Poobah.6254

Seriously anet, either put the map in the ranked rotation or allow the achievements in custom arenas. I've done literally hundreds of unranked matches trying to get these achievements and I'm still not done, it's a horrible waste of time because it's very unprofitable compared to ranked queue, there's no way to set my preference for this map, even when I do vote for it almost no-one else does so even when it comes up the spinner has a low chance of hitting it.

GW2 definitely doesn't run amazingly, especially during its trademark 100+ player meta boss spam-fests but it doesn't run that badly either and I have to wonder if you have some sort of system or driver issue if you're reporting such poor frame rates even in unpopulated areas. You didn't list your CPU but I imagine if you have a new system with a 4080 in it with 16 cores it's probably a 13700k at a guess? You certainly shouldn't be experiencing such performance with such hardware. For comparison I have a somewhat weaker GPU (RX 7800XT) and a somewhat stronger gaming CPU (7800X3D) and have experienced framerates significantly above 100 in unpopulated or low population areas and can usually maintain above 50 even in player heavy metas. So maybe look in to that?

The past couple of weeks since the patch I've been having semi-frequent crashes where the game just closes, no error message to pass on, no freezing or poor performance beforehand to indicate anything is wrong, just a full crash. I think I've had these elsewhere but the instances I remember have all involved the trading post. I think there may have been one on the Vault UI too which makes me wonder if it's something to do with the browser interface GW2 uses - coherent ui I think? Did anything change with it in the Through The Veil patch? Thanks.

I was strongly considering buying a RX 7800 XT for my new build but I've read a few reports of serious stuttering in GW2 with this card, which after googling around seems to be a shader caching issue? I was wondering if I'm correct that that is the case, if the issue has been fixed/mitigated and to what degree it's still affecting people and the playability of the game? I'd rather not spend hundreds on a brand new GPU only to find that it's made my experience in one of the games I put the most hours in to significantly worse as I currently have zero issues with my old 1070. Thanks!

I don't use any overlay like that.

This didn't happen to me at launch but since playing through the story again the past few days with a friend I've been crashing every time a SotO cutscene plays... but only the first time. If I go and replay the story again it plays fine. It's bizarre, I don't know what to make of it. It's also very frustrating.

Same. It's very annoying having that red icon there that I can't get rid of.

This is awful, needs to be fixed/reverted asap.

You need to interact with the "do no touch this" thing first is all. It's been working fine for me. The only time you can't start it is if it's already been completed and the glowy ball is above the forge, where it stays for a while to let people fly.

These don't seem to be dropping at all. The description for the collection says that they are tradeable, and drop from chests and champions in the expansion zones. One week on and a quick poll of my friends suggests that nobody, despite playing a hell of a lot of SotO has seen a single one drop, more to the point there are 0 of them on the trading post and none have ever been listed which is pretty strong evidence that there are 0 of them in the game period and they weren't put into the loot tables or something's bugged somewhere.

We thought this was the case but it really doesn't seem to be. I've tried this with groups where we've been very careful/motionless and still shenanigans have happened with the aspects deciding not to tether quickly enough, changing targets, ignoring a player etc.

The big thing I don't see being fixed in this is the inconsistency with the tethers. We can't have wipe after wipe because the aspects decide to target a new player half way through casting their tether and then there's not enough time to kill them. Also honestly if ya'll are listening to feedback at all maybe just make the aspects die when you cc them too, it's such a problem for healers to kill them in time even when they don't get the last or a late tether (that's basically an auto wipe). Even a healer in celestial or harrier can struggle. These split phases are the only cause for frustration for my friends and it's a real downer that the one phase that has the problems and frustrations is going untouched as far as I an tell.

I can't believe that this still hasn't been addressed.

Wanted to give a more balanced feedback post about the good and bad of this fractal/boss fight since anything remotely positive gets downvoted on reddit by the salty echo chamber over there having a cry. Positives: Overall I quite like the fight. It rewards high levels of personal awareness and requires a lot of attention and focus not to make a mistakes, which it punishes harshly. The core concept is pretty fun and I strongly like that it disrupts the standard fractal speed clear meta of "lol just stack and have massive burst, what even are mechanics?" (which is why my hardcore fractal friends are so salty). I like that the fight mechanics engage with boons - for a core system of GW2 precious few PvE fights engage at all with boon rip/strip/stealing/corrupt/etc. and I think this is a good way to do it too that also rewards player skill. It does favour ranged a bit but I think it's not nearly as bad as people are making out (I think it's very hard not to in GW2 with how the game works if you want a fight that's engaging, and really either if you don't make people spread out for stuff they'll complain that stacking is boring anyway so what can you do). It seems like most people haven't figured out that the axes are baited on to the furthest players which can than be controlled to leave one or two melee players pretty high up time. Kanaxai is an iconic GW1 boss and I'm glad to see him back (Urgoz when?). That said while I like the fight I don't really feel like it's deserving of the top / 100 cm spot. It's not as visually impressive and diverse as Ai/Sunqua or tied to the main fractal story in the way that Arkk/Shattered Observatory is. It's too long to have a second phase but it really is lacking that little je ne sais quoi to make it feel like a fitting 100 CM. Though really I feel like we're getting to a point, certainly when you add the fifth CM with the new fractal in SotO where the Fractal CMs should go into their own category away from / above the regular T4s which would kinda solve that issue. Suggestions/dislikes: Dread Visage - this is something I'm more relaying from friends because it's something I'm ok at conceptualising but a bunch of my friends have complained about a lack of indicator for if you have any of the aspects of Kanaxi in your LoS and have pointed out that Artsariiv for instance shows a beam to you if you're looking at her. I think it'd be a good QoL to add one. Rending Storm aka Axes - This could really use an expanding circle so you know when it's going to drop. I'll be back to talk about this skill again in the bugs section. The tethering/Phantasmagoria for the split phases is very janky - there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to get them to target specific players such as proximity, and if any player interrupts one of the tethers in any way (there seems to be several from evading /blocking it to running through someone else's) and causes the aspects to have to re-target it's basically a guaranteed wipe because they take so long to do it. This is highly frustrating and feels unfair and unfun, especially because often people can't see the tether lines on other players and they are staggered/don't all happen at the same time. Something needs to change about this. Maybe have Kanaxi not start charging his attack until everybody has a tether (this could be exploited I suppose, but people are already escaping the boss arena to avoid this so shrug) or just make it take a little longer, the aspects definitely need to be much faster when they lose their target for whatever reason and need to find a new one to tether. The tether also shouldn't be blockable or anything like that. A lot of people are saying that it feels pretty bad that there's very little counterplay to Frightening Speed and I kinda agree, though I get what you all at anet were going for with it being undodgeable damage that people will need to cope with via healing or barrier and that maybe making it able to be dodged would invalidate it completely so IDK. Personally I kinda feel like invuls should work at least against the initial damage (though you should still get flagged that if you get hit again by someone else's number you're executed) but actually my main feedback about this is that for a skill called Frightening Speed it's really really slow. I think even unchanged people would be a lot happier if it didn't take so long to go off, it's just a huge amount of down time, especially below 33% where you have to look away too so you're literally doing nothing. Go straight to the boss - you guys figured this out with Sunqua, so the regression to making us fight a meaningless trash pack and champion feels bad? Which brings us along to my biggest frustration with this fractal - the title eligibility not being tracked only in the fight but across the whole instance, thus forcing us to reset the instance every pull and re-kill that stupid trash pack is giga frustrating and terrible. The Grappling Hook I haven't had as much difficulty with this as some - one of my friends who uses a lower camera height literally can't target the highest platform even - but I still think that again it's very janky, my biggest issue is getting stuck on the bundle or then ending up swapping to the wrong weapon set because I'm mashing drop bundle. Honestly ya'll made those super nice "olden days" ziplines just for this fractal why not put those in so people can reliably get out to the platforms and do away with the bundle. Bugs: Regeneration & Phases - Now the boon ripping from pets is mostly fixed this is the other big one we got hit with a couple of times - If the boss gets regeneration when he's phasing the whole fight breaks pretty much because the phases trigger again. Tethers/Phantasmagoria - Gonna repeat here that I've seen a bunch of people say that they can fail due to blocking or dodging which very much feels like a bug to me. Also often you can't see other people's tethers, leading to accidental running in to and them breaking them and generally ruining any chances of coordination. Rending Storm - Again most of the time you can't see the visual for the axes being on another player making it hard to react and coordinate. Thanks!

I feel like this is a bit of a band-aid thatwill shore up some of the uptimes but doesn't really address the fundamental issues with Druid as it stands in the post June 27 world. It feels very strange that you identified that people don't like being forced to press a button on cooldown in order to generate their required boons but then have created a situation where we need to press even more buttons on cooldown to generate those boons, including the same ones as before in the spirits just they do less than than they used to. The big problem was always that when you have a button that has a purpose you want to save that button for the appropriate moment to use it effectively - and ideally you want choice in which buttons you have access to via making meaningful decisions in your build - and when you tie an essential boon to its activation we're then forced to use it disregarding and regardless of what its original purpose was. Putting more boons on Spirited Arrival is... fine... but the knock on effect of that is that we're gonna be swapping pets on cooldown which means that if we can't really have 2 different pets with different purposes any more - for instance a CC based pet and one with a different utility. This is already kinda not viable any more anyway since most of the ways that people are figuring out to upkeep the same boons as we used to get from our spirits involves triggering Invigorating Bond, and thus requires a) tracking an invisible internal cooldown and b) spamming pet skills again regardless of their original purpose. You can see why this is frustrating and leaves druids feeling like they've been dealt a bad hand I hope. Edit to add: And silly me, of course Spirited Arrival competes with Windborne Notes which... I dunno maybe we don't need for our regeneration uptime which leaves us with two situations either we did need Windborne Notes and now our regeneration uptime is bad or we don't need it in which case it's now a completely dead trait which is also bad.