Guild Wars 2

My Herald cannot run any of his abilities anymore. Within 1 second sometimes 2, the abilities get automatically toggled back off. In fight, out of fight, it doesn’t matter. I always have plenty of energy (50%+) when this happens and it is dramatically affecting the functionality of my Rev-Herald in a severely negative way.

I wasn’t noticing this yesterday, but today it has been happening constantly.

I’ve got a Revenant that I ran up to 80 and filled out his Herald elite spec. (Yes this does relate to the current state of Engineers. Just bare with me.) Needless to say I’ve become very impressed with the over all flexibility of design and wide range of capabilities I can do with the Revenant, especially in combination with their Herald elite spec.

I then switched over to my Engineer / Scrapper and very quickly had a realization. My Revenant is now… what I hoped my Engineer would be. “Jack of all Trades” class that I can setup as a Tank, DPS, Healer or Buff-bot. You name it, the Revenant is most likely more than adequate at it. All I have to do is carry around some spare gear in my bags and boom, I can switch spec and functionality inside of a minute, tops.

So now.. circling back to the Engineer: the brand new Scrapper addition is more than a bit of a joke in several ways. Gyro movement speeds and A.I. are buggy at best. The ‘self destruct’ function on all Gyros are exactly the same. The list goes on and on… and that is just with our NEW ‘Elite Spec’.

The base class itself? Almost as broken, if not more so. Turrets are almost entirely pointless and quite often get ‘focused down’ by monsters as soon as they are placed. Elixirs have a bare amount of usefulness and appeal at best. Just about the only thing everyone agrees are ‘good’ are weapon kits, and even those have some pretty glaring issues at points as well.

I’m really hoping that the Engineer will see some fixing and soon. Until then? I’ll be playing my ‘other Engineer’ (the Revenant).

After getting my Revenant to 80 and finishing out my Herald elite spec for it, all I can think of when playing my Engineer is that Gyros should have been what Herald Facets ended up being.

My biggest issue with ALL of the Gyros is travel speed. They simply do not perform well when it comes to following AI as well. Also I really do think that from a PvE player perspective the Function Gyro is fairly bland and underwhelming. It really does need some improvement or better features somehow because it comes across as fairly crap when compared to the perks of other elite classes.

So many of Mallyx’s traits just didn’t make sense to me as I had not played earlier versions of it in Betas. Now.. I get WHY they don’t makes sense (or seem to do nothing).

100% Ditto here.

The ‘new and improved’ Guild Interface is actually a pretty massive mess in several key areas. It needs more tooltips and information to explain things.

Do we know yet if already invested HP #’s will be recalculated? Or is this just a cost decrease on stuff you have not bought yet.. moving forward?

Bandit.8279:

Running full Settler Tempest D/W auramancer and can take on just about anything. Can even solo some of the Hero Point Champions but my issue is I usually run out of time.

Prior to switching to a tanky support/condi Tempest I ran my glassy Sin burn D/D and it was tricky to survive some of the content. Have had a lot more success once I put some durability into my builds.

The Great Al.2546:

I am finally switching to Reaper. The content is difficult and tempest is the worst spec you can have as a solo ele. I find my character alone most of the time, and there are just no advantages to using a tempest spec in this scenario.

You’re just using the wrong builds. I have had no such issues on my Tempest.

Can you post a link to your build? I’m real curious about your “D/W Auramancer” it sounds really interesting.

I really hope we get some kind of response to this tomorrow.

My baseline for being able to solo my way thru GW2 is .. GW2 itself. I can solo my way thru from level 1 to level 80, no problem. I grabbed all the Hero Points necessary for me to unlock my class abilities, all solo.

New expansion pack called “Heart of Thorns” gets announced, and I’m intrigued. New Elite Specs? I’m EXCITED! I could NOT wait, I was very eager and happy.

Now that I’ve spent the better part of three days in “Heart of Thorns”, I have to say that I am confused and a bit disappointed. The over all difference in design philosophy is so drastically different that it caused a bit of ‘culture shock’ for me, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly why they changed it so dramatically.

The fact that I have to wait (pretty much) to even use my Elite Specialization until I have COMPLETED Heart of Thorns is a real let down. Combined this with the absurd difficulty of the expansion preventing me from being able to solo across the open world map segments.. and it becomes even more of a disappointment.

I really hope something gets done about this Elite Specialization unlocking thing. I thought we’d be able to use the Elite Spec DURING Heart of Thorns… not after we’re done with it.

I have to agree with the “This expansion is not solo-player friendly” sentiments. Despite great exotic gear (no ascended stuff, sorry) and an extremely solid spec across two different classes, I am getting my butt handed to me by the normal ‘trash mobs’.

Herds of Pocket Raptors can 2 shot me within the first 3 seconds of a fight. Mordrem Guard / corrupted Sylvari can easily 1 shot me. The Champs that get summoned at the Hero Challenge locations? Even more impossible to deal with.

To make matters worse, the exact same build and gear I was using pre-expansion in the old world is now failing to get me thru some of the same fights I could previously waltz thru with ease. Yes I will state that so far I’ve been a tad disappointed in the expansion, but my greater concern right now is trying to figure out why my Engineer suddenly can’t solo the old world stuff he could before.

Damage for the kit may be good. Unfortunately the travel time for the damage is absurd. Combining this with having to repeatedly spam #1 just to get all this “amazing ranged damage” makes the kit boring, annoying and downright silly.

Shoyoko.7309:

Flamethrower is good close range ^^=

You think that your build would still work okay if I just swapped Grenade Kit for Flamethrower?

Yes I think you are looking at this rather backwards: Elementalists -always- have the option of using swap sigils. Engineers can option NOT to take advantage of them.

Either way the situation isn’t going to change from the way it is. ArenaNet has core structure for each class to tightly woven into the game at present, so any attempt to try and change it would require much more work for them than they just do not want to put time into right now.

We are stuck the way we are unfortunately.. Engineers just have to hope we get one or two quality of life “Bug Fixes”.

I really see the appeal of your build, and I especially love the detail in which you presented each part of it. Unfortunately I’m wondering if the -Grenade Kit- aspect of it is my speed in relation to PVE. I need a solid PVE build and I think kits are the key, but I really do suck using the Grenade Kit in close range.

Elementalists don’t have weapon kits in the same sense as ours, they have summoned weapons. They get one copy of the weapon, and a second one is dropped on the ground for someone else to use.

That being said, I’m not sure if that counts into the “swapping weapons” or not. That is a grey spot in my knowledge.

I haven’t really had the chance to run any dungeons yet as an Engineer myself. Needless to say I am not looking forward to having to figure out a balance between what I can do and what a group expects.

Yes, someone remind me WHY exactly we can’t stow the MedKit.. we have to actually hit Tidle / Grave and “drop the kit”? That is REAL dumb.

I believe swapping attunements on an Elementalist actually COUNTS as “On Weapon Swap”. If I remember right, this was patched in back in October some time.

tokyoshoe.6308:

I am looking for a great kit build, myself. I find that I get far more use out of the kits than I ever did out of the elixirs or turrets. (Love the CONCEPT of the turrets, hate the execution.)
I’m up to about level 45, still experimenting with what Rifle/Kit build I like the best.

Just a follow up to my post, for clarification: I am looking for a solid set of PvE builds that center primarily (but not exclusively) on our kits. If anyone has even some passing suggestions, I’d love to hear.

Why they do not let us zoom into First Person perspective with the mouse wheel so we can actually SEE more of the beautiful landscapes is just beyond my comprehension.

Vuh.1328:

I need your help, is there any workaround i can do to semi fix the camera issue with elixir s?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqJUibOOGFQ

Unfortunately one of the absolute worst “features” in GW2 across the board is the super-restrictive camera controls. There, as far as I know, is no fix to this problem.

I have discovered that dropping the bandages while running in a straight line does the trick just fine for me. Start moving forward for a short distance, drop a bandage or two while doing it.. and you will automatically pick them up if you are hurt. Works great for me.

I am looking for a great kit build, myself. I find that I get far more use out of the kits than I ever did out of the elixirs or turrets. (Love the CONCEPT of the turrets, hate the execution.)
I’m up to about level 45, still experimenting with what Rifle/Kit build I like the best.

The thing about clones (and phantasms) that I think is utterly ridiculous is that they vanish if we lose sight of our target. This makes fighting skelks a SEVERE aggrivation / hazard with my Mesmer.

I target a skelk, Greatsword#2 ability. The skelk may fight the clone for a bit, but as soon as it diverts attention to me it vanishes in a poof… and my clones go right along with him. Quite often my phantasms also disappear at this point.

Someone please tell me this is a bug?

All I can contribute to the conversation is this: Of all the fellow mesmers I’ve spoken to, I have only met two in game that actually use their shatter abilities. Most of them think they are either worthless or downright ineffective while a large chunk of the others just plain don’t know what the abilities do.

(After all, if I have three illusions up and hit F1, I see them run towards the target with at least two of the three exploding prematurely and doing nothing. The third does so little damage it’s hardly noticeable. So who would blame someone for thinking the abilities didn’t work?)

That is all I’m gonna pitch in.

Telegraph.7509:

Mantras are not “horrible”. They are quite okay, just very annoying and awkward to use. They are actually technically better than normal utilities that do similar things. The healing mantra is on really low cooldown, Mantra of resolve is a very strong condition remover while mantra of distraction is two fast instant interrupts. Mantra of concentration isn’t great, but the ability to break stun twice is helpful, particularly in PvP type environments where people have multiple stuns. Mantra of Pain – the troubled poster child of mantras, is actually good spike damage. You can cast it in the middle of anything, and it’s at 1200 range. I hated on it for a long time, convinced that its only purpose of existence was to abuse the mantra traits, but it’s quite helpful once I actually tried to use it.

I find that Mesmers have a lot of great utilities that are very powerful. Every class has some skills that are extremely situation-specific, but perhaps because of the really good utilities, a lot of the other utilities just don’t measure up and don’t get used quite as often.

Our heal mantra is a perfect example of the gripe I’ve got with it. Both charges of “Mantra of Recovery” expended STILL heal for less than our starter heal, “Ether Feast”. Even slotting and gearing for +HEALING doesn’t counterbalance this. I think that’s rather stupid. Add into this the fact that while “Mantra of Recovery” is able to be cast while using other skills AND it’s got a short cast time.. in the heat of battle I regularly forget how many charges I have left. So it suddenly goes from a 2 second cooldown to a 10 second cool down with a 4.5 second casting time. While “Ether Feast” does have a 20 second cool down.. that’s ONE press every 20 seconds that does MORE healing (with only 1 second of cast time) than “Mantra of Recovery” heals in the same 20 seconds.

“Ether Feast” is 20 seconds cast time each time every time, nice and predictable… and gives me MORE total health (because I almost always have 3 illusions up.

I’d also like to ask why so many other classes have a heal that passively grants them health-per-attack or health-per-cast… but we don’t?

tokyoshoe.6308:

Mantras in general are just horrible, especially our Heal mantra. And yes, agreed.. why don’t we have a source of stability?

I apparently completely spaced and forgot about a tier 3 utility (I believe it’s either a signet or mantra) that grants us stability. DOH!

Mantras in general are just horrible, especially our Heal mantra. And yes, agreed.. why don’t we have a source of stability?

I was thinking about this last night. I would LOVE to have an item purchasable from the BLTC that could instigate a permanent race change.

I also don’t see why you couldn’t just sell an accessory slot item (like say.. back slot?) that is a “Race Illusion” item. Say it’s a back slot item, make it a harness. That doesn’t seem like it would be terribly game breaking.

I have this exactly same problem any time I use Lightning Whip while turning with my right mouse button held down. As soon as I release my right mouse button and start turning with keys (WHICH IS STUPID SLOW! ARGH!) or just run straight.. it immediately stops missing. There are quite a few abilities, not just Elementalist powers, that have this same bug.

Actually there are quite a few weapon swapping sigils that I have found to be non-functional. There is one that inflicts poison with your next attack after swapping, doesn’t work when I had it put on an equipped staff. “Chills nearby foes” doesn’t work for me on a staff either and neither do numerous others.

All tested in combat, money wasted in the testing. (Shrug)

Also, Ryld, are you sure, that sigil is working? I mean, it says “when you swap on this weapon”, but elementalists can’t swap the weapon.

Actually I’ve been told several times that those sigils work for Elementalists when swapping attunements. I have actually never tested this theory tho. It seems like everyone I want to test it, the Trading Post is down.

Sannou.8632:

I had the exact same problem… I died about 20 times I’d say. There is that other skill you could use which was basically health drain on the enemy which damages them and heals you, but the damage on that is so low it took forever to kill them…

Nono, that is a 100% good point. There is a Life Siphon that drains health from your target, refilling your health bubble. Unfortunately it has a cool down of around 10 seconds, which may as well be forever when you are a cloth wearing elementalist.

Only one ability out of the five provided actually drains health. All of the rest of them actually SPEND your health, with all but one (the bubble, #5) taking up 95% of my total health.

The mission’s a nightmare and needs to be completely scrapped and re-structured.

14 deaths on “The Queen’s Justice”. 9 deaths on the step before that. 11 deaths on the step before that. I have now spent a rough total of 17 silver and counting on equipment repairs as a result of deaths from Personal Story missions in my 20’s.

Currently a level 28 Elementalist and I refuse to do any more personal story quests until the difficulty on all of them (ALL. Every single one.) is at least reduced by 50%. Several of them also need to be completely reworked, not just have their difficulty reduced, because they use broken mechanics or force the player to give up their powerset for another one that’s far far inferior (and completely foreign).

At present.. the personal storyline missions are BEYOND not fun.

MISSION NAME: “The Queen’s Justice”
REQ LEVEL: 28
ORDER: The Durmand Priory
CHARACTER: Level 28 Human Elementalist

This mission needs to be completely reworked, it is downright idiotic.

PROBLEM #1) You replace the character’s powers with a completely new set of five powers that they have no experience with or knowledge on how to use other that tooltips.

PROBLEM #2) After taking away my Elementalist powers you then lock me into using the “Mortis Verge” (which is mispelled “Mortis Virge” SEVERAL TIMES in the text). I can’t even hit the ` key to drop this “anti-undead weapon” and use my own abilities.

PROBLEM #3) You send in a wave of eight risen, with a mixture of thralls brutes and a few others I was too busy to catch the names of. That’s not the problem. The moment one ability is used on the Mortis Verge, your target Risen and at least two others pair off and bum rush you, dumping ABSURD amounts of damage on me. THAT is the problem.

PROBLEM #4) The Mortis Verge uses my HEALTH for ammo? Who’s imbecilic idea was THAT? I fire off an ability at a Risen Brute, I believe it was the #1 slot power, and it dumps a load of energy into my target. Since my target is already standing on my toes, he responds with a smack that does 400 points of damage. Trouble is… I only have 64 points of health level after ONE SALVO from my new health draining powerset that’s been forced upon me.

PROBLEM #5) With just TWO risen standing over my now downed body, they do exactly the same amount of damage that LOGAN THACKERY is healing while trying to revive me. To make matters worse the Risen are alternating shots so I can’t keep my #4 slot downed ability going long enough to contribute. It takes Logan the better part of SEVEN MINUTES to finally whittle my health back up while the Risen are beating on me.

This is a full seven minutes that I either sit there and wait, or just hit the teleport button and opt to respawn at the nearest check point. Oh did I mention I was pinned against the front door and I’m STANDING ON THE CHECKPOINT ? Yeah. 1 Mortis Verge power, the Risen I’ve got targeted goes from 85% health to 50% health, then downs me again with one shot.

RINSE. LATHER. REPEAT. This cycle went a total of 14 deaths.

SYNOPSIS: Totally stupid mission, especially for a CLOTH ARMOR WEARING CLASS. No player should ever be forced into swapping their powerset for another one that is fueled by HIT POINTS in order to complete a PERSONAL STORY MISSION.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Adjusted it for the 9/24 update. Reduced the abomination count to 2 L24 enemies, which is much more reasonable.

Thank you very much for the heads up. You will want to know however, that this is still going to be far too difficult for a big chunk of elementalists. The layout of the building combined with the way the waves come in placed me upon the battlements with three abominations charging at me. They dropped me so fast I had to get down off the battlements by way of DEATH.

This is an Order of Whispers mission. I keep going into these Whispers missions expecting them to be all “Spy” and “Covert Operatives”, but every single one turns out to be a death sentence for me. If I want missions with LESS of a combat bent to them, I pick the Vigil missions… which is just stupid because they are supposed to be the military organization.

At least with the Vigil missions, I have other soldiers wading into combat with me to support me. The Order of Whispers guys send me to my death ALONE.

Avatar.1923:

as a guardian level 28, this was faceroll before the patch. i did it yesterday.

not even endangered.
barely taking dmg.
jump in the fray with my greatsword, call the
flames, whirlspin of death, and thats it.

all k.o.

all in all, i am very surprised by this patch.

You were a heavy armor wearing class that was 4 levels HIGHER than the mission’s suggested level.

So I cleared out all of my Trading Post transactions on all of my characters. Either sold them off or pulled them out and vendored them. (That’s not the important point.)

One of my characters, a Human Elementalist in particular, keeps getting one or two random items at a time popping back into her “My Transactions” tab. They are always items that are crafting related that I never put up for sale in the first place. I am worried that the BLTC is actually giving me someone else’s items!

I’ve reported it in-game with the “/BUG” function. What else should I do?

I am getting this buy a lot recently: most of the dialogue spoken by other participants in personal story missions never actually gets audio. I just have to read the on-screen subtitles. Really kills the immersiveness I enjoyed from the whole “Conversation Cutscene” thing going on.

Man I wish the forum’s “Subscribe” function worked, I totally forgot about this thread!

Thanks all for the great conversation and suggestions on the topic. You have given me several ideas with which to work. I want to gear my Guardian more towards offensive damage dealing, maximizing damage output of weapons and abilities as best I can. I’ll start rummaging through some of the ideas posted here and see what I can come up with.

Thanks all!

MISSION: “Track the Seraph”
RACE: Human (Female Elementalist)
ORDER: Order of Whispers
SUGGESTED LEVEL: 24
ACTUAL LEVEL: 26-30

The personal story mission “Track the Seraph” (an Order of Whispers mission) is flagged as level 24. Initially this mission is difficult only in placement of bad guys on top of the fort’s battlements, making it difficult to dodge or evade. The final wave of bosses in this mission however is a set of three level 26 Veteran Abominations that I had to basically throw myself at and die against repeatedly as a level 24 Elementalist. Ended up getting killed six times total, with almost all of my worn gear damaged and broken. The difficulty on this mission needs to be ratcheted waaaaaay down.

SERVER: Ferguson’s Crossing
GUILD NAME: Defenders of Rad Kingdoms
GUILD TAG: DORK

Issue: No Leader permissions. I can create new ranks, but not delete them. I can’t invite new members, cannot adjust rank permission except for the “New Members Here” tag. Cannot interact with the Guild Registrar, they insist I do not have “invite new member” permissions for the guild.. despite my being leader (and only member because of these bugs).

Greyfeld.7104:

While you’re at it, make the system remember which skills I have set to auto-attack. I’m tired of turning on my flamethrower’s auto-attack, only to have it flip back off every time I switch kits.

SO.. SO.. sick of having to set the autoattack back ON every time I equip a kit. It’s downright stupid.

I am looking for suggestions on Guardian builds. None of the chosen traits really thrill me or seem more useful than others. Nothing really "grabs" me when I sit down and try to come up with Trait Builds. My eyes start crossing, my brain hurts... and I end up just throwing in the towel.

Can some of you perhaps post your Trait Builds here.. tell the rest of us why you chose that build setup?

Confirmed: doesn’t work for me either.

LeoDeSol.7604:

I don’t really see how this is any different than many other games in the end? I think this equates to about, what 1 to 1.5 gold per slot, worth of gems.

Why unlock more until you are sure you are keeping the character? Why delete so many characters that this is a issue? In many games, you pay game gold to increase bag and bank slots on a per character basis and if you deleted them, you would lose those upgrades (bank and bags alike).

The only difference is, you have a option to buy gems with real money instead of gold. However, you do not have to do so, you can use gold to get your gems.

Anet has to make money somehow. If it is too big a deal, use the gems on extra character slots first.

How about this: a more expensive bag slot upgrade you can purchase that’s account-wide? If bag slots are 400 gems.. maybe make it 1600 gems? That way you’re getting a little bit of a discount for doing account-wide but ANet still comes out on top?

DaveK.1023:

tokyoshoe.6308:

I’m kind of curious why purchases in the BLTC don’t just delivered by mail directly to you? (Sorry, did I miss someone suggesting this?) If that happened, it would really eliminate the need for Trading Post NPCs.

That’s a very good suggestion!
If mail is such a promoted way of getting rewards and allows for sending items between players, why not expand on that idea ? Why not have access to TP anywhere “using mail” ? Everything from ordering through to delivery would be done via mail, just like some home delivery catalogue of sorts.

Taking cues from other games, you could put say.. a 30 minute delay on delivery time for anything bought on the BLTC. Have a “cash out” button for your profits, so you can get your BLTC sales profits mailed directly to you even if you are out on the world (and even assign a 30 minute delay to this as well).

I really think it could be a great game improvement.

I’m kind of curious why purchases in the BLTC don’t just delivered by mail directly to you? (Sorry, did I miss someone suggesting this?) If that happened, it would really eliminate the need for Trading Post NPCs.