Guild Wars 2: The One Thread

[Svifnymr]

I disagree on GW3, because i have always felt like Guild Wars 2 was a disappointment.

Given the current market for MMO's (as in, new ones aren't MMO's like this), I'm leery of a GW3. I've barely dabbled in the loot&shoot stuff and can't imagine spending a lot of time in a similar model for GW3. And while I mostly enjoyed GW1, let us be honest and say that GW2 has soundly beaten GW1's numbers in nearly any conceivable measurement. These are just my opinions, obviously, but I think there has always been a disconnect between the player base responsible for most of the income and the folks that really grind to the highest content and demand more.

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I'm trying to understand the whole build templates thing but it seems to be going over my head.

I assumed it would be like wow, switching between templates you made for gear and spec traits.

You're going to have 3 character build tabs. Each will hold a slot skill layout as well as trait layout. You can swap between them when out of combat.
You'll have 3 account build tabs, which can hold any of those builds for any class and be copied to your character build tabs.

You will also have 2 Gear Build Tabs, which hold a gear layout. The gear placed into these tabs is not stored in character inventory. This will be separate from the trait builds.

So it'll be two clicks to swap traits and gear.

I think the feeling of movement and action in the game is better refered to as "organic" rather than lag. its in player movement and actions but is best representated by the mounts, which have their own movement and feel compared to wow mounts turning and moving on a dime.

Yeah, it's startling sometimes to go to TOR since the turn rate is just whiplash fast when you get used to GW2. Probably mainly an issue if you're bouncing between games.

[PACOX]

I remember back the day people complained about Asura being clunky even though the little hop step they do when they stop is visual only.

[Lazuli]

I really hope I don't regret buying the templates and they add some significant content to GW2 soon. They already give a ton of open world stuff, they need to focus a bit more on instanced content now or more elite specs.

It's impossible to main a guardian with only those templates. And I am so glad I didn't log in during the whole arcdps ban and read reddit before trying to fix my saved templates that mysteriously stopped working xD apparently some perma's were thrown out. Big yikes to those guys. Still, 7 years for a paid feature that the original had for free lol.

This is the kinda shit you have to deal with when they don't make expansions. It's fucking sad. Did PoF sales do horrible or something? All the zones still seem active.

[PACOX]

People weren't banned because of arc. There was a sizable account sharing/cheat ring that got busted up I don't mind them selling slots if their templates work like arc...but it doesn't seem like it.

The also reiterated that they don't look to ban people for add-ons that aren't straight up hacks/botting. They will never officially support or endorse 3rd add-ons (arc was an exception and there was the one dps meter guy who was doing stuff they didn't like). There's a clone of arc build templates but it's expected to break with the patch.

This is the kinda shit you have to deal with when they don't make expansions. It's fucking sad. Did PoF sales do horrible or something? All the zones still seem active

Sales have consistent, but maybe that's the problem. They say a huge boost after HoT then kind of hit a plateau.

[Lazuli]

Don't buy templates they're not account bound it would cost hundreds to max multiple characters loool this is ea levels of cancer they don't even save like in gw1 it's separate pvp and pve. How is this designed so bad.. no wonder they don't want people using arcdps templates anymore apparently they have 0 shame milking this game now.

The creator of arcdps made a deal with anet that when they release official templates he would remove them from the addon so yeah unless someone else makes a better version. Why would anet not ban for that? They've always never officially supported addons. Technically stuff like texmod in gw1 is still bannable. They aren't going to let people use unofficial templates which literally operate better than their paid templates.

Ok my fucking phone so hard to quote you in edit^

[Edge-]

Sauce for that arcdps stuff? I know he'd long been open about the fact that he'd end the mod when Anet added builds in, but I've seen nothing about Anet pressuring him or making an agreement with him.

Amusingly, it's actually cheaper to just buy new character slots rather than more build loadouts, so if you're not tied to a character then that's a cheaper option.

Myself, I don't have too many builds on most characters so I can probably get by with just the free loadouts. May need to buy the odd one here or there on my guardian/ranger, but they're giving out free additional slots for the first month at least.

Not amazing, but not the end of the world either. And I'm honestly pretty stoked to be able to free up 2 gear sets worth of space in my bags since apparently your loadout gear gets stored in the UI rather than your bags.

[Gray_Matter]

They probably priced them the way that they did so they don't eat into the char slot sales.

For me, they seem to be adequate. I never used ArcDPS build templates.

Just a word of warning, there is a bug with legendary gear losing it's upgrades in the swapping.

[PACOX]

Here is why people got banned ~2 weeks ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/..._wave/f4lgjva/

Good morning and happy Monday, everyone.

As you can possibly guess, there's not a ton I can say, as I am sure there will be users in the mix who would highly prefer to not have their actions put forward to the public and who have kept mum since their accounts were closed.

However, I can give a few points.

Firstly, there was no ban for ArcDPS. Not sure how that rumour started, but it seems to come up every time a padlock is placed and so far each time it was brought up, that was not the core issue. That folks spoke up who never used it could have been a tip-off, too.

And with that addressed, I can only go into general things here.

Last week, a user was actioned for very, very blatant cheating in PvP (which is why the meme thread is kind of funny to me right now...). The user in question had a bunch of other violations piled in as we investigation the situation and we actioned his accounts and the accounts used to cheat with.

In doing so, we also found that he had access to about five dozen other game accounts. As these were accounts that were otherwise undamaged (no gold stolen, no characters deleted, no economic change to them after access) we found them to not be hacked, but shared with permission. All accounts this user accessed were also shut down under the same ban reason, as the cheater used them at some point.

I would like to take this chance to please, please urge you all, yet again, to not share access to your game accounts. Ever. Because you do not know your online buddy as well as you think you might. They may be up to no good, they may use your account to do very shady stuff... or their promise to help bump you up in PvP might come at the price of a few months of dishonour.

Aside from the user who used cheating software, all users who know they themselves did not still need to open a ticket to the customer support team, so we can help them secure their game accounts fully. We need to make sure passwords are changed and that each of these users understand that their accounts need to not be shared going forward to stay safe. Please note that if their accounts were used for cheating by that user, they may still be actioned for the cheating done on them.

Heres Anets stance on third party software, which is what its always been:

(Snippet from a longer post, not my picture)
https://imgur.com/nnBvsAT

They don't ban for macros, they don't ban third-party software. They'll even let exploits slide ie an exploit was used to spectate raids for a tournament. They won't save you (they say that but they have on case-by-cases bases) if you're using something that trips their cheat detections or the author of the program did something shady.
Again, there was a fork of arc build templates that ran after the original dev stopped supporting his version, no one got banned for it. I have guildies who never deleted the DLL for build templates, Anet can see when it's loaded into the game, no bans.


As for Anet's build templates, I don't love them or hate them. They work fine or 90% of my toons. The toons I use for pvp/wvw were screwed though because I use a ton of loadouts on them thats more than just a single trait/skill change. People who only play WvW or PvP got 3 slots for their character though. Win for them, I guess.

People who didn't use arc build templates seem to like the feature. One major issue from what I've heard is that sharing gear amongst your toons is now a chore if slot the gear into a secondary equipment build/slot/whatever. I don't want to get into the technical aspects but it takes a couple more clicks to split gear thats part of a build between toons. Using shared inventory slots for gear, especially legendaries, not so fun anymore. Hopefully they make it easier for people to use their legendaries across all toons.

Other than that the system does pretty much what its intended to do. I don't mind them monetizing it, the current model is illogical though, even for them. I think someone just through numbers at a board because character slots are cheaper than expanding your build storage...honestly character slots have always been better than buying more bag slots/bank space for players who didn't mind juggling multiple toons. This new system just makes it more apparent. Example, I have 2 guardians because I figured it was easier to switch toons than builds.

Last thing. People literally begged Anet to implement offical build templates AND said they would pay a good amount of gems for them. People have said this for years, even though arc had been around for just as long. Anet let arc build templates ride for years yet people kept asking for Anet templates. Anet was like, "we don't really want to, its a lot of work and theres an alternative". People kept asking, Anet adds them.

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They probably priced them the way that they did so they don't eat into the char slot sales.

For me, they seem to be adequate. I never used ArcDPS build templates.

Just a word of warning, there is a bug with legendary gear losing it's upgrades in the swapping.

T
The way legendaries are saved isn't intuitive at first glance. The games backend duplicates the legendary, a completely new item as far as the game is concerned. It
'spits out' that upgrades in the process.

Say you have Equipment Slot A and B.

You place your legendary in Equipment Slot A with a force sigil. So your legendary and sigil are removed in your inventory and now saved your invisible equipment storage space.

Say you want to use that same legendary in Equipment Slot B. The game removes the sigil then clones the weapon because the game doesn't clone sigils for reasons (something something spaghetti code and to prevent duping via systems like the mystic forge). When you look at Equipment Slot B you'll see your legendary with no upgrades (which includes infusions), but where did they go? They aren't in your bags. They exist in the equipment storage space because they are still linked to the legendary in Equipment Slot A. What if you want to reuse those upgrades in Equipment Slot B? Pull up Equipment Slot B, click the legendary, look to the left, BOOM, your upgrades are right there ready for you to re-slot.

Disclaimer though. Those upgrades that now live in 'equipment storage space' can only be used in other legendaries. Youll have to unlink the upgrade from all legendaries if you want to use it in a non-legendary (which would then require a tool if you want to take it out).

[Edge-]

They probably priced them the way that they did so they don't eat into the char slot sales.

For me, they seem to be adequate. I never used ArcDPS build templates.

Just a word of warning, there is a bug with legendary gear losing it's upgrades in the swapping.

Amusingly enough, it's actually much cheaper to buy character slots and use the free slots there than it is to buy more character slots for a single character.

Also, holy crap does this look like a mess right now. It's functional, though only 2 gear slots sucks and I had to use some gems I had sitting around to buy a third slot. But apparently it's a fucking nightmare for folks with legendaries/infusions/etc. and who play PvP/WvW too.

Anet had a great chance to earn some points with the community and win back some trust/confidence after a rough year and they're fucking shooting themselves in the foot instead : /

[Svifnymr]

As I said at first, the issue really is that a character that did PvE, Wv and PvP had 3 specs before, so now they have 3 slots for those and don't come out ahead at all.

I'm not a PvPer or Wver, but I am an altaholic who has bought character slots nearly every time they have been on sale...so I haven't actually assigned most of my alternate specs because I don't need a flamethrower & scrapper & holosmith build for my engineer, since I already have a flamethrower character, a holosmith character and a scrapper...

I do sympathize with those affected, but it's just not an issue for me. That said, I reeeaaaallly hate that they don't have Individual and Account Wide unlocks for all this stuff. If 1 character gets 1 gear slot for 500gems, then make one that gives all characters 1 extra slot each for 1200 gems or something. This goes all the way back to bag slots though, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.

[Lazuli]

Sauce for that arcdps stuff? I know he'd long been open about the fact that he'd end the mod when Anet added builds in, but I've seen nothing about Anet pressuring him or making an agreement with him.

Amusingly, it's actually cheaper to just buy new character slots rather than more build loadouts, so if you're not tied to a character then that's a cheaper option.

Myself, I don't have too many builds on most characters so I can probably get by with just the free loadouts. May need to buy the odd one here or there on my guardian/ranger, but they're giving out free additional slots for the first month at least.

Not amazing, but not the end of the world either. And I'm honestly pretty stoked to be able to free up 2 gear sets worth of space in my bags since apparently your loadout gear gets stored in the UI rather than your bags.

I wish you quoted me so I saw this earlier. Its on reddit I'll have to find it but there IS official talk between arcdps creator and the devs making a deal, with specific code to break the addon when official templates released. Apparently this had been talked through since years ago.

[LilSaihah]

I'm kinda disappointed that they've removed the "you automatically use this build when entering pve/pvp/wvw" functionality prior to this system. It would've been great if you could just tell the game "whenever I enter WvW I want to be using this build" and I also would have loved it if they extended this functionality to gear.

Disclaimer though. Those upgrades that now live in 'equipment storage space' can only be used in other legendaries. Youll have to unlink the upgrade from all legendaries if you want to use it in a non-legendary (which would then require a tool if you want to take it out).

I read this and I thought "wait no that's not right" but it is completely right; it's not the legendary you're putting it in, but the other tier gears that you might be putting it into that locks down the upgrade. This system's too complicated.

[Gray_Matter]

I'm kinda disappointed that they've removed the "you automatically use this build when entering pve/pvp/wvw" functionality prior to this system. It would've been great if you could just tell the game "whenever I enter WvW I want to be using this build" and I also would have loved it if they extended this functionality to gear.

My understanding is that they plan on adding it back. There was a bug that prevented it from working correctly.

[Casterbridge]

So I decided to play around with GW2 after a very long time.

I played it when it first came out got a character 50, took a hiatus came back briefly, and at some point must have picked up the Hearts of Thorn.

Anyway, my original plan was to start a new character but I have a level 80 boost and I'm curious is there any reason not to use it?

Since GW2 has scaling I could just use the boost and then go back to the start anyways correct? Maybe do the mount quest etc first?

Basically is there any reason to not use the boost, even though I'm trying to learn my way through the game again?

[Edge-]

So I decided to play around with GW2 after a very long time.

I played it when it first came out got a character 50, took a hiatus came back briefly, and at some point must have picked up the Hearts of Thorn.

Anyway, my original plan was to start a new character but I have a level 80 boost and I'm curious is there any reason not to use it?

Since GW2 has scaling I could just use the boost and then go back to the start anyways correct? Maybe do the mount quest etc first?

Basically is there any reason to not use the boost, even though I'm trying to learn my way through the game again?

Not using it likely gives you a bit of an easier intro back into everything as you slowly unlock mechanics/skillslots etc., but realistically not. As you said you can go back to old zones without issue, you'll be a bit OP but they're easy zones to clear out.

[Casterbridge]

Not using it likely gives you a bit of an easier intro back into everything as you slowly unlock mechanics/skillslots etc., but realistically not. As you said you can go back to old zones without issue, you'll be a bit OP but they're easy zones to clear out.

Thanks for the reply.

So kind of what I thought. I did start levelling without using the boost, and it's pretty easy as is, so may as well unlock the advanced mechanics as well and see what it's like.

[Theangryone]

I agree, don't buy those templates. With all the sub money they get they should be free.

[Rogalicus]

I agree, don't buy those templates. With all the sub money they get they should be free.

Is this supposed to be a joke?

[Theangryone]

What do you think? I see people here and in Reddit complain endlessly about monitization of services like templates, all while doing where is the next expansion, where is the WvW overhaul, where is season 5, where are more elite specs? It's all good and well to have a wish list but you have to pay for all of that somehow.

[PACOX]

What do you think? I see people here and in Reddit complain endlessly about monitization of services like templates, all while doing where is the next expansion, where is the WvW overhaul, where is season 5, where are more elite specs? It's all good and well to have a wish list but you have to pay for all of that somehow.

You said sub money when you probably meant gem money.

Build templates have a lot of issues but you can still joke about them. Like how reddit told Anet they would pay A LOT of gems for them then gets mad when Anet asks for gem money. Or how people brought gems to sponsor the dev of official build templates, build templates are then monetized for future projects.

Templates aren't nearly as bad as reddit says but a far far from what they should be.