Guild Wars 2

Hey folks, I just posted in another thread regarding how to somewhat easily get into a deserted instance, similar to what EnemyCrusher did.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Issue-With-Ice-Totem/first#post4443550

Hopefully it works for you folks too.

If this event is anything like Tequatl spawns, champs will only show up once there are more than five people in the area. It might actually be easier with fewer people.

It’s pretty appalling that they didn’t have the foresight to remove champs from the event; it’s not like champ trains are a secret. Not only that, they were supposed to have fixed it back on the 9th according to an Anet reply over on reddit, but the problem persists.

Today, I accidentally stumbled upon a decent way to get it done.

Frostgorge gets many new megaserver instances during the Claw of Jormag event, creating a bunch of empty zones after it’s dead. After the dragon dies, wait until the prompt to move to a more populated instance comes up. Most people will probably leave to join a champ train or do other things. Choose “later” and you’ll have an hour to get it done.

With less people, no champs should spawn (and thus no train). With two players, it still seemed like a lot spawned in the events, but at worst there were a few veteran mobs. If you’re not such a great player, just stick to the outskirts and pull stuff away. I was on my thief with mostly berserker gear and I did fine even in the thick of things.

It’s possible that your instance may still create its own champ train, so I guess that’s a potential problem. It may help to try to join as new of an instance as possible by hopping into character select or joining the Claw event late, or even playing during off-peak hours.

Hopefully this helps someone. Good luck!

About a month too late here, but I stumbled upon this in a web search while searching for other things.

Just going to say that you might have to resort to buying another account. This issue has been brought up multiple times, and to my knowledge Anet have yet to dignify us with an answer as to why the system works like this.

The “invisible at logon” feature was in beta, until they broke it with the new launcher and didn’t bother to fix it since. It’s also in GW1 and seems to be working fine there. Using invisible mode in GW2 is a crapshoot anyways, because sometimes it seems other people can still see you online or message you regardless.

Moreover, posting threads like this will get you attacked by those that feel your privacy is a trivial matter “because it’s an MMO,” or that it’s somehow your fault that you feel this way. This is the Facebook generation we’re talking about — we’re used to having our privacy compromised or having to “opt-in” to basic privacy features in exchange for a service. And sadly, this is probably the reason this won’t get fixed for a very long time, if ever — there aren’t enough people to make a stink over it.

It’s funny, because most of us would object to being followed in real life. People may know our names, phone numbers, or even home address, but that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly aware of all actions we take throughout the day.

Spending your private time how YOU want to? You’re doing it wrong!

Double your power, double your (direct) damage. As far as I know it’s as simple as that.

Crit damage is only useful with good crit chance, and those two are really only effective if you have high power too. Power is usually best to prioritize first, then crit chance and crit damage if you have room for it.

If you want some basic numbers:

916 power = 100% base damage output
+50% crit chance = 125%
+50% crit damage = 150% — this is including the +50% crit chance

1832 power = 200% (double) damage from 916 power
+50% crit chance = 250%
+50% crit damage = 300%

The old login was nice, but not necessary. However, the “login as invisible” function was removed for no justifiable reason. Being able to select login status at character select is near useless if your contacts are still alerted as soon as you enter your password.

Still hasn’t been fixed despite numerous requests, namely because I assume nobody of importance thinks its important.

Consider me “signed” if it brings back this baffling exclusion of a game function.

I’d actually like to request a bit less of the ultra-precise platforming. The camera in GW2 isn’t ideal for that kind of stuff, as anyone who wrestled with the camera bumping into even the tiniest of leaves can attest.

I’d like to imagine that a 2D side-scrolling stage or two could be pretty novel, as well as being an even more obvious retro throwback — think of something like the sidescrolling stages of the Super Smash games.

Or what about a haunted castle or clock tower where you use your whip to look for hidden turkey legs inside candles or stone walls? Of course, this would mean making the whip actually useful…

Or even a dungeon crawler maze mode where you’re captured and have to recover your equipment from your jailers. It could even be pseudo-randomized by creating a bunch of smaller blocks or segments and having the player randomly teleported or moved through a certain number of them, kind of like how the fractals are.

Or… imagine this: (uematsu_meme.jpg) a shooter level where your character and camera are fixed to looking straight ahead while you shoot your way through levels reminiscent of Contra’s second level… and a boss that goes bullet hell mode like the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan! Let’s attack aggressively.

My best idea yet: A stage where you escort an NPC with really bad AI that you can’t control, and often charges into enemies and dies. And if he dies you have the start the whole stage over. We’ll name him Mhenlo or Togo.

Well, whatever you folks come up with, it’d be cool to go, “wow, is this really the same game?”

Ugh, we can sell the rare chest drops? Wish I’d noticed that before using my shield skin… There goes 15 gold, and here I am sitting on 300+ bubbles.

You can easily get five bubbles per character per day if you get the shovel first (optional). Do you know how to do the easy bubble runs? Just run straight through world 1 without bothering to pick anything up. Do the same for world 2 except stop at all the hidden bauble caches and dig them up. Use the shortcut worm, exit, and backtrack just a tiny bit to dig up the cache there. This will give you four bubbles plus 250 baubles you can use to buy another bubble. There’s no terribly hard jumping and both bosses are fairly easy.

That should get you an easy five bubbles per character, per day. That’s a 20 per day with four characters, if you’re willing to put in the effort. You can get your skin back in just three days. There’s also a tiny chance you’ll get lucky and get a skin from opening one of the chests too… although it’s only ever happened to me once out my 300+ bubbles.

Once you get the routine down, I’d say it only takes about 10-15 minutes per character. You could get your 20 bubbles a day in less than an hour, or 16 bubbles without the shovel.

Hope that helps, and hopefully you don’t hate SAB so much that even this sounds terrible. But like I said, this is pretty easy and quick, so I like to think even busy people can find time to do this.

Why couldn’t it work on a “technical” level? Aren’t we forgetting that costume brawl weapons exist? Yeah sure, it’s not real combat but I don’t see why they couldn’t shoehorn it in somehow. Instead of leveraging the game’s native HP system, why couldn’t the entirety of SAB be one big costume brawl?

Instead of those annoying monkeys having 50 HP, they could have two Costume Brawler boon stacks, and each hit would take one off. Of course, no one really dies in costume brawls so I don’t know if they’d have to do some complicated programming trickery to make them disappear.

On another note, my engineer can hotkey swap to his chef’s uniform while still using a grenade kit (not sure about the other kits), and go around killing stuff in the normal PVE world — so it doesn’t seem like there’d be too much work involved.

I personally feel a bit odd wearing my combat armor into SAB so I usually swap my stuff out while doing my runs. But I suppose it’s too late for something like this. Maybe next time?

Anyone who plays a necro might want to test some of the skills/traits they’ve been avoiding in case they’ve been stealth-fixed. I’ve been testing various things in the Mists and noticed they’re not bugged, but it’s hard to test some of these under controlled conditions in PVE and I always forget to ask friends to help me test.

Here’s what I’ve found — and again, most of these were tested in the Mists so they might follow some odd PVP-only rules, so feel free to correct these:

• (NB0021) Plague Signet now works — passively draws conditions and removes them from allies (although how many conditions/targets at a time, I don’t know), and activating the signet removes all of them from you.

• (NB0093) Deathly Swarm (Dagger 4) removes three conditions from the player and applies them to ALL targets hit.

• (NB0066) Vampiric seems to work with just about anything that hits an enemy, including marks and wells.

New/unlisted bug?

• Fetid Consumption: When drawing conditions off of you, minions simply make the condition disappear, i.e. they don’t receive it. Still doesn’t affect Bone Minions.

I noticed a lot of things are being fixed without being put into patch notes — or did I just miss them? For example, I noticed on my engineer that the condition immunity trait now works, albeit tested only in the Mists via the campfire (which applies burning).

Happy Halloween!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the number of replies. Sure would’ve been nice to at least receive a courtesy reply though! It’d be nice to know sooner rather than later if I’m going to have to buy multiple accounts in order to have privacy, or will inter-account character transfers be allowed or purchasable at some point?

Here are some comments from other people on another message board that’s heavily unmoderated, so people tend to speak their mind. None of these replies are from me, but believe what you will. I copied the replies into a pseudo-threaded image format.

Ignore any highlighting and colors; those are just from the board formatting. I’ve also censored some of the words in case it terribly offends anyone.

https://www.box.com/shared/static/a9cdszqszpl27p2hmxdt.png

Edit: I don’t know what forum improvements you folks have planned, but if a public dev/bug tracker is out of the question, maybe at least a way for mods/devs to mark threads to acknowledge that a particular issue is being looked at? It’s not like anyone needs to be coddled, but it’d be nice to know something’s not being ignored simply because more players are crying about not two-shotting people with pistol whip anymore.

Here’s the question: Does ArenaNet care about players’ current lack of privacy control options?

I’ve previously posted about the broken invisible mode (with no response), but this post covers a broader scale. Here are the things I cannot do in GW2 that I can do in other MMO games:

1. Login as invisible. It’s also broken in that it reveals online activity even while invisible:

• Location updates on mutual friends list or guild roster
• Player name changes/updates to mutual friends and some guild window functions (MOTD, I think)
• Forgetting to leave a party before going “invisible” reveals any new characters I switch to

2. Consent to other players tracking my online status. Anyone can add me to their friends list and see if I’m online.

3. Have my alt/inter-guild activity protected. I can understand the purpose of being able to represent different guilds easily, but if I want to represent a certain guild, why does every other guild need to know that I’ve done so? And why do they need to know if I’ve created an alt that I want nothing to do with their guilds? Even if invisible mode were fixed, it still wouldn’t solve this problem. This could be fixed easily by showing non-representing players as offline.

Let me make some analogies. Here are some things the current privacy functions are like:

• Tweeting my location at any given time even if I don’t want that to happen. I should have control over my tweets, and not have them sent out automatically if I don’t want them to. Currently, it’s almost like wearing a GPS tag/collar.
• Being a celebrity without the fame or money. If I wanted people to follow me without my consent, I’d be a movie star.
• Calling up Friends Group A to let them know I’m going to hang out with Group B, even if they had nothing at all to do with Group B — separation of interests.
• Letting my parents know I’m going to be in town, but I’m not going to visit them. If I go somewhere, it’s my choice to let people know, even if they’re supposed friends or family. And like it or not, there are people who will get a little hurt or offended if they know I’m choosing not to be with them even though I might be busy.

Here are some solutions I’ve come up with:

• Removing real-life friends from my friends list because it shares more info than I’d like.
• Not joining multiple guilds (even though I want to) because of above scenarios.
• Choosing not to play even though I want to, because I’d have to first login as visible.
• Buying another account. Is this really the extreme I have to take?

So is this not seen as a serious issue? What was ANet’s intention in designing the friends and guild functions the way they are? It seems to me this causes more problems than it solves. We can’t keep our social groups separate.

If it is in fact ANet’s will to decide for players what information they’ll share, will we at least get a fully-functioning invisible mode? That still wouldn’t solve the problem of inter-guild visibility while playing as “online” but at least it’s something. And before someone makes the comparison, this isn’t GW1 — very different scope, gameplay, playerbase, and different guild functions.

I may be the most vocal person about this, but that doesn’t mean others don’t care or that this isn’t important.

Here are the key problems with this encounter:

1. The margin for error is extremely small and the penalty is too severe.

You have maybe a second to dodge the knockdown meteors, and if you miss one, all but the toughest of characters will almost always die due to being knocked down in that fire field. And the lava fonts from the fire imps don’t even have a delay before they start ticking damage, but at least they don’t knockdown.

Either reduce the number/frequency of the knockdown meteors or make them do less damage. Let’s compare this to the lieutenant in Ascalonian Catacombs, the one that does that AOE pull+frenzy attack. While the penalty is severe—roughly on par with one of these meteors—the margin of error is reasonable, and what ultimately balances it out. There’s a noticeable wind-up time for the pull-in, and he doesn’t just spam it continually.

Another comparison: The Maw event with the Svanir shaman in Wayfarer Hills. The penalty for not avoiding the large AOE ice comets or ice storms is heavy damage or even downed/defeated for weaker characters, but it’s balanced out by giving you a bit more time to react AND the fact that he doesn’t carpet-bomb the area — there are small “cracks” in between each large AOE circle, giving players a small refuge to escape to. In Thaumanova, it’s possible to have multiple knockdown meteors hit the same spot. Even if not, there’s the worry of having the imps’ lava fonts layered on top too.

2. A key gameplay mechanic, being downed, is almost negated.

Again, back to the severe penalty. Because you’re downed inside a fire field, it usually results in your defeat, causing players to ignore you. Is this really the intended effect? Even during the Svanir icebrood events which have fairly severe penalties for not dodging, I can usually find an opening to at least contribute to a defeated character. But Thaumanova? Absolutely not.

3. Inconsistency of difficulty and lack of precedent.

Why are some “epic” world boss events like the Shatterer disgustingly easy compared to events like this?

I agree with others that challenges should be in the game, but this is unsuitable for the level 15 Metrica Province. I’ll emphasize that other starting areas have fairly difficult events (at least for new players) that are more reasonable. Wayfarer Hills is probably my favorite starting area because of the well-balanced events. Queensdale has very strong cave troll, but it’s balanced out because there’s only ONE, and players can control it better with their relatively plentiful cripples and immobilizes.

There’s no precedent for this level of hair-margin dodging combined with the one-hit kills. If anything, this event should set the precedent for future encounters (like dungeons).

I brought my level 80 engineer to this event just to make sure I wasn’t delusional. He’s equipped with full Knight gear (power/precision/toughness) with like gems, and +300 vitality from traits, so I’m not exactly “squishy” — yet one knockdown resulted in losing 80% of my health, and only surviving if I could get a heal or condition removal off in time to remove burning. That’s assuming I wasn’t targeted by another knockdown meteor or one of those instant-hit lava fonts from the imps.

I managed to beat it reasonably well, but mostly by cheesing the fire imps and elemental with my 1500-range triple-throw grenades, giving me plenty of leverage to kill imps before they could reach me or get in range for a lava font. It also helped that relatively few people showed up, reducing the number of imps that spawned. Let me emphasize that it was my various high-level traits and stat bonuses that made this tolerable, all of which I wouldn’t have access to at level 15.

Yes, I’m sure some characters can handle this encounter better than others — say, rifle warriors due to having a naturally largest HP pool, heavy armor ,and assuming they prioritize toughness (we’ll ignore the fact that toughness isn’t available on armor until level 15 and they may not have upgraded just yet), but for everyone else it’s actually in your best interest to just get in a good number of hits and not come back. In fact, after dying a few times on my thief and choosing to leave, I got my first ever gold medal on this event.

Sorry if this has been posted about recently. I and a few others have brought it up a few times before but those posts seem to get lost amidst the board reorgs and suggestion floods.

Simply put, invisible status does not work.

1. Players cannot log on invisible, alerting friends or followers of their presence, defeating the purpose of invisible mode.

2. Player activity is still revealed to others in a number of ways, even while invisible and when playing characters not in that guild:
a. Location updates on friends list or guild roster
b. Player name changes/updates on friends list and some guild window functions
c. Forgetting to leave a party before going “invisible” reveals activity via the party info system.

3. A number of other things, probably. I believe name order in the guild roster is also affected even when people are invisible.

Frankly, invisible mode is useless. Why is it important to some of us? For those of us that care about this very much, it’s a tool for us to separate our real lives from our leisure life. The two will inevitably meld together to some degree in GW2, but we need the ability to control our own experience.

Some people might respond by saying that I need to just talk to my friends or guildmates, but social relationships aren’t always that cut-and-dry. There are times it might not be favorable to say “I don’t want to play with you now,” or “I know the guild could use a fourth but I’d rather not play with you folks now.”

I see the root of the problem being the GW1 system where guild membership was account-based. GW2 is a different game with a different audience — I personally think GW1 is rather bad despite buying all expansions, and GW2 is quite ingenious — so it doesn’t make sense to adopt the same system just because nobody might’ve complained about it before. Why can’t I play an alt without having to worry about any obligations that are tied to another character?

Why not just adopt a per-character privacy (and this is very much a privacy issue) system? And if nothing else, why even have this function in game if it doesn’t work properly?

Personal anecdote: I’ve even gone so far as to remove real life friends from my friends list at the risk of slightly estranging them in order to better protect my online activity. Because some of my activity is still revealed, sometimes I choose not to play. And if I get disconnected or the server goes down while I’m playing invisible? Well, I suppose I’m then done for the day.

I’m sure only a minority of players care about this as much as I do, but for us it is a pretty severe quality of experience issue. I’ll be happy to further explain or make an analogy if needed.

Please fix invisible mode.

- Players can’t log on as invisible.
- Invisible mode still reveals online activity, especially if you’re mutual friends.

I’ve even gone so far as to remove everyone from my friends list, but they can STILL tell I’m online because my name in the guild roster shows me changing zones even though I’m on a character that’s not in the guild. Even the guild MOTD changed to my alt’s name even though he wasn’t in the guild.

I realize this is how it worked in GW1, but this is a very different game with a different audience. Privacy should be the default state, not something I have to try to figure out. There are times when I want to play an alt in “private” without making it look like I’m ignoring my friends.

From a player standpoint, there’s nothing wrong with having each character have their own friends/guild associations, perhaps with the option to share those contacts between characters.

Any chance we’ll get better privacy options for the game? I don’t know if this quite counts as a bug, but being that logging on as invisible still reveals some of your online activity (namely the fact that you’re actually online), I would consider it not working as it ought to be.

The issues:

1. Players currently need to log on to the character select screen as “visible” to change their status to invisible, which defeats the purpose of having that option.

2. Even if you go invisible, there are still indications that you may be online via party, friends, or guild interfaces (some of which I can understand). My biggest issue is that if I want to be on an alt that’s unassociated with my guilds or friends lists, sometimes they’ll somehow figure out that I’ve been online and that I have another character that I wanted to keep private. I don’t know what specifically is tipping them off though — perhaps something in the guild rosters or friends list that shows your last played character?

I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m spitefully ignoring them because I dislike them or anything. There are just times I just want to play without any obligations to friends or guild. I’m obviously in a minority when it comes to people who actually care about this, but I feel it’s a pretty important one.