Guild Wars 2

Forzani.2584:

I sit back and watch Thieves from my server terrorize small groups to mini zergs. That way I can actually get an idea what the Thief is doing since I can see him even when stealthed. Thief kills someone, stealths, teleports away and watches from total safety as the zerg runs around like a chicken with it’s head cutoff using aoes and swinging their weapons in the air. Laughable.

The biggest problem isn’t stealth …or mobility…it’s stealthed mobility. Daoc had it right. Even though they had perma stealth, your mobility was severly hampered. Your movement speed was maybe 50% slower than not stealthed.

GW2 ? Two different shadowsteps that teleport you 1200+ units away in a blink. Spam heartseekers…use SB and you can put a ton of distance between you and the enemy. Never mind Fleet shadows that is a 50% movement speed while in stealth…..which is kind of weird imo. The fastest movement speed in the game is while stealthed ? Hopefully I have that wrong.

So the Thieves that come on here telling us to use AOE …yea right. Unless you have a 1200 unit aoe spell I don’t know about good luck hitting a thief with it.

Currently there is zero penalty to be stealthed. No movement speed penalty and zero counters. Plus when you are stealthed you can’t even be damaged to take you out of stealth. Yes, you can get hit while in stealth ….but you are also likely under a very strong regen and condition removal….and as mentioned earlier, very unlucky if you do take a ton of damage while stealthed with all the mobility.

Very poor game design.

Stealth in GW2 is pretty much total immunity.

Agreed, I keep saying this since the launch, stealth has to be broken by damage, or your speed slowed down, or at least certain abilities disabled, especially the ones used to escape fast. Either you stay in stealth and sneak away slowly.. or teleport away to the horizon in 2 seconds. Not both hat once.

It’s ridiculously OP both in PvP and PvE for the thief to be able to move away miles in two seconds, beyond reach. Who even cares about stealth here, the mobility itself is OP, there is no way a good thief can be killed if he doesn’t want to be dead, he’ll blink away and that’s about it.

Currently thief’s stealth and mobility combo is as OP as perma-stun ability in some games. You can’t do much if you’re stunned 100% of the fight. Neither can you do much if the thief is either invisible, or beyond any reach.

The suggestion is simple:

Please let the players have access to all armor models in the game, don’t lock them out of 66% of the content, just because they play a class that uses light/med/heavy armor. Is that not against your game design logic (locking people out of the content for petty reasons?). Your designers worked hard on making the models, we, the players, want to use them on our characters.. but there is no way my human mesmer can do so, only about 33% of the armor models are available to me. There is however a simple fix for this, that also gives a huge boost to crafting without making it overpowered or breaking dungeons!

A crafter could obtain design recipes, that would give him the option to choose a look of the armor he crafts. He could even (with more mats and effort) apply a heavy or medium skin to a light piece. It’s just looks, no stats are changed, no mechanics are broken, no extra stress to the engine because no models/textures are added – we just use the currently locked out models.

This would mean a huge boost to crafting, and give players so much more variety to customize the characters they love.. and requires no additional content to be actually designed at this point.

I reject the argument that locking out 66% of the content is ok because it helps differentiate classes. Imagine you could only access 33% of the world if you chose a class – would you not call this insane?

Please consider this.. I myself struggle to maintain interest in the game, due to lack of armor models that fit my character. Especially in a game that is proud not to be about armor stats but armor looks. I can’t be the only one who thinks that..

Best event ever. Totally getting flashbacks to my childhood :P This has to be permanent..

~22g spent on 900gems/10 keys.
With keys from chests I’ve opened total of 18 chests
Got my token on 14th try)
Also got a total remake kit and 5 fine transmutation stones, both worth together some 550gems and I wanted to buy these anyway.
So.. lucky day I guess.

I was quite critical in the past, but some praise is deserved for ANet. I’ve just come back after months of absence, to the game, and I see significant improvement. First and foremost – the FPS! Holy batman, what did you do? When I left, the game was unplayable in places, especially LA, now it runs quite smoothly pretty much everywhere. The only thing that changed on my end is Win7 32bit instead of 64bit, but that can’t be the reason. The game is a lot more enjoyable now, when things are smoother. The game is finally performing as it should.

Next thing is of course item preview in TP, something I asked about for months, finally there, and already put to good use to re-dress my alts.

Then the awesome news of the End of Phantom Wars in WvW. Too long have we been taking part in ghost conflicts, where I was the only model on the screen, despite the effects and damage clearly telling me there is at least 60 others around me. Better late than never. I have a distinct feeling, that I see more models in the open world as well, with characters being visible from afar, which really adds to the experience.

Did you remove the old cutscenes in favor of a more traditional camera shots? At least I saw none in the living story missions. I quite like that too, but I miss the high quality view of my character

Finally the living story and the events in the old zones really bring a feeling of exodus, and a war looming on the horizon. Giving players a reason to be in older zones is equally important as adding new zones, that was always my opinion.

However, I still see world event balancing is completely off, large groups of players one shot the boss and TP still has no way to filter for medium armor only for example. I’m currently not interested in any grind due to lack of time, so won’t comment on instances, fractals etc. Consider this an opinion of a returning casual player

OMG… ok, the fault is mine. I found the culprit.. it’s peerblock, which did not close properly and was still running in the background. After killing it, the high cpu usage disappears and I can even log in to the game! Go figure.

Yeah but I wonder what it’s working on :P ArenaNet’s top secret computational war machine? It would take an evil genius to devise such a cunning plan. Use the combined power of 3 million subscribed CPU’s, while the owners are AFK and the launcher is doing it’s thing ^^If you could hear my hard drive right now, while I’m waiting for the game to let me in, it’s loud like a machine gun :P The second I close the launcher, it’s blissful silence again. This kind of behavior only happens when I run many torrents and start to move big files around at the same time, while deleting a lot of small files from the recycle bin – but I’m not doing this now :P

30%? You’re lucky, for me it’s 60-90% on a C2D. The game itself uses less of my CPU than the launcher. On top of that the hard drive works like it was being pounded by a pneumatic hammer, while no updating is being done. Something is seriously wrong here, no amount of CPU drawing would cause this type of behavior, it must be a serious bug. If I left the launcher open accidentally, I fear it would fry the system. I hope something is being done about it..

Here is a screenshot of the issue. The fact it’s trying to log in on it is not relevant, the HD/CPU usage is spiking even when I simply open the launcher and let it stay open. I repeat, this is when no updating is being done, during an update it goes as high as 94%.

Presence

A third bar added to each tower keep and supply camp, under Supply and Courtyard Control. It’s being slowly filled up as long as long as there are MORE allies than enemies in the zone that defines the bounds of the structure (Event bounds). If there are less allies than enemies near it, or none at all, presence is being slowly reduced over time.

Presence amount will directly influence the strength of the gates and walls. At 100% presence, the gates will be strongest, for example 125% of the current value, while at 0% presence (a keep that no one visits) the gates will be at 50% durability (for example).

Most importantly, the more objectives your server controls, the longer it will take to fill the presence bar on any of them, and the more people people will be needed for it.

What does it all mean? It introduces the need to MAINTAIN presence in all the structures you own, which will put a high strain on a server that attempts to control the entire map, while making it easier for the smaller server to counterattack. So the dominating server, will have to send some people away from the big zergs to patrol areas already captured and keep them at high presence, or risk small ninja teams to take abandoned keeps with ease.

Example default values (for when all servers control equal land areas):

Presence is filled at 50% when you capture an objective.

Time to fill Presence from 0 to 100%

Supply Camp
2 people can maintain presence at current level without raising or lowering it
6 minutes to fill bar with minimum crew, down to 2 minutes with large force

Tower
5 people needed to maintain stable presence
12 minutes to fill bar, 4 with large force

Keep/Castle
10 people needed for equilibrium
24 minutes to fill bar, 8 with large force

The above numbers do not take into account the number of objectives you control. For example, a server that controls most of the map, might find it takes their entire zerg 3x more time, so 12 minutes, to fill Presence on a tower they just captured. A server with no map control might take a bit over 60 seconds to fill it with a smaller group.

Keep in mind that if even 1 enemy scout comes near your keep with 10 people in it, you will be at 9 effective people after the subtraction so the presence will slowly be reduced, until you get more people in – makes sense, when enemies come near, you should call for more people anyway.

A side effect of the mechanic is a natural simulation of wear and hunger during a siege, a force camping outside of the walls will over time reduce the defensive strength of the keep, making it easier to take after some time – at the risk of reinforcements arriving for the defending side.

The more people the faster presence rises – or falls, but not faster than 2 or 3x the default value (which will be slow, like upgrading), to avoid a big zerg insta-capping presence as it runs past a tower.

A dominating server will have many keeps at low presence, because gamers are quickly bored of doing nothing, like patrolling an empty keep. It doesn’t mean the mechanic itself is boring, it can be used effectively by organized guilds who work out smart routes and swapping mechanics to send players back and forth and keep them near a keep only for a short while while maximizing presence gain. This won’t work for unorganized servers of course.

A weak server that owns only a couple of objectives, will find them easier to hold, and quicker to capture new objectives, with lower numbers.

;TLDR;
The more lands you have, the harder it is to keep them.
Ask the Ancient Rome about it.

Zoid.2568:

The new dungeons are for hardcore endgame players. You don’t have to do any of the content, you can sit in a corner in Divinitys Reach if you want. It’s ok.

People said exactly the same about radiance in LOTRO when it was introduced. “If you’re not a hardcore raider, you don’t need to grind radiance”. And yet after some time the casual masses did catch up with the radiance raids and were hit by the grind.

When I read the article about Agony, Radiance in LOTRO instantly came to my mind. Can’t be a coincidence.

Here I fixed Ascended Gear system for you.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Ascended-Gear-2-0-The-Way-To-do-It-Right

You’re welcome.

One solution is to introduce Ghosts, transparent white identical models without textures. One model kept in memory at all times, with 0 loading and display time. These would be visible from as far away as you can see, and over time would be faded into the actual models as they load. Bottom line is, you would SEE something at all times.

One word.

Customization.

That’s all.

I am still puzzled as to why they let me choose the Infinity Ball as invention on my Asura during character creation. All it did was add a small text to my Bio? lol and here I was expecting some followup or meaning! Like:

Destiny’s Edge: Oh no! What do we do? Zheitan killed us all and we lie dead on the ship floor!
Me: Fear not! For in my youth I invented the Infinity Ball which I happen to have on me right now!
Traherne: Hope at last! What does this awesome artifact do?
Me: It….. rolls! Forever!

Come on, at least a few lines of funny dialogue? Better than nothing at all.

Focksbot.6798:

Well, in some ways, but not in others. My personal experience of the boss is that once he makes the clones and starts sending streams of lasers across the floor in all directions, I can’t get close. If one little glowing dart hits you, four more hit your while you’re on the ground. I’ve played my fair share of shmups, and I can dodge for long periods, but one hit and I’m toast, it seems.

All you had to do is run at them from the side, dodge twice, and you were in the zone where the darts could not reach you. One shot at the real eye and the clones disappear. Not hard at all.

It was my favorite part of the personal story, one of the most epic fights in any MMO. Not because it was hard, but because of the epicness of it. It was not trivial, but just right. For me that fight WAS the finale, not the Zheitan flop. It had only one problem, the fight lasted a bit too long, 3-4 full pattern repetitions would be enough, but he had so much health it took me twice that. I haven’t seen him since, but if the nerf people describe is true, then GW2 has no real epic ending anymore

Solution:

Keep AoE cap but modify it. If your hitbox touches another allies hitbox, you take 25% more damage from AoE. And it stacks. If you stand in a stack, the stack is instakilled by one AoE guy. If you spread around, all works as ususal.

hilarious, really well done

It looks like people started to sell them too early, and many panicked selling theirs as well, causing the price to drop because right now most people got them. The prices will rise in time, when more people get to 80, or level alts. My guess at least.

I don’t think you will get a response. The system is designed as a black box, from what I gather. Stuff goes in, stuff goes out, but what happens inside is kept a secret.

I would hope that all the gems are generated by players buying them from ANet. Why? Because then all future expansions could be sold for gems, without any loss to ANet. You might buy your stuff for gold made by playing, but, all the gems you buy for gold, have been paid for by someone else in real cash. If true, this would be a fantastic system, making the playfield more equal, rich people spending real money so that poor people can play. But I believe this was asked many times now, and the threads are always ignored. It’s a black box. ANet probably puts in some free gems into it, generating them out of the air, because.. the black box is too big to fail! The business must go on, even if no one is buying gems. Go inflation.

I love these threads. It’s like asking the game makers to implement mouse support into their game that, for some reason, lacks it. Same with item preview. Such an obvious feature. They don’t have it. Why? Oh, I dunno. Budget cuts? Temporary loss of common sense that lasts like, um, 7 years? That’s how long it took to make the game ain’t it right? And yet it has no item preview in the TP. It’s where it’s most needed! Go figure. Why can’t we have at least one MMO that when launched, has at least the basics covered, that were standard for the past decade?

There is a workaround for now though! Spend hundreds of $ on gems, buy gold, buy ALL the items that sound like they look cool, and preview them this way. In case of dyes it’s only 400 or so. Gives you an excuse to buy the inventory and bank slots too.

Whatever brings in the cash.

Malediktus.9250:

There seems to be a lot of market manipulation going around by very rich people with thousands of gold, so I have the following suggeions.
1) Make things you bought on the trading post temporaly account bound (say 24h) and make it impossible to sell old stocks (not account bound) of that item for the same duration.
2) If you sold an item make a cooldown on it until you can buy more of the item.
3) Add an extra 10% listing fee + 5% sale tax for items you previously bought on the trading post (lets say for the last week).

Ok, but if we start penalizing people with thousands of gold, we have to penalize people with lots of free time to play the game too. And the people who earn a lot of money IRL. And people who can organize. I mean 12 people can come together and together they will have a few thousand gold, so they can manipulate just as well as a single person. What you suggest will hit everyone, the average joe who wants to make his 2g on the TP just as well as your gold mafia making their 2nd million. It’s like, you know, it’s like dropping a 10 megaton nuke on NY to get rid of the rats. Yeah you will hinder some rats, but most will survive and thrive because you wiped out all the humans. Way to go!

Halloween made Gems-Gold rate very VERY lucrative. I bought 14k gems for about 60g few weeks before Halloween, and during the highest Halloween price spike, I sold all the gems back for around 120g, that’s around 60g pure profit.

- few weeks before H 1 gold could be traded for 185gems (that’s when I bought most of mine)
- during the gem price spike on first day, 1g could be traded for 81gems or so, and that’s when I sold my gems for the insane profit.
- later the worth of gems fell again, but not as low as they used to be before the event

Maybe this graph will help a bit. You can see the situation before the event, the spike when it began, and the falloff to more or less where things are now. The worth of gems will most likely fall once the special items are removed from BLC. But it will not fall as low as it was before the event.

One word – goldsellers They make money from gold, and what’s better for them than to make hundreds of gold doing nothing, like by for example reselling a lot of event weapons? They have the means and the motive to do what you say.

Candy corn is pretty bad IMO when it comes to making significant money. Sure it may go up, maybe even double the price, but consider how much you need to have to make a lot of gold. It only stacks to 250 doesn’t it? You’d make a lot more reselling the weapons.

You bet there is “market manipulation”. There is nothing sinister or strange about it, everyone with a common sense knew this will happen, and if you did not get a stockpile of those items, you can only blame yourself. That’s how it’s done. But it’s not done by 1 person. I myself bought a couple of those weapons with the sole purpose of selling them at a much higher price in the future. I could already make some 50g profit if I sold the items today, but I think the prices will rise even more. I only wish I bought more of them

If you’re taking about the “one time only” animation of the mad king bursting out of the hole, then I think I just saw it in game like 5 mins ago, while in overflow after porting to LA, my character was still invisible from loading and so was most of the town, but the huge pumpkin-man did appear once again, it seems only for me ^^ Bugs will be bugs..

Asura Engineer, 80
No boosts

Trick is to jump on the wheel right after the shake, avoid instances with big people, and stay first. After a couple of jumps you will usually have only 1-2 people around until the end.

I like the new FOV as well, it feels like I can see more of the enviroment thanks to it.

Oh so that’s what it was! On the first day of the festival as I was standing near the new open world mini-dungeon where the last page is located, a guild mate came and we started chatting, he invited me to a party, and we kept talking in party chat. At some point when I was about to offer him to show the location of the jumping puzzle on this map, since he said he didn’t know they existed, I discovered my messages were not appearing in the chat anymore. I thought the chat was bugged but I guess I too was blocked by the system. I was bored anyway and since I could not help him with the puzzle location whilst being mute, I logged out.

There is a difference between difficult, and badly designed. When one race can play easy mode through the puzzle and make it nearly impossible for another race to do it, then it’s bad design, and not hard content. People should at least get an understanding of the problem first, before jumping on the “oh stop whining the game is great” bandwagon.

Yeah I completely agree. I gave up on the puzzle for now, too many big guys playing right now. On the other hand I don’t know if I wan to play it on a Charr or Norn, might be easy mode, but I don’t want to be the object of hate either.

Probably the most prominent achievement of GW2 is going against the “other players are an annoyance” mentality from all other MMO’s. It has succedded in this for the most part.

However, the newly introduced Mad King’s tower jumping puzzle clearly breaks this rule. As a smaller race like Asura, you actually WANT the players who play the huge Norn and Char to go die and fail and leave asap. As long as they play with you, you can’t even see your model, not to mention see where you stand or are jumping to.

The negative mentality from other MMO’s is back, with a vengence. How did this go past the QA team and beta testers? Let me guess, you guys did it all solo right? Why not make the instance SOLO, or at least give an option to enter a solo run if you play Asura?

Charr and Norn should get an achievement after 100 runs, Asura players should get the same achievement after 5 runs. Enough said.

Jrunyon.3012:

Well stop complaining on the forums and do it. You’ll see how much easier it gets after you get down all the jumps and finish it.

Let me guess, you are a charr or a norn? Or were lucky enough not to have any of them around?

The puzzle is currently BROKEN beyond belief just because charr and norn are allowed to play it. It should be a solo instance. I want to SEE where I’m going, it’s not like I can, er, wait a bit and let them go first, now can I? Sloppy design, no beta testing, QA department should be fired on the spot.

Yes just logged out of the game because I don’t feel like beta testing without being paid. I don’t mind the timed nature of the puzzle, or how unforgiving it is to make a split second error, in fact I like this. However, I would like to SEE where I’m going! Which is not possible with all the ubersized Charr and Norn jumping with me. So you end up with a timed puzzle with no margin for error, rotating and moving platforms that you have to do BLINDLY. Really? No one bothered to beta test this and make this already INSTANCED puzzle a solo experience, as it should be? I’ll try again at 2am maybe there will be less people then, but why should I even be forced to do this, if it could be simply a solo instance?

I’ll just give out a simple secret that eventually comes with age and amount of games played, but also with a certain knowledge of programming and how games are made.

Nothing in a game is worth spending the money and time you spend on it.

Spending months of your life and a few paychecks on a skin created by some modeller in a few hours? Or on a few numbers that describe your next end-game item with +5 more stats? It is not worth it. It’s just smoke and mirrors, an illusion, it doesn’t really exist. Just get as much enjoyment as possible from playing through the story and exploring the world and end it there, then you won’t be, hopefully, so disappointed.

Yeah it’s to prevent people from playing the market. But it doesn’t meant it’s not possible. I still made 60g on buying gems with gold 2 weeks before Halloween event, then selling all the 14k gems for 120g or something like that :P Almost doubled my gold during the peak of the curve spike.

Yeah for about 1g you could get like 200+ PToT’s from the kids, considering the bags gave more candy so you could buy them again. Easiest way, and works instantly.

I have used 1000 candy on PToT which cost me only 1g, which resulted in about 160 bags and my results were similar to yours. Some food, some toilet paper, 2 trash recipes, and some one-use tonics. I guess that’s only fair considering it all cost only 1g..

but what I find really bizzare is that ANet sells these bags for a fortune, to get 160 PToT’s I’d have to pay a lot of cash (don’t remember the price atm but it is like 275 gems for 10 bags?), I think around 50$? Who in their right mind would buy it then, considering how easy they are to get in game, and why would ANet even sell them? I mean wtf? Did their marketing team get high on portobello mushrooms or something? :P

I don’t get how this is possible. Isn’t the server controlling everything? How can a client side bot perform such ridiculous actions? Is there no code on the server to check incoming packet data for invalid values? Such as 500% MF? Or changing position with speed that clearly violates the rules? And if there isn’t, why not?

Are you serious? You want preview on items bought on TP? It’s like asking that your new car should have windows. No way they could have anticipated it while designing TP! I mean can one expect from mobile phone designers to include speakers right? Who in earth would think of putting speakers in a phone? That’s crazy, no one would ever want to hear the person you’re talking to right? Right?? Would you really dare to ask an architect to include a staircase in your apartment? You know, to reach the second floor without using a ladder? No way, stairs in a two floor house? Insanity, no one would want that, surely! But preview on items in TP beats all of this. ANet could never have imagined people would want such a thing!

Bazinga. In case your sarcasm radar is off

127g right now, made about 60g yesterday on the gem price spike ^^

It’s good that skills are being split this way. Would you prefer if PvP balancing started to influence your PvE gameplay?

Bodycult.4516:

I would be more enjoyable to have some sexy outfits and armors for female character.

.. or male. I want my alt as revealing and sexy as possible, to MESMERize the enemies ^^ The armor I could find so far is rather boring, and no male dungeon or cultural armor is revealing enough. Why can’t we have Age of Conan barbarian style sets? ;/

Nice idea. For GW3. Will never happen in GW2.

20c profit from a single transaction is hardly worth it. It takes less time to kill a mob and get 10x more in loot than to buy and repost it. In fact you could kill dozens of mobs in a starter zone who drop items well over 20c each in the time it takes to repost.

What grenades need is the ability to throw them as far as possible even if the circle is out of range. Right now I consider them broken because of this.

Level up by building rams in WvW. Solid, hard work. You may even finish before you’re 80 yourself!

Or move half of the people from NA servers to EU and vice versa :P

Gandara also suffers from nightcapping every other week. This early morning I stayed to witness all our upgraded keeps being taken by a 40+ zerg, while we had about 8 people on the entire map At once point they used 4 trebs and few catas while we had 4 defenders xD Just don’t upgrade, if that bothers you, that’s what I’m doing, and retake stuff for karma and gold boost.