Guild Wars 2

Worked yesterday for the first time in two weeks, broken again today.

If any ANet staff reading this, is there anything we can do to help troubleshoot this problem? Getting really annoying, would love to help fix it.

plasmacutter.2709:

Centaur runes sacrifice a crap ton of crit to get you that swiftness. that hurts when your dodges depend on crits.

Which crit runes do you use instead? If you have full zerker gear, I haven’t seen it to be that much crit sacrifice.

Bondage Fairy, aka Moral Hazard:

http://i.imgur.com/ajPwj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZrxpO.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/DrIOo.jpg

Very imformative response, but i fail to do 2 things on your suggestions. I can chase after the mesmer all i want and dodge his punts and break his daze, ill never be crippled with warhorn #4 and both my warhorn traits turning conditions into boons, my healing removing 2 conditions and shouts removing totals of 4 conditions. The problem is that at the end of the day i can never catch up to him even at 100% movement speed because he has too much movement. I can immobilize on 10 sec CD and cripple him for 5 seconds but it doesnt stop him for long.

What exactly is he doing to be able to evade you like that? The only build I can think of that would allow me to 100% evade you in those circumstances would use 6x Runes of the Centaur + one of the short cd heals (Mirror 15s or the healing Mantra) + at least 20pts in Chaos for boon duration increase.

Otherwise, staff has Phase Retreat that can be traited down to ~6s, but it’s only 600 range. There’s Blink which is on 30s cd or 24s traited, at 900 range. There’s Portal which is ~20s duration on 60s cd.

Is he teleporting around a lot? Disappearing and reappearing elsewhere a lot? Or perma-swiftness? Or something else?

Fwiw, here’s a good annotated vid of a thief dueling a good GS/Staff mesmer. Maybe it will help.

6x Runes of the Centaur + 20pts Chaos + Mirror healing skill = 14.3s AoE Swiftness on 15s cd + 1s recast time.

That AoE part is kitten clutch in WvW – you can singlehandedly power the entire zerg around the map. I usually find a Commander without perma-swiftness, stick with him wherever he goes, and pretty soon we have a speeding death train.

Also, Centaur Runes other buffs aren’t bad for mesmers. +Power, +Bleed Duration, + +Swiftness Duration all useful to mesmers, making Centaur runes among the best general rune choices.

If you really hate Centaur or strongly prefer some other rune set, then run with a Focus, traited or not. This is generally what powers the zerg anyway – multiple mesmers alternating Curtain cd’s so that the group has perma swiftness from pt A to B.

TLDR: yeah, pre-80 pre-6x Exotic set mesmers are probably the weakest with travel speed. But if you can bear it till then, you have good options for plugging that one hole in the class’s mechanics.

I love Charr but my two characters are both human. Reasons:

1. The big races feel sluggish. Logically I know they move and do everything at the exact same speed as humans, sylvari, and asura, but it doesn’t feel like it. I have a 70 Norn Guardian I’ve retired and rerolled after playing around with an Asura guardian in the starting zone for that reason. The smaller races mechanics just feel quicker, with more alacrity, even if they actually aren’t.

2. Teleports on the smaller races feel like you’re going a further distance than on the bigger races. Basically similar to #1, there’s no difference but there feels like there is.

3. Charr have by far the best story arcs, best lore, best leveling area (Ascalon), and best music theme (wistful, poignant, and epic all wrapped into one). However, I can watch the story on Youtube and level my humans through Ascalon to get the lore, environmental beauty, and music. After all that is said and done, all you’re left with is your character’s aesthetics and mechanics.

Hence, human. Asura too small except for warrior and guardian, for which small is fun. Sylvari are cool but I like armors better on human (at least for mesmer and thief). Charr and Norn too big.

And this is from someone who used to only play Orcs in WoW. I like the Noble Beast characterization, but at least Orcs were basically the same size as humans, felt the same mechanically. Not the case here with Charr and Norn, for better or worse.

Mohammed

Elona she is more african looking

Specifically, Northern African/Egyptian. I chose Elona and she had neck-length black hair, lightly tanned.

The female stance is actually correct, the male wrong, at least from a Samurai’s point-of-view. Observe:

Show that to your niece, tell her her character is doing it the pro way, the males are all doing it like no-skill brawlers who think they’re holding a baseball bat.

The first option is a good middle ground – not too curvy, not boyish, sleak and streamlined. Take a closer look at it, and actually roll it and get into the world to see how it really looks. Use a Med armor class, the skimpy starting light armor over-emphasizes things.

IceBlink

Hrm. I was gonna go dagger/dagger on my thief, but now I wanna give this a try, haha. How is it as a levelling build or is it better to wait until you’re 70-80 before respeccing into this?

I’m using it to level my thief now, level 20. Love it (though haven’t spent much time as d/d) Reasons:

1. Infiltrator’s Strike removes conditions and is semi-spammable. So any time I fight something whose portrait says it does conditions, I either open with IS, or kite with the Shortbow. With IS, if you get a condition, just shadowreturn back to your starting point to remove it, then IS right back to your mob/s instantly. Repeat as necessary. Like a yoyo sometimes.

2. Can easily escape overpulls. Open with IS, if you’re about to die, Shadowreturn back to your opener location, then run away with Shortbow. If Shadowreturn has expired, then Dagger 5 for stealth, make some distance, then Shortbow away.

3. Dancing Dagger does really good damage, can 2-shot most regular mobs with it, meaning you can 2-shot most groups of 4 world mobs. Sword 1 is also frontal AoE, so if they aren’t quite dead yet then spamming 1 will finish the job.

5. If you go up the Acrobatics tree first, then from level 15 you will have almost 100% uptime on travel speed, either via Swiftness from dodging or SB teleport. The few gaps in between are usually no more than a second or two.

6. At low levels it’s Infiltrator’s Strike that really makes this build. I love classes with Charge/Leap/Teleport abilities, and nothing can match a Thief with IS for the amount of Teleports available. It’s almost spammable, even from level 1.

Another interesting use of IS is – say there’s an event where you have to guard 2 things, like guarding the mortars outside Black Citadel (southern entrance near Tomb where the Charr starting story happens). The mortars are about 1200 apart and you have to guard them from attacking harpies. So, stand exactly in the middle, and IS to the first attacking group, kill them, Shadowreturn, tab target the harpies attacking at the other end, IS to them, kill them, Shadowreturn, re-tab-target next group, repeat. Really fun, and effective.

Blank TP and Gem Store screens. Happened a month ago for about 2 weeks, resolved itself shortly after i reported it in this thread, now happening again for about a week.

Details:

- Blank screen for both TP and GS
- Gem count shows correctly in tiny text bottom left corner of TP screen, but not on the top left corner of GS screen
- Windows 7 Home x64
- Graphics set to “Best Performance” option

Things I’ve tried:

- Restart client
- delete /Users/me/Documents/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat
- Checked Windows time to make sure it’s correctly sync’d

No luck.

A couple pros and cons for this:

1. Love the new viewport, can actually see this beautiful world in all its glory now (esp with the post-Mad King dungeon bug, amazing).

2. Nice in WvW as well, can better see what’s going on around me.

3. Can’t see enemy weapon swaps as well, which makes for an interesting tradeoff – do I zoom in close to watch for weapon swaps to anticipate their next move, at the cost of having to pan and scan alot to maintain situational awareness? Or do I zoom out for better awareness at the cost of not catching a weapon swap as quickly as I might have?

So, I hope you guys keep it, and provide an FoV slider and longer range zoom, and let the players decide which they prioritize. There are tradeoffs to the wider FoV and zoom range, and allowing the choice still keeps things interesting and strategic.

Lmao, hilarious vid. Hate it when that happens.

Electro

Would cause a lot of problems with the many attunement-based traits Elementalists have.

True, though engineers have similar on-swap traits – 5s Swiftness on 5s cd (permaswiftness as long as you swap kits every 5s), 5s Vigor when you gain Swiftness (perma vigor), cast a damaging spell when swapping kits…

Would require some rework for sure, and would have to make sure certain on-swap stacking buffs can’t stack too much (or at all), but not all of them have to go or be redesigned, some are probably ok in current form.

The 4-kit Engineer [¹] and the Elementalist [²] are functionally equivalent, with the single exception of weapon-swapping cooldowns. Their equivalent functions are just in different places. Each profession has:

1. 4 weapon bars to swap among
2. 4 weapon-bar swap buttons
3. 1 healing utility skill, 3 utility skills, and an Elite

However, #2 and #3 are swapped (except the Elite):

• Elementalist: #2 are the F1-F4 buttons, #3 are 6-9.
• Engineer: #2 are 6-9, #3 are F1-F4.

For both professions, each skill (except 1) on the weapon bar has a cooldown, and their healing and utility skills have cooldowns.

The big difference of course is that Elementalist weapon-bar swap buttons (F1-F4) have 9-15s cooldowns (depending on how may points in Arcane), while Engineer weapon-swap buttons (6-9) have no signifcant cooldowns (like 2-3s).

As a result, Elementalist weapon-swapping cd means that you are penalized somewhat for switching to another attunement – say from Water to Fire – by not being able to go back to Water right away if you need to.

For example – say you’re spamming Shatterstone (scepter 2) to build up big stacks of Vulnerabilty, then switch to fire to do some Vuln-buffed damage, and immediately a damage spike hits your group and you need to switch back to Water for AoE healing – but you can’t for another 6-11 seconds (an eternity in combat).

Hence, Elementalists are incentivized to use a 5-4-3-2-swap rotation, cycling through all their skills for maximum throughput and cd usage (not that all do this, just more of an incentive to than Eng), whereas Engineers are better able to pick the right kit and right skill for the situation at hand.

For example, say a Grenade/Bomb/Elixir Gun engineer uses one or two Elixir gun skills then swaps to Grenade kit for more damage, and immediately a damage spike or condition bomb hits the group and you need to swap back to Elixir gun for AoE condition removal and healing (assuming their individual cd’s are up) – you can. There’s no weapon swap cd preventing this, just individual skill cooldowns.

You still have to play smart and save those individual skill cooldowns for when they’re needed, but you aren’t prevented from using Elixir Gun 3 and 5 because you just used Elixir Gun 2 and 4 and then switched to another kit. Your tactical skill choices aren’t stymied stymied by the long weapon-swap cd that elementalists are.

Yet, the Engineer is not considered OP because the actual weapon skills still have cooldowns (although on average much shorter than the Elemantlist weapon skill cd’s – max 25s vs max 45s). They’re not spammable and you still have to use them smartly or find them on individual cd when you really need them.

Would it be the same for the Elementalist, were the Elementalist to have its weapon swap cd’s dropped to the same as the Engineer (2-3s)? Less clunky, less artificial barriers to skill selection and use, more incentive to choose skills strategically/tactically in response to the combat circumstances rather than for cd-optimization, but still limited by individual skill cooldowns.

Thoughts?

Alternate links in case gw2skills.net goes down again:
¹: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k34;2R0-V015wM-Z0;9;8Tn
²: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-V70;2sPVg0c-gTFx0I

Both gem store and TP are broken for me but no one else.

Eg, neither will load for me:

http://i.imgur.com/IZcdc.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/S2AnN.jpg

That is what I get anywhere in the game world – LA, Rata Sum, WvW borderlands and EB, just out in random places in the world, etc. But when I ask in Map chat if anyone else has this problem, I get 100% ‘no’.

I bought 800 gems yesterday afternoon (10/17 PST), spent 600 on a bank tab, and that was the last time either the gem store or TP worked for me.

Any idea if there’s something I can do reset them?

Intigo.1653:

rias.6872:

Broken link …

The link is fine. Copy-paste it because ArenaNet is silly.

kurtosis.9526:

Some variation of this:

http://www.intothemists.com/calc/?build=-kZ;3R0-V015sM-Z0;9;69TT;42;028A45AU;5nBnBnBnB9cS

Toughness, aoe healing, aoe condition removal, self-combo’ing, with multiple ways of gaining Protection and/or escaping a bad situation.

Did you seriously just take Vigor on Crit over Blasting Staff in a Staff build?

Heh, what you really should be asking is, ‘Did you seriously just take Vigor on Crit over Blasting Staff in a build with just 4% crit chance?’

Yes, obviously a mistake, meant Blasting Staff there, but not just because it’s a staff build.

I’ve experimented with exactly this build but with all Berserker gear, meaning survivability from the build and damage from gear stats. The idea behind it is to max endurance regen (hence Renewing Stamina and Soothing Disruption) to fuel dodge blast finishers, reduced cooldowns on defensive Cantrips, and condition removal from attuning to water (Elemental Attunement + Cleansing Water) and granting regen.

No Blasting Staff. Would be nice to have, but it’s a tradeoff for other stuff. After maining a mesmer, you get used to smaller AoE fields and don’t miss it as much.

rickets.1386:

I can not tell you how much money people in my WoW guild spent on this feature. It’s definitely something Anet should reconsider.

Same. I bet they made as much or more money selling race changes than they did on the extended playing time of people rerolling the race they really wanted, esp factoring in the handful who just quit b/c they didn’t want to go through the grind again and weren’t happy with their current race.

ANet is leaving money on the table, especially as a sub-free game, to not implement this.

Legicon.7952:

The only way I see it working is restarting the whole story. But then there’s an xp, karma, and money issue if one can just race change then replay all of the story at a higher level.

I don’t see that as an issue either. After you race change, you either spend your play time farming Orr/dungeons/WvW/TP/whatever, or getting rewards from redoing your personal story. Six of one, half dozen of the other – they’re roughly functionally equivalent.

urtv.8791:

i doubt they would want to go through the trouble of patching the personal story to the new race

I’m not sure they would have to. Just wipe the personal story and require the player to do it all over again (or not, since it’s not really required in the firsts place). Most people who want to change races would be ok with that tradeoff.

Cryshal.4036:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fvUXGQyAolc/UDzqfTByqxI/AAAAAAAABHc/7SeXrtRhiPc/s1600/Guild+wars+2+thief.jpg

This is the Thief armor I was referring to. It’s medium armor and looks like something I want, and can’t get as a Ranger. Unless it’s available in PvP, which I don’t do, and probably couldn’t afford anyway.

Why can’t you get it as a ranger? I think it’s available in different sets:

http://carsen.dreamhosters.com/game/gw2/armormedium.htm

(main: http://carsen.dreamhosters.com/game/gw2/)

And if the stats are wrong, transmute it.

A few more here: http://www.gw2armor.com/human/female/medium_list.php, though only 80 exotics and not as extensive.

I keep seeing bot clusters (1, 2) around the world, staying in one spot autoattacking thin air to pull in nearby mobs, and sometimes in the middle of a fast-repeating DE area.

I’d like to request a way to report the entire mass of them, rather than individually. Reporting a player for botting individually apparently goes into ANet’s database of players to investigate, and ANet has to gather data and do their due dilligence before taking any action, and it takes forever.

But a bot cluster is so obviously botting that there’s no need to investigate further. Just read the bot cluster reports, log in to a GM toon, fast travel to the location, see them, and insta-ban them all. At most, cross-reference their names with accounts that have been stolen so you can return any that need to be.

The bot clusters are much bigger annoyance than individual bots, but also much easier to recognize, verify, and ban, if there were just an easy way for players to report them as such. Perhaps add a Botting/Bot Cluster option to the bug report tool (which is what I’ve started using anyway, under General PvE/Environment/Exploitable Issue).

My mains are Guardian and Mesmer, both spec’d for solo’ing champions. It’s a bit easier on my Illusion/Staff/Condition damage Mesmer, though. Keep 3 clones up at all times, keep conditions up on boss, stay at max range and kite.

Guardian requires more skill, especially when it comes to dodge/evasion.

And I’ve seen a good warriorr solo a Centaur champion I wouldn’t have thought possible for a melee class, and there was a video a while back of a thief evasion-tanking soloing a 5-man boss, and a Necro minion-soloing a 5-man boss.

So I think most classes can solo champions if you know the game mechanics really well, have good timing on your evasion moves, and not terrible latency.

Lol @ both you guys. kitten now I gotta roll a rifle/‘nade engineer. I’ll never be done leveling alts.

Staff mesmer with Phantasmal Disenchanter (lowest cd), Mirror Images, Null Field, and Time Warp, alongside a Scepter/Dagger/Arcane Wave Elementalist would be fun:

- 4 combo fields (3 chaos, 1 fire)
- 5 blast finishers (2 fire, 2 earth, 1 arcane) (maybe more if Cleansing Wave and Shatterstone count, can’t recall)
- Enough illusion production to keep 3 up at all times, even in long fights where you’re 2-manning champions

Constantly blast finishing all 5 of you (you, your wife, 3 clones) should be fun – AoE Chaos Armor, AoE might, etc.

If spec Elemental Attunement at level 20 you can get AoE swiftness for 10s every ~15s (iirc), giving the two of you a periodic speed boost. Staff would be better for that, but no blast finishers.

Some variation of this:

http://www.intothemists.com/calc/?build=-kZ;3R0-V015sM-Z0;9;69TT;42;028A45AU;5nBnBnBnB9cS

Toughness, aoe healing, aoe condition removal, self-combo’ing, with multiple ways of gaining Protection and/or escaping a bad situation.

Ok, thanks, maybe I’ll try that fight again and pay closer attention to both range and target dropping.

Maybe that was it, or a combination of things. I notice it every now and then when fighting regular mobs or veterans, figure it’s a timing glitch or something, but it was happening a lot more against that giant.

Want to get my elementalist alt to 80, what’s the best weapons/traits/stats for leveling one? D/D looks like the most fun, but is it most effective/fastest overall?

Also, is there any pre-80 build/gear that allows you to solo champions and tough veterans (like I can on my mesmer and to a lesser extent guardian)?

I was just fighting the giant in the Charr town of Nageling, southern Diessa Plateau, on my 60 mesmer (downscaled to 20). Literally half the time I used a skill that was supposed to spawn an illusion, no illusion spawned.

The skill would animate, do its sound effect, and go on cooldown, but no illusion appeared and none of my three illusion indicator dots would change from empty to full.

Skills I was using were Staff 2,3 and Mirror Images, and Phantasmal Defender. Fighting this giant in group fight (about 7 of us) was the first time I’ve noticed this.

I was staying on the edge of the 1200 range, and might have blinked backwards out of it using Staff 2 or Mirror Images. But also a few times this happened I was too close the giant, had aggro, and was trying to spawn illusions to decoy and escape.

Anyone else experience anything like this or have any clue what was going on?

For what purpose? sPvP? WvW? 80 DE farming? Dungeons? Leveling?

Depends.

Fwiw, the hottest female human and norn mesmers I could make:

human
http://i.imgur.com/ruKui.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GpCdT.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NqMw6.jpg

norn
http://i.imgur.com/NyQg0.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/32LQ2.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1alqW.jpg

I went with the human, she’s now 60 and will be my main at 80, but I think you can make a hotter norn. Human has about 3 faces that are attractive, the rest are either plain or wtf.

Norn towers over everyone and everything, as do their illusions, which may be more distracting to foes than smaller human ones.

Racial skills for both humans and norn are interesting, but useless because there are so many good mesmer skills. Your problem as a mesmer is one of riches – you’ll be wanting to equip many more than just 3 utility skills at one time, and the human or norn racials won’t even merit consideration.

My advice, make one of each, experiment with character creation, play the intro area, get a feel for the aesthetics, and decide.

>asura have the best racial for this class in radiaion field

Except that it’s inferior to all the combo fields mesmers already have (Null Field, Feedback, Time Warp elite, and Staff 5) so the odds of ever using it are slim. Radiation Field is great for classes like Warriors that don’t already have their own fields, not so much for Mesmers and Elementalists.

Mesmers have such good utility and elite skills that there are no racial skills for any of the races you’ll ever use over the profession skills, at least outside of just playing around.

Fwiw, WoW didn’t have this till Wrath, iirc. Prior, GL’s just restricted access only to themselves and handled withdrawals and deposits manually.

But yeah, to make this work there needs to be:

1. Player guild ranks
2. Different bank sections (separately configurable tabs as in WoW, or something else)
3. Access control based on player rank and bank section
4. Access control that limits daily gold withdrawal/repair money based on player rank

I wouldn’t say ‘shame’ on them, there are a million quality of life things to be implemented – look at this forum – but if you wait to launch before you have them all, you’re never launch.

I for one would rather be playing.