Belorn.2659

I would like to add that talking about personal health does not create a constructive environment for discussion and for the topic of this discussion it is rather irrelevant. If those post on twitter constitute a violation of developer conduct then that is what we should focus on.

Is the tone and language that this developer is using to talk to the game community acceptable or not? If not then Anet as a company and Gail as community leader need to step up and address the situation so that both developers community feel that it is safe to carry constructive discussions about the game.

Next time I see someone post a critique of the story in guild chat or map I know exactly what to write:

"Be careful with criticizing the story! It could be claimed that you are only criticizing the story because that developer is a woman, which would be sexist, and then have the accusation published on twitter to all the developers follows. From there you are going to get death threats and harassment, so its not worth it. Criticism is not allowed in GW2."

> @"Haleydawn.3764" said:

> > @"Vash.2386" said:

> > People keep mentioning that it was her personal twitter feed as if it was a private feed.

> >

> > It was not her private feed. There is a big difference personal and private.

>

> You can have a personal public twitter. Her Twitter account is not provided by Anet, which makes it her personal account. If it’s public, which it is, is also fine she can still say what she likes. It’s the fact her personal account is affiliated with working at Anet that’s the problem, and means she needs to hold herself to higher standards when using her personal public account. You can’t post about where you work and what you do, then basically trash talk others who want to have a constructive conversation with you because “it’s my personal account”. No honey. You’ve got a company to represent at that point.

The problem with the idea of "personal twitter account" is also that it causes further problem since then anet would then not be able to ban or strike players who goes on twitter and harass developers, as then that would be that players personal twitter account. When a developer and player meets, through any medium, it carries with it the standards that we all agree should exist between player and developer.

It used to be that daily fractals had instant death hits. You missed a mechanic and you died. You did not dodge and you died. Then they changed it so bossed had more health, lower damage spikes and they introduced instabilities.

Is the "new" way better than the old way? I don't know. Maybe they could create a new super instability that returned bosses to the old state and inactivated the other instabilities, and have that super instability be part of the instability rotation.

There is some missing relics in that calculation.

Go to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractal_Relic and click "Relics by Reward Level" and "Relics per Boss". In total:

3xT4 fractal that is lvl 75-100. Average out to 18x3 = 54

3 recommended is between lvl 1-75, Average of 11x3 = 33

Relics per boss (CM) gives a total of 140 relics per cm. 99cm and 100cm = 280 relics.

Daily max is 19 Pristine relics. T4 gives 4 chests with one Pristine each. 4x3 = 12. Recommended has one in each chest. 12+3 = 15. CM give 2 each, 15+4 = 19. Pristine can be converted to 15 relics so 19x15 = 285 relics

Recommended potions worth of 16 Handful of Fractal Relics (Potion Refund), worth 3 relics each. 16x3 = 48

Jumping puzzle give one Handful of Fractal Relics bag. 3 relics.

Sum before Mist attunement: 703 relics.

With attunement you can add about 90 relics per day per level.

To calculate the time to fractal god, about 2/3 of the cost is spent on lvl 3 and 4 (this is because the price increase for each lvl). It is hard to get a decent average but I would guess that it should be around 180-270 per day, but lets be conservative and say 180. 208,000 Fractal Relics divided by 703+180 = 235 days.

So I would say Fractal god takes 235 days of full runs, or a few years given missed days, skipped cm's, skipped recommended and so on.

I do not count the few random potions you get from T4 chests. I would guess that you get about average 18 relics per day (one large and one normal potion), but that is just a personal guess from doing T4 on a almost daily basis. In theory you could cut the total time with 5 days using that average, or make a more conservative guess of half of that on average.

> 60 Fractal Relics (From the 4 keys acquired

I don't know what this refer to. Cracked fractal encryptions gives randomly 5 relics, but that is not even 1 relic on average. I don't consider keys to be part of the daily max of relics. Doubt it will even cut the total time with a single day.

For all the discussion about pro and cons of downstate I would like to suggest some changes which would make no downstate more viable as a permanent solution:

1) A mechanic to limit the running time between zerg and map waypoint.

2) A DPS cap to prevent instant kills. In what form is that very important but the instant kills from classes like thiefs and mirages, and to lesser degree rangers and warriors need to be addressed.

3) A limit to the roamer mechanic of high dps attack and quick disengage. It was not fun with downstate, and it is even less fun with out it.

The no down state event was fun. Really fun, and not just because our server held the #1 spot during skirmishes. Fights felt more intense, and the punishment for overextending was high. All good right?

The running back was not. The disengage style combat, especially in roaming was not. Long term the idea of instant kills will not just be fringe, it will be the primary way of doing things. WvW is not as strict as PvP and getting single skill dps over 20k is not that difficult. No, the cost is a bit too high but as a fun weekend it was great.

The only really "sure" way is to demand a API key and check gw2efficency.

The pug community could start doing that. Such change need to start from the pug commanders, but the result would be an elimination of both fake pings and the need to ping in general. It is however very costly in term of getting people to understand what an API key is and how to get one, but if thats what you as a commander needs then start demanding it and see if the community is willing to adapt.

> @"Funky.4861" said:

> How about: Epi doesn't need to be nerfed, just be glad that necros finally have a slot in raids/ co-ordinated content? Most of us necro players are rightly dubious of how anet will buff necro damage if they nerf epi, considering that their previous buffs are still insufficient (vampiric trait, pretty much all of the axe buffs) and unused for that reason.

It would be very surprising and out of character for Anet to buff anything in connection with a nerf. They almost never do that, and its usually up to the community to figure out the second best when the single highest DPS skill get nerfed. We can look what happened to nerfs like hundred blades, each of the elementalist elites, ice bow, overload, dhuum fire. The only exception I can recall was the nerf to confussion that affected mirage, which did get a buff to torment.

No, I doubt we will see a corresponding buff to necro after epi get nerfed. Maybe they throw in a few token buffs to underused skill with the expected community response being that small buffs to underused weapon sets won't make the class viable. A few fans of the class will still bring power or condi reaper, and do acceptable dps, while the community will react like it it usually do when a class falls down to the average/below average line.

For raiding there is a use for all weapons in the game, through some are more common than others.

Pistol is used by mirage.

Rifle is used by holosmith.

focus and shield is used by chrono.

Hammer is the least used weapon. The only current build that has it is the hand kiting rev build, which is an occasional one-off for one boss. Hammer are use for pvp and wvw so from a larger perspective its not an uncommon weapon, but it all depend on context.

It > @"TexZero.7910" said:

> > @"Mini Crinny.6190" said:

> > If i'm not mistaken Wings 1-4 were already around when epidemic got reworked?

>

> They were. Oddly enough Epi wasn't cry out loud broken back then, sure there was a phase with jagged horrors where people started using it. However, it was far from the watershed of complaints we see now. Which begs the question why ? From what i can tell we have a bunch of upset ele mains that dislike the "ease of play" factor that necro has and generally haven't said much of anything else outside of "Our rotation is harder, therefore we deserve more damage" and they do have more damage. So these complaints are really of base from that crowd. The other complaints are about general balance in which they don't want to acknowledge that the encounters themselves effect balance far more significantly than any other thing outside over the top skill ratios.

It took years before anyone cried about ice bow, and then suddenly everyone talked about how broken it was. This is normal. It takes time for the single best dps skill to establish itself and to become mainstream to the point where the novelty of it start to drop. Once epi get nerfed the next top dps skill on the block will bubble up, be experimented on, become mainstream and then finally complained about and nerfed.

I think this is the 6th iteration of "single highest dps skill" getting nerfed that I can name. Those that do a lot of benchmarks can likely create a list of which skill is next after epi.

> @"Kas.3509" said:

> But it seems its kinda hard to balance out necro, because with their aoe's and great survivability they can't be given best dps too. They tried to take away part of their survivability with scourge (taking away shrouds) but honestly I feel like scourges are on par with surviving with reapers.

I recall reading that Weaver had this as a design goal compared to core ele and tempest, where tempest has condi clears, cc and stun breaks and weaver got higher dps. In theory you could do the same to the next necro elite spec by cutting their health pool, removing their condi clears and barriers in favor of pure dps.

But I doubt this will happen. If each class had a identical dps set which all shared the same stats and lack of any support, then does choosing which class to bring have any meaning beyond cosmetic and RP? If you had to choose between two dps classes where one had a bigger health pool and both has the exact same dps, which one would you pick?

Top golem benchmarks means exactly nothing for raid and has been proven repeatably. Sites like gw2raidar has been providing global player stats for almost a year now and it has consistently shown average dps, top 75% and 99% percentile as being spread out on multiple classes.

Weaver has and still is top for the keep construct charts. The obvious reason is the 20% (now 10%) damage boost from stunned targets and the large hitbox. This is the only boss that weaver has consistently been top dps on.

Every other boss has had a number of different top dps classes depending on what has been top performance for its specific environment and mechanics. Xera being a great example where it has been tempest, condi ranger, berserker warrior, firebrand, mirage, hs, and finally scourge. Ironically weaver have never been top dps on xera since there have always been an other that has been "better" dps for that fight, both power and condi.

At the peak when weaver was most used a few patches ago I recall doing the numbers and found that about half of the bosses had weaver as top dps. After that weaver has been used less and less. The uniqueness of the boss mechanics means that what is optimal changes according to every patch.

> @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > @"Vrita.7846" said:

> > With the current nerf to MS, I don't think there's any reason to bring a staff Weaver to anything anymore. People seem to forget that Weaver brought literally nothing except dps, so if you take that away from it, what can it do? If it can't bring dps, while also having a complex rotation, it'll just be another condi engi. Did Weaver need a nerf? Sure, but it didn't need to be gutted the way it did. Besides, the nerf to MS wasn't just a nerf to Weaver, it nerfed cored ele and Tempest as well which aren't even that great to begin with, and now they're worse. Weaver has plenty of dmg modifiers, why didn't they nerf those to tone the dmg down a bit? It's pretty clear Anet's balance team doesn't know what the hell they're doing, cause they make such horrible decisions on almost every balance patch they put out.

>

> Now that's an exaggeration. I don't like the change, but staff weaver is still top dps unless you can epi bounce. Or, well, you're doing a condi-friendly boss.

Staff weaver is top dps on KC. Time will tell about gor, sloth, sam, deimos and dhuum. Early data (ie data from last tuesday and today, which excludes all the reset teams), seems to point towards few changes except for gor but time will tell. This is too early to conclusive claim anything about "top dps", except KC which I doubt will see a change even with the 10% nerf.

> @"Malediktus.9250" said:

> The difference is that it is done by an ingame tool provided by Anet and that it has to be manually redone every time you do the encounter.

> It is like the SAB or adventure taco routes. You could follow a friend or watch a video about it. But that requires much more effort than just following optimal lines the addon draws directly into your game.

> I am aware that Anet said the addon is ok, does not mean I have to like that decision. Anet always does a lot of decisions that are very questionable and probably have their roots in barely playing their own game.

The difference is the mean in which it is done and how convenient it is. Good thing that game developers usually care more about results and the effect on the game.

Sadly this mean no more spamming the glider skin animation and other fun activity as a way to pass the time while waiting for the group to ready up. This was the primary use that I had with the jet pack, to the point where I bought glider skins for this very purpose.

> @"Imperadordf.2687" said:

> This thread is turning to the "Commanders don't accept me to squad" thread. I summon @"Gaile Gray.6029" to close the thread. Please, it's turning to a troll fest here.

Agree.

> @"Mini Crinny.6190" said:

> I mean, people would start asking for gear checking instead

Which people did before DPS meters. That and AP point and a much more restrictive class requirement than after DPS meters became common.

> @"mindcircus.1506" said:

> But really if someone is using ARC they have been doing so mainly so they can maintain grouping with similarly minded players. We have been reminded time and time again by users of these tools that their main benefit is so they can play with like-minded players who value performance they way they do.

> There is nothing wrong with that it's a strong, reasonable argument.

>

> But in fairness if someone wants to use a DPS meter to group with people who know and understand their roles as the meter displays, then someone else who opposes their use should know, so that they may also group with like minded players.

> A small icon beside a player's buffs when they are selected sounds reasonable.

The main benefit is to not return where requirements for achievement points and class where the primary way to form groups.

If we want full fairness then let have Anet make a amazon rating system where we can rate each other and have that as a small icon. If someone else who opposes 1 star players then they can kick them from the start. A small icon, 1-5 stars sounds perfectly reasonable right?

Except *why* should anet develop something which primary purpose is to separate and cause more strife between players? DPS meters helps to reduce the problem where achievement points, classes, kill proof, titles, or gate keeping guilds are used to define who will be accepted and who will be kicked before players have even meet and tried the content. It solves a real problem and brings player together which previously would be suspicious of each other. It allows a new player to join amazing content even if they only has 5k ap on their account, helping a bit to get new players into the game. DPS meter makes people less discriminative when forming parties, putting their trust to actually game play rather than silly stuff like achievement points.

It is not reasonable that anet should design the game for more discrimination before a player has had a chance.

> @"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:

> > @"steki.1478" said:

> > > @"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:

> > > > @"Ceit.7619" said:

> > > > One thing that I keep seeing come up and find hilarious is ele's complaining about complicated rotations. You guys need a perspective switch. You guys have SO MANY AWESOME DAMAGE SKILLS that you need to do a lot just so you can hit them all and are complaining about a class that has ONE AWESOME DAMAGE SKILL that for 4 fights, is higher dps than ele, but not as much higher as ele is compared to necro everywhere else. Are you guys being serious right now?

> > >

> > > This (don't get me wrong, still want Epi to be nerfed, though ... in combination with huge buffs to anything else Necro related), but what strikes me the most is that most of these Ele mains talk about other classes while they clearly have never (properly) played them before. And I understand as well, you don't _have_ to "read" into other classes, cause you're already needed everywhere anyway! Have you ever heard of a Raid PUG saying: we don't want Ele's cause they have "complex rotations"???

> > > Most Necro mains on the other hand, they _have_ tried other classes, mainly because they're simply not wanted in the PvE endgame as a Necro.

> > >

> > > To some Ele fanatics out there: it's really easy to spit down from your Ivory tower, show some empathy please! Don't worry, ANet will not nerf your awesome Top 1 damage, they've NEVER done it before, so why would they start now. But a little bit more leniency to the other classes is appreciated. Thanks.

> >

> > Exactly one year ago (and a bit more), staff tempest was only useful on big hitboxes.

> And what are most Raid bosses? Exactly: big Hitboxes (bigger than small, at least). So they were still number 1 .... As always! Never really changed, except for maybe a few weeks, but it was obviously a bug then (Scourge after PoF release being an example at that).

No. Most raid bosses are medium to small. When ele was considered viable on only large hit boxes this translated to exactly three raid bosses: Gor, Sloth, KC. Even with wing 4's bosses of sam and deimos, condi ranger were at that time #1.

Then the nerfs came, ironically in order to decrease the dps of large hit boxes, and when pof was released this resulted in weaver having acceptable dps choice for medium targets if-and-only-if they stand still. Condi ranger also get heavily nerfed, and got mostly replaced by HS for the medium/small targets.

Which is where we are now. Large hit box and weaver has the crown. Medium immobile targets and weaver and HS share. Small target and HS has the crown. If medium or small and movement then mirage is the superior choice and weaver end up last. Scourge just managed to beat into this ordering because given the perfect environment epidemic is the single highest DPS skill by far.

There is a few specific exceptions. SB is good for Cannons on sab, backwarg on escort, and sam CM. DH can do river of souls. Thieves can open the door in wing 4. Nerfing epi won't change this.

If people who use DPS meters should get flagged, could we also flag people who get kicked out of groups? Even better, lets bring up some amazon rating system so we can all flag each other so everyone know who to exclude and who to include before they even meet. I can only see flowers and hearths from such change.

> @"Voltekka.2375" said:

> ANET answered tickets, reddit post has been updated, yet people bring up the "ANET claims... We dont know for sure..." argument. The same people who were so quick to believe banned cheaters who said they didnt use cheats/said they didnt use cheats WHILE playing gw2/said they used macros for music/said they ACCIDENTALLY used em in other modes as well. They believe people who used exploits in a game, yet when it comes to ANET, their view is completely different. "But I had lag when the SPYWARE was in effect!" Well, buddy, proof is what you want, proof is what you should provide. Double standards, oh those double standards.

> Now, I am not saying to anyone to pick a side, here. But you know what? It is nigh impossible to change the mind of a suspicious person, of someone who wants to stay in disbelief. It is easier to change the point of view of a thinking person, when that person is presented with arguments. Which makes one's decision on who to believe, much easier.

Discussing reddit posts work better if there is a link to it:

> @"juhani.5361" said:

> > @"Oldirtbeard.9834" said:

> > This post is meant to be constructive and to help heal some of the strife and misinformation regarding the recent wave of Bans. For almost 2 weeks we've been speculating what this software was collecting and whether it could lead to false positives, unfortunately there has not been an official statement as far as I can tell.

> >

> > I recently received an answer to a Support Ticket regarding my privacy concerns which I filed because I wanted an official word directly from the company, some transparency.

> >

> > I'm glad to say I have it and I'm sharing my response with you, I'm not sure if this is kosher but I feel and think this is important.

> >

> >

> > Lead GM MagisterToday at 18:00

> > Greetings ,

> >

> > The detection process, which we ran from 3/6/2018 to 3/27/2018, identified if a version associated to one of five separate programs we previously disclosed on 4/14/2018 was running on your computer at the same time as Guild Wars 2. The data sent back to ArenaNet was a yes or no to whether or not we detected one of those programs. No other data was sent to ArenaNet as part of the detection method.

> > Regards,

> >

> > Lead GM Magister

> > Guild Wars 2 Support Team

> > http://help.guildwars2.com/

> >

>

> Thanks for posting this :) Re-installing the game now.

>

> For the life of me, though, I can't see why Anet couldn't have just said this to begin with. A lot of pain and a lot of annoyance, not to mention misconceptions, etc. could have been avoided on all sides of the issue.

Could not agree more. When all that facebook discussion were active someone at Anet should have considered the public image when collective information. A clear and simple message such as the one here would have limited a lot of discussion to the issue of cheating rather than data collection and spyware.

This information contradict the reverse engineering that people made which said that the whole process list was sent to ArenaNet.

But this new information can only do good. If its true then great =) . If its wrong and they feel pressured to delete the collected data then great =) . If its wrong and they do not delete it, and it get leaked then their claim to never have gotten the data will look really bad in a European court, also great =) !

The whole episode still makes me want to sandbox the guildwars 2 program. Fool me once and all that, even if this time it was only a grey hat patch.

Just a few days after Anet nerfed meteor shower I called it that the next skill on the block would be epidemic. Anet has systematically targeted the single highest dps skill in the game, which was fgs -> lava font -> icebow -> meteor shower. It has however taken the community a bit more time then I expected to figure out how and on which bosses you could exploit use this highest dps skill in the game.

But that time is over so I am not very optimistic about the future of epidemic. I would like to think that a nerf won't happen without giving Necro other tools, but that never occurred in the past either. Buffs and nerfs happen regardless of each other. The most likely outcome is a nerf in between expansions and then a possible buff from the next expansion. Naturally, nothing will change except that people will go from what ever is #1 choice for dps to #2.

In the mean time I recommend that people tries it out. It require a fair bit of coordination and has a rather high skill ceiling. It much more punishing than doing the mechanics (vg, xera), and for dhuum cm it just is the safer strat used since the rooting and close contact for weavers make them high risk in regard to the echo.

Please A-Net, let bring back the ol good days where party search was "30k AP only eles!". It was so much better in the past where instead of giving players a chance and see how they perform we instead used proxies for it like class choice and achievement points. Everyone just love how KP and LNHB works in raid and fractals! Let not just continue that but improve it and push players into more proxies for skills so that people can be kicked even before they joined. If you are not per-approved than no point trying to join! It would save so much time for everyone if "different" players such as those running anything unfamiliar get kicked at the start of the fractal and raid.

The gw2 dungeon community also had this lovely practice of using solo Lupi and MAMA as a barrier for entry. Instead of DPS meters we could just have titles attached to soloing bosses. This way we don't need meters and we can safely kick anyone that hasn't the title (and make sure to ban anyone dealing with account sharing).

DPS meters are just too slow and toxic. Lets bring in toxicity from the past which just had the lowly taste of green.

3-4 full or semi-full clears per week with varied results for each group. Some of that being low man, some want dhuum cm training, and on some weeks there is training raids to help new players to get into raiding.

I don't know the number of /gg per week but it is a few.

I did call it now almost a year ago when they nerfed meteor shower than epi would be next. Epidemic is the single highest DPS skill in the game and while it require specific situation to be useful, so did fgs, icebow, tornado and then meteor shower. First it was walls, then it was large hit box, now it is two targets next to each other. In the end there will always be a combination of environment and game skill that has the highest dps.

Giving scourges more overall dps would not really help the situation. There will always be one class that has best dps on small golem, large golem, moving golem and so on. The more special mechanics anet remove and the more equal the different classes become in dps, the more mono culture the class diversity becomes. If scourge do 95% of a weaver to a small golem and identical cc, then why ever bring scourge? why gjve the group a 5% handicap for no reason? And now you got a nice buff to scourge and yet none will bring scourges.

Personally I prefer that they made future raid boss mechanics with specific classes in mind. Maybe add a boss mechanic which require the pulsing boons from a rev?

I see this topic pop up every few weeks and the same issue is always unresolved. Before meters we had people looking at achievement points and booting anyone from joining unless they had 20k, 30k, or what ever represented a sign that the player knew what they were doing. To join certain guilds they put players to the test by having them solo bosses such as Lupi or MAMA. Class restrictions was extremely heavy, as anything non-meta screamed casual.

Most of that silliness is gone thanks to meters, through we still have some lingering meta class requirements, KP and titles as a proxy for skill. I have no desire to return to the days before dps meters and would rather like to see some builtin indicators for what meters already do like failed mechanics.