Guild Wars 2

Ross Biddle.2367:

frifox.5283:

robotempire.2451:

The new Mimic is also situational. However, what the hell situation is it useful in? When you’re facing one guy with a bunch of buffs?

Earlier today, stole 6 min of stability off an engi…

Oh right, this was the one thing I’d thought of.

Mantra of concentration vs mimic. You lose the stun break, but if you can steal good stability you’re golden. In a zerg situation that can make it superior since its a 25s mantra cd vs 30s mimic cd. But, of course, it’s chaotic by nature. You have to find a target, and find him with a good amount of stability. Otherwise…..

First, six minutes of stability? What. How does that work? Can engis stack stability or?

Second, leaving that aside, literally no one in their right mind should be equipping this skill with the plan of “I’m going to click around looking for someone that has stability, then cast it, then hope and pray they don’t dodge roll or run out of range!”

Come on, that’s ridiculous. That is such a waste of a skill slot. You are absolutely grasping at straws.

edit: Wait, were you being sarcastic? Your other posts imply you want Mimic back the way it was. I’m confused now.

Agreed. I said this as soon as they announced this change.

Yes, the old Mimic was situational. But kitten, the situation it was useful in was crystal clear. When you’re facing a bunch of rangers or whatever else with lots of projectiles (bow warriors, thieves perhaps).

The new Mimic is also situational. However, what the hell situation is it useful in? When you’re facing one guy with a bunch of buffs?

I’m sorry but this was a really ridiculous change. Put Mimic back the way it was. Where did they even get the idea to do this? The ONLY problem with Mimic was that the tooltip was terribly, terribly written. 75% of the time when I tell a mesmer (the old) Mimic is awesome, they’re like, “But like doesn’t it just absorb a projectile?” They had no idea there was FOUR SECONDS OF REFLECT. Why? Because the tooltip was awful. It said something like, “Absorb a projectile to fire back at your enemy.”

…then, there was a little blurb that said: “Reflect: 4s”. To most people, what that meant was for four seconds, you had a chance to absorb a single projectile to fire back at the enemy. It sounds awful. But what the tooltip REALLY meant was:

“Reflect all projectiles for four seconds. Additionally, you will absorb the first projectile fired, which you can then fire back at the enemy.”

ANet buried the lede on that tooltip, then when no one was using Mimic, instead of clearing up their writing they just threw the whole kitten thing out. Argh, really upset by this. Again it was situational but kitten there was a really clear situation for it, and in those situations it was really good.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

So far I am loving mimic on my 4 4 6 chaotic interrupt build with gs/staff or s/f staff. I have even made several mimic plays so far lol. I find mimic a very strong but balanced skill. I honestly don’t even notice the extra 5 sec cd.

This post doesn’t even make sense to me.

Yeah it’s “balanced” I guess in that it’s an extremely weak skill that neither hurts the enemy nor benefits the caster in any meaningful way in a fight.

I’m looking at a 4/6/4/0/0 GS+Staff power build for WvW zerg.

For what it’s worth, my plan was to build a “watch list” overlay for use in WvW that would allow you to create a list of n objectives, and get notifications if one of those objectives were taken. I think it would be quite useful for scouting and commanding, and also well within the guidelines & spirit of the “give no advantage” terms of the ToS.

If anyone wants to give it a whirl, go for it.

Some of the API endpoints appear broken as well… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.guildwars2.com%2Fv1%2Fworld_names.json for example returns a 404. There are others as well.

I’ve tried futzing with the GW2 API before, and it’s really annoying. In order to efficiently do lookups you must create your own database of information. For example, if you want to know the status of Garrison on the green WvW map for the Blackgate-Jade Quarry-Tarnished Coast matchup, that would require multiple API calls each requiring some heavy-handed client-side joining.

My hats off to GW2Spidy which I assume does exactly what I mentioned about building your own database.

I registered for this before I remembered how painful the API is. I feel bad saying that because it’s really awesome an MMO company even made an API available for game data, it’s just not great to work with.

Hi.

In short, the new animation for opening a black lion chest is unbelievably annoying. I would really like it if you guys would revert to the very simple interaction around opening a black lion chest.

It should not take 5 seconds to open a chest.

Thanks

Ruhrpottpatriot.7293:

If everything goes smoothly with GW2.NET you only have to download it once every patch and then you can access and filter it as you like.

I personally don’t see a reason to change the api for that, in my opinion this is a job for the clients to do.
A reason why there is only one endnote might have something with the /v1/items node which dumps all the items ids in a big list.

I don’t develop on Windows.

Anyway, your last sentence validates my point. The API design right now forces client-side joins. In a perfect world the API would be better designed around useful resource types. In the simple case, this would be things like weapons, armor, recipes, etc., each having their own API endpoints that could be filtered separately. I’m just talking about basic discoverable API principles.

At the VERY least, the items API should work like:

- items.json returns a list of say 50 or 100 item records, with inline pagination metadata. There are lots of formats out there to do this. One is HAL-JSON, but there are many more.

- items.json?item_id=x would work as item_details.json?item_id=x works now

- Filter on attributes. For example, items.json?type=armor would get all the armor. You get the picture.

I’m positive the limiting factor at ANet for improving their APIs engineering bandwidth, not talent or whatever. This is just constructive criticism.

I’d like to suggest splitting the item APIs into discrete endpoints based on item type, e.g.

• /v1/armor/

• /v1/weapon/

• /v1/accessory/

• /v1/recipe/

etc.

At the very least, I’d like to see the /v1/items/ API expanded to allow filtering on attribute. I reckon there must be something about the data modeling on the back end that prevents it, or it’d be done already. Plus the fact that trading post search is limited such as it is speaks to the likelihood there’s some bigger data issues that need to get settled before that kind of granularity can be implemented.

Anyway, I’m sure there are limitations on what this v1 API can do based on available engineering bandwidth. It is amazing someone took the time to even do v1. I am ok with denormalizing the data in my application. I am just loading all the armor I could find into Solr here …

Thanks.

This feature, where to get traits you are required to either spend skill points (which are very, very valuable during leveling) or endure unspeakably, intolerably dull, boring, repetitive grinding is the first unjustifiable, way-off-base, player-hostile design decision ANet has made in this game. I spend most of my time in WvW. Like, almost all my game time, actually.

I started an elementalist a few days ago, and leveled her through crafting. My 3 other 80s all hit the level cap before the patch, so this was my first experience post-patch. I cannot describe to you how annoying is it to have to run all over the game world, spending literally hours to get a single Master-tier trait. My ele is Sylvari; the location for either Rock Solid or Soothing Disruption is near Sorrow’s Embrace. I realize I was probably not choosing an optimal path to the location but it did indeed take 2+ hours to find the spot, go through the event, find the champ, down him, and get my trait.

Then to get Rock Solid (or Soothing Disruption, I can’t remember which was which) I had to run Molten Factory or something. I can’t tell you how long that took because dungeon crawling is not fun for me. I play this game for the WvW aspect, and nothing else.

I realize that a lot of people do a ton of PVE anyway, and they level their characters through quest/map completion, yadda yadda yadda. I’m not one of those people.

Please, please revert this terrible set of changes. I know you won’t. But gooby pls.

Bump. This also is effecting me. I submitted an in-game bug report as well.

This is especially a crappy bug because I wasted several “servings” of very expensive food before it dawned on me it wasn’t supposed to be running out so quickly.

I would really like to get either a refund or a replacement primer.

Thanks.

edit: I just used another metabolic primer (wasting the rest of the previous one since they don’t stack duration…) and this one appears to work ok. ANet you should really fix this bug then give a couple replacement primers to all of us who bought them from the gem store. These are good items that are being completely negated by this bug.

For the 2nd or 3rd time since the patch yesterday, I and many others in WvW were suddenly booted back to spawn.

We were fighting an attack on Bay when I suddenly got a loading screen. When it finished, PPT said +250 for a few seconds, then flipped down to +115 (I think the latter is the right number).

As far as I know first-hand, only Blackgate people were booted, but someone in map chat said some JQ people were booted as well. I don’t know.

What’s going on here? Can someone please explain why this is happening?

I think I know which Sensotix build this was inspired by, as I riffed on it myself. I’m still 20/20/30, though. High toughness + lots of stealth.

Also I dropped the staff in favor of sword/torch, and keep Signet of Domination handy. I have pretty decent stun/immobilize while keeping conditions up and staying alive.

I also have been running a mantra build but heavily focused on defensive support (this is a zerg fighting build though, not roaming). It is amazing.

This is a bummer. Phantasmal Warden was/is a great source of damage when PvD’ing or attacking siege.

I was booted out of an SPVP match as it ended. When I went back to the SPVP menu/map listing, there were no servers listed. I then unchecked “Hide Empty” in the settings. This revealed MANY servers that were empty. I could join one successfully. It’s been about five minutes now.

Thanks

Shrug.

I really enjoy sPvP and WvW. I don’t really play for rewards, I play to win matches. It’s just a hobby that I find enjoyable, don’t get why it has to be anything more than that.

Jubelum.3472:

BillFreist.1527:

Over the past several months we’ve had a small team working on ways to relieve some of the load from the game server while there are large concentrations of players. Most of the work thus far has gone pretty much unnoticed from the player’s perspective, but there have been pretty large steps made towards the issue. This continues to be a large and high priority issue for us so we can continue to make improvements to make this a thing of the past.

You need a “large” team. There needs to be noticeable improvements every patch.

This is not a troll post and I appreciate that it’s being looked into, but I’m going to tell you this one simple fact: Skill lag makes the game unplayable, players abandon unplayable games. It is a testament to how much player interest there is in WvW and the large scale PvP concept that players have stuck with Guild Wars 2 in spite of this skill lag for as long as they have. What I hear all the time in Teamspeak from the WvWers is that this game is “it” right now, there are no other serious choices for WvW. All anyone has to do really is introduce a game featuring the WvW concept without the skill lag and poof, there goes your entire WvW population which incidentally is the group who spends the most money on this game.

Again I’m not trolling, I’m just underlining the fact that first and foremost you need to fix the skill lag problem which has been around since launch a year ago or you will lose all of your WvW players to other games. It needs to be noticeable improvement every patch, it needs to be a “large” team working on this. You need this more than you need new PvE content.

Whether or not you meant it to be this is really condescending and kind of annoying.

I’m quite sure these guys know that it’s a serious problem, and that it is going to negatively impact their player base. They’re not idiots, you know? I’m quite sure there are project managers, CEO types, customer service people, etc., etc., all aware it’s an issue and breathing down these guys’ necks. Do you ever stop and think how tiresome it must be to read stuff like this?

I think there’s plenty of causes for legit frustration around this issue (my guild is WvWing right now but I’m sitting in queue reading the forums, and I’m not sure I even want to play WvW because the lag is so bad), but it’s the most annoying thing in the world to have someone preaching at you about what you need to do like you don’t already know. Especially in this particularly condescending, “Now, I’m not trolling bud, but I’m just letting you know…” tone. Do you think the QA devs of all people don’t know it’s a serious issue?

Source: I’m a dev who absolutely HATES stuff like this, either from users or co-workers.

edit: I guess there’s a chance I’ll get infracted in some way for this post myself, since it’s kind of combative, but sheesh.

edit2: And this whole “you need a large team” thing is garbage. Throwing more people at a problem is counter-productive. Mythical man-month, etc.

BlackDevil.9268:

Hey bill!
Great you explain us what’s going on with the skill lag and great to hear that you guys are working on it!

Though I’m still confused by what happened the last week.
Basically what has been going on is a few months ago there was a post about a team of arenanet saying they were working on the skill lag step by step, which you mentioned in your first post. Of course, like you also mentioned, the first steps are barely noticeable, but what actually happened after the patch?

You probably already know what’s going on, the skill lag got worse, and not just a bit. Pretty much at every fight there’s skill lag now, which wasn’t before the patch. So what happened? Is it a bug which came along with the leagues or is it the leagues itself causing the problems? Or maybe totally something different?

Hope to hear an answer soon from you,

Doiid

Well said! I would like to hear some tech details behind what’s happening to create these conditions.

Dr. Clarke-Willson had a great talk here (slides only, unfortunately), maybe an explanation in the context of that talk?

I know there is a lot of discontent with PVE “carebears” participating in WvW in the forums right now but this discontent is misplaced. Any player should feel welcome to participate in whatever part of the game they want. It’s not other players’ place to say that people should or shouldn’t play WvW.

The real issue is that ArenaNet should not have enticed greater numbers of players to participate in a game mode that was already suffering from debilitating issues. By doing so they have degraded the playing experience for many, many users.

In other words, enjoy playing, ignore the vitriol. And ArenaNet, pls.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Merged-Skill-lag-issue

Byega.4215:

BlackDevil.9268:

I can live with 1 day lag or a hour a day, but now its just all week, every hour in every borderlands. Even 30v30 causes the whole map to lag.
Can’t roam, can’t raid, pve is boring. Game is kittened.
GG on this patch, only kitten came with it AGAIN…

+1

Everything is so laggy, i can’t barely 1 vs 1, i can’t barely switch between my attunements, i can’t barely do something in WvW …

Do something Anet

Yeah, this has just been a huge blunder. I try to constrain hyperbole about this stuff because it’s just a game, and devs are people who put in a lot of work on making it fun. But whoever was involved in making the decision to entice even more users to play WvW when servers were crushed on reset nights anyway needs to have their hand slapped or worse.

WvW is unplayable for me. Not literally unplayable, but it is not fun to play. The lag is out of control. I was trying to defend a yak, for example, and couldn’t fire off any skills against just a single player. This was near garrison. The zergs were at south camp/lake/briar.

Either call off the season, fix this immediately (i.e. don’t wait for the next scheduled release) by whatever means necessary, or people like me who play a few times a week and buy gems twice a month won’t be logging back in because there’s nothing fun to do.

DevonCarver.5370:

Queues will be fixed as part of the new map. They will continue to operate as they have since launch until then. The queue does not function as a typical queue and we are fixing it. It will just take some time. It has been a lower priority than the other things we have done and we’ve only now been able to devote the appropriate resources to it.

I mean, I’m a dev, I know sometimes things have to go out the door for political or business reasons before they’re ready. But honestly why were leagues, achievements, etc., even put on the table if a legit queue was not in place? Why entice more people to play when servers (at least for high-pop/tier 1 WvW servers like Blackgate, etc., and I’ve heard anecdotally other servers are the same) are crippled by current load? It just totally boggles my mind.

My bias is toward thinking there are political reasons things went out before they’re ready because I can’t imagine the guys pouring their energy into making this game would give this game mode an indian burn of this caliber on purpose.

Search is broken again/still. But really I’m posting because I want to hear how search got into this state in the first place. Would love a post-mortem on this. I wish you guys had more talks available on your web architecture.

A month? Dude they’re probably still working on the same stuff they were working on when you left.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Join Random will put you on either the Red team or the Blue team, not spectator. However, there’s an issue where the join team buttons aren’t greying out properly when the teams are full. So I suspect that’s what happened to you. You began the match as a spectator, clicked Join Random, but both teams were full, so the UI just closed, without moving you off the spectator team.

Thanks for responding.

Clicking “Join Random” should have 0% probability of landing you as a spectator, and yet this just happened to me.

Dawdler.8521:

Psych.6527:

What do you focus on then? just staying alive? wait for back up to arrive? bit boring honestly.
Mesmer is such a unique class and extremely fun to play with even shatter mesmers can be really tanky.

Btw, mesmers can take on 3 players as well…

Hey you play what’s fun to you. The focus is on staying alive, yes. That’s what you need in tPvP unless you have a specific focus (like glasscannon backstabbing theives). I find the dueling fun, its when I fight a really good player for half the match that I enjoy PvP the most. Bad players die regardless of your spec anyway. Dying or killing quickly is the most boring thing in the game. I use the same spec in random sPvP because I’m lazy.

Berzerkurderpers melt but sometimes you meet some gems. Like a dagger/dagger Elementalist I met yesterday. Nasty little bugger, but very skilled (he had double my ranking I saw later). We fought for quite some time at a high pace (so many stuns, ugh) but he couldnt kill me and I couldnt kill him either. It was literally about popping the right skill at the right tim. Even when we re-engaged a couple of times people died around us but our battles was epic, lol. Most enjoyable.

I really enjoy my 0/20/30/0/20 bunker build as well. Staff/sword+torch. I never die but I don’t really do a lot of damage either. What I am good at is being a constant nuisance and getting people to chase me because they’re irritated.

For skills I use Ether Feast, Blink, Decoy, Mirror Images & Mass Invisibility. I’m using Fighter runes (power/toughness) on my armor.

I can get out of basically any pinch, ducking in and out of contact nonstop. I’m really, really annoying.. or at least I like to think I am. I’m having fun anyway. And yeah those really epic battles with thieves or elementals or basically anyone who expected to squash you really quick because you’re a mesmer… make the whole not-killing-stuff thing worth it, in my opinion.

Zinwrath.2049:

szthesquid.9576:

The more skills are split the more people are pressured to stick with 1 game mode. I don’t want to have to re-learn my class to try a new game mode, or keep track of 3 different variations of each skill.

no offence but this sort of mentality just stinks of laziness.

Most people play video games as a form of leisure. The dude just doesn’t want to spend his leisure time that way. That’s not “laziness” that’s just called “having an opinion”.