Game Update Notes: August 2, 2022

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

08/02/2022—August 2 Release Notes

Festival of the Four Winds

On behalf of Queen Jennah of Kryta and the Captain's Council of Lion's Arch, you are cordially invited to participate in the return of the Festival of the Four Winds!

High atop the Labyrinthine Cliffs, our Zephyrite friends have been working in tandem with Lion's Arch to host an incredible variety of fun vendors and events to entertain visitors from all across Tyria. This celebration of unity and peace between our cultures is more important than ever before, and we hope that you will join us in the festivities.

In this spirit of cooperation, Queen Jennah has personally overseen the reopening of the Crown Pavilion, featuring a variety of challenges for Tyria's finest to test their mettle!

Transportation to the festivities couldn't be easier! Special hot air balloons are now stationed in each nation's capital city. Visitors can also sail directly from the ship from Lion's Arch.

We look forward to seeing you at the festival!

— Captain Ellen Kiel

• The Zephyrite bazaar has returned to the Labyrinthine Cliffs! Visitors to the Labyrinthine Cliffs can try their hand at many festival activities, including adventures, races, and scavenger hunts:
  • Show your skill with the Zephyrite crystals in the Flying Dolyak race!
  • Enjoy the sights of the sea in the bay-spanning Skimmer Slalom race!
  • Team up with your friends to plunder lost treasure in the Treasure Hunt meta-event!
  • Scramble to set a high score in the Crystal Collection adventure!
  • Demonstrate your aviation ability in two Labyrinthine Cliffs Griffon Master adventures!
  • Compete to take the lead in the Sanctum Sprint activity!
  • Challenge the competition with unique Zephyrite skills in the returning Aspect Arena!
  • Leap across the Labyrinthine Cliffs to recover Zephyrite crystals and discover the fate of the Bazaar's fallen star, Kookoochoo the Incredulous!
  • Trade materials with the Zephyrites for a new Zephyrite Supply Box containing a wide variety of possible items, including exceptionally rare skins and equipment from distant lands.
• For combat-inclined festivalgoers, the Crown Pavilion has reopened in Divinity's Reach. Challenge recreations of humanity's greatest foes, legendary champions, and notorious figures!
  • The renowned Boss Blitz returns! Organize your companions to challenge 6 legendary foes—they'll gain strength as other bosses fall, so plan your battle carefully!
  • Adventurers yearning to show their skill in a solo challenge, rejoice! The Queen's Gauntlet has reopened!
  • Between blitzes, blow off some steam in the most hazardous festival race since Halloween: the infamous Pavilion Pursuit!
• New updates and prizes this year include:
  • Complete the annual Four Winds Customs meta-achievement to earn the Zephyrite Shawl, a new shoulder armor piece crafted in the Zephyrite tradition.
    • Last year's meta-achievement reward, the Zephyrite Traveling Boots, can now be purchased from the festival reward vendors.
  • A new Watchwork weapon set is now available! Complete the annual Four Winds Customs meta-achievement to receive your choice of a weapon. You can rarely find additional tradeable weapons in Four Winds Prize Bags, which are available from a new daily achievement.
  • A new skiff-themed race has been added to Labyrinthine Cliffs. Gather a crew and compete to be the fastest boat on the seas!
    • A skiff rental is available for players who have not unlocked their own skiff through the End of Dragons storyline.
  • Fishing nodes and a fishing tournament event have been added to Labyrinthine Cliffs. The unique Labyrinthine Cliffs waters stand at the intersection of numerous ecologies, and fish normally found in distant seas can be caught!
    • Fishing must be unlocked through the End of Dragons storyline.
  • The event rotation in Labyrinthine Cliffs has been updated to accommodate the skiff race and fishing tournament.
  • A new weekly achievement has been added. Complete activities across the festival to earn extra rewards each week!
  • Contents of the Zephyrite Supply Boxes have been updated, including four new weapons crafted by a traveling weaponsmith.
  • Two new minis have been added to the festival reward vendors in Labyrinthine Cliffs and Crown Pavilion.
  • Added new guild decorations inspired by Zephyrite architecture.
  • Updated the festival mount and skiff races to use a shared reward box for their adventure prizes.
  • Various bugs and glitches have been fixed to ensure a safer and more pleasant festival for all participants.
• Complete festival daily achievements to earn the Four Winds Zephyr daily achievement. This contributes to the Four Winds Gale achievement, which rewards your choice of weapons based on Zephyrite crafts!
• Earn Festival Tokens and Favors of the Festival by completing festival events and trade them for exciting prizes, including Zephyrite backpacks, the illustrious Sovereign weapon set, and items based on the latest wonder of the Crown Pavilion: the Watchknight Mk II.
• Zephyrite Kite Baskets have been scattered across Tyria. Open them to claim prizes from the Zephyrite stockpiles.
• The Festival of the Four Winds will be available for three weeks, from August 2 until August 23. Enjoy the festivities!

General

• The Kralkatorrik legendary variant skin collection is now available. Speak with Leivas after unlocking an Aurene-based legendary weapon to begin this collection!
• To prevent stalling issues during the Ogre Wars meta-event, certain critical friendly NPCs have been updated to be unwilling to die.
• Updated the models for the three Great Jungle Wurm bosses found in the Triple Trouble meta-event chain in Bloodtide Coast.

Graphics

• Made some minor performance improvements in the renderer.
• Improved performance when transitioning from underwater.
• Improved the visuals on some level-of-detail transitions.
• Fixed an issue that occasionally prevented water reflections from updating.
• Fixed an issue that caused some lights to flicker.
• Replaced "Enable DX11 Renderer" with "Enable DX9 Renderer (Deprecated)" in the Options menu. The new setting will appear disabled for players who have already enabled DX11, but their settings have not been changed and they are still using DX11.

New Player Experience Improvements

We've been experimenting with some changes to the new player experience. You might have heard whispers of new players leveling more quickly than their friends or gaining access to the raptor mount early in their Tyrian adventuring career. After evaluating the effectiveness of these changes by digging through mountains of data, we're excited to make these first experiments permanent additions to the game.

• Road test the raptor!
  • Accounts with an expansion unlocked will be granted permanent access to the basic raptor mount after they reach level 10 on a single character. Players who have reached level 80 and own the Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire expansion can unlock this mount's Masteries.
  • Characters on Play for Free accounts will get a 10-hour trial of the raptor mount when they reach level 10.
  • For characters that are already over level 10 and missed the initial unlock checkpoint, we will attempt to grant the unlock every 10 levels. This is true for both Play for Free and expansion accounts. We are working on additional methods to offer this unlock to players not caught by this fallback solution.
• Updated default selections in the Options menu for new accounts.
  • General Options:
    • AoE Loot on Interact: On
    • Autoloot: Autopickup: On
    • Show All Enemy Names: On
    • Show All Usable Object Names: On
    • Show Skill Recharge: On
    • Show Target Health Percent: On
    • Disable Player Camera Shake: On
    • Right-Click to Attack/Interact: Off
    • Melee Attack Assist: Off
    • Lock Ground Target at Maximum Skill Range: On
  • Graphics Options (skipped if Autodetect would choose lower values):
    • Reflections: Terrain & Sky
    • Character Model Limit: Medium
  • Control Options:
    • Strafe Left: A
    • Strafe Right: D
    • Turn Left: Q
    • Turn Right: E
    • Special Action: N
    • Information Dialog: - (dash)

Fractals

• Fixed an issue that prevented players from interacting with Mistlock Singularities after a party wipe.

Profession Skills

General

Pet Skill Autoattack

• A pet skill set to autoattack will be used automatically when the pet is in combat, within appropriate range of a target (when applicable), and if the skill is off cooldown. The untamed elite specialization's Unleash Pet F1, F2, and F3 skills may not be set to autoattack; this function only applies to the pet's natural skills.
• Any ranger or mechanist pet profession skill may be set to autoattack.
  • For rangers, druids, and soulbeasts without Unleash Pet active, these skills are bound to the F2 key by default.
  • For untamed and mechanists, these skills are bound to the F1, F2, and F3 keys by default.
• Untamed and mechanist elite specializations may set one, two, or all three to autoattack simultaneously.
  • This is done by holding the Control key and clicking on the skill with your Mouse 2 button, in the same way that player skills are set to autoattack. A reminder of this functionality is at the very bottom of any applicable skill tooltip.

Engineer

As we mentioned in a previous blog, the interaction between Aim Assisted Rocket and the mechanist's jade mech is adding too much passive power to the pet and doubling the power of this trait. In this update, we're reducing the damage this trait adds to mechanist builds by giving the mech a longer internal cooldown between the rockets it can fire. We're also removing the minimum range mechanic; we found that it created some unenjoyable play by giving players an incentive to move away from their allies, and it's hard to judge the correct distance from the target. It also led to some strange edge cases where melee attacks (or Bomb Kit!) hitting at maximum range could trigger rockets. We're cleaning up these issues by making them only activate on hits from missile weapons.

Explosives

• Aim Assisted Rocket: This trait no longer has a minimum range. Instead, it only activates on hits from missile weapons. The mechanist's mech pet now triggers this trait at half the previous rate, with an internal cooldown of 6 seconds.

When we introduced Rifle Burst to replace the old Hip Shot, there was an animation timing issue causing each shot to lack recoil. It didn't look good! This was corrected in a hotfix, but that timing fix was made too hastily and accidentally increased the total casting time of this skill from 1 second—which it was balanced for—to 1.2 seconds. This accidental nerf made it even weaker than Grenade Kit's first skill! We've taken another pass at it and have gotten it back to the intended 1-second total casting time. This restores the intended balance of this skill to about 10% lower sustained damage per second than Bomb Kit's first skill. In PvP and WvW, a 1-second casting time makes it equal in DPS to the old Hip Shot.

Rifle

• Rifle Burst: Adjusted total animation duration down to 1 second from approximately 1.2 seconds.
• Jump Shot: Fixed a bug that caused Jump Shot to sometimes deal less damage than expected.

Mesmer

Similar to recent tuning of ranger weapons, the following are small changes focused on improving the damage capability of chronomancer builds. Improvements to greatsword and sword, as well as a significant damage increase added to the chronomancer's Improved Alacrity trait, will increase the performance of both damage-dealing and boon support chronomancer builds.

• Spatial Surge: In PvE only, increased minimum damage multiplier from 0.69 to 0.8. Increased maximum damage multiplier from 1.005 to 1.1.
• Mind Stab: In PvE only, increased damage multiplier from 1.0 to 1.8.
• Phantasmal Berserker: In PvE only, increased damage multiplier of initial strike from 0.4 to 1.2.
• Mind Slash: In PvE only, increased damage multiplier from 0.75 to 0.8.
• Mind Gash: In PvE only, increased damage multiplier from 0.75 to 0.8.

Chronomancer

• Improved Alacrity: In addition to its previous effects, this trait now also increases your critical strike damage by 10% when you have alacrity. This is a multiplier to total damage dealt, not additive with critical strike damage from ferocity.

Virtuoso

• Fixed a bug that caused phantasms created by a virtuoso to have 5% less critical-hit chance than expected.

Ranger

• Spirits: Fixed a bug that caused spirit boons to be granted in a circle around the ranger instead of the spirit.

Warrior

Banners

We badly missed the mark with banner changes in the June update. We've gone back to the drawing board to be bolder with changes, add more powerful utility, and make banners easier to use. Each banner will now provide its most powerful boons immediately on use and have a much shorter base cooldown of 30 seconds.

 

To address situations where it felt like warriors needed to constantly adjust the positions of their banners, pulsing boons are now granted in an increased duration per pulse over a shorter amount of time. It will no longer be necessary to stand around the banner for its full duration to upkeep banner boons; duration will stack up more quickly. The reduced cooldowns allow warriors to frequently use their powerful boons on placement. The radius and duration of banner boons have been reduced to better reflect this more focused role. The previous ability for banners to grant quickness to allies has been moved to the Doubled Standards trait.

 

General Banner Skill Changes 

• Recharge reduced from 60 seconds to 30 seconds (except Battle Standard).
• Animation changed; casting time reduced by 0.2 seconds (except Battle Standard).
• Light combo field radius reduced from 600 to 360. Combo field duration reduced to from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
• Pulsing boon radius reduced to 360.
• Once placed, banners last for 15 seconds and can no longer be picked up.
• Banners no longer grant quickness on placement by default (except for Banner of Tactics in PvE only).
• Doubled Standards: This trait now grants quickness on banner placement, in addition to its other effects. Its description has been changed to clarify that boon duration increase only applies to the pulsing boons and not any other boons granted on the initial banner placement.

All banner skills (except for Battle Standard) have been reworked. They now grant different boons when placed, depending on the banner.

• Banner of Defense: Grants barrier and aegis to allies.
• Banner of Tactics: Applies stability and superspeed (and quickness in PvE only) to allies.
• Banner of Discipline: Damages and applies bleeding and crippled. This skill no longer creates a light combo field but acts as a blast finisher instead.
• Banner of Strength: Damages and dazes enemies. This skill no longer creates a light combo field but acts as a blast finisher instead.
• Battle Standard: Damage multiplier has been increased from 1.5 to 4.0 in PvE only. This skill no longer creates a light combo field but acts as a blast finisher instead.

Pulsing boons have changed to the following:

• Banner of Defense: Regen (4 seconds)
• Banner of Tactics: Resistance (2 seconds)
• Banner of Discipline: Fury (4 seconds)
• Banner of Strength: Might (10 seconds, two stacks)
• Battle Standard: Fury (6 seconds), swiftness (12 seconds), and might (12 seconds, two stacks)

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

08/02/2022—Late Notes

Living World 

• Living World Season 2 achievements will no longer require story replay for completion.

General

•  Players who are blocked will now be unable to add the player who blocked them as a friend.

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed two server crashes.

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a server crash.
• Fixed a client crash.
• Fixed an issue that prevented bladesworn warriors from using gunsabers in the Queen’s Gauntlet arena.