GW2: Update Notes Thread

**ronin sparthos** · 2013-01-09 11:50

Still waiting for Anet to make half the dungeons not boring skipfests of repetition because the trash mobs have nothing worth the time and certain boss encounters have too much HP for their own good. Adding tons of 00s to a mobs health does not a tough battle make. Things like SE p1, CoF p3 and CM aren't run for good reasons - they just aren't worth the time.

They got it right with fractals at least. You want to kill most of the trash since they actually drop useful things.

If I weren't such an altaholic I'd probably be whining about Fracs 35+

**Arcana** · 2013-01-09 12:05

SE1 isnt run because of that shitfest of a gauntlet. CoF3 isn't run because it requires coordination & surviveability. CM isnt hard, sure theres annoying parts but its quite often pugged on my server atleast. HotW underwater bosses are just huge health pools that make you not want to run the instance.

**niwaar** · 2013-01-10 15:36

CM is just about badly thought out mechanics. The Rifleman encounter is not a difficult one, it is just annoying. The real issue with CM is the room full of Grenadiers/Bombers who like to immediately stack 20 stacks of vulnerability so their Thief friends can the 2 shot you with their 20+ instant stacking bleeds. I will just say, that my group ran this place for our thief who is working on the legendary pistol (because its funny) and that single pull was the only real issue we always had in the place. The rest of the instance is just about understanding what is what. That pull is just about a clusterfuck no matter what.

SE1 is not too bad once you understand the mechanics. That gauntlet can be minimized by smart play, and proper group makeup. After all the gauntlet mobs WILL deaggro after a while if you run far enough.

CoF3 is just a textbook case of "what were the designer's thinking?". The coordination part is easy. Its having 5 people capable of killing the 1-4 enemies sitting on top of a torch without dying themselves (or evading into yet more aggro) is the problem. I mean we all did the light the lantern in the proper order BS for Nyzul afterall. This is no more difficult. We just dont have Sleep and Bind to help us deal with the enemies sitting on top of them.

If I were complaining about dungeon design though, I would complain about two things. 1) General Waypoint placement in ALL of the dungeons. There are some dungeons where it is a 5-10 minute run back if you are unceremoniously defeated. TA was my first experience with this, but it is rampant in ALL of the dungeons. Its one thing if they do not want you to zerg fights, then close doors or prevent "releasing" during an encounter. 2) The sheer stupidness of Arah. I am all for having a dungeon that is large. Arah feels like I went back to raiding the size of the explorable map. I have no problem with GL. Once you understand that fight, he's a pushover. Yet the sheer scale of the dungeon all but demands you to "cheat" the system to make the instance time efficient. (Oh and do not get me going on the damned Jotun path and its buggy ass door.)

**Arcana** · 2013-01-10 16:01

Originally Posted by niwaar

SE1 is not too bad once you understand the mechanics. That gauntlet can be minimized by smart play, and proper group makeup. After all the gauntlet mobs WILL deaggro after a while if you run far enough.

If I were complaining about dungeon design though, I would complain about two things. 1) General Waypoint placement in ALL of the dungeons. There are some dungeons where it is a 5-10 minute run back if you are unceremoniously defeated. TA was my first experience with this, but it is rampant in ALL of the dungeons. Its one thing if they do not want you to zerg fights, then close doors or prevent "releasing" during an encounter. 2) The sheer stupidness of Arah. I am all for having a dungeon that is large. Arah feels like I went back to raiding the size of the explorable map. I have no problem with GL. Once you understand that fight, he's a pushover. Yet the sheer scale of the dungeon all but demands you to "cheat" the system to make the instance time efficient. (Oh and do not get me going on the damned Jotun path and its buggy ass door.)

The problem with the gauntlet is that you NEED to destroy the barriers that block the the path to the boss at the end and even then they don't stop respawning which makes that boss incredibly claustrophobic.

I Agree with you on the waypoint placement, TA is simply a poorer dungeon because of it, frequently run dungeons such as AC and CoF are placed where they need to be. Arah/TA/HotW/CoE are really bad for running almost the whole instance to get back from a res.

Scale is an awesome thing in open world areas, but in dungeons its terrible. Don't get me wrong Arah is an epic dungeon but its too damn long. It takes almost 1.5-2hrs to complete a single path for 60 tokens, now WTF were these people thinking? Doing the partial run is more effective in getting tokens yes but when i do dungeons i want to get down to playing the whole thing, Arah loses out on alot of players who would be interested in running it because of how badly its designed atm.

**Takiwaki** · 2013-01-16 13:11

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guesting-is-coming/

Fail..

Because (different from a world transfer) we are not moving your character between data centers, you may only guest on worlds in the same region as your home world. Players on North American home worlds cannot guest on European worlds or vice versa.

So much for waiting for this to play with EU friends

**Corrderio** · 2013-01-16 13:19

It's nice it's happening, but yeah that is a load of crap. The NA/EU region thing really annoys me. I got an EU friend playing on NA servers and he has never had any latency issues, so I don't see a problem.

**Aevis** · 2013-01-16 14:27

WOOOOPDIFUCKINGDOOO finally! No clue about the NA WvW ladder but the EU just did a barrel roll in excitement. There hasn't been a single month without some huge guilds joining a T10+ server to steamroll it into T1 and letting it fall again. I hope the fees will be high enough so only those who really want transfer and stay will pay.

**Churchill** · 2013-01-16 14:57

The guild trying to do that on the NA ladder sucks and prob won't make it past T4/T5 without other guilds transferring to them. SoS is pretty firm at the top for the last few months, but could easily change if JQ had guilds come in and change their coverage. (Or SoS had guilds leave). Most of the SoS guilds are pretty loyal though, they weren't T1 when they started as SoS and had to fight to the top.

**Katlan** · 2013-01-16 15:20

I just hope this doesn't cause a few severs to empty out. Crystal Desert has been in a good position ever since the start of the game and has only gotten better (for the most part) as time goes on. I can imagine WvW ranking might be overall fucked after this unless they reset rankings and start over, because lots of guilds are going to be moving around right now to find a good server before the free transfer is removed.

**niwaar** · 2013-01-16 17:05

Originally Posted by Takiwaki

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guesting-is-coming/

Fail..

So much for waiting for this to play with EU friends

Honestly, that was one of my initial desires for the Guesting system. My EU friends ended up choosing to stick to an EU server and I was looking forward to being able to play with them. Fastforward 5 months and the system in which we were going to use to play together fails us... I understand the entire "data center" thing, but correct me if I am wrong. I can server transfer to an EU server right now if I choose right? So theoretically I will be able to pay for a transfer to an EU server after this system goes live but I cant guest? All I can say is "..."

Originally Posted by Katlan

I just hope this doesn't cause a few severs to empty out. Crystal Desert has been in a good position ever since the start of the game and has only gotten better (for the most part) as time goes on. I can imagine WvW ranking might be overall fucked after this unless they reset rankings and start over, because lots of guilds are going to be moving around right now to find a good server before the free transfer is removed.

I honestly do not think this is going to be a huge issue. The vast majority of servers are pretty much locked in their current tiers. Our tier 3 matchups havent changed in over a month and before that we hadnt changed in 6 weeks. Our places changed but the matchups did not. Next week we get a new team for the first time in 7 weeks (as Isle of Janthir suddenly tanked after Christmas). It seems that most tier's have had very little movement. I would say that our matchup can be quite competitive as well. Hopefully new WvW rankings and changes will reinvigorate the WvW game. But, I just do not see massive movement in the next two weeks. There will be movement for sure, but not everyone in WvW is about getting to the top. Since the exodus of the large guild alliances in November, we have a lot more guilds that just want to win their tier, and even more so that their tier is not completely onesided.

**Takiwaki** · 2013-01-16 18:05

Live stream tomorrow

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...Mike-Zadorojny

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

**Arcana** · 2013-01-16 18:24

Europe T1 is going to be pretty much the same 3-5 servers for the foreseeable future, it seems like VS lost a bit of steam and SR is now determined to be no.1 and stay there its now just down to the 3rd place server which will probably change between elona/blacktide/desolation. i think the paid transfers coming in will pretty much see the major wvw guilds/alliances look to find one of the more competitive tiers of play and select one of those servers and lock in at that which can only be good for wvw balance.

**Kuishen** · 2013-01-16 18:31

edit: derp

**Corrderio** · 2013-01-16 19:37

Hopefully this doesn't spell disaster for WvW. Don't get me wrong I'll be glad when they remove free server jumps in hope things stay stable, but I just hope servers don't shift to total shit because of it.

**Lucavi** · 2013-01-16 19:49

If it spells disaster, than its Anet's fault from the beginning. They shouldn't have designed a system this loose in movement knowing that there's always going to be a large audience in any game that will do whatever it takes to "win", even if it means abusing the fuck out of a loose system.

**Corrderio** · 2013-01-16 20:03

I honestly wouldn't mind getting my ass kicked if getting badges wasn't such a pain in the ass for anything but damage builds. Sucks how if an enemy server is camping a JP, I'm pretty much shit out of luck on my badges for the day.

**Cjskater** · 2013-01-17 10:25

IoJ is going down because it imploded, most of those guilds afaik are transferring to other servers as I type this. Only official things I've heard is SBI is getting 2 guilds from them, one oceanic with 800 players. I think this will effect EU servers as well, as some of them will want to see the NA bracket before the servers lock up (ex: Red Guard), and vice versa. Those guilds may even end up staying or the guilds that were already over there (from NA or EU) will jump back out of fear of not having anybody to play with in the future. I can already tell you its happening right now, there's a lot of transferring going on, WvW will be shifted next week.

I don't look at this as a bad thing though, as somebody who plays WvW every day (yes, still): This is how the servers should have been from the start. Your guild is dedicated to WvW? Then you belong on a server that supports that. Same for whatever interest it is you have in the game.

I know some of you wont agree, but that's most likely because you have different views of dedicated. You like to go into WvW every day for a few hours and kill dudes? Thats cool everyone, I hope, likes that. Do you like to log on (or stay up 7 hours past when you should be asleep) at 1pm and then play till 6pm just to make sure your server doesn't lose too many points in your weak timeslot? and then play during NA time as well because you're needed? That happens large scale in T1 and less so T2. You can't do that and make a difference on just any server, I know because I was on the second highest pop server in the game, and we were outmanned in every BL for over half the day. If you want another example of this, look at Tarnished Coast. They are "full" the same amount of time as SoS, possibly longer, but they cannot beat SoR (and possibly SBI). I'm not saying they don't try, but they certainly do not perform to their potential.

Again, I'm not trying to hurt anybodies pride or anything. If you feel threatened in any way by what I said then sorry (I have a feeling Rhyis is going to reply). Everyone finds their own enjoyment from the game, but if your main attraction is competitive WvW... what I said is no doubt something you agree with.

edit: holy fuck I typed a wall of text

**Churchill** · 2013-01-17 13:30

Euro time for SoS is pretty sad, lol.

**Corrderio** · 2013-01-17 15:12

Can anyone give a recap of the livestream? I missed the first part so wondering what all went down.

**Zerocool** · 2013-01-17 15:28

So basically didn't say shit. The blog post they released a couple days ago explained more than these guys did.

Thread: GW2: Update Notes Thread

Thread Tools

Latest Threads

Up & Coming Threads

Hottest Threads