Guild Wars 2

How will this affect voice chat communities and server pride for PuG players that aren’t invited to alliances? There are a lot of more casual WvWers not in a guild but still enjoing their server and voice chat, but now they’ll probably get random placement.

With this latest update, the very last jump in the Swashbuckler’s Cove JP in Gendarran has changed. Even with Swiftness and a dodge-jump I can’t make the jump and I haven’t found an alternative route.

Has anyone completed this post-patch? Was this intended?

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

Do we know if FotM 50 completion if being credited on the leaderboard-we-can’t-see? or is unlocking it enough, since completing it doesn’t unlock 51?

Dungeon runners can get ascended weapons from dungeons without crafting. Champions and fractals have a chance to drop weapon chests.

I think each server wants to win and any server would be demoralized at losing that prospect. Week 1 was (and likely Week 7 will be) incredibly close though, so I’m not buying that T1 is ruined. Hope we can continue having some fun along the way.

NeHoMaR.9812:

soulcakeduck.7036:

karma trains and in a group of 5

That’s almost impossible on T1, here 99,99% of time is zerg, if you run out there with a 5 people team you will be wiped miserably.

You misunderstood. A karma train is a zerg flipping objectives. Five players in your party increases the amount of ‘credit’ the tracking system awards you which increases your chances of being tagged for the event completion.

It’s not really the achievement. The credit system for doors and walls has always been unreliable. If you get WXP for the objective, the achievement tracks it correctly though.

My best luck has been in karma trains and in a group of 5 where all are putting good damage on the gate. This may be one of the achievements you plan on not finishing for the meta, though.

yeosel.7902:

Olba.5376:

yeosel.7902:

gennyt.3428:

DevonCarver.5370:

The rewards included in season 1 achievements should help to address this. Very specifically the ascended crafting materials. It is also the case, that we want people playing all the parts of the game, so there are always going to be optimal ways to get specific rewards and those may not always include WvW. We are building the whole of GW2 and we try and balance things across all the game types.

We will continue to make strides, however, to make WvW feel more rewarding, especially in this type of area.

I’m curious if you can name one thing achievable in WvWvW that isn’t faster and more abundant in PvE?

Gift of Battle?
Badge of Honor?

Because you totally cannot get thousands of Badges of Honor for Achievement Points, right?

I never noticed getting badges from pvE achievements, But still its probably easier and faster to get badges from wvw then from PvE

Every achievement chest gives at least 100 badges. 500 for the largest chests. I’ve received 5000 badges from achievement points, which I am relatively certain is more than I’ve received from WvW play (currently rank 320). It’s enough to buy 10 gifts of battle, without ever setting foot in WvW.

So it’s a lot.

Suggestion for the future, split these infantile achievements per zone not per world. It’s a huge investment (especially with the W2 zone lengths) to have to redo the entire package for an unpredictable point missing through no fault of our own.

Stormleaf.1769:

Uh. You don’t need to finish the repair animation for Supply Mastery to trigger.

I never claimed you had to finish the animation. You do, however, need to use supply while holding zero. Devon Carver confirmed as much—the only time Supply Mastery triggers is on the “last” tick. And you can see for yourself that when your current supply lands at zero, there will still be another tick where you try to use supply and are met with a “not enough supply” message.

In this example it ended up requiring the full 5 ticks of the animation.

If you started with one supply, it would take “only” two ticks to trigger supply master, one to leave you at zero and another to try to proc.

Build, Repair, and Supply Mastery need some tweaking. These traits are supposed to make using supply easier but can often make it harder.

- When your Build/Repair Mastery should spend all your remaining supply, it often leaves you with 1 supply instead.

- Supply Mastery refunds some supply, but this only occurs when you continue to spend supply while having 0 left.

So, if I have 15 supply and spend it 6 at a time,
1st tick leaves me with 9 supply,
2nd tick leaves 3,
3rd tick leaves 1,
4th tick leaves 0,
5th tick may (or may not) proc Supply Mastery.

Instead of spending 15 supply in 3 ticks, as you’d expect when spending 6 at a time, it takes nearly twice as long.

Instead, Build/Repair Mastery should drop you to zero supply if you’re carrying less than a single tick uses. And, Supply Mastery should do it’s single proc check when you reach zero supply, not after.

Has there been an update about this? Will players that lost finishers have them restored?

I had temporary finishers in my bank (like the Snowman Finisher), that I had never used. With today’s update, the items are seemingly gone and the finishers are “locked” on my finisher page.

:( My snowmen!

Genuinely curious: what stopped your group from equipping some Stability, or even just staggering your approach to the camped area so not everyone could be knocked off at once? Cannot picture how a single player, using a single skill, trolled a group for 45 minutes.

With the new hard cap preventing groups from killing Maw 50+, I believe ArenaNet likely intends to revisit rewards for FotM at least at higher levels. I think it will be very likely that these higher levels (once they’re again accessible) will end up having a noticeably better chance to drop Fractal Weapon skins, possibly even a guaranteed chance at a skin (once all Ascended gear is in, on the “hardest” floor with non-fatal Agony?).

That could be a while. They want to phase Ascended gear in over time…

And that means Fractals remain an oddly unrewarding, random number generated casino-gamble for months (they already have). I really do appreciate that weapon skins can be rare instead of handed out to everyone who steps inside, but this is not a nice way to treat the customers willing to dedicate themselves to the long run, especially in the GW franchise.

So. Why should I play FotM before that next patch?—that’s been the question for FotM at every step.

All Bags collected in Explorable mode have 3 tokens each from that dungeon; bags from Story Mode do not.

After completing an explorable, my game client crashed. I logged back in and opened the bags only to find they had no tokens.

I wouldn’t normally link to videos but this one is perfect for Alpha:

This provides perfect understanding for each ability. You should know what telegraphing to look for and how to deal with it.

Silidus.7985:

- Some AoE ‘Dragon Tooth’ like effects do not require that you move out of the AoE field. You can dodge these types of attacks from within the red circle if you time your dodge with the impact. Cancel your res, dodge, then return to resing.

These are the rule, not the exception. The entire point of dodge rolling is that you are evading during that frame, regardless of what would hit you. There are very few attacks that cannot be dodged (I think Lava Shaman’s churning earth in FotM is one example, can’t even think of any others).

Tilion.4062:

First of all thank you Blueshield for your quick reply.

So, basically the 20+ participants won’t have access to the RNG of fractal weapons and infused rings while doing a 10-19 Fractal chain. Is this statement correct?

For players in fractals below their personal fractal level, the only change this patch brought is that they should now be awarded bonus karma (as an incentive to help out lower level players) upon completion. Basically, doing lower levels is unchanged.

Dredge can take an hour to clear in a good group now. Compared to clearing 3+maw other fractals in 42 minutes in the same good group, for me. That’s crazy. A group without dredge can almost clear two floors in the time it takes for a dredge group to finish.

If you’re doing a lower level, the only change is that you should receive karma for completing it now.

If you’re doing a level equal or higher to what you’ve unlocked, you’ll progress your personal level and be rewarded at your personal level (regardless of how high the actual difficulty is set).

xplode.6903:

what u mean mate?

Which part was confusing? He means: no. It is hard capped now.

They’re not going to stay as they are now. Probably, ArenaNet wanted to have a large amount of data before balancing the titles, so they were intentionally left unobtainable in the mean time.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

The number of accounts terminated as a result of this exploitative activity is actually very small—fewer than 200. However, these people are the very worst offenders, and engaged in this exploit to egregious levels—hundreds and even thousands of times. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew that their activities would damage the economy.

As a reminder, when we dealt with the karma exploit incident in September, we said that we would show some leniency for that particular incident. However, we made it clear that future exploits would be dealt with more firmly. As a result, we have terminated the accounts of the worst offenders in this most recent incident.

As always, if you have an exploit to report, please email exploits@arena.net.

Thank you.

I see a clear difference in the two exploits. The karma exploit relied on fixed costs—the vendor cost of items.

This time, we’re dealing with variable costs, the market-determined value of goods on the Trading Post. Briefly, there was a huge profit margin available, but the market adjusted for that. Basically, this was only “too good to be true” because briefly, players were undervaluing their snow flakes and selling them cheaper than they should have… and the buyers were banned.

Some of the people banned were getting profit margins no better than what we get for just about anything else. 3 silver profit from a 25 silver investment is really nothing to get banned over.

I literally have items I craft that reliably bring in better margins than that, and I’ve sold hundreds—maybe even thousands. Am I getting myself banned by mentioning this?

So confused.

Reasonably easy if you fight in the right-side room. The nova-spam phase is hard, but you can just death zerg through it so not a big deal.

Certainly a terrible design though. So bad I cannot even tell which parts of the fight work as intended.

I enjoy gameplay and most of the dungeon and boss design on its own. I’d play it even if they did not have unique rewards.

The biggest hurdle for dungeon gamers today is that there are no tools to assemble groups. I know developers are strongly against adding automated group assembling tools like some other games have, and I think that is fine. But the lack of a cross realm, cross map way to find players interested in doing things with you often means you just cannot do them, or spend more time trying to find people than actually doing them.

Oh, and Fractals… the “same server” requirement here is absolutely unacceptable. It is a requirement to play only during peak hours and then to pray that your servers are popular, even as concurrency dwindles between content patches.

So, we need an LFG channel, or opt-in overflow map (think “Enter the Mists”), or bulletin board listing tool that let’s us communicate what we want to do and find others. And once we’ve found those others, we need to be allowed to play with them. The increasingly prohibitive search for players is itself the biggest problem with the reward structure of dungeons, as the reward does not scale with this absurd and constantly increasing difficulty.

The bugs don’t help make him enjoyable either. Here are the problems with his new design:

1. All of his challenging abilities are during the same “phase” of the fight. Every other phase is unbelievably boring, while one is unbelievably hard.

2. His abilities stack up a bit too well. Red circle spam, a player-pull, a PBAoE nova, and dangerous adds during transitions that can largely be avoided by staying out of most areas of the room, all have the same effect, creating “Danger Zones.” There’s too many, too quickly chained together for this one phase, making it easy to get pinned down, where the right move to avoid one lethal attack forces you into another.

3. His PBAoE nova is poorly telegraphed, for its power. His spell reflect (? or whatever was throwing 7k fireballs at us) is also poorly telegraphed. I’ve done this new fight 3 times successfully—quite a time sink in it—and am still not entirely sure when which attack is coming.

4. Cages. Just like binding roots, it seems to be impossible to find the direction that allows you to DPS these. If you’re a build without much AoE damage, good luck, hope your group can save you without killing you by bringing the boss closer.

5. Length. It feels a bit grindy but this is probably because 80% of the fight is so incredibly boring. Maybe shorten the encounter at the beginning of the fractal if it just gets copy-pasted later?

6. Graveyard zerging. Who knows if this is even intended, but his health doesn’t reset when groups wipe—though the Seal’s life does.

Spread his abilities out better and animate them better. Or, I expect groups to graveyard zerg his nova phase and then AFK the rest.

To encourage you to spend 10g on a good infusion, instead

Kellie.3687:

have meleed every encounter in game, apart from Phase one Lupi, have meleed phase 2 and 3. You cannot afford to melee phase one becuase it screws over your group if grubs spawn on you.

Not really true. The “warning” before a grub spawns on you is very long. If it is going to spawn on you, using swiftness or a teleport to get to your ranged group (or maybe relying on them for an extra snare after it spawns) is fine. Even without swiftness I can usually get to max range… it’s a very long warning.

Phase 3 is definitely the harder of the lupi phases to melee.

I don’t think they need to be account wide necessarily. The skins often show mastery of some area of the game (like a particular dungeon) that you might not be masterful of on an alt.

But Ascended gear makes this problem so much worse. With its higher stats (and infusions, for doing Fractals), players are forced now to either limit themselves to only one skin set, or to sacrifice a half-tier worth of stats. I currently switch between 3 full dungeon sets just to change appearances; am I supposed to get 3 or more (expensive!) Ascended sets to transmog into those skins I like?

That is sad and boring. Instead, we should only need to collect armor with different stats (Power/Vit/Condition set, Power/Precision/Crit set etc) and should be free to change those skins daily if we want without losing 10+ days worth of grinding a dungeon for tokens every time. Those skins were our rewards, let us use them

This discussion seems to be lacking two important reminders.

1. You only need (at most!) to gather the Halloween-specific materials during this event. It should not be hard to get your candy corn and your 100 rare crafting mats over the next couple weeks.

2. Alternatively, since these are tradeable items, you can buy them off the TP after the event but expect the price to rise quickly as supply vanishes.

After the Halloween materials, you can spend as much time as you want gathering the other expensive items (wine, 100 lodestones, etc). You’ll be able to craft your weapon all year round if you have the materials, not just during the event.

Some MMOs hand out holiday skins easily, but it looks like these are still intended to be fairly rare and prestigious. That makes sense since the only ‘endgame’ here is the prestige gear grind. The requirements during Halloween seem very reasonable for creating your weapons.

Kevin.2176:

The changes to Magg actually made the intended strategy much easier. Majority of the changes have been tuning difficulty down or fixing current exploits. Changes only made dungeons harder if you are using unintended methods of completing encounters.

Increasing the bomb’s timer for 100 seconds to 200 seconds does not make it easier, no matter what strategy you use.

With every patch Anet brings more nerfs to dungeons

No, they don’t. There have been a lot of dungeon changes and so far only one change which made a single boss easier. The rest all made dungeons harder (see: Magg changes).

Perhaps you should try the ‘nerfed’ content so you can tell us firsthand that it feels too easy now. It doesn’t to me, even though I was clearing both of the nerfed zones prepatch.

Better solution: allow me to choose to only receive mail from players on my Friends List (or maybe in a Guild with me).

An advertised feature of dungeons was that even when repeating the same dungeon and path, dynamic events would add some variety. I feel like this hasn’t lived up to its promise yet.

I’ve done most of the paths now, and there are a very small number of events. All of these that I can recall are 100% predictable: you’ll get them every time (unless you avoid them).

This could go a long way towards evening out some of the risk/reward differences between paths. Give easier and shorter runs a chance of spawning a more challenging event. It would also make farming less repetitive.

Have other players found paths that are more dynamic? Is this something that should be improved going forward?

Add Backstab to the rotation at the very least. The ~4x damage will help make up for your damage down time.

More importantly, you understand that the ‘Revealed’ debuff only starts when you break stealth, right? So you’ll have to spend a few seconds out of stealth no matter what you do.

Four runs tonight, first two apparently worked and the rest did not.

TA (forward/up) rewarded 60. Then a few hours later,
TA (forward/up) rewarded 20,
TA (up) rewarded 45 instead of 60. Completion time for the two consecutive runs was about 1h20m total.
HotW (Butcher) awarded 45 instead of 60. 30 minute clear time, plus ten minutes between TA traveling and assembling group.

For both of the 45 token runs, experience (133k) and gold (19s) were also diminished even though it was the first run for the path.

And not doing it is unfair to the game because it makes one of the more repeatable content types feel like more of a grind than it needs to. We weren’t going to release a perfect game, and can’t let things live this stop us from improving the experience for the majority of the players.
Jon

Great news and great attitude.

One consideration: if we reduced costs, then players could farm today and stockpile tokens awaiting this change eagerly. If we add more tokens, then farming is less efficient now than later, and there’s an incentive to take a break while waiting for the change.

Either is a good change, and I look forward to it.

Two things I don’t understand about this fight.

1. Why does the boss not reset to the same starting position as when he first spawns? Instead, he’ll spam-spawn crystals even when out of combat, so that groups with the misfortune of wiping on him have to start the fight with 26 stacks of regen on the boss, making it far harder (impossible?).

2. What causes him to spawn 20 crystals in under 3 seconds? Every time except ONCE when my group managed to get his stack count low enough to actually start dps, we would watch in amazement as he’d just instantly gain 20 or more stacks of regen. I haven’t seen this in any kill videos or strategy discussions and it does not seem beatable.

I’m still getting 26 silver for completion.

Chilsung.3710:

I was thinking about this earlier today and was really stumped. Mostly the thought came up in response to the Magg event change. It is quite clear that the event in its current incarnation is not supposed to be completed except by very well geared 80s.

Uh. It’s a level 75 explorable mode dungeon. The difference in difficulty between 75 and 80 is not going to be that large.

Explorable modes can be completed before 80. Some of the best players I’ve run with were doing them around the dungeon’s downlevel (often on alts). Really some of the best runs I’ve been in so far.

OP, this makes no sense:

And yes while you can command that your guild members either represent 100% of the time or get kicked, this prevents smaller guilds from forming and growing.

Being locked into one guild is exactly the same, with the same problem.

Hopefully OP realizes you can change major traits as easily as you change which weapons you’re using.

Dyranos.2406:

gurugeorge.9857:

If you’re already pursuing a particular stat line, then the weapon that’s traited will already be relevant to that stat, so why wouldn’t you want to beef it up?

This is totally incorrect, your stat lines from traits do not effect particular weapons, you can be a DPS guardian with a staff or a tanking guardian with a scepter and shield, if you improve power via traits it improves power for all weapons and not just one or two of them, so all weapons should be aviable in all builds

You’re misunderstanding. What about major traits that increase bleed damage when not all of your weapons have bleeds? What about taking the condition trait line when some of your weapons have substantially stronger condition damage? Get rid of all of these, too?

This isn’t very meaningful without comparing it to the throughput from other stats. 300 condition damage might increase my bleeds by about 20% for example, which is what I’d compare to 300 healing which increases my healing by 10-15% (or whatever).

I think trading in 20% damage for 15% healing on the entire party would be a reasonable consideration. There are lots of situations where healing is going to be more valuable than damage per second. Time to live scales differently with healing than with damage. A 15% increase in healing could increase longevity infinitely, depending on the incoming damage.

The OP doesn’t include any of those numbers though.

Level 80 in 25 hours is pretty impressive. Crafting alt?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.

I’m really glad this is the philosophy for dungeon design. I wish the changes had been sooner or had a warning attached, and I regret that I thought I could spread the easy-grind over a few weeks and did not take advantage of it while it happened (mainly because I was not sure it would be changed). But overall this is MUCH better design, going forward, than what we had before.

This is causing some serious growing pains and non-exploiter remorse but looking past that, I admit I appreciate the work. Good job.

Amarinth.8534:

At least it’s upto 100 characters this time and not just 15.

I don’t really know because I did not take the time to test around with it. For all I know, the GW2 client or official websites could still be truncating down to 15 characters which is why my (allegedly) 100-char password wasn’t working on both.

Also, while we’re on the subject of passwords, what the hell is up with all of these companies lately that are blocking copy-paste in the password change / creation fields?

Very frustrating. My work around for these has been to set up KeePass to type into those fields since I cannot paste into them.

The GW2 client’s password field and the password field on official websites (and probably GW1’s client) are sanitizing inputs differently. The result is that users can log in to some but not all of these services with certain passwords.

I wanted to try a 100-character password. After successfully changing my password, I found that I could use this new password to log in to the website but not into GW2’s client.

I had this problem before the change to 100-character maximums, and learned then that the websites and GW1 client were truncating password changes and password inputs down to 15 characters, but the GW2 client would send longer passwords.

Clearly, either the official websites or GW2’s client (but NOT both) is now truncating passwords to something less than 100 characters.

I think two changes need to be made.

1. Password input needs to be handled consistently. If the website truncates it, the client should too and vice versa—I’d prefer no hidden, black-box changes to our secure password changes/input though.

2. Users need to be warned when they attempt to change their password to something beyond the limit, or attempt to input a password beyond the limit, that it will be truncated. It is crazy that we could successfully update our account and as a result, no longer know what our password is.

I am sticking with 15 character passwords for now.

With 60% magic find, your chance to find magic items is increased by about 60%. Pretty straightforward.

Perception bias is difficult though, yes.