a problem though, just about all of them are vets

I hear that… I’m standing at 1200 range from the closest Aetherblade and I’m just dropping dead with no visual cue. Combat log says something about lightning-something-or-other. Really growing weary of the Aetherblade events on my glass cannon ranger with the attacks that can’t be avoided, lol.

Had the worst case of that during one of the miasma events that spawned inside the bank. On top of the walls making it practically impossible to see what was going on thanks to camera bumping, ever so often some mob would spawn that seemed to do a AOE attack that would down anyone on the spot…

skullmount.1758:

Delvoire.8930:

Well… it’s a good thing they held off the release of the patch for 5+ hours to get all the kinks worked out…………

I wouldn’t really complain. At least it has less problems than Edge of the Mist did.
Aetherblade balance might have a problem though, just about all of them are vets

I think the scaling code is wonky, but then the typical zerktard GS heavy don’t seem to have a problem cleaving his way through multiple L84 mobs a second…

Then again, you also have overlapping molten protectors down south, making it practically impossible to hurt anything for several seconds at a time. This on top of the typical particle FX smog that make it kitten hard to tell what is going on most of the time. Never mind that mobs seems to swap targets as if the aggro code is fed directly by the RNG.

Heh, allow a sylvari to offer his sympathies.

TurtleofPower.5641:

They really need to stop supporting old story items. Let people clear their inventory in peace!

Or introduce a LS section in the bank/inventory where all of these things go. Just about every other game out there has this, so that quest/event items do not fill up the main inventory.

Caveth.3268:

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Awesome list, thanks for bringing these up!

• 1-3 are legitimate issues that we are already working to fix, and yes, they affect the main server maps and not the overflows.
• 4 – So the defend events won’t run if the Scarlet Alliances are currently holding the rally camps. If you see the crosses swords event at the camps, that means a defend even has already run and failed – you’ll have to succeed the recapture event before another defend event will start. If you are seeing it work out differently, let me know!
• 5 – Rubble Piles will offer Found Heirlooms only once per day.

For number 5, you should make the rubble piles not appear to the players until they can be looted again. It’s hard to tell which ones I have/have not looted today.

That kind of mechanical QOL is up there with achievements that lists what dungeon paths you have run, so i would not hold my breath…

Seras.5702:

Another bug is the auto-resizing of our inventory panel whenever we change maps.

I think it actually happens ever so often when you open the inventory. Someone on reddit tested by hammering the i key and watching the window resize ever so often, but at no fixed interval.

pmnt.4067:

Einlanzer.1627:

Since the #1 has less of an impact in PvP than it does in PvE, I’m not holding my breath for it to ever be fixed, which honestly frustrates the hell out of me.

So, just hope that attrition gameplay will become the PvP meta that the auto attacks imbalance matters also there?

Not likely, as condition spam pretty much forgoes any kind of attrition build.

Only skritt i have seen so far is one trading for heirlooms behind a tent in the south camp.

Yep, had a lovely WTF moment when i checked up on the place.

kitten it people, the place is on fire. Let the guy out already.

A major part of the zerg issue is the lack of any functional aggro mechanic.

I constantly see big bads simply up and run after someone nearby that is not even attacking them, while i am standing there doing my best to hurt them in melee.

End result is that there is no concept of front line, back line, or anything else that could turn into coherent formations.

It is just blobs smashing into blobs, and one of them being wiped out.

At least until WW1 and trench warfare, the concept was that front line formations protected artillery in the back, while cavalry tried to break through to take out the artillery.

White Dragon.5429:

you have to make the basic one first (doesn’t require 250 iron/dust, only 50) then upgrade it with steel and the corresponding dust tier and blade shards, then upgrade again with mithril, dust, and more blade shards. Then upgrade again with orichalcum, dust, and even more blade shards.
then buy the ascended recipe from a vendor at a refugee camp

I haven’t got the ori upgrade yet(need more blade shards) or the ascended recipe, so I can’t tell you what materials the final step takes

Ok, how much did you spend on the TP to get that far already?!

Hey Scarlet, if you want to taste some Lion’s Arch BBQ chicken you can lend me one of those death rays for a few minutes.

Here tengu tengu tengu…

FateOmega.9601:

Probably because many players complained that they keep getting back pieces but could only use 1 at a time. Unlike pvp where skins can be stored, in pve extra backs just take up more space. So they gave us the material instead and crafting the back is optional.

With the end result that the materials take up 3 times the space…

Unless they are account bound they seem to be a altaholic’s nightmare…

Nikked.7365:

So… has anyone here played the content yet?

People have to cover the map and be ready to move on a moment’s notice for the next event. It requires groups to work in unison. The tri-kill mechanic does seem to get people to group up on cross-swords events, but to really kick kitten in this map, you need players all over the place.

This event is a terrible place to zerg.

The tri-kill is fine on paper. But i found myself not seeing the aetherblade location on map at all while around the traders area. Could see the toxic and molten ones just fine tho. Unless it was inside that clusterkitten of a bank event. I wonder how many mass downs i spotted there from no discernible attack. Ended up staying outside and taking pot shots….

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Deified.7520:

They just need to learn how to split people up.

1. Too many Events spawned in close areas

2. You awarded based on kills, not on event completion.

3. No depth to the fights. They’re just like the Scarlet Invasions. No interactables, not really interacting with NPCs.

On point number 2 and 3, that’s just pretty much what happens in a zerg. If you can’t tag a lot of mobs, you’re screwed. Which is basically a flaw in the gameplay mechanic of choosing how you want to play since if you’re specced for support with not much fir power, aoe or cleave damage, you are awarded with nothing. Hence the zerker dps zerg blobs killing everything and anything in a matter of seconds.

Never mind that anything veteran or higher has crazy thick skin when they reach L80. End result is that you barely make a dent in them with anything but zerker. But when you go zerker you pretty much tear anything short of a champ apart…

Whoever it was that tried to claim you could tank and spank dungeon bosses in cleric, without glitching or stacking, is smoking Scarlet’s finest…

surprise surprise…

Sometimes i wonder if they do this just to fill up our inventories…

insanemaniac.2456:

no, condi damage needs nerfs in general right now. either scaling, food, or accessibility. anets too busy fixing the pve zerker meta to notice.

In (s)PVP perhaps, but in PVE it is pretty much worthless outside of solo world roaming thanks to the hard cap on stacks.

ellesee.8297:

in a pve scenario sure. but in pvp it’s really good and the skills aren’t split.

And this is why the game is such a mess…

Yeah, mixing conditions and hexes was a bad move by ANet in terms of balancing.

Pretty much, Terrahero. And for anyone else, no the fix is not to allow turrets to become mobile via a trait. We already have that with ranger spirits.

Honestly, engineer turrets seems like one of those “because we can” designs. Its like the engine devs one day announced they had added the ability to stack skills, and everyone scrambled to make use of that feature in the profession designs.