So, sorry about disappearing, folks, RL decided to boot me in the ass. Completely took away any chance to return for the duration of the stress test.

Thanks for what time I was there though, you guys are awesome.

 

Yeah, you need siege weapons. If your team doesn't bring siege weapons, expect to only be useful in taking supply camps and killing sentries.

 

We only had around ten minutes left of the Stress Test, and we just wanted to head off to a Keep anyway. Just curious to see what we could do.

 

Commerce Infographic about the GW2 Economy during the Beta/Stress Tests. Kind of interesting, although there are understandable reasons for certain biases(crafting professions are noted on).

---------- Post automerged at 03:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:17 PM ----------

On a related note, I saw this on their home page and was amused by it.

 

Just got back from moving most of my shit to uni and trying to get this game started. The server all my friends are playing on is Full and I can't create any characters there. Supah! Any solution found by anyone?

edit: A couple of hours later and the server went to 'High' population instead, making character creation possible.

 

Okay then, here is a tip from me.

There are some rather useful commands that for some reason do not innately have keybindings, so it might be worth going into Options(F11) and further on to Control Options for the following:

- Binding 'Walk,' 'Stow/Draw Weapon' and 'Mail,' are largely unimportant, but the latter may be nice.

- Binding 'Swim Down,' a directly vertical descent, rather than having to orient your camera down, then move forward, while not super important, may prove handy in several fights to maintain orientation while moving.

- Now for more important ones. Binding both 'About Face' and 'Look Behind' could help quite a lot. The former perhaps for a sudden retreat, considering you move slower walking backwards, and the latter simply to see who or what is chasing you.

- Also a potentially important one, or not, is to bind the 'Nearest Enemy' command.

-----

Think on it, and I figure that many of you will likely do at least the third one, but who knows. Either way, since I didn't feel like changing my existing key commands, I just did:
Shift-R = Walk (toggle) (opposite of Auto-Run, so it shares the key)
X = About Face (Below the W key, which is walk backwards)
Shift-X = Look Behind (Related to the above, so...)
Z = Swim Down (Z is for Z-Axis, which is okay for me~)
C = Nearest Enemy (Taken from GW1, so I'm used to it)
Stow/Draw Weapon and Mail are "J" and "L," respectively.

 

So, I was wandering around, doing the heart in the Godslost Swamp in Queensdale, when this little story started.

I'm minding my own business, attacking an Underworld Portal when, suddenly, I fall through the ankle-deep water. Normally, this wouldn't be so bad, except that the water wasn't supposed to be swim-able, and I couldn't go back through the surface. After a moment, of disorientation, and finding out that I could still attack things with ranged attacks through the water-surface, without getting attacked back, I knew that I had evolved. Ascended to the next plane of existence and become the Ectomancer(*tip 'o the hat*) himself.

Either way, I proceeded to get the nearby Commune-type Skill Challenge, since it was close to the surface, then swam northwest through the Phinney Ridge. Here are some pictures I took while I was underneath:
Lookin' at a cave from below
The cave again, from a different view and without the interface
Looking at the hill-side, through the hill
Again, but without the interface
Same place, but underwater, despite the mini-map

Note my mini-map and see what's wrong with those pictures...

Anyway, I continued my journey north, and wasn't completely surprised that I couldn't cross zones into the capitol, but still kind of disappointed. So, before filing the Bug Report, I took some final Screenshots beyond the zone-portal, but before the edge of the zone, enjoy:
Lovely floating houses
Looking a little higher, you can see the Zone Portal floating up there
For the heck of it, I took a picture of the reflection on the water

Altogether, it was an interesting adventure, and unfortunately, there was a maximum depth that I could reach. Still, nice to discover that the world is made of water just underneath the surface. Promptly after my Bug Report was sent, I got out of overflow, and when it loaded me in, I was back on the surface relative to where I was standing when I pressed the accept button. I kind of wish I had stayed beyond the portal when I did so, but ah well.

---------- Post automerged at 09:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:45 PM ----------

Just repeated the bug by accident, but I know how it happened now. The Mesmer Staff #2 ability, Phase Retreat, when by the swamp water, (maybe I was in a very similar spot to last time, I can't confirm, but this time I was on the left edge of the island to the direct west of the Skill Challenge) it teleports me into the water, through the realms of existence.

There was one thing of note this time, since I tested things a bit. Somehow I glitched a Veteran Aatxe, either with my Sink ability, or my movespeed/knockback ability, to be part-way into the ground. It just stood there, while me and a couple other players attacked it and killed it.

Either way, I reported the bug again, with my new conclusions.

 

And now I must experiment with staff.

Also, I don't know if it's because I'm bad at picking options or not, but if I solo my "split choice" quests now, it usually ends in gladiator style fights where it's me against 4-5 people 3~ lvls higher than me.

Gets annoying when they throw in OHKO mobs too.

 

Found this "calculator" while browsing.

Might be of use so someone. ;D

Huh, looks to be filled with wrong info - there's this, too. Looks more matching to the info in the wiki, though.

There's another one, that, so far, looks to be the best one.

 

Installing my copy now. See you bitches on the other side.

o/

 

A small technical question for anyone with enough game knowledge. About the stacking of abilities in general - how do you know that it stacks? Or so you always presume that it does?


An example with ranger - there's:

1. a fern hound that can give regeneration to you and your allies with a howl
2. a signet of the wild that heals both you and your pet passively
3. a trait in Beastmastery, natural healing, which gives passive health regeneration to a pet
4. Troll Unguent healing skill that gives rregeneration to you and your pet (for 10s)

Does everything in this list stack, and is everything affected by the size of your healing score? I presume that the answer is yes, but want to be sure.

 

Regeneration is a boon that stacks in duration. Everything that says regeneration is specifically that boon (1 and 4). 2 and 3 are passive effects and are therefore not the boon, thus they will stack healing. Yes, the healing from all those sources of regeneration is affected by Healing Power. The formula for the boon (and I assume the passive ones as well) are:
(1.625 * level) + (0.125 * healing power) per second.

EDIT: Apparently Signet of the Wild provides the actual boon rather than a separate effect (going off the wiki here).

 

Zephyrus.6237

Rolled a tank.

 

There are no tanks, no healers, and no "DPS" in Guild Wars 2. They specifically designed the game with a core precept being completely abandoning the "Holy Trinity". If you try tanking with a guardian or a warrior you're going to fail hilariously and I'm going to point and laugh at you from the sidelines.

 

You can built your character tanky. But there is no way to hold threat.

 

In my experience so far with the hardest content available at my level, this translates quite simply into "everybody dies."

Some of these mechanics are not fun.

 

Three DLP members, myself included, and 2 non-DLPers apart of the guild ran through Ascalonian Catacombs last evening. Rentar was our guide basically, and also managed to keep focus on him as a guardian. I'm running a glass cannon DPS focused guardian but I have a bit of survivability.

While no roles exist, the only hiccup I feel, was during the lovers phase of the instance where I think we should've had 2 people on the guy, 3 on the girl, as we allowed them to meet up and we the proceeded to die a bit more than we needed to.

Otherwise, I enjoy the idea of moving away from hard roles. That makes gimmicky instances hard to make, such as a tank targeting a foot on a dragon or some shit, but there's nothing particularly clever about that or challenging. It boils down to we need a tank, oh the tank failed, clear. Oh the tank is holding aggro, succeed. Boring.

 

So, I had to take remote control of a golem and lay a minefield before taunting them to engage me...

I think I probably should have laid more mines. Now to test if my field works!

Well, my minefield had a chain-reaction explosion and was entirely destroyed on the first three enemies...

On the plus side, it only took a couple of mines to kill the enemies, so it worked out to lay a few sets, taunt, and repeat.

 

I was referring to exploration mode, which essentially has bosses that will one shot any class if their ability is not dodged, and trash mobs that can 2-4 shot a warrior like me.

Believe me when I say that this made me want to pull out a gun and just range dps with everyone else.

Also, some of the major world event bosses suck ass as melee. I recognize that they have "tells" that let you know when they are going to use their insta-gib melee abilities, but often when there are a dozen plus people attacking the animations will completely mask what the boss is doing. Basically I can't see shit until I'm dead.

 

I have this (probably stupid) idea of making a Charr ranger that focuses on bleeding.

If my math is correct, off raw base damage, before applying items and traits, the bleeds will hit for 1k damage per second if I throw all bleed skills on at once.

Every 100 condition damage adds 200 per tick.

Entangle would be the "oh crap" button when they close in on melee or cleanse the initial bleeds to lay down massive pain.

Not sure how I feel about it, but seemed interesting at the time.