Guild Wars 2

So the people who completed their monthly in the past 3 days got 10 extra laurels? And the people who were at 2 out of 4 for champions/group events are now at 0/4 and SoL? This seems like bad communication and bad implementation on anet’s part, why not just give people who’ve already done their monthly the crafting rewards?

JonathanSharp.7094:

ilr.9675:

So wait… I heard more ranger nerfs… Could you all just please instead remove the whole class from PvP isntead? That’d be a lot faster and save a lot of time (and our sanity in PvE). Thanks

Wait til you see the update! You may be making it out in your mind to be more drastic than it really is.

I took the “wait and see” approach with the necro patch. Sorry if we remain skeptical till we see the evidence. It’s fine to mess up, just don’t expect us to trust you implicitly afterwards.

Although it is a dungeon, arah story mode is part of the personal story. In the context of the article he was talking about player feedback and I think arguably the zhaitan fight has been one of the most complained about parts of the living story – so it’s reasonable to assume its one of the things he’s referring to in that quote.

They’ve also said they want to make dungeon changes tie into the living story, which is relevant to the second quote. If their strategy going forward is changing a dungeon to advance the plot of the living story, changing the arah story mode dungeon may not fit well into that model, for the reasons Colin listed.

I fully agree with you, that dungeon should be priority number one – it’s not just one of the many dungeons, it’s the big finally to the main story arc of the game – and it’s a horrendous, buggy mess. It seems, though, that the devs have other priorities – primarily forcing all new content updates to fit within their living story strategy.

I know I’ve heard from multiple sources that the devs were rushed and ultimately unhappy with the arah story mode dungeon. And yet, it seems like they’re not quite sure how to fix it, or if such a big fix (and it would require a pretty serious overhall) would be worth the time it would take. —

“we did analyze internal and player feedback a few months after launch to address the question, ‘Does it make sense for us to redo portions of the personal story as it shipped?’ I’m not sure it would be the best use of our resources, to be honest. There are plenty of people who enjoy the personal story in its present form. For those who don’t, they still have a breadth of content to experience elsewhere in the game.” (Bobby Stein)

“Due to the nature of the personal story and how it ties into the content of Orr as it currently stands (and its moment in the timeline) it’s going to be really complicated for us to try and find a graceful solution to pushing Orr forward in the timeline via Living World releases. There are some ways we could do it, but it’d involve creating two versions of Orr, which would fracture our player base in a way I’m not sure is healthy for our game, or it’d involve something more akin to the Fractals that I think is more likely.”(Colin Johanson)

I don’t hold out much hope that it will get fixed any time soon.

I don’t get the thought process at all. “WvW match ups are terrible, ppt means nothing and we’ve done nothing to fix it yet, so why don’t we tie some exclusive rewards to it!”

I just feel the need to point out the irony, which I’m sure has been pointed out before….

Of a game called “Guild Wars” having their PAX livestream chat spammed with a plea for a “guild vs guild” mode…

The only advice I can give, which has worked for me, is be friendly. Not overly talkative, but say hi, stay positive. When people are taking out their frustration on you, just let it roll off – don’t try and argue. You don’t need to be a push over, but engaging with the argument just creates antagonism. It sounds like, though, this wasn’t the case for you – they didn’t ask you to alter your playstyle, things seemed to be going fine, and they suddenly they kick you. Unfortunently, that’s the risk your take when you join a pug. Just remember that you are grouping with total strangers – there’s really no telling what people will do. If you go in with the understanding that running dungeons with strangers is a calculated risk, it will be easier to brush off those rare, random moments when things turn bad seemingly out of the blue.

Exploits /= skipping. Jumping over barriers with a leap skill is one thing, it’s not the same as running past a pack of silvers. If anet wanted you to fight every single trash mob, they would make it so bosses did not spawn until they were killed. There are labeled bonus events and optional bosses throughout the dungeons. The dungeons were designed such that you don’t need to kill every last trash mob. Other than that, it’s simply your opinion on what is “challenging”. For me, coordinating with my group (chaining invis, using line of warding, keeping up aegis to say ooc) is a lot more interesting than beating on a bunch of silvers for 20 mins. It’s not taking the easy way, it’s the fastest way.

Exploits are different, and IMO pretty obiovous. Hitting mobs through walls, leaping or blinking over terrain -basically breaking the map. If you really have a problem with those sorts of things it’s your right to report them.

Easy fix, go to gw2lfg.com, post with “no skipping” or “killing all trash”. Or go to your guild, say you want to start doing no skip dungeon runs, and see if you can get a group together. You’ll get nowhere trying to tell people how to play the game – you don’t like having people tell you to play certain way (skipping), so why should they? You can’t even claim that your way is the intended why, since anet has stated that skipping is a legitimate tactic. I’ll go as far as to say it was intended in some cases – TA and arah spring to mind.

Just remember that if your joining into a group, your playing by their rules. If you want to run a dungeon a specific way, be the one to start it and be clear in what you’re looking for.

haviz.1340:

I didn’t really find condition removal in most dungeons as something useful.

Ah, then there I suppose we have a difference of opinion. With that in mind, you could just go 30/30/0/0/10 and use gs whirl for team condi removal. For myself I find the the extra clearing and team wide might stacking from the 30 in honor to be more worth while, but maybe you’re right that it puts into the category of a “support” build. I’ve also found that the 0/30/0/30/10 build works well in pugs, because it tends to meet people’s expectations that guards will bring good condi clearing and boon stacking. But, that may not be your experience. Maybe i’ll go back and try a more offensive build, and see if I’m just paranoid about conditions.

haviz.1340:

Why would anyone call a build with just 30 trait points spent into offensive line a dps build? You don’t need 30 points spent in honour just to get condition removal. Hammer build isn’t exactly the best with lightning hammer since you create light fields all the time and their duration is even increased, lowering the window during the fight when you can use your fire field skill.

You make some good points, and I won’t claim to be an expert in build optimization. I’ve had good results with both builds, but there may be room for improvement. I’m interested in what you would recommend instead? To your point about hammers, in my experience it’s rare to get100% uptime on fire fields, and so it’s more a matter of being careful and coordinating with your team (easier said than done, of course). For condi removal you could go 20 into virtues for absolute resolution, but personally I like at least 20 in honor for empowering might. I’d still probably put the last 30 into radiance, so that would still be only 30 points spent offensively. There doesn’t seem to be any condi clear traits in zeal so unless you are forgoing traiting for condi clear all together, its seems we’re stuck with 30 in honor or 20 in virtues. Unless I’m missing something? Again I’d love to hear your recommendation.

Edit: perhaps you could do something like 20/30/0/0/20, and take focus cd reduction which takes the bubble down to 36 seconds and the aoe blind to 20. You’re probably a little squishier than you would be with perma vigor and a 46 second retreat, but you’re also getting 200 power as compensation.

Guardians generally are expected to bring condition clearing, aegis, and projectile reflection. Which of those you focus on will depend on the specific dungeon. Caudecus’s Manor is full of ranged enemies that can one or two shot you, so reflect skills are crucial. Twilight Arbor is basically one giant poison cloud, so you’ll want to bring condition clearing (you can trait your shouts to do this if you go 30 deep in to honor). Team wide aegis is strong in all dugeons, and by taking “retreat” and renewed focus we can give our whole team 3 blocks back to back.

From there it’s up to you and your team’s playstyle. If you like hammer, use fire fields to might stack with blast finishers (this is especially strong if you’re running with a lightning hammer ele.) Sword/focus can make for a great blind spamming build. The only thing i would discourage building towards is healing – gw2 is very much about active defense and damage mitigation, rather than the traditional tank/heal model. Aegis, blinds, reflects and vigor (for more dodge rolls) can prevent much more damage than we could heal through, and we don’t need to invest in a primary stat slot to get full effectiveness.

Whichever build you choose, it’s best to keep one of each weapon in your pack – or at the very least bring a staff (utility), a scepter (ranged), and your melee weapon of choice.

I recommend these two build guides by Brazil from [DNT]. His presentation style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but he really knows his stuff. You won’t be able to make full use of his guides till you’re level 80, but it will give you an idea of the kinds of things guardians excell at in a dungeon environment.

Sword/focus blind spam dps – http://youtu.be/IpR45w6Lfwo
Hammer build – http://youtu.be/pZTPyt1BknU

What’s the ETA on the tab targeting rework?

Also +1s to the asura issue and turning off nodes in custom arenas.

Wukunlin.8461:

speaking of which, why do we even have bags of coins? I understand the tradable ones you get form the BL chest but I don’t get why we have those soulbound ones

I always thought it was a flavor thing for dungeon loot, like your character is coming out of a dungeon with a bag full of coins. I agree though I can’t see a practical purpose and its more annoying than anything.

They could just grant karma directly, not in a bottle. They don’t give you a bag of coins for your daily. There use to be no way to transfer karma to other characters besides the bottles, but now it’s all account bound so I really don’t see the point.

Phloww.1048:

@rfdarko and Septimus – I am not insulting. I just post a couple images showing that there were purple/violet already with the weapon and also wonder and speculate what Anet had in mind about the Meteorlogicus. I never said that you should just “deal with it” or that your color scheme is horrible, no. That is why I also said that perhaps Anet could make the purple more dark blue/black to match with the nighttime style.

I apologize if my images and speculations were offending of any way. I thought I could share some things and opinion but it seems that’s insulting to others….

It’s definently not you I was responding to, it’s the people saying “lol what a hideous wedding dress.” Your post was on topic, totally fine.

Why the hell should he care what you all think of his look? He’s obviously worked very hard to get the look he wants, he’s come to the forums to express a legitimate concern about a pretty significant cosmetic change to his legendary, an all he gets is insults? Brilliant.

If you look at how much some dyes sell for on the tp, it’s obvious that color coordination is a big deal. Completely changing the color effect, even if its just at night, is a pretty deal. Half of is open world time and in 4/7 dungeons his character won’t look the way he worked to get it to look. If they wanted it to change it for night time make it a darker blue with stars or something. Not purple verging on pink.

This isn’t a “rate the look above you” thread, can we stay on topic and keep the insults to a minimum?

Probably wont win any originality contests, but I couldn’t resist a flaming blue sword for my magpie asura :T

Since your working with ai, practical dps is going to be a lot different then theoretical dps. The best way to test it would probably be on risen giants or any champion mob you feel comfortable soloing. It may not seem as scientific as testing in the mist, but after enough kills with each weapon you’ll be able to tell which weapon set gives you the fastest clear times. You can definitely test on the mist dummies and use that as a place to build a hypothesis, but when your working with a class that’s dps depends so heavily on ai with tiny health pools, testing things out “in the field” is an important part of figuring out what kind of dps you can realistically expect in a dungeon environment.

The warden seems to spawn at max melee range next to your target, and is then rooted for the duration of its spin. Unless the mob stands perfectly still or moves toward your iwarden, you won’t get the full effect. I remember reading somewhere that they supposedly fixed it so iwarden will run up to its target between spins but in my experience its inconsistent, and often it will die before its gotten through its first attack. I’ve gotten frustrated placing down iwarden only to have the mob step a few inches away and leave my phantasm wildly flailing in the air. I tend to use focus now for bosses that can be pulled against a wall and rooted from melee stacking, and sword for bosses that move around.

The one thing warden has going for it is that it’s attack is aoe – so if you can place it in the center of a big pack of mobs it can do great dps, and it will continue its full attack even after its target dies. But again the mobs need to be closely clumped up and relatively stationary.

The warden’s reflect is pretty unreliable, especially in a fight like lupi – it’s placed semi randomly and you have to be stacked right on top of your phantasm for it to work. Take the golem -turret fight in CoE – your warden might pop up in front of a buff turret, or it might not. It’s never been a deciding factor for me, just a bonus that comes from making temporal curtain a reflect.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

fungihoujo.8476:

-A mechanic, reflection, which should logically deflect the spider’s ranged attacks being completely ineffective- check

Thats funny. When we did it yesterday reflects worked fine. Maybe teach your party how to stand inside them.

Most of the projectiles are reflected, but some of the silver ones have projectiles that won’t be, which might be what he’s refering to. You generally won’t see them unless you wipe (assuming you’re using the reflect meathod), if you do, though, there are 6 or 7 usually standing around the boss. That’s part of what makes fighting him post wipe so tricky. That said, calling reflects “completely ineffective” is exaggeration to the point of inaccuracy – it’s only a few of the projectiles that are inexplicably immune to reflects.

It’s a more systemic problem – there needs to be an “open all” option for container items. But I also agree that bottled karma is a relic of a time when you needed to manage it between characters.

It’s kind of depressing. This patch was suppose to encapsulate the new direction for the living story and updates in general and what did we get? A massive zergfest which you will have to spend at least 5 hours doing to even unlock the “dungeon”, which is actually just a slightly long personal story mission. After the molten and aetherblade dungeons this was really a let down. The focus of development seems to be on turning champion farming into a sanctioned, streamlined activity. If your preferred style of gameplay is running in a circle pressing 1 over and over, gw2 has to you covered. We are at least getting 3 new fractals, we’ll have to see if it makes up for the months of casual (non)content.

From what I can tell, fresh air was introduced to reduce the need to go 30 deep into arcana, and at least from a pve perspective I think it worked. I’ve recently come back to the class and I’m finding fresh air 20/30/0/10/10 scepter/dagger to be very strong. The only thing I really miss is the cleansing wave dodge roll.

But @OP I sort of agree with what you said about “making only using 1-2 attunements a viable option”, because for the most part, in the fresh air build, I’m almost always in fire and air, only infrequently switching into earth for the blast finishers and water for the condi clear.

But again this is all from a pve perspective. With the pvp condi meta the way it is, giving up swapping into water frequently and cleansing on dodge might not be viable.

So they looked at the thread to delete the flagged post….and we still didn’t get a sticky. :/ Maybe it’s a counter troll by the mods as punishment for the “front page liberation”.

I realize the mods don’t come here much and I’m probably talking to a wall, but the merged thread really did nothing to stop the daily posts and the trolling is only getting worse. It should be renamed to something very obvious, like “Strats for Twilight Arbor: Forward Up”, since people seem to make posts even when a tafu thread is on the front page. I think will save a lot of frustration for the community, on both sides of the issue.

@op do you primarily play Norns and humans? I ask because as someone who plays asura and charr, the living world doesn’t seem like a “new direction” to me. GW2 has never been a traditional d&d or Tolkien-esque mmo, except perhaps in queensdale. High fantasy is definently one element of the gw2 fantasy trope mixing pot, but I don’t think it’s ever been the “main” one.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I’m not claiming that the path is designed 100% perfectly, I don’t believe I ever claimed that. However coming to the forums and acting like spoiled children because you can’t complete a path and get your title is some serious next level stuff. The OP of this thread came to the forums with problems. Instead of staying on here complaining, he went out and kept trying. He earned his path completion and his title because of it. There’s no reason why everyone else can’t be like him.

Dunno if you read the first page of this thread, but he did complain :/. in fact if you follow up on a lot of those “spoiled children” they also end up completing it. Facing that boss for the first time, it can feel impossible, and I think we antagonize a lot of people that are just genuinely frustrated. Yes, there are a few people that just want it easy, but reading through the threads it feels like there are a lot of people who started out just looking for help and turned sour because of the response they got. Maybe I’m too much of a softy for this sub forum, tho :p

From my experience SR on a thief is really great for pugs, since some of the trash runs can be a little tricky and black powder is great for trash. Warrior is always a solid choice for any dungeon, and unless your building for condis or shout healing you’ll ne just fine. Ranger is good depending on your traits, and I’d recomend a s/w. On necro I’d really recomend taking a main hand dagger – right now you have a condi heavy weapon and a utility weapon, and although dagger doesn’t cleave it does decent direct damage. But basically, TA is not a tough dungeon (with the xception of the final boss on f/u, for me anyway) so any of those characters you listed would do just fine. If you’ve done CoE and CM I can’t imagine there’s anything that will really phase you, just remember as others have said – bring condi clear.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Why not add an option on the options menu to have it auto-dodge for you when a boss does a big wind-up attack?

I wouldn’t even mind a subtler or shorter tell, I’d just prefer an action that seems like something I should dodge. It’s bizarre that because I rolled on the floor I prevented those dozens of spiders from descending from the trees as a tree shakes. It doesn’t read as a wind-up, if you know what I mean. But again if you could reset the boss properly, then it would be something you would learn. To me it feels like if lupi, on reset, maintained all the bug buffs you had let slip through. Yes, arguably, you shouldn’t have let the grubs slip past in the first place but I much prefer being given a “fair” second chance. I don’t see it taking away anything from the actual fight. Your welcome to disagree, I run with a lot of casual pugs so that probably colors my opinion.

It’s fine if they need time to fix it, but they need to update the dev comment which at the moment is patently untrue.

There are a lot of useful information that is not in game. For example, there are traits in game that will say things like “heals for a small amount” or “boost damage”, and you have to go to the wiki for the exact number. Also, many icd are hidden – lifesteal is a good example. No where on the omnomberry pie tooltip does it say there is a 1 second icd. This game, for better or worse, requires use of the wiki to get the full information. I agree that that is an issue, but that doesn’t means that because there’s no information in game that it’s not working as intended.

Dunno if this is strictly speaking a bug, more like poor implementation, but I agree it’s really frustrating for me playing on a laptop as I can dip below 20 fps which makes liadri much, much more difficult.

I can only recommend guesting on to low pop servers and turning down render distance to the lowest setting. Unfortunately like most problems in living story events that don’t have any easy fix I don’t think anything will be done about it. Hopefully in the future they will keep challenging small group/solo pve content separate from the zergfest areas.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Two things need to happen:

1) Spiders need to despawn after each attempt. It should not be more of a hassle to keep trying than it is to restart the whole dungeon after one failed attempt.

2) The boss’s mechanics should be better conveyed. They don’t need to be changed – just better conveyed. There is no indication that the spiders are a dodge-able attack – yes he shakes his head, but there is no indication of a hitbox or a “dodge now” or even an “I should dodge this” to portray the mechanic. The very concept of dodging an add spawn is just silly – “Oh, they evaded, looks like my spiders can’t get here now. Well, **** me.”

I agree with both of these, though I can see arguments for and against the second one. The shaking animation is not really something you would intuitively dodge, though there’s something to be said for fights that need to be learned rather than done successfuly the first time. If the fight was properly reset on wipe, it would be much easier to learn the boss mechanics, and they might not need to change it. On a personal level, tho, I wish the animation was something else, more similar to his slam attack.

Another problem with conditions, specifically in pve, is their ability to effect objects. AC p1 is a perfect example of this – as far as I’m aware you cannot damage the graveling burrows at all with conditions. It’s not as big a deal as the cap, but it’s yet another thing that makes conditions harder to work with.

I sort of hope the devs look at these other, peripheral issues with condition damage, because I’ve seen devs fob off questions about condition damage in pve with a “caps are there for technical reason, we might develope a work around at some point”, when in fact, it’s more complicated then that and there are some small things they could change that would help.

According to the wiki, “Static bonuses stack with themselves when used on dual-wielded weapons, except for Superior Sigil of Force (only +5% bonus to damage) and Superior Sigil of Accuracy (only +5% bonus to crit chance).”

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil#Mechanics

I don’t think this is a mesmer specific problem, it just LOS in general that has trouble dealing with anything but horizontal attacks. In PVE, most of the time your are on the ground fighting something that is on the ground, although as you pointed out sometimes minor dips in terrain will cause it to be “obstructed”. In WvW, taking advantage of high/low ground is more important, but the LOS system in this game doesn’t seem to handle it so well especially when trying to shoot up at something. I find it nearly impossible to hit single target spells on anyone sitting on a wall, even if there torso and legs are in full view. It seems like it would require an entire redesign of LOS, which i don’t think is on their agenda right now. For the moment, ground-targeted aoe and melee cleave will continue to reign supreme.

It would look bad for them to come out and say explicitly “Yes! Please, sell your dungeon slots so people can get the rewards they didn’t earn!” It looks like they are encouraging it, rather than just allowing it, if you know what I mean. For the reasons stated above, the practice is really not an issue, but its a different matter to publicly approve of it. There best course of action of they don’t mind it is to just let it continue, which is exactly what they are doing.

If they could do it similar to the way LoL does, that is, have tournament matches played on a few patches previous than live, you wouldn’t have to punish every single pvp players for the sake of a couple dozen competitive players. (Though it may not be feasible for technical reason). A PBE would also go a long way to help – I understand they want to keep LS stuff under wraps, but a purely PvP PBE might really help test future balance changes.

Almost switched it off in the first few seconds when his first recommendation was clerics gear…but yeah not much here for vet pve necromancer, and his builds definitely seem to be open world focused rather than dungeon focused. But it terms of a very basic introduction to some synergies between traits and skills, its not so bad.

Necros are amazing (right now) in pvp, situationally strong in wvw, and struggling in group based pve. This all comes down to the fact that we do insane condition damage – condi is the meta in pvp rn, but it suffers in pve because of condi caps and boss mechanics. We also lack good single-hit spike damage mitigation, which is not so common in pvp but is all over in pve, especially in dungeons or fractals.

The problem people have with the gold rewards (for the most part at least) was the lazy and frankly arbitrary way they assigned the amounts. The rewards themselves arent terrible, but its soured by the fact that there was clearly 0 thought but into it (the system implies, forexample, that SE path 2 is of comparable length and difficulty to CoF p1) The tokens were for many people unexpected, ands its made running with alts completely pointless rather than somewhat less lucrative. I cant speak for everyone but I know at least in my guild if I’m not doing dungeons at reset its much more difficult to get a group together.

Are you talking about “gifts”? Those are part of Legendary recipes. For example, you need the Gift of Zhaitan to make The Bifrost. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gift_of_Zhaitan

I guess they don’t want people running dungeons, they want people farming the queens gauntlet….if they make dungeons utterly worthless to the point no one does them, they’ll never have to fix them and they can focus solely on the 2 week carnival rotation… :o it all makes sense now. /tinfoilhat

Has any server got this open since the patch? I’m genuinely curious, i need my obi shards :x. Every time I check not a single server has it open. If there’s a server on NA that is attempting to complete it I’d be happy to pitch in, but at the moment it seems like the past 3 days its been continuously contested on all servers.

Maybe we’ll use the buttons again in the future…..? :O

No but seriously seems like an oversight, surprised it hasn’t been fixed or commented on.

I did post in GD about the token nerf – got a lot of up votes but no response :< many people seem to be of the opinion that people running alts are cashing in the tokens for rares to salvage for ecto$$$$.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dungeon-token-stealth-nerf/first

Not sure how many listened to the SOAC podcast this week, but they had a nice discussion about how holding out for the “perfect change” is not necessary best when there is an easy fix that might resolve some of the issue in the mean time. It was in the context of minon master necros and aoe damage, but I think the sentiment applies here as well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZczV7o3fc1Y , about an hour in. The guest host also discusses his problems with DS overflow towards the beginning). Reverting deathshroud is definently not the perfect fix, but its easy and will at least help the problem if not totally solve it.

? I wasn’t trying to insult you, I was genuinely confused. We’ve have a bit of a troll session on this topic in the sub-forum, it’s not your fault for missing the context and yes, the title of the merged thread should be clearer, but nothing I said was an attack on you, and I certainly don’t think it’s infraction worthy. Regardless, sorry if I offended you in some way.

…I was doing pretty good before, but I cant tell if this is a troll or not. You don’t need to search, it’s on the front page…like, within the first 5 topics.

Only advice I can give beyond the strats listed on the wiki is that you really only have one shot at it, since the spiders do not despawn. That’s really what pushes the fight over the top – the fight pre-wipe is challenging but reasonable. I do think that the boss post wipe is way out of proportion, sort of like the fractal chanters – simple fix would be to make the room clear adds on wipe. But until then, I recommend that if you wipe, reset the dungeon.