Guild Wars 2

This infuriatingly long instance of the story keeps disconnecting me at random points during the two final fights, despite the fact that I can run open world PVE just fine and my connectivity to other games persists in the background. No other Season 3 personal instances have randomly disconnected me.

No checkpoint system and a long scenario make this painful. Bear in mind this story costs money for people who were not present at the time it was released in February, it’s now August and there are still progression blocking issues.

Still the same after several days, no enemies in sight near drakkar waypoint, the rest of the map is fairly void of the typical enemies.

Bump. Getting the same problem. No logic to how the snapping works. Driving me bonkers.

Can we get a dev standpoint on this? I don’t fancy being banned because the (improperly coded) event dumped a bunch of stuff in my bag that I don’t want to risk deleting, as it seems like a one-time reward.

Not sure what OS, CPU or graphics card you’re using so here goes. I’m assuming you’re using Windows, and you’re capable of over/underclocking your graphics card through software.

I jumped back in during Flame and Frost, and I also had BSOD until recently. I checked the event viewer in Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Event Viewer, and it was showing Event 41 – Kernel Power in system errors at the exact times guild wars 2 restarted. Brand new 800w power supply, and not happening in any other games. No overheating, tried various drivers, still random BSOD. Only thing I changed in that time was my graphics card from an Nvidia 4xx series to a Radeon HD 7800 series, so I figured it must be something to do with that.

I tried two things: AMD Overdrive (if you’ve got an AMD Graphics card) and underclocked the graphics card by 1mhz on the clock and RAM, and disabled the sound card built in to the graphics card through Device Manager (never used it). From this I have had absolutely no black screens after playing for 40 hours, even through all game types.

Good luck, and remember to check the event viewer whenever you get any restarts, it can give you a clue as to why the system is restarting.

The problem with these recipes lies in their nature. The mystic chest recipes, for example, were something that I made a great profit out of because the price of butter and what have you was substantially low enough to beat the RNG of mystic chests reliably and produce several mystic forge conduits (the permanent portable mystic forges) which I subsequently sold. By Mr Smith’s definition “cycling reliably” that would be considered an exploit, yet there was no problem with this recipe.

This drained a lot of the excess resources out of the economy (butter / green dowels) but the ones who found out early were the ones who profited immensely before the market prices shifted to accomodate the new value (butter prices went up substantially). So what’s the difference between mystic forge conduits and ectos, butter and mithril? Both had recipes introduced that altered the value, yet one is considered an exploit, the other, completely fine.

My point is that how are we to know whether a dev team introduces a function in order to balance out supply and demand in the economy, or whether it is a subtle exploit, when they can’t even be thorough enough with their own QA testing to identify said exploits? Other companies run public test servers quite successfully for this kind of thing.

I myself didn’t touch recipes, I never performed the karma exploit, and have never been banned. Despite this I am finding an increasing number of reasons to be disappointed in the devs and to stop playing. Perma-banning enthusiastic members of the community (and subsequently shaking up subsets of said community) seeks to be another nail in the coffin.

JonPeters.5630:

Agreed. Signet of the hunt needs to and will go to 25%.

Fantastic news, this is a sign(et) of good things to come. Thanks for the communication, it’s nice to know you’re watching the forums, and it’s really appreciated.

Ever since the lost shores update I have had terrible luck with loot in general PvE and WvW. Funnily enough, fractals do not receive Diminishing Returns and I have had some amazing drops from there, as the loot rate is just flat-out better in every way. (sometimes 2 or 3 rares in an hour along with an onyx lodestone)

So this isn’t just a perceived issue, there are pages upon pages of us and even people in the reddit AMA saying loot is wrong. Was this intentional? Maybe. Diminishing returns is probably borked or the loot tables have not been done right. Last time I got a rare from a dragon chest is 4 weeks ago..

During the AMA it was stated that these ascended pieces will eventually be obtainable by other methods, which I believe is the right direction to take. The problem is those of us who fall foul of the RNG gods who do not get any ascended rings and whatnot, get left behind in fractals, which, right now, is the only way to farm good loot and ascended items.

I believe that the fixes will come too little too late in regards to making the game feel less grindy, or repairing the fragmented community.

I thoroughly agree on this matter. However the current QA process is structured, it is not working. I am not your alpha tester, your QA, or your beta player. I am a customer that has reasonable expectations of the quality of a patch that is released. The recent patch illustrates that there are not enough resources being spent on the testing phase, or we are just straight up being relied upon to test even the most simple of bugs.

I believe that while new content is great, and the rate at which it is coming out is fantastic, there are too many problems with existing content to focus the majority of your development resources on making new things, especially if said new things are broken in even the simplest of ways.

I read that a dev had finished a story bug fix, but could not push this fix out until “The next major content patch”. That is puzzling, as you pushed the personal story as something integral to the game itself and then you cannot release a fix that is seemingly complete. Patches should be done when they need to be done, not monthly. Hundreds of class bugs exist yet we’re only really seeing tooltip description fixes, which is something that an intern could do. Fractal bugs are breaking entire runs, and fractals themselves have indeeed fractured the community on some of the lower population servers.

I believe the priorities for this game are all wrong, and it’s seemingly not just me that feels this way.

Pustulio.8207:

Lord almighty, it’s easy to troll you forum-junkies. At least make it semi-difficult >:D

You’re misunderstanding something again. It’s not just you that reads the forums, it’s hundreds maybe even thousands of people, and if I can type out a few posts that help a few more people understand that there is a crippling problem with the game, then that’s great. Trolling or no, your answers could be the exact thoughts of a legitimate player, and therefore worth responding to.

Pustulio.8207:

“except incredibly rare edge cases”

well, there you go, I’m a rarity.

Not you yourself, but the way you play, or your perception of a battle. Hardware/software combinations are unique enough in the first place to give some variation in the loading times of occluded characters, but what I’m trying to tell you is that either you are playing in an incredibly conservative manner (good for you) or that you cannot perceive the problem that is a fundamental part of the way Guild Wars 2 works. That is fine, I have no problem with that whatsoever, but in normal play in large scale battles, this does occur, whether there are rarities or not.

When you say you don’t have a problem, you mean you don’t have a problem with the current rate of character rendering. That’s fine, but a normal person would. This would seem a non-issue to you, but it affects the underpinnings of the game, and WvW especially.

For your enemies that might not be able to see you, this is not fine. It’s not your problem, it’s a problem for the majority of your fellow players with the game you are playing, therefore it’s a big problem. The problem is there, it is affecting you too, but either you’re so far away from the main zergs that it has time to load everyone in, or you’re just not seeing it. You have a different perception of the same behaviour, or your behaviour in the game is causing you to encounter said problem at a reduced, and seemingly unperceivable (by yourself) rate, that’s all.

I play a sword+dagger and shortbow ranger in pvp, I can even win against some nasty thieves! I base most buttons around the WASD keys and use AD as strafe instead of turn, this allows for quick return to movement keys after using skills, and 8 directions to dodge in. I use the following setup:

Autoattack turned on or off, depending on whether I’m using shortbow or sword. It’s just a matter of ctrl+rightclick anyway.

F1-F4 are pet commands.
` or tilde (next to 1) is weapon swap.
1 to 5 are weapon skills.
Q is heal, R is elite. (E could be elite, but chances of me accidentally hitting it are high)
ZXC is utility skills.
A and D are strafe left and right instead of default of turn left and right. Easier movement.

I still mouse look with right click and mouse movement. Big, big part good movement skills.

Mouse 3 (middle mouse button/scroll wheel click) for dodge. Combined with WASD can create 8 directional dodges.

I use mouse button 4 (near/on thumb) to target closest enemy, and press tab to cycle through targets.

Autotarget is turned off.
Double tap to evade is turned off.
Free look is turned on. (Autorun while looking around with camera in bigger maps/fights)

This is after trial and error of various control schemes, it just feels ‘natural’ in such an action-oriented profession and game. I’m not hoping you adopt my control scheme obviously, but I do hope you can find some inspiration from it!

It does sound like you’re a ‘clicker’ (clicking on skills instead of pressing them), whereas I’m a ‘presser’ (pressing buttons for skills), so our styles may be too different for you to glean anything from.

gadenp.7586:

@Karizee.8076

1 word: Ranger

Amen to that. If we were fixed, we would be gods, but alas, we are doomed to poor pets and uncanny underwater proficiency. They should re-release our profession as “Violent Scuba Diver” or something similar. There are of course, loads of other classes that are lacking in build diversity, or are just underpowered in several common situations, and I empathise with people who use those too.

How people like Karizee can say we are all fairly balanced is beyond me. They are either godlike in pve, pvp and wvw altogether, or they really do not have enough endgame experience of all classes to make a proper assessment. Neither do I, but pooling collective knowledge from a set of rational friends is probably going to give something closer to a balanced view. The only way I can dominate in PvP is picking appropriate 1v1s, and using shortbow and sword+dagger, yet the nasty rendering bugs still leave me flailing about like an idiot when that thief inevitably goes into stealth and regens his health for the umpteenth time.

Me and five friends were taking the north camp in enemy borderlands, yet a thief was stealthing up every few seconds, stopping us from capturing a checkpoint, and even downing some of us, despite knocking him to 1/4 health in a matter of seconds, repeatedly. Balanced? Try again.

I find DR kind of disgusting. I understand that this is the development team’s game, and we are playing how they design it, but it should be a harmonious relationship where they give us what we want (fun) and we give them what they want (money or the ability to make more games). DR is not fun, it is counter fun, and there is no good reason that it should exist in the game. If you don’t want people to repeatedly run content, don’t have it. Bots? Don’t have content that bots can run, or get enough people working on banning them that you don’t have to create anti-bot content.

Fractals, at the very least, do not have DR, this has been explicitly stated by one of the devs either on the forum or in the Chris Whiteside AMA. That’s another reason why the general population on our server is migrating away from high level areas such as Orr in droves. Fractals is number one for farming, and for getting exotic gear, and working towards ascended gear. If I can pick up 2 exotics and an onyx lodestone in one set of fractals, that takes roughly an hour, why bother playing anywhere else? It’d be a waste of time, unless you find fighting swathes of Risen for eggs and bones “fun”. Sure you get to play with the 3 other people in the map if they’re not just bots, but what happened to big dynamic events with dozens of people? Don’t worry, they’ll introduce 10-man fractals for us soon probably…

The game is certainly not dying, but the dev team are not helping it by being blind to the road they are taking. It is currently just being misguided heavily into niche content instead of ‘the whole game is endgame’, temporary (hopefully) vertical progression, with heavy instancing in the form of everyone and his brother running fractals, and no word from the dev team on what on earth they are attempting to do to address some of the issues that people are having.

There was the AMA on reddit recently, but half the questions that the community as a whole wanted answered were just simply not answered.

I still have faith in the game to keep a big enough audience, but masking all these problems with ‘monthly content’ and ‘free expansions’ is not going to make your playerbase ignore the fundamental flaws in your game, or the way that you are treating your customers as a whole by seemingly ignoring them. DR is mistreatment of customers that want to invest time in your game.

I love this game, I really do, but when I’m repeatedly getting sucker punched by the dev team with DR, stealth ‘bug fixes’, nobody fixing huge bugs quick enough, and incredible alterations to the manifesto that then that leave me with less people to enjoy the game with, you wouldn’t be able to blame anybody for leaving, never coming back, and never trusting this particular developer again.

I’m currently running around Fractals level 7 to 9, helping level guildies and pugs up and whatnot. For anyone that has run fractals: Is it me, or is the loot much better than any other mode of play?

Dungeons, WvW, Events, Dragons, everything else seems to drop pittance in comparison. I get at least one rare from every fractal level I run (usually about 20mins each) and I’ve had far too many exotics there to boot. Never, I repeat, never had an exotic drop in regular PvE, and that’s with 500 hours played.

Thing is, I was getting rares and whatnot before in events like Claw of Jormag and such, until they started doing this dodgy loot balancing business. Surely they’d do unit testing and test case scenarios on the drops so that they could see if they were dropping correctly.

Like simulating the drops a level 80 would get from killing 50,000 Risen (49,999 porous bones, probably) and making sure the system was spewing out the right ratios of loot? Or maybe there is some grand interference between the loot system and the ‘anti-bot’ Diminishing Returns system. Still, proper testing would have shown that something was wrong right?

You’d think so, but the guardian staff skill empower, which is meant to give 10s of might according to the tooltip (which was noted in the patch notes, in Lost Shores) still does only 8s.. It appears that inadequate testing is certainly not out of the question.

I suggested a while back that a multi-window chat system similar (but not identical to) EVE Online’s tab system would work. I find the current chat system nice and functional, but basic. Multiple windows for multiple resolutions of communication (especially in WvW) would go a long way to making awesome chat functionality.

I would also like alliance chat (and for that to work, we need guild alliances). I just don’t get why some of the functionality that was in GW1 was not able to be built upon in GW2. Other than that, a proper LFG system, so we don’t have to hope to heaven we can find an overflow and then post an LFG to GW2LFG.com. You know you’ve dropped the ball when functionality that should have been in your game from the get-go is being implemented on an external web site.

Pustulio.8207:

Caedmon.6798:

Pustulio.8207:

things/people render very quickly for me, so maybe it’s you…..or maybe I’m just lucky lol

50+ People do not render “quickly” ( might give your definition of Quickly,for me thats instant ) for you in wvwvw,since it does for no one.A group this big will be invisible untill they are smacking away on you.Vice versa.

so…basically what you’re saying is: “I have a problem, so everyone has one, and that’s FINAL”. I understand you, and a lot of people have a problem. I don’t…deal with it. And my “definition” is: “Occurring, achieved, or acquired in a relatively brief period of time”. In other words, by the time I’m close enough to be hit, I can see the people hitting me. Is that clear enough?

The fundamental way the server side functionality works for player occlusion in large scale battles means sporadic loading and unloading of players, regardless of your hardware. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary is more likely to indicate a perceived lack of problems, rather than an actual full functioning game.

There are very few ways you and I can have vastly different experiences when the variability of such behaviour on the client side is so minimal. I’m talking seconds here. I am in a small server but we still get 50v50 zergs in WvW and I still have rendering issues. The entirety of my guild has rendering issues. Great swathes of players outside my guild have rendering issues. Some of these people have top of the line hardware (to no perceivably beneficial effect).

I believe the problem and your perception of having no problem may be two different things, as the server side functionality does not allow you to have ‘no problems’ in large scale battles. Perhaps your playstyle may minimise problems, but such a thing would certainly affect practically everyone except incredibly rare edge cases.

I had a problem the other day where I could not get past “Downloading 0kb/s” on the launcher, yet I had a fully patched game that I was playing fine on the day before.. I went to reinstall and it downloaded files, tried to open the launcher again and closed immediately.

For me it was a problem with DirectX. I had corrupted the drivers by installing my new video card (ATI/AMD) and THEN uninstalling the old drivers (Nvidia). So it could be a DirectX problem. It could also be anything from firewall problems to Antivirus interference.

I solved the issue by uninstalling ALL graphics drivers, then reinstalling them, took about 5 minutes overall and it was completely fixed.

I hope you get it solved.

I’ve also given up on renaming my pets, if anyone is like me and uses the bears with default names and a shortbow, we must just look like bots half the time..

I have not had any connection problems up until the lost shores event, and all of a sudden my connection quality in the game has turned to mush. Massive lag spikes, people not showing up where they should be and doing what they should be (even in dungeons). Every other time-dependent application and game I use is working fine. This is a problem with Guild Wars 2, and it happened during and after Lost Shores. I know this thread is old, but I’d like to chronicle my woes where I can.

I’ve also been struggling with these. I get lots and lots of latency despite my ping running at 20ms to google.com constantly. I even have it on while playing the game sometimes for testing and there’s very little variance and absolutely no lag spikes. I have a 60Mbit downstream connection with a 6Mbit upstream and it has never failed me before. My router firewall is switched off completely therefore I see no problems on my end.

I have low latency in all the other games I play, and I am connected to a server in my region (Piken Square). Something went really wrong after the Lost Shores event and I am seeing terrible connection issues where there were none before. Even in dungeons. Plugged in to the router, using it purely as a modem doesn’t help either. I really hope there’s a fix for this, as it really diminishes the quality of the gameplay for people experiencing these issues.

Xander.4539:

voidelysium.7285:

The aggro system must have changed. The same mobs I was fighting two weeks ago that practically hugged my bear are now chasing me around nonstop. I wouldn’t mind but the bear has more vitality and hits harder than me..feels like the mobs are picking off the weak..

I’ve played 100 hours of ranger and I am absolutely certain the aggro mechanics have changed. First they put half your DPS and HP into a pet, and then make the HP part useless because it can’t hold aggro…

Or your gear has gotten better, which is some of the worst thing a ranger can do in this game. Just take off all you gear for a few mobs, and see if you notice any change.

Wore level 60 gear instead and tested. Same old mobs from multiple levelled zones, pet holds aggro like a champion. Seems like armour rating is factoring more into aggro now. One more reason Ranger’s design in its current form should be heavily amended. And no, ANet, I don’t mean give us light armour so pets can hold aggro better o_O

The aggro system must have changed. The same mobs I was fighting two weeks ago that practically hugged my bear are now chasing me around nonstop. I wouldn’t mind but the bear has more vitality and hits harder than me..feels like the mobs are picking off the weak..

I’ve played 100 hours of ranger and I am absolutely certain the aggro mechanics have changed. First they put half your DPS and HP into a pet, and then make the HP part useless because it can’t hold aggro…

Durzlla.6295:

Tibbel.3450:

Zaith.9132:

• Improved the effect chance on ranger spirits to 35% base and 50% when traited.

The spirits have an internal cooldown of ten seconds. The effect can only be triggered once every ten seconds. If you attack 3 times, untraited, you are statistically promised the effect will trigger. The only way this buff helps is if you attack twice or less every ten seconds.

That’s not how probability works.
Here’s the chance you will get a proc given the number of times you attack (assuming a 35% proc chance each hit):

1. 35.0%
2. 57.8%
3. 72.5%
4. 82.1%
5. 88.4%
6. 92.5%
7. 95.1%
8. 96.8%
9. 97.9%
10. 98.7%

This may explain peoples “10 second internal CD” theory… 10 hits tend to take ~1sec each or so, but if you are both AoEing and using a skill that fires off shots faster then 1 second (IE barrage + rapid fire) you’ll get those 10 hits faster… anyone test that?

It’d also explain why with greatsword the effect procs the more people that are in melee range of me, more enemies, more hits per swing = more procs faster.

This is interesting, we’ve got several people who are seemingly unaffected by internal cooldowns. Perhaps this is a bug of some sort? I have tried for the past 20mins to get both the stone and frost spirits to proc quicker than 10s using quickening zephyr + petswap quickness. I traited to have 50% chance to proc and still, no dice.

I am a greatsword/shortbow user by nature but neither those nor the longbow procced buffs at a rate of less than 10 seconds between. Maybe your traits/runes on your armour are different and that’s what’s causing the bug?

It’s worth noting that there are two pieces of the ranger trait line that provide the same buffs as these spirits. Dodge rolls grant protection (15 in wilderness) and swapping weapons grants swiftness (5 in skirmishing). Perhaps these are affecting what you see as the cooldowns for the spirits?

I’d appreciate someone with the lower cooldowns to do some testing.

Yasha.5963:

How do you test for the internal CDs? I would like to do this as well, could you give me a methodology please?

Equip a spirit, go to the training dummies in Lion’s Arch. Attack them. This will trigger the procs, and as you attack rather fast, you will see the procs are easy to get off consistently, but do indeed have a ten second gap. Mouse over the tooltip for a spirit and it states Effect Recharge: 10 seconds. That’s the cooldown. Tooltips have been wrong for me before for several classes, but this one seems right.

I love my ranger but I hate my pets. Coming from guild wars 1 as a pet-less ranger, it left me feeling pretty puzzled as to why we are forced to have one.

It does me no good to have a pet die on me nigh-on instantly in a WvW zerg, or aggro half the map if I don’t have it stowed because it keeps pathing to strange places. Or when it takes a hit because it can’t dodge so I’m brought into combat mode through no fault of my own (although I should have stowed the pet really).

These are all culminating in a pretty sour experience with pets overall. It feels like something that was dragged in from guild wars 1, despite A-net not really thinking about how effectively it would fit into the heavy action-oriented style of the game.

krojack.4920:

Yes they should be tied. This is why fixing the pets should be one of, if not THE top priority for anet to fix. I’m personally against the idea of stowing your pet and having your over all damage increased. If this is what you want then change to an engineer or something.

Why? What are you afraid of? If you want the utility of a pet, you can have it, if you want to be in sole control of your damage output, aggro, and presence, you can stow the thing. If it was done in a balanced way, you would just be open to more build diversity but hey who wants that when we can just go play engineers right?

Well the engineer’s regular weapons are actually rather lacking, the ranger certainly outpaces them in that regard, as well as not being able to weapon swap, and they’re pretty reliant on utility kits/weapon kits/elixirs, they’re closer to an elementalist than a “ranger without pets”.

Pets were never a necessity for rangers in guild wars 1, and they have made them an intrinsic part of the design in guild wars 2 as some sort of poorly conceived gimmick that is a nod to the original, just like necromancer minions, but that’s another argument.

They do too much damage for a sidekick, which means you need them alive to compete with other professions in terms of damage output. They are too fragile, so while they act as a big part of your overall dps, that comes crashing down fairly quick. Yes I can tank champions with my bear and murellow, but what about when they die? Which they will, because they turn to wet paper at the slightest sign of an AoE attack.

Pets need to do less damage but take more damage, and act more as utility units rather than another weapon.

Durzlla.6295:

There is so much wrong in this thread… and it’s very clear you do not use spirits if you think there is a 10 second internal CD…

GS got a huge buff, spirits got a huge buff, splinter shot got a massive buff (i can actually hurt things underwater with my 1 now!!) The 2 off hand things are buffs, CotW wasn’t getting the reduced CD or the increased area, now it does, throw torch would be able to miss if your target freaking crawled out of the way with how slow it went,now it lands a little better…

And then the last mass of underwater things i have no idea how those will help us… as far as i know there are no combo fields underwater…

It’s nice to have conviction in what you believe, but saying others are wrong before you bring anything to the discussion is only serving to take away merit from your own points.

GS got a huge utility buff, the damage buff is nice but nothing to shout about unless you’re in the midst of a group of enemies.

I have indeed used spirits, you’re only showing yourself up by claiming there is no 10 second internal cooldown. There is. It even says so in the tooltip (which would hopefully be correct…3 months into the game..maybe not). This cooldown shows up well enough while beating on the training dummies.

Spirits still die too quickly from general AoE, rangers do enough attacks within 10s to make the ‘buff’ to the proc-on-hit chance nigh on useless.

You could hurt things underwater before, in melee. My guardian’s ranged underwater is still far more powerful than the rangers.

Rangers are fundamentally the most boring class to play, and I was hoping for much more to increase that diversity. All we got are buffs to things we really didn’t need buffs for.

The pet mechanic is a bit convoluted, and brings great pain in larger fights such as WvW / Big events with champions in. They just don’t have the sustain to withstand AoE, and with the pet out of action, you lose an awful lot of DPS. In Guild Wars 1 you could spec to either have a pet, or to not have a pet, and each had it’s own pros and cons.

I would really like to see a system where we can stow pets and not be worse off damage-wise. I agree with the person above, the choice should be there for us. It’s not like the technology isn’t already there. Engineers use kits, which take away their weapons but boost certain stats. Pets should just detract from stats when you activate them instead.

Zsymon.8457:

Nah, that doesn’t add up my friend, the orb never needed three seconds to reach it target before, it didn’t go THAT slow.

It’s a bit more comfortable using now if you never detonated the orb before, less comfortable if you did, but there’s no change in the actual outcome of using it, other than being a little harder to dodge.

The orb skill only resets once the orb of light reaches the end of it’s range, or hits a wall or the floor (sometimes doesn’t reset on collision, very buggy right now).

It’s not noticeable most of the time but it pierces, it’s not a case of how long it takes to hit the enemy, it’s how long until it resets. It also does double the damage of the staff #1 skill, so while it doesn’t make an amazing difference, it’s definitely a positive boost, and allows for a little bit more interaction on the staff skillbar.

For the skeptics; try it on a training dummy in PvP/Lion’s Arch. The speed increase helps dps when fighting on open ground, especially against mutiple mobs that are close together.

nvmvoidrays.2158:

you do realize that outside of the fractal dungeon, using ascended gear won’t be optimal, correct? infusions (as far as we know) only effect agony.

Someone has been exploring item template codes, and found that apparently infusions affect more than agony. This could be the first step down a slippery slope…

Infusion possibly discovered here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Infusions-affect-normal-stats/

Yeah I think the proc rate enhancement is kind of redundant, as most professions tend to have fairly quick attack speeds. You’ll have attacked around 10-15 times in that 10 second cooldown, the proc rate didn’t really need to be changed. It kind of feels like a fake buff…

Zsymon.8457:

The only thing that changed on staff #2 is that the orb moves a bit faster, there is no changes to damage or cooldown.

Yeah but the speed makes all the difference when it’s just a 3 second cooldown after letting the orb expire at maximum range instead of detonating it. It makes staff #2 a single target dps booster.

Karew.2169:

Oy vey. All Anet did was make it so every Greatsword Guardian can’t keep retaliation up all the time. You now have to spec a little into it if that’s what you want. Greatsword’s AoE DPS actually increased a bit because Whirling Wrath and Leap of Faith got a cooldown decrease.

Grand misinformation there. Whirling Wrath was always 10 seconds cooldown. Leap of Faith has a 5 second shorter cooldown than before (20s down to 15s). That would be great except it is not an AoE skill, it is single target, or it has a very narrow attack arc, and it in no way equally compensates the 10s increase on symbol of wrath cooldown.

You claim a DPS increase without understanding or appreciation of the synergistic properties Symbol of Wrath and the whirling/leap combos and traits. You could make the symbol bigger (hit more enemies), last longer (hit enemies for more ticks), heal allies per tick, it has massively nerfed the DPS capabilities (especially AoE) of the greatsword and to some extent the support abilities the symbol provided. This was accounting for a great deal of prior DPS on greatsword users, especially if fighting toe to toe with other melee users.

I still get along just fine with my trusty hammer and staff, but I can see the huge nerf as clear as day. I think greatsword needed balancing a bit due to the high attack speed of whirling wrath, and great battlefield control, but this is a bit too far.

I don’t like the way they’re turning one of our staple boons (retaliation) into a situation-specific thing. I never kept retaliation up all the time unless I specced for it and lost utility elsewhere.

Now I lose retaliation, have less DPS due to less AoE from symbols and retaliation, and a massive knock-on effect in regards to the effectiveness of symbol and proc-per-crit/attack related traits. This is a bigger nerf than what it seems at first glance.

Why do we want to only use retaliation to “counter many hits”? That just means we’ll be god-awful against heavy-hitting enemies who hit less times for more damage.

I can undestand why they changed the layout to coincide with the increased cooldown on symbol of wrath, and decreased cooldown on leap of faith. Main problem is: this is a huge greatsword DPS nerf in two ways.

1 – You can’t have retaliation up as long unless you’re using shouts.
2 – The aoe it provided every few seconds would tick for a noticeable amount of damage on an enemy.

The only compensation is slightly lower cooldown on leap of faith, which is a single target combo move. Greatswords are now a little bit more in line with the awful damage output of the rest of the melee weapons at least.

What I don’t understand is they don’t want us to ‘have retaliation up all the time’, yet we have 2 shouts that give a mighty amount of retaliation on fairly low cooldowns.

Apraxas.3685:

i just did a leap finisher while having 28 seconds retal and it jumped me to 36 on a light field, tips on how to test it?

Keep trying to stack that retaliation with various shouts, I did more testing, and I found that I can get as high as 48s of retaliation with a burst of skills, but sometimes shouts, combo finishers, and symbol of wrath will work, and sometimes they just won’t. It is super inconsistent. That’s the main problem.

As a Guardian I have noticed that while I can maintain retaliation indefinitely with very little effort, the behaviour by which to obtain retaliation is incredibly inconsistent when dealing with higher durations.

Sometimes combo finishers and shouts that would normally grant retaliation are completely ignored. This often happens at around 12 to 18 seconds of retaliation already accrued.

I can reach roughly 40s of retaliation through quick consecutive activation of shouts and virtues, then use something like greatsword skill Leap of Faith in a light field.

The problem is this does not work every time, nor does any skill have a guarantee to accrue more retaliation. (Some points in time a combo finisher or a symbol may contribute, whereas a shout may not and vice versa.)

I have a screenshot attached indicating the traits I have chosen to make hitting this bug possible.

Is this a bug? Or is there an unclear/unreliable ceiling on retaliation duration?

Bug / Hidden Feature: When using GS skill Leap of Faith inside a ‘light’ combo field (possibly other combo finishers that grant some form of substantial retaliation) that will take you to greater than 20 seconds of retaliation, absolutely zero retaliation is granted by the combo. Shouts and virtues on the otherhand, will grant above and beyond this arbitrary 20 second limit.

MattChernicky.2945:

Hey all,

For those of you that tired to use the -perfdebug command last night, can you confirm that the .dat file that should be found in the profiles folder is not there for me please.

Confirmed, there is no .dat file in (My Documents)\Guild Wars 2 or any sub folders after following the instructions multiple times.

Perhaps these command line switches only worked on the debug executable or ArenaNet’s own version?

Despite having a maximised chat window, I still manage to miss important info. Not sure if other people feel the same way but it would be great if we could view these channels of chat in various floating windows or a splittable chat window.

For example, instead of being able to flick between tabs, you could have one occupying the left 50% of the chat window, and one occupying the right 50%. Floating windows for various chats would be another possible solution.

I have the exact same problem, and have reported it as a bug through game, and in the forums, as well as the ‘symbol of swiftness’ buff where it doesn’t stack with pre-existing swiftness from other sources. I have reason to suspect that the trait lines haven’t been thoroughly tested either, guardians need some love from A-Net.

You CPU is certainly the bottleneck. I don’t know where people are getting figures from for RAM usage, but even at peak usage Guild Wars 2 never uses more than 1.6GB of my 8GB total, I can imagine the problem would be running lots of other programs at the same time.

Unfortunately the game (as with other MMOs) is rather heavily CPU-bound, so you need a fairly decent processor to get a decent framerate.

Guild: Critical Failure [FAIL]
Server: Piken Square

Travelling to Lion’s Arch, Black Citadel, Divinity’s Reach, Hoelbrak and all 4 WvW maps did not fix the guild issues (couldn’t represent, use bank or armourer) however, I jumped into an instance, and it allowed me to represent without so much as a delay, it was immediate.

TheKow.7604:

This thread is silly the travel cost are fine I travel all the time to help people sense I’m 80 and never drop below 1 gold from managing my drops for cash crafting and running exploreable instances the cash flow is fairly even spending 3s a way point isnt bad at all as I make 40 silver within the way points zone with people out there having 50g plus this is not a problem for most players other then tho’s that toss cash at things.

(from77-80 i was traveling with a pocket of 27 silver from buying all exotic earings/rings/ect) Maybe stay in a zone longer then 5 mins and you make cash running a exploreable instances yields plenty for daily travel cash.

tl:dl why cant I have 10000g I wanna be rich, cause you bad with money and item management

I don’t mean to be a put down or anything but this problem is user/player error and sadly its always the talkative players that complain tho most on forums while tho’s who don’t have problems hardly post.

You are telling people how to play the game. That in and of itself should give you an idea of why the waypoint system is broken, when a person tells everyone how to play the game just to keep their balance even. I don’t want “10000g” I want to do an event, then hop around with my buddies/anyone calling for help out on /map or heck, even just hop around and see what events are going on. Heaven forbid I want to do that without having to do instances.

I understand the problem of free waypoint costs, and the inflation associated with it. I played Guild Wars for years and it wasn’t long before money went haywire and people were trading rare materials as currency instead. I’m not asking for free waypoints, I’m asking for a balancing of the money sinks. Instead we have people on the other side of the coin trying to rationalise everyone having to do a certain task or a certain playstyle for a certain amount of time to get some money.

This is an MMO, there are varying setups and playstyles, and the economy and its corresponding money sinks should account for diversity of play. If someone runs 1 event (which, by the way, at level 80 take somewhat quite a bit more than your supposed 5 minutes), that should be enough to cover costs to travel across to the lowbie zones and back to lend a hand to a mate. Unfortunately it is nowhere near enough, unless we put a hard cap on maximum waypoint costs, or even scale the entire thing back a bit, people are less inclined to play with each other.

The forums are here for suggestions and complaints, and I find that your ‘Oh it’s the minority’ outcry a little bit perplexing. You’re entitled to your opinion, and you can offer a rebuttal to my arguments all you want, but please don’t discount what people are saying entirely just because you believe they are all playing the game wrong with your ‘player error’ theory.

Don’t put down ‘talkative’ players, because they tend to be the ones who can elaborate the most on bugs, issues and exploits for Arenanet to track down as quick as possible, so that they can make this into a better game. Not just for you, or just for me, but for all of us.

TL:DR Waypoint costs are not fine, if they were, nobody would be bothered, let other people play the game how they want as long as they’re playing legitimately, and don’t discount other people’s playstyles and opinions because of them being ‘talkative’ or different to yours.

There are a few problems I’ve noticed spinning off the back of the scaled waypoint pricing.

People are driven to heavily using the WvW/Mists=>Lion’s Arch=>Home hub method to get cheaper waypointing. This places unnecessary pressure on the WvW servers, there are unnecessary queues and users have to go through several additional loading screens due to the prices. This is surely costing A-Net money, as unnecessary bandwidth usages are a very real cost. The silver we ‘pay’ them will never convert to real money, so how about reducing waypoint costs to something more sustainable?

To make it worse, disproportionate monetary event rewards in level 80 areas and aggressive negative reward scaling in lower level areas (1 to 2 silver for a 15 minute event at level 80 is certainly not sustaining enough to cover the costs of waypointing to a buddy halfway across tyria to help them out) means running everywhere or exploiting the WvW/Mists method are the only financially viable solutions.

I do not think the current waypoint system is feasible as a money sink. In fact I would prefer higher repair costs and lower waypoint costs so that players can hop around to their friends more, which would certainly encourage less anti-social play.

@Sterling; I don’t know about others, but my gold management is perfectly fine, I salvage only ‘salvage’ items, while looking out for how much I can sell things on the trading post to make a profit. I do quite well out of this combined with efficient guild dungeon running.

Despite this, when the initial cost of helping someone out at lower levels is approaching 4 silver from Orr, it personally makes me think twice about aiding others in the world, save for immediate surroundings. I don’t think you have the right to say how every other player should manage their gold better, because not everybody has the same playstyle as you.

I don’t want to sit in a location and farm for an hour to make it feel like that waypoint was worth it. I want to jump about the world and explore, help people, and the costs of the waypoint system combined with poor monetary rewards despite being level 80 culminate in a restrictive set of playstyles that are not for everyone.

Funnily enough that is exactly my current methodology for chat layout, but as an ex Eve online player, I have been spoiled by all the bells and whistles of a very customisable UI (guild wars 1 eventually had this to some extent, hence the reason I am suggesting it).

Your solution is ideal for those of us who struggle to keep up with all the goings on in various chats given the current implementation, but I hope that in the future A-Net will consider adding flexibility to the way chat can be displayed for those of us that want the option.

Thank you so much for bringing us a game that is full to the brim with the love of those that created it, and the cracking involvement you’ve displayed with the community from day one.

I play a great deal of WvW, and I constantly find myself missing strategic information because I have guild, party, team and map chat to sift through, all in the same little window.

Despite having a maximised chat window, I still manage to miss stuff. Not sure if other people feel the same way but it would be great if we could view these channels of chat in various windows or a splittable chat window.

For example, instead of being able to flick between tabs, you could have one occupying the left 50% of the chat window, and one occupying the right 50%. Floating windows for various chats would be another possible solution.

I apologise if I have missed the suggestions thread/sub-forum, but the last permalink I tried to use to get to the official suggestions thread redirected me to the forum home page.