f13.net

Notes are up at: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013

Highlights:

New living story content, combat and two new achievements. Old achievement/title is still available.
Daily tasks are now selectable, no more underwater kill daily unless you like that one.

***A new event scaling system is being prototyped with a few high volume events, no note on which ones. These events should be HARDER with large numbers of players present now.***

Item preview on Trading Post items (yay)
Guild Missions of course
Event reward chest loot table improvements.
Some chests are now lootable once per day(tell us which ones, Anet?)
Stealth change in pve, probably preventing solo players from accidentally resetting their mobs if they use stealth skills.

Eles:
Minor bunker nerf (evasive arcana's heal is now 50% in pvp)
RtL cooldown increased to 20s

Guardian:
Assorted buffs

Necro:
A whole mess of trait improvements trying to make Jagged Horror not suck.

Thief:
Cloak and Dagger no longer works on walls (yay)

WvW:
Swords only appear with 25 players fighting now, improvement for small groups not showing up on the map.
Invuln NPCs no longer killable via condition damage

Anything not listed seemed relatively minor, class wise. Lots of bug fixes with traits.

Unfortunately the guild quests have pretty hefty requirements to get going and will only be obtainable by large guilds for some time to come.

Our little friends and family guild on JQ is hoping to eventually do these, but we're just a handful.  If it's something you'd like to work towards though, drop one of us a line and we can milk you for influence, pending our dear guild leader's approval.

Heh, I poked my head into a hornets nest thread about the guild missions, and even people in big zerg guilds are complaining about the guild missions.  ArenaNet went and kicked themselves in the face yet again.  Go team.

I'm amused by how many people are freaking out about the ICD being added to on crit foods. Oh no, you can no longer heal with rapid fire abilities using crit heal foods! You might actually need to use a healing skill to heal! :P

I'm mostly amused because it's thieves really melting down about it, and they already have the stupidly good healing signet that can pretty much passively outheal any non dungeon content.

Seeing the guild mission system in action: holy shit this is a terrible idea by terrible people. What the hell, did Anet move all their devs to the expansion and put the fifth string in charge of ongoing development?

The guild missions are the gift that keep on giving for Anet.  Not only are they a significant PR mess, they're also apparently bugged.   Go team.  Again.  

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/bugs/Attention-Guild-Bounty-Missions-Bug

edit:  or were, looks like the patch for it is out now, but it's still funny given how badly this has gone over to begin with

I honestly don't understand some of the decisions here.

1) completely lock small guilds out of this content

2) fix exploits in dungeons but don't fix the reasons people exploited - stupid, unfun, unfair bosses

3) introduce ANOTHER currency to grind


Where's the actual content? Where's the new fractals, the new appearance sets, the fixes to the fundamental combat engine issues like the debut stacks?

EDIT: they added more dredge to the dredge fractal. Who in their right mind is making these decisions? How bad IS their dungeon team?

Their dungeon team was always the weak link, even back in alpha. They'd cook up cool base mechanics and then just turn the difficulty/grind/both up to stupid levels. Because... well, nobody really knew because. They were largely incoherent.

Anyway, I actually like the patch. I feel like they're slowly turning it around after the disastrous initial Fractal gating decision. I've been logging in again and having fun.

I like most of the patch. I really, really, REALLY disagree with gating even the tier 1 missions behind level five of a tree most of the people who want the content wouldn't have ever gone up.

Part of the issue is the logic: Art of War sucked for pve guilds. This makes it useful for pve guilds! Or, you know, hides content at the end of 16ish days of building AoW5 while 1-4 are still completely useless.

I'd be fine if they patched it and made guild bounty level 1 gated at Art of War 2, level 2 at 3, and 3 at 5 or something. So at least if you had a puzzle loving guild you wouldn't need to grind for months just to get the ability to do puzzles.

The whole gating system is completely opposed to absolutely everything good in GW2's design. It's gating the shit you'd like to play behind a ton of shit you don't want to play.

I like being able to select the dailies I do and hope they start letting me select monthlies as well at some point.  As it stands I'll never complete one due to the dungeon requirement.

They're moving in the wrong direction with all the gating in general.
One of the great things at first was how open everything was, easy to go back and do stuff you missed and there was still some sort of a level appropriate reward. It was casual and open.

Then they start adding AR with the fractals (I frickin HATE one off gating stats like that, it's such a cheap idea that doesn't even attempt to disguise it's purely about the grind) and now some ridiculous requirements for the guild missions.

I don't understand the reasoning behind it; there's no sub, how is annoying your customers a good idea here?

That said; I appreciate the effort they're putting into balancing and fixing the classes, you know you're approaching balance when the forums are ablaze with people screaming: "you broke my only viable superawesome build!!". As far as that goes it's an excellent patch.

We tried AC path 2 explorable last night.  Dear gods...

If we had Sach, Selma, Kild, Khali, and Vu... we would have finished.  Painfully, but finished.  With just our friends who we liked to run dungeons with before?  Dear gods...

The spiders before the Queen are no longer one-hit kills.  Which isn't too big of a deal, but they still hit hard and you need to finish them off before tackling the Queen, who is throwing around longer lasting poison fields.  We actually wiped on her.

Kholer starts with no adds next to him.  He gets two at each 25%.  Now in general, some of us can deal with this.  Unfortunately we have members who have enough trouble dodging Kholer by himself.  Add an unexpected Necromancer and people are going down.  Having only one or two people up, dodging Kholer, a Necromancer, and a stunning warrior while trying to rez the three downed members?  Also Kholer uses his pull more frequently and randomly.  Wipes were immanent.  Lots of wipes.

In the trap set up we had five mobs instead of four.  This was already tricky depending upon composition.

The Ghost Eater's mechanics sound pretty cool.  Play Ghostbusters to make it vulnerable.  Execution is a different matter:

Hitting the Ghost Eater causes it to spawn ectoplasms.  Continuing to hit it spawns more.  Not hitting it is important.  This is also difficult for some people.  So one person lifts an ecto while another pulls it to the trap.  Do that enough, the Ghost Eater is vulnerable.  Do it poorly, and it reabsorbs ectos causing it to heal.  Of course you have it spewing out damage and damage fields all over the place, on top of the ectos, so coordinating this actually requires competence.

We gave up after enough deaths to cause me four pieces of broken equipment.  Not damaged, broken.  We might have finished it, but frankly the guy who needed one more dungeon for their monthly was so worthless we weren't willing to try any longer.  It's nearly impossible to carry a single person now.  If you have two or three who aren't decent dungeon runners, it's not going to happen.

So I imagine the dungeon rewards are a special tier of awesome now.

Exactly.  I say hello to my little unfinished monthly icon that sits there like the microsoft paper clip.  Hey bud!  Not doing dungeons sorry!  Unfinished ye shall remain.

One cool thing:  haven't been able to play since patch, but I hear loot bags are dropping in huge numbers in WvW, and an Arenanet poster said in the forums that it is intentional and should stay that way. 

All these other things don't really affect me since I play so infrequently, and for short periods of time.  I'm happy to do a few dragon events and run around WvW for an hour or 2. 

That's distressing, Lanty, and really odd. The just started nerfing AC and the like to recover from the death zerging nerf (can't death zerg, so tune down bullshit bosses!)

Now they turned around and made AC bullshit level difficulty?

Part of the issue to me is that they're tuning for 80s running heroic modes in WoW. Not level 35s running AC Explorable, or casual gamers. That combined with some of the fractal tiering and gear acquisition changes (ascended basically being impossible to grind on multiple characters at once due to all the gating being account wide) makes me wonder if they accidentally put a mess of old EQ players in charge of PVE content.

It really feels that way.  It's not like we've got shit gear.  We're only up to level 7-ish fractals, but exotic weapons all around, rare or exotic armor, and we could get through all three paths with a bit of effort.  (The mage was a bit tricky due to the first room, but that actually sounds doable now.)

It feels tuned for the guys doing fractal level 80 stuff, not people heading into the game's very first explorable dungeon.

I feel like even with the beta weekends the resounding complaint was that AC's mechanics are far too punishing for what is expected to be your first introduction to the game's group content. Due to how the rewards work (same token is used for level 80 exotic pieces), they seem to be balancing them around how 80s use them for gear, not for any other use case like non 80s running them.

Hell, there's non 80 rare gear out of the dungeon vendors that I'm sure nobody has ever purchased because it's a giant waste of the tokens that you wouldn't have by the time you could use the gear anyways.

I went into AC once - I haven't done an instance since.

I really think that they screwed up the whole instance thing and have either no idea that they have otr have no idea how to fix it.

Monthlies just don't happen as a result which makes me a sad panda.

Ditto. At least I think that was the one dungeon I tried.  It pretty much ended any interest I had in this game at all.  When I saw how the devs expected me to 'fun', I knew this wasn't the game for me.  I just have to sadly shake my head when I see they're going even further down that rabbit hole.

The sad thing is, last month's patch went the other way. They disabled death zerging and nerfed most of the encounters to no longer include one shot bullshit and other poor mechanics.

This patch nerfed all silver mob hp in AC so there aren't as many bullet sponge trash pulls, but for some crazy reason made the bosses and minibosses crazy hard to the point that one missed dodge = welp.

Something is really really strange with their design process, because it seems to lack any uniform vision of what the fuck they want to do.

It was Caudacus Manor, and I'm still kinda mad at myself for inviting you.  (Because it made you hate the game, not because I didn't want you along.)

But them I'm also mad at the dungeon designers for thinking making things harder is a good idea.

CM Story has some dickish bits, but I really think AC Story is the worst of the lot for Fuck You mechanics. Now nerfed a lot, but Lovers used to be absolute dicks and a terrible design.

IN INTERESTING NEWS:

The WvW lead gave a quick interview about the March patch. Noncommital stuff about WvW ranks (given the current systems going in, I'm fucking dreading them), but the one odd piece of news is that the culling tweaks in January were not enough: Culling is exiting the building in the March patch, completely. No tweaks, the client's just going to try it's hardest to render everything in range. Client options will be available to tweak this if your system can't keep up.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat on dungeons.  I did AC story, tried and failed hard on AC explore, and CM story, and then basically just gave up any hope of ever bothering to do dungeons again shortly after launch.  When the dungeon runs, and then fractals started showing up as requirements for monthlies, I just wanted to cry.  I seriously don't get why they have such a hard on for their shitty dungeons.

I don't mind them having a hard on for them.  What I mind is they keep trying to poke me with it.

I think they have deluded themselves into believing that if they force players into the dungeons enough times that eventually we will learn to love them and thereby justify the resources they pored into making the things.

What I personally would love to see are the % of players who got to level 80 AND completed Arah story mode at least once for their account to finish the main quest.  I have a sneaking suspicion that number is a really low percent.

I suspect the Arah numbers are higher than you'd think. I've done it on all of my 80s because it's actually really fucking easy (not even kidding, the whole thing is on rails and about 8x easier than AC story or CM story)

What is killing them is explorable mode being effectively Cataclysm Heroics all over again. As Lanty was saying, it's now pretty much impossible to carry someone through an explorable. This may be seen as a feature, but imo it's a bug because it ignores the social dynamics of MMOs. Some of my MMO playing friends are not very good at games. I still enjoy playing with them and will veer away from games that make it clear I should be kicking them to the curb because I value my friendships far more than my achievement points.

yep, im tired of not having any friends in game and moved on.
they pretty much can't stop complaining about efficiency and 'being good dodger' on mumble.

for a melee class playing with latency - i give up.

I bit the bullet and gave Arah a shot today on my ranger (with guildies). Is it just me or is it actually considerably easier (and more fun) than earlier instances? Basing this on the fact that AC killed instances for me. 3 of us hadn't done Arah before - 3 rangers, a warrior and a mesmer and just fun and a little thought into situational awareness. No wipes, a few simple deaths that were recoverable.

Maybe I'm getting old but the hardcore raider bullshit is what killed WoW off for me and brought me back to GW2.

The main problem with Arah(story) is the boss fight at the end, which is just lol.

As for annoying story mode, the best/worst is still Sorrow's Embrace for me. That 4-phase golem boss... almost everything about it is grrr-worthy. It's a pity too, since the boss after it (Iron Forgeman) is one of the more fun dungeon bosses I've played.

The only time I've done Arah was back in September and it was "a bit difficult" with the insane number of mobs (especially on the airship) that kept spawning. As for the end boss it seemed to be bugged as when it was the only mob left it was just a matter of doing some "target practice" (which was a big letdown but after the number of wipes leading up to it I wasn't going to complain)

Not to mention, the rewards for doing dungeons were barely worth doing the pre-nerf AC explorables. Now I can't see a reason to bother in the slightest.

I have done exactly 2 dungeon runs, storymode AC and Arah. I agree with Kildorn, I think that number would be higher than you think.

The ship sections are a lot easier now (I did it pre and post Jan patch), but it was always pretty easy. The main change I think was they got rid of almost all hostile knockbacks on the boarding mobs. But yes, whoever made Arah story understood that story mode wasn't supposed to be dickishly hard and was intended to be consumed by casual players.

.. don't do Arah Explorable, because the explorable team's opinion on it is far different. One of the bosses (path 4) is essentially impossible if you have any classes with a pet.

edit: as for end boss himself: not bugged, just nowhere near as epic as the designers thought it was going to be. It's Michael Bay's Dragon Fight. If you did it a long time ago there was a bug with his adds not spawning, but it's still like.. 10 adds with normal mob hp that spawn once during the entire fight.

This describes me; I got to 80, 100%ed the map, and still never did Arah. Not so much because the dungeons suck (they do) but because the story had gotten so god-awful I had no desire to see how it ended.

Once i saw the lackluster reward i never bothered finishing the story. 

I seem to remember some of the designers posting that they envision dungeons as something similar to the GW1 'elite areas': Underworld, FoW, Tomb, The Deep, Urgoz' Warren, DoA. Which were pretty terrible and you needed min-max builds + consumables to have a chance of clearing them.

On the bright side, the GW2 dungeons ARE more enjoyable than those... maybe in a few more years they'll reach vanilla WOW dungeon enjoyability.  :why_so_serious:

Was that early on? They added a rare (I tihnk? I'm pretty sure it's not exotic) weapon to finishing Arah Story's quest.

Still, saves you like, half a gold and imo the skins are kind of shit for most of them.

Just did the guild bounty missions (1-3 just for the "fun" of it). It takes some organizing and the karka bounty was nowhere to be found. We actually managed to fail level 2 mission the first time due to wiping and not being able to kill the mob, but this can be blamed on a nasty bug: all players were downleveled to 43 by the zone while the target mob was level 80. Needless to say it was taking out everyone with a single hit and didn't really take any damage  :uhrr:

Did they nerf my flamethrower? It seems to be worse than ever.

I know, I should be levelling with power 'nades/bombs/rifle.... but I'm weird, I like levelling with condition pistols, flamethrower, eliixirs and thumper for vets/champs.

On another note - holy crap is guardian easy to level with? I thought ranger was ok but a bit glass cannon to level and engineer is slow.... guardian seems to be non-stop multiple pulls and vets go down fast. I might have to shelve the engineer for a bit. At level 11 on ranger and engineer I was never able to power through like the guardian.

I really want to take my mesmer and necro out as they are sub-10 but seem like fun.

Still trying to work out how to level faster - is it possible to do it through crafting?

They (barely) buffed flamethrowers, actually.

edit: and my leveling habits: do 1-9 in your starting zone along with story quests. The zip over to another starting zone, do map complete there. Then go back, finish your actual starting zone and story quests. This is the basic theme: start in a level appropriate zone and do hearts until the mobs start being your level/+1. Then go to another zone of that level and repeat. Never try to do +1/+2 content, it takes longer and provides no measurable increase in rewards.

Stockpile crafting mats and at some point pop a crafting booster if you have one and just power through a few tiers of crafting for an hour. That can easily be 10-20 levels. My necro and engineer are around level 60, and have never been in a zone above level 45.

Personal opinion, guardians and warriors level easy. Followed by thieves (Dagger/Dagger #3 murders trash mobs in pve by the truckload) and elementalists. Mesmers get awesome at 60. Necros are.. boring as shit, imo. Some people love them, but dear lord you're forced to use staff a lot for any reliable AE, and the autoattack is godawful with an irritating noise attached.

Yes, that always works well.

If you have an alt with some gold, you can get some free levels with cooking and JC pretty easily.  I think from scratch it's like 2-4g.