Guild Wars 2

Wasn’t there a press release about hitting 2 million accounts about a month ago?

I doubt 300k more since then, but it’s at least in the right ballpark.

Bleeds.4029:

When the game first came out, and on my first character, there were opportunities for story modes everywhere. Now, working on my fourth character there isn’t very many opportunities.

I don’t understand. There’s the same instanced dungeons with story mode as there ever was. You have the same opportunities.

I’m going to try, desperately.

But I know from launch not to get my hopes up. My top choice names were gone by 9:01 the night before headstart began.

Ari Kagura.9182:

I don’t remember some of the stuff in AC Story, but in AC Explorable, condition builds are generally discouraged because you can’t put conditions on the graveling mounds; and if you don’t destroy the mounds fast enough, many gravelings will spawn and well … “Many gravelings! Now handle it!”

Hopefully, that would change in the future when it comes to applying conditions on objects, but for now if you insist on bringing conditions, you should equip some Rampagers or Berserkers gear since that has a decent amount of Power to help you destroy those mounds.

Given the fact I can stand on right top of a mound and not be able to hit it with a freakin sledgehammer… there’s more to it than just that. If you want to bring mound-killers, you have to exclude anyone who uses melee OR conditions. Or range. hmm… do turrets handle them pretty well?

I hope they get it fixed before we get out of beta… oops :o

I think any responsible player has a couple extra bits of gear to help with particular situations like that, and there’s good reason we can adjust our utilities and traits on the fly.

They haven’t done any 1-time rewards yet. Doubt they will.

Rannulf.9417:

wonder why doesn’t gw2 have more solo content .

The only non-solo content is dungeons and tournament pvp. Oh, and 1 episode of the 80-levels of story quest requires a dungeon.

The overwhelming majority of the game is for solo players.

I’m a little confused, cuz some talking about pvp and others not. We only have those particular amulets. Part of the game is selecting which one.

It’s not meant to be flexible, but rather make you weigh the costs and benefits.

There’s nothing to stop you from doing them with less than a full group.

I don’t see any reason to water down this one bit of group gameplay, the only group content in pve.

One thing that’s very consistent w/ ANet is never receiving replacements or helpful support when you suffer a glitch that’s their fault.

Something like the daily – just wait and get it tomorrow.

We can fit a whole squad in a single mesmer portal. With the result that whomever you plop on is dead before you render on their screen.

If the server were managing collision, you’d be dead for several minutes before anything showed on your screen.

Real pvp games always have collision, just like football. But this is GW2.

Not designed for it, and it’d be totally unfair with the races.

It’d take 5 minutes after server up for a handful of nekkid Norns to block access to the BLTC in Lion’s Arch.

Atheismo.5164:

mulch.2586:

Population levels are still high – full.

There is a lot going on, new stuff weekend after this one.

But not that much has changed, cuz we’re still in the post-launch tryin to get the bugs worked out stage of the game.

Has PvP improved at all? Last time I did PvP it seemed like it was fairly unfair for melee classes – and while I’m pretty used to melee getting the shaft after 10+ years of MMOs, it’s still a little disappointing when every WvWvW degenerates into a ranged AoE Spamfight

PvP is definitely better to be melee, with the maps all being node-capture.

WvW has actually evolved to mesmer-portal-bomb aoe spamfights. Same sort of idea, but poof you’re in an apparently empty lords room, hit 100 blades and do 50k damage on invisible targets. Same AoE spamfight, just ploppin in on each other making use of the rendering bugs.

Thief is the only real melee-profession, and it still has short bow for some aoe 1200 range. Guardian is weak at range, too, but any relevant wvw combat at range is really about siege.

The promo video I saw for AC story had 3 mesmers an engi and a guardian.

That was pre-release…

I think we’ve all done ele + thieves only runs, and other “weird” combinations that wouldn’t work in other games, and then come to realize how GW2 dungeons actually work.

But, video game players will be video game players. There’s almost as many ignorant but strongly-opinionated players when it comes to dungeons as there are in group pvp. But no one’s forcing you to play with them.

Make your own group.

My son’s using ours for GW2, with the thumb d-pad for movement. (disable double tap to dodge is a must). That left him enough keys to be able to map 1-0, swap, F, T, F1 to the keypad on the Nostromo.

Population levels are still high – full.

There is a lot going on, new stuff weekend after this one.

But not that much has changed, cuz we’re still in the post-launch tryin to get the bugs worked out stage of the game.

Make your own group. People can be weird about their preferences and biases. People who think dungeons are hard and require particular builds prob’ly aren’t making great choices themselves. But it’s a social game with a big community, and there’s room for all types.

I won’t have you in my group if you’re crude or mean. I don’t care what profession you are, but if you’re minimum level I do sigh and resign myself to carrying you.

Your most important assets are your guild and friends-list.

It’s the lack of options that disappoints me about elites.

When is a choice not a choice?

Underwater thief has one choice.
Underwater ele has one choice.

If we had the option to slot in regular utilities in the 0, I definitely would, at least on some maps. But if you used the utility in the 0 slot, would it put your other real elites on cooldown?

The tier 2 and 3 armors, if you’re buying them, you obviously have enough wealth to get transmute stones. But I have to admit, I have enough transmute stones to last a lifetime, despite never having purchased ’em, just from quest completion and black lion chests.

I do think it’s a little cheap that they don’t come as applicable skins, but what can ya do…

Sigil of Bloodlust and the others like it gives you stats that are reflected in the character sheet, in the green ink part. The only wrinkle is the size of the buff is scaled according to the zone you’re in. For example, I have the Sigil of Perception that’s supposed to give me 10 Pre per stack, but right now I’m in Sparkly Fen, and only get 8-9 Pre for each stack, cuz I’m down-leveled.

Those stacks apply to all your abilities, and remain even if you go underwater or swap to the other weapon set.

In short, those buffs pretty-much work the way you’d expect them to in any other game (the one weird part is when you zone all your stacks are removed).

The Sig of Accuracy is a break in convention from other games, cuz usually if you see +5 % crit on an item, it means +5% crit on everything you do while wearing the item. sounds stupid yep.

I hadn’t even noticed the stats on my cultural. Cuz it’s really just a skin to apply to the gear you actually want.

What I’d like is if we could take regular items and use them for town clothes.

I’d also like if we could take the cute pirate town clothes from the gem store and put them as skins on regular armor, at least medium wearers.

I think wvw and pvp need the silhouettes to be consistent. Of course there’s no transmutation in pvp anyway. But wvw…

Theik.9340:

Come check out Henge of Denravi mulch, we’ve been getting butchered every week for the past 4+ weeks.

HoD was #1 on the continent for a good bit of time. It’s only the last 3 match-ups that HoD didn’t compete. Looks like this week’s the same.

Hindsight is 20/20, but ya should’ve gone when they were winning. It’s a long fall when you’re coming down from the tippy-top.

Hopefully guesting will finally be ready to launch soon, and you can go elsewhere to finish it without disrupting your regular pve play.

The reason it doesn’t show on your hero screen is that the crit only applies to weapon skills for that weapon.

So if, for example, you do a Mantra of Pain, it doesn’t get the +5% that’s on your GS.

If it were a 1-h sword, the +crit doesn’t apply to your 4 and 5 skill either.

If you really just want the weapon, I can point you to a site where you can buy them with Paypal. They’re tradable for a reason, yeah.

I think they’re worth getting. I say this because I did 3 epic weapon quests in EQ1, and the feeling of accomplishment was great.

I’ll confess also that one of my epics in EQ1, I was basically power-leveled for. I felt more accomplishment in the item I sold (Cloak of Flames from my very first Nag kill) to pay “admission” to finish my quest than I did in the weapon.

The legendary part isn’t the weapon, but rather the work you put into it to get there. Do that many dungeon runs, you’ll have some good friends by the end of it. 500 badges isn’t too much, but still, you were there representing your world.

If you paypal it, yes, it is just pixels and prob’ly not worth it. If you do the legwork yourself, it’s worth considerably more.

I kinda thought the topic of the thread wasn’t if loot-drops are client side, but instead about the typical lack of complete patch notes we get from ANet.

I wish it were a bug that’s going to be fixed. I’ve not seen them say one way or t’other.

Where it’s hard is for characters/professions who select different weapons to swap between, and which sigil to put on which weapon.

E.g. my guardian carries a hammer, a sword & shield, but also swaps in a staff for wvw, and a scepter, fairly regularly, also carrying a torch.

You can only benefit from one of (Bloodlust, Luck, Perception, Corruption, Life) at a time.

These ones share cooldowns (Air, Blood, Earth, Fire, Ice, Strength, Frailty, Purity, Rage, Water, Nullification).

The swaps ones seem to overlap cooldown if you choose the on-crit that matches. (intelligence, battle, doom, energy, geomancy, hydromancy, leeching). So if you go Leeching, it puts your Blood on cooldown or vice versa.

To me a big part of the appeal of accuracy and force is the simplicity of you know they’re not conflicting with anything. But then again, the crit rate doesn’t show up on the hero stats, so…

ha! It’s not that, it’s just all the changes/fixes they don’t talk about, which seems to be most of them.

Some other game company spoiled us with informative/complete patch notes.

Eli The Yahoo.9782:

I agree that traits should be a little stronger. but as a guardian warrior conjurer – i benefits alot – summons lasts 50% longer. sword heals me. fire does 10% more damage. etc…

As a guardian, you have to be especially careful of the traits that simply don’t work. Too many are bugged.

On the other hand, the effects of most of them aren’t going to totally kitten you if they aren’t there.

In NA, I couldn’t see any world that’s lost every single week. Is there one?

I’ve never played wvw and not earned more than repair.

I’ve never done open-world pve and not turned a profit.

The daily achieve isn’t about the 5 silver. It’s about the big ol jugs.

So much of the problem with thief, that resulted in so many nerfs already, yet more coming… it’s all nerfing the thiefs but ignoring the cause of the problem, which is the game engine not working right.

Really, the same is the case with mesmer portal. Right now, it’s functionally a way to move an unlimited number of players in long-lasting stealth that persists even after attacks. Portal bombs only work because the game doesn’t.

zomg thief killed me before I could even see him — that only works cuz the game doesn’t.

So far ANet has an alarming tendency to nerf a class instead of fixing the crappy design/engine.

In pvp, when the screen pops and waitin to rez, it’s hardly ever thief anymore at the top of my list. In wvw, it’s all about siege (as it should be) and portal bombs. In pve, the thief takes a lot of skill and finesse to keep alive, and will never match the kill-speed of dps professions.

It’s a fun playstyle, but not without its frustrations.

It’s about as important as your gear in pve. If you just choose what traits sound good, vs a min-max optimized build, it probably is about the same effect as if you just bought the cheapest 80 exotics off the TP versus planning for your build.

Run by a good player, both characters will do fine in DEs, dungeons, etc. Perhaps the well-equipped character wins a couple more close fights than the other, or has a quicker kill speed, but the difference is prob’ly minimal. That’s why so many of us have a magic-find set of gear, too.

Run by a bad player, both characters will struggle.

It’s striking how much longer guild-leaders’ posts are than the average poster.

I wonder if that reveals anything about their nature?

Something that comes to mind is that when a game launches, you don’t know if it’s going to flourish or not. Same thing with a guild at the start of a game.

If a guild is mostly composed of hoppers or multi-representers, it’s prob’ly not going to stand the test of time. I think that’s ok.

There’s a lot of guilds that could stand to be pruned to let the community grow stronger.

It is odd that wvw maps in the mists are required for map completion. I’m afraid the time has passed by for easy pop-over to do maps and pop back home the next day.

Seems like if you’re hell-bent on 100% and on a bad wvw server, you gotta transfer out.

With the ranking system, even horribly pathetic servers eventually are facing competition they can handle.

Looking at the history, it doesn’t look like there’s servers that have never won a matchup, but not knowing the OP’s servers, it’s hard to tell. http://mos.millenium.org/matchups

GW1 had the tradition of players with a lot of alts. GW2 continues this by having a very fast leveling process, and a low plateau for exotic gear. You can do it in one day without even leaving town. Not to mention instant-80 with full gear and traits for pvp.

GW2 is a game, like the first guildwars, that supports and encourages multiple characters. It’s so quick to have your character at the top plateau of level and gear.

And in terms of crafting, for example, it’s simpler to have 4 characters with 2 crafts each, than to have 1 character master all the crafts.

it’s a horrible bug that’s lasted too long

it’s made even worse by the fact ANet won’t ever reimburse you when things that are their fault cost you

Akasuki Murakami.1634:

Unless you can show me the update notes on this matter I’m still going to say kitten you Anet.

Go ahead and say kitten you Anet, they prob’ly deserve it.

Here’s the content:
“Daily achievements are short, easily-completed goals that reward experience. Progress is reset each day at midnight UTC (4:00 PM PST/5:00 PM PDT); there are a finite number of tiers for each daily achievement. "

Here’s the link:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daily

I don’t feel like it’s the mobs that are a drag in Orr. It’s grander than that – the from the ground up, the zones aren’t designed to be fun or inspiring or adventurous or anything remotely entertaining.

My dream is ANet gives us a couple new lvl 80 zones that are designed to be fun and challenging while including the high level crafting mats we want.

It is in the wiki. And has been on the forums regularly.

The “day reset time” for daily and monthly content is based on 12 midnight GMT.

It makes sense to me, cuz GMT is right in the center.

The little bit of pve in wvw can be done in a very short amount of time. It’s not nearly the hours-long endeavor that zone completion of pve maps entails. The task more on par with getting map complete in a city.

Rellin.3914:

I did not read the thread, just the OP, and he is 100% correct. Guilds are pointless as they exist right now. Not that you really need a guild in this game for anything anyway.

Need? Not anymore than you need a party for a dungeon run, or need exotic gear at 80.

As a single-player game, GW2 is really sucky. Without community, it’s a really really bad version of the witcher.

Yet again I’m plagued with a lack of functional forums software to do a quote… Soooo much is just not ready for launch yet.

Mentioned above is the idea of multi-guild chat. Even if it were just like separable chat channels that we could join, that’d be a big hurdle. Ideally we’d get guild alliances. So much of the issues in this thread are exacerbated by limited software.

Today I ran all the way from one zone edge to another without seeing a player or a functioning DE, and pretty far into the next one (blazeridge steppes). I didn’t check the server-status display at the time, but it’s a popular server (Sanctum of Rall) that’s sposedly received inumberable transfers in.

I think the “replay” value of lowbie zones isn’t there, particularly the ones that are far from Lion’s Arch. It’s a snowball effect, too, that if you get out there and there’s no events, no other players, it feels like a solo zone, so we’re much less likely to return, unless we’re committed to map completion.

I hope it’s fixed too. This has been going on for a very long time. On my end, it’s very hard to predict whether I’ll have the icon-tools or not. (Ironically similar to the behavior of bugged traits in game).

We need multi-guild system, if for no other reason, because ANet set a very low cap on the max size of a guild. My guild has several component guilds, and the officers jump between them.

Doesn’t seem relevant to a game where you can’t be attacked by another player in all of Tyria, nor in a game with no pk qualities. You don’t even lose xp, let alone drop items.

Focksbot.6798:

mulch.2586:

The design flaw is mistaking hassle for challenge, using complicated travel to make the world seem bigger than it is. It feels like a design from a decade ago.

We need to articulate this more clearly.

For me, ‘good’ difficulty (what you call challenge) is when the player has a feel for how to solve the problem, even though the execution is difficulty. The player should always feel: “If I keep trying, I’ll get the hang of it.”

‘Bad’ difficulty, which causes hassle and frustration, is when you can’t see any way of improving your chances – the game is designed to trap you in a pattern you can’t break free from, and deliberately so. I feel most negatively towards GW2 when I can almost picture the developers play-testing an area like Orr and saying, “Hmm, if they fight through this front, they’ll be able to cut through this route here quite quickly – drop a few more root and knock-down mobs around that point to make sure there’s no alternative to the slow, laborious fight.”

You articulate that well, particularly the “bad difficulty” aspect.

Good challenging difficulty would be putting some of the design elements they use in dungeons to use, or some of what you may encounter in wvw to use.

Use traps that if disabled make it easy to go thru. Have ranged mobs shooting into a choke point, but give an avenue to flank them.

Something I’ve found challenging and good for immersion is making social/intelligent foes act social and intelligent. In this game, the intelligent humanoid mobs are no more strategic than mindless risen and creatures with very little brains. How many of them cripple, but don’t try to kite you?

There’s enough of these traits that simply don’t work. On my guardian there’s the traits you can spend to remove a condition or convert a condition to a boon that when you actually watch, they only sometimes remove the condition and you never get the boon.

Kill variety is the hardest for me, unless I’m on a lowbie, in which case it can be hard to find events if doing map-completion type play.

I’m on a server that’s usually “heavy” during game time (sanctum of rall). I like to get the daily achievement every day that I can, which requires leaving Orr/wvw/halloween zones to get the kill variety. Most recently I’ve been going to Brisban and Fields of Ruin, and it can be pretty empty. Other lowbie zones I’ve been in recently, like to do the scavenger quests, do have a decent # players.

I wager that if you look at population density on the lower-level zones, the further a zone is from Lion’s Arch, the lower its density.