Guild Wars 2: The One Thread

[Edge-]

Yeah, the meta group for most(?) fractals is 4 FB/1 Ren, I guess.

Guardian has been a pretty overloaded class for some time. In large part due to Quickness being absurdly overpowered while also being largely limited to one class.

That boon really needs to go away or be reworked, whoever thought that giving players Bloodlust with no limitations, 100% uptime, and limiting it to one class was off their goddamned rocker.

Weird, I thought chrono brought it as well? It's stupidly strong so I have no clue why they'd limit it to so few specializations, and the way it is now holy shit it's trivial to keep up. My FB heal in my ascended gear grants 8s of quickness alone (on a 9.5s cooldown), and even my scrub ass could pretty consistently keep it on my group for the entirety of boss fights. Also realizing how easy it is to trivialize quite a few boss mechanics by being able to functionally spam aegis on the group.

Damnit, I feel like when I was semi-seriously doing fractals FB were the uncool support. I can't feel like a hipster anymore : (

Oh well, it's still a fun build to play even if they do nerf it, or preferably buff other builds. Stupid heals, stupid defense, might, and stupid quickness.

Edit: Playing through some of the DRM's for the mastery points (I still need to farm a dozen more to finish out the last set of dragon masteries from IBS) and...they don't feel as awful as they did the first time around. Still not great or terribly exciting, and they don't seem terribly active, but they're not as awful as I remember. Not great tho.

[Edge-]

Reminder: The free S2 event starts the 25th.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/new...begins-may-25/

Beginning 25 May we’ll spotlight two episodes of Living World Season 2 each week, in chronological order. Log in during the week to unlock the episodes for free!

As the episodes enter the spotlight, we’ll update them with new permanent achievements you can tackle at any time. Complete all the new achievements to progress toward legendary rewards! Check out our Guild Wars 2 Live: Summer 2021 overview to learn more.

Free LS updates if you missed them, just gotta remember to log in each week to claim them. I'm curious about this new meta-achievement for the legendary amulet and new achieves for the precursor weapon, never even had one of those.

[ryanmahaffe]

I think this is great for catching people up before the expansion drops. As well as giving incentive to those who already did this content (legendary amulet and precursor) am excited.

[Edge-]

I think this is great for catching people up before the expansion drops. As well as giving incentive to those who already did this content (legendary amulet and precursor) am excited.

Yeah, pleased they added in something for all of us that played through it all already. Even if I don't get the legendary there seem to be some smaller rewards for the achieves as you progress through them.

[Rogalicus]

as massive inflation of prices and extremely limited sources of profit are to their benefit.

Since you are an expert on game's economy, could you provide some evidence of massive inflation and how devs are benefitting from it?

[PACOX]

Not a surprise in the least, but I guess one of the big "baron" streamers recently exposed themselves on stream as a (likely) duper. As in, literally thousands of infusions in their guild bank. Not to mention tab after tab of legendaries, tens of thousands of mystic coins, etc.

Given the economy of this game, it's no surprise that people have been doing this. Also no surprise that ANet has been incredibly lax about dealing with any of it, as massive inflation of prices and extremely limited sources of profit are to their benefit.

Anet hasn't been lax about. It's their investigation and communication style. It's never changed. They are typically aware of these issues well before players and monitor them to gather evidence, catch as many people involved as possible. Strike to early and you only get one piece of problem while the others hunker down.

The trading post, in this case RMTs and manipulation, cut into their bottom line (Gems <-> Gold is as source of revenue). They have people whose job is nothing but to manage the games economy.

Its not the first time something like this has gone down, probably not the last. Sometimes a dev gets tired of misinformation on reddit and outlines their investigation, usually not because the hivemind forgets the next day.

[PACOX]

Sure, but this particular individual, the dupes being used, and the RMT over the past year have been borderline common knowledge. At least to the trading post community.

They made a video of how to perform some of the dupes literally a year ago and sent it to ANet. They're still there today.

The player in question in this particular case was viewed as suspicious (because he made literally millions of gold in value in a super short period of time) and was removed from several player communities, but just kept going on in-game manipulating the MC price for seemingly no reason other than to troll. The only reason he seems to have been caught at this point is that he outed himself on stream.

There are several other individuals that have been strongly suspected of duping, but there's not much players can do about it.

There's "Oh, they're waiting to catch a lot of people in a big ban wave" and then there's "Ok, this shit just isn't getting fixed, apparently".

The scope of this is bigger than a lot of people think. It's not as simple as one player duping then making gold.

Investigating the dupe itself would take a considerable amount of time.

RMTs open a can of legal issues and new threads to follow. Underground RMTs often involve stolen data that must be preserved, traced, sometimes passed onto 3rd parties for a number of reasons.

IP must be logged. Connections between accounts have to be established, verified, logged.

The duping involved a network of people. Everyone's involvement has be accessed. How much they knew, what they didn't know. Knowing what I about Anet, they had someone feeding them Discord screenshots, chat logs, which have to be verified.


Then it was probably some poor persons job to look for instances of laundering on the TP.

I will be shocked if someone does (lying of course) to have received an unwarranted ban.

The last huge TP controversy involved people datamining patches then manipulating the market in game and through social means on places like reddit. People swore up and down Anet was ignoring the issue and then a massive ban wave came.

[Edge-]

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topi...s-may-25-2021/

Patch is out! S2 episodes 1/2 are free for everyone now, and there's some new achieves to go along with it. Some balance changes coming with it too. Episode 3/4 next week, and I assume the final episodes the following week. Just gotta log in and you can nab them for free.

[Rogalicus]

Episode 3/4 next week, and I assume the final episodes the following week.

S2 had 4 episodes on each map, 8 in total.

[PACOX]

Raids mentioned in the patch notes? What a time to be alive!

[PACOX]

Random and huge news today.

EOD pushed back to early 2022
First iteration of Alliances this year
DX11 support incoming
Colin Johanson (first game director) and Grouch (don't remember his title but big in pvp/wvw) are back

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a...ate-july-2021/

[Edge-]

Random and huge news today.

EOD pushed back to early 2022
First iteration of Alliances this year
DX11 support incoming
Colin Johanson (first game director) and Grouch (don't remember his title but big in pvp/wvw) are back

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a...ate-july-2021/

Man so many thoughts...

EoD pushed back - Depressingly predictable, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't be bothered much except...they gutted the second half of IBS and we got hot-garbage for updates as they took folks off that team and moved them to the expansion. And now we're looking at what will likely be a full year without any meaningful content updates before the next expansion. I'm actually kinda salty about this, and wouldn't be surprised if it pushes beyond "early" 2022.

Alliances - Great news for WvW folks! But I feel like this has been in the works for years now. I don't have strong opinions other than, "Waaaahhhhhh, they're working on stuff for content I don't play!" But seriously, hopefully this'll be nice for WvW folks.

DX11 - ABOUT FUCKING TIME. At the very least it dispels the rumors that there's nobody left who can really work on the engine. They're still being careful not to oversell any performance gains, but I genuinely hope that they mean that adding DX11 support will lead to more performance improvements and graphical goodies. The game looks great usually but is definitely very dated at this point, and it runs like absolute piss when there's literally anything going on around you. Still blows my mind that my rig that can run most games at max settings at 2K resolution with at least 60fps (usually closer to 100+) is giving me 20-40fps during events and whatnot even with almost all other player models turned off.

Returning folks - Don't forget JT or whatever the marketing dude is. I guess some of the "big names" that moved to Amazon to work on Crucible/New World (and esports for the marketing dude) are all slinking back to GW2. Good in a sense, but also like, I don't know if it's actually a good thing. Colin has said a lot of stupid/cringy things over the years (NO MOUNTS EVER!!!!!!) and I won't hold that against him. But what I will hold against him is if he wastes a ton of the teams time trying to force esports into GW2 for the like, fifth fuckin time, especially after the projects he worked on at Amazon that were designed with esports firmly in mind went belly up almost immediately. Read the room, let esports happen organically if it happens and support it. You. Can't. Force. Esports. (unless you're a company like Riot or Blizzard and making a fantastic game [Valorant/OW] and dump obscene amounts of money into it. See: SOE trying to force PlanetSide 2 esports which...similarly blew up in their faces).

But hey, WE FINALLY KNOW WHO IS RUNNING THE SHIP FOR ANET/GW2! IIRC we haven't known who's "running" Anet since MO departed over a year ago, and I feel like we haven't had any actual confirmation on who is leading GW2 in as long if not longer. For a company that's 21 years old, Anet is still a bloody god-damned mess, and for a game that's approaching 10 years old, GW2 is kinda still a fuckin mess. Anet/GW2 really need to find their respective grooves. They've briefly found them over the years, but it seems like they can never really latch hold of it.

Oh well, guess the July 27 first look steam is holding, though I feel like given the delay they should push that back too so they don't have such a long marketinng campaign. Will be curious to see what it delivers.

[PACOX]

Man so many thoughts...

EoD pushed back - Depressingly predictable, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't be bothered much except...they gutted the second half of IBS and we got hot-garbage for updates as they took folks off that team and moved them to the expansion. And now we're looking at what will likely be a full year without any meaningful content updates before the next expansion. I'm actually kinda salty about this, and wouldn't be surprised if it pushes beyond "early" 2022.

Alliances - Great news for WvW folks! But I feel like this has been in the works for years now. I don't have strong opinions other than, "Waaaahhhhhh, they're working on stuff for content I don't play!" But seriously, hopefully this'll be nice for WvW folks.

DX11 - ABOUT FUCKING TIME. At the very least it dispels the rumors that there's nobody left who can really work on the engine. They're still being careful not to oversell any performance gains, but I genuinely hope that they mean that adding DX11 support will lead to more performance improvements and graphical goodies. The game looks great usually but is definitely very dated at this point, and it runs like absolute piss when there's literally anything going on around you. Still blows my mind that my rig that can run most games at max settings at 2K resolution with at least 60fps (usually closer to 100+) is giving me 20-40fps during events and whatnot even with almost all other player models turned off.

Returning folks - Don't forget JT or whatever the marketing dude is. I guess some of the "big names" that moved to Amazon to work on Crucible/New World (and esports for the marketing dude) are all slinking back to GW2. Good in a sense, but also like, I don't know if it's actually a good thing. Colin has said a lot of stupid/cringy things over the years (NO MOUNTS EVER!!!!!!) and I won't hold that against him. But what I will hold against him is if he wastes a ton of the teams time trying to force esports into GW2 for the like, fifth fuckin time, especially after the projects he worked on at Amazon that were designed with esports firmly in mind went belly up almost immediately. Read the room, let esports happen organically if it happens and support it. You. Can't. Force. Esports. (unless you're a company like Riot or Blizzard and making a fantastic game [Valorant/OW] and dump obscene amounts of money into it. See: SOE trying to force PlanetSide 2 esports which...similarly blew up in their faces).

But hey, WE FINALLY KNOW WHO IS RUNNING THE SHIP FOR ANET/GW2! IIRC we haven't known who's "running" Anet since MO departed over a year ago, and I feel like we haven't had any actual confirmation on who is leading GW2 in as long if not longer. For a company that's 21 years old, Anet is still a bloody god-damned mess, and for a game that's approaching 10 years old, GW2 is kinda still a fuckin mess. Anet/GW2 really need to find their respective grooves. They've briefly found them over the years, but it seems like they can never really latch hold of it.

Oh well, guess the July 27 first look steam is holding, though I feel like given the delay they should push that back too so they don't have such a long marketinng campaign. Will be curious to see what it delivers.

Anet is stuck in a small studio mindset despite the success of their games. Perhaps they (the old heads) want it to be that why. Would explain why some of them to found some random small studio. Its probably frustrationg as someone new coming in being up against the old companies culture. Theres no reason for Anet to be as bad as it is at marketing unless its purposeful. GW2 would have no industry presence if not for a dedicated playerbase. A lot of MMO players have no idea this nearly 10 year old game even exists. They are obviously good at what they do but also extrememly awkward.

Their stream should be fine if they just stick to what they know and not trying to do anything crazy like they did with one living season reveal. Their old in-studio streams they did for the content throughout the first two expacs were fine.

Everyone is pretty good with expac being pushed back. It kind of came out of nowhere in the first place and we have no info about right now anyway. Taking the time to pad it out is fine instead of just putting on out to put one out. Also FF14 has too much momentum this year. No reason to stand in front of that train.

[LilSaihah]

Honestly I don't mind the idea of a pretty chill second half of 2022 for the game. There's a lot of stuff I need to catch up on. I haven't played any of the new fractals. Saving up gold and materials for the next expansion seems good, too.

[Edge-]

Theres no reason for Anet to be as bad as it is at marketing unless its purposeful.

Honestly, their whole marketing/coms arm sucks ass. Badly. I love Rubi from her old Massively days, but she and the community team may as well not exist from what I can tell. I worked on the game a bit well, well before it launched (not development, and not in-house) and a lot of the issues that we saw post launch from the marketing side of things (including that god-awful live action trailer everyone hated) were obviously coming from the way they were handling pre-release promotion. We legit had a fantastic opportunity killed because...they wouldn't let a magazine take their own screenshots, even if they sent all the screenshots to Anet for approval beforehand.

I feel shitty saying this, but honestly they need to clean house on their marketing/community/PR side of things and bring in some fresh blood. They can make some slick looking trailers on a budget, but their campaigns are just...fuckin awful.

Their stream should be fine if they just stick to what they know and not trying to do anything crazy like they did with one living season reveal. Their old in-studio streams they did for the content throughout the first two expacs were fine.

I don't remotely trust them not to over-hype this as is their history with everything. I fully expect them to bring on the returning folks and have Colin START THAT HYPE TRAIN THAT NEVER STOPS, and build up big expectations...only to go quiet for a while again because they need to stretch this campaign out through launch and they'll need to keep plenty in their back pocket for the proper ramp-up to launch. It's not that it's not possible to stretch a campaign like this for 9 months (when realistically they should be doing a 6 month campaign tops, especially given likely moderate resources), but I'm saying that I have absolutely zero trust in their ability to do so effectively.

Also FF14 has too much momentum this year. No reason to stand in front of that train.

Probably the best point, honestly. I keep forgetting that's coming out and that it's coming out in late November. It would be a pretty bad idea to go up against that given that it's already a stronger/healthier MMO than GW2, and with the recent huge surge it's seeing (even before WoW folks started flocking over) even moreso.

Though I doubt the delay is for marketing vs. production reasons. This isn't PoE where they delayed a league for a month so they wouldn't go up against Cyberpunk (and that league was probably one of the most polished/stable they've ever released!) purely for marketing reasons (and probably because Chris Wilson and others wanted to play it). I'm just still salty that the second half of IBS was gutted and pretty fuckin shit so they could pull resources for EoD only to have it delayed anyways.

[PACOX]

The communitys promo material vs Anets

[Edge-]

Is this shit raids? Because this looks infinitely more hype than I remember literally any of the trailers for raids at the time. Like...I kinda wanna do these. Just for comparison -




Seriously, neither of these trailers does a thing for me.

[Nerph-]

Recently decided to reinstalled GW2 after many many years. I have 2 level 80's, a Guardian and a Revenant, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing on either of them.

So, I was wondering if there is a good site with guides and builds? I googled a bit but only really found links to "MetaBattle" which is confusing the fuck out of me (then again, that's not hard).

[PACOX]

Recently decided to reinstalled GW2 after many many years. I have 2 level 80's, a Guardian and a Revenant, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing on either of them.

So, I was wondering if there is a good site with guides and builds? I googled a bit but only really found links to "MetaBattle" which is confusing the fuck out of me (then again, that's not hard).

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Use...ide#Start_Here

[Nerph-]

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Use...ide#Start_Here

I somehow missed that. I'll go ahead and blame it being the early hours of the morning Thanks for the link!