Caelin.9167

So here's another example I noticed from the new content. Apparently I cannot account unlock the portal from Lion's Arch to Wizard's Tower simply by completing the story one time and using it. Same thing from Beacon of the Ages to WT. It only works for the toon that completed the story. You can go from WT to BotA, but you cannot go back. Why would you do that? Do you really expect people to complete the entire story on ALL of their toons? That's completely unrealistic. It amounts to character-binding instead of account-binding. Again, it feels like some ex-Blizzard employees have invaded and are imposing this mindset more and more often. This is the wrong direction.

The difference in terms of quality of life often looks something like a really challenging boss fight versus a really challenging to use mount. To return to the WoW example: slow mounts or obscure locations that take forever to get to. Travel time is not challenging enjoyable content, it's just difficult to manage. Developers often use their ability to dictate the world the player has to travel through as a replacement for creating actually challenging content to play. It's the difference between fun gameplay and simply tedium that keeps people in front of a screen longer. The Offensive/Defensive bot charge thing is an example of completely unnecessary tedium. Gyala Delve's long upward turtle march is another. There is no challenge. It's just slow and tiresome. It took me 3, maybe 4, times to be completely sick of it and wishing I didn't have to do more to complete the achieves. My strenuous advice to you: stop following development style #1 and refocus on #2 like the original GW2 crew did. Change the cultural mentality of the developers to make challenging/fun gameplay the priority, not challenging/difficult world physics. Perhaps not surprising to readers at this point: I haven't played much this past year. I came back to get the new content going. My legendary runes are a lot less useful I notice. And despite having waited a while already the legendary relic isn't available yet. (How long is that annoyance going to be imposed on us?) What's more, the relics are kind of awful for PvE. Just looking at power there are only 2 options really. The good condi one frankly is only good if you apply a lot of bleeds or are in group play, and requires you to buy it. (Again, when's the legendary relic coming so I don't have to squander currencies? No matter, I'll just disappear for a few more months until it's out. That's not a passive-aggressive joke. I'm serious. I'm going to get the masteries and most achieves and then I'm out. I'm not bothering to fix all those 27 toons' builds without a legendary. We're talking many builds on each of 9x OW/Raids, 9x Fractals, 9x WvW. Not happening.) And the really painful kicker - the reason I decided to write this post - is that these crappy relics killed a whole lot of my builds. I have builds for various purposes. In a raid I don't need to provide myself with most boons unless I'm playing a boon giver class. But in OW - which is what I'm doing with the new content right now - I make sure my toons can provide themselves with at least Fury and some Might. So... what happened to Pack Runes' special? What happened to Fireworks'? It seems solo players (including anyone doing map completes for Gifts of Exploration) were forgotten about and got the shaft with the relics. Seriously, I was looking at my Reaper and the build is basically unchanged except now I'm on Dhunter runes with a relic that doesn't give me Fury anymore. I have no personal source of Fury? Except to take the Fear trait? Who wants that? I don't want mobs I'm about to kill to run away from me. I want them grouped. I can't have 100% crit uptime? At least, not without a group? This is insane. The only choice here is to always go back to Arborstone/Echovald every 2 hours and spend 10 minutes rebuffing the Offensive boons so I have some sort of source of Fury. You see? It's no longer optional. In the old days I'd simply let the buff run out and not worry about it. Half the time I wouldn't bother getting it at all. Now on my necro I have no choice. I haven't looked to update all my toons yet but I imagine the necro won't be the only one that gets screwed here. With these relic options the power creep is now fixed into the game. And as long as that's the case, y'all might as well just have those things sitting by any waypoint in all EoD+ maps (and frankly, by at least one WP on all OW maps). And keeping with style #2 you should make it take a single charge to get 2:15 because the tedium of buffing that stuff up is so blatantly bad for gameplay QoL. Especially considering if you enter any instance it gets stripped away. (Did y'all make it persist after the instance yet? You should do that with all buffs that get stripped anywhere. WvW'ers get screwed on that quite a bit.) Another example of more tedium are the daily system changes. It is noticeably more difficult to do dailies. To the point that I look through the list and sometimes just Nope. That mini dungeon in Echovald? Nope. What happened to the one in Queensdale? Now that was nice and quick. Y'all made them harder and more time consuming. How about that WvW defend one? I spent 15 minutes defending SMC the other day - fighting the whole time - before I finally got credit. I know you didn't want to reward the AFK'ers anymore, but it's ridiculous how hard it is to get defense credit for daily/weekly achieves. I can't even figure out what exactly the requirements are other than a kill seems to be one of them. I don't play the game to do dailies. Nobody does. They are a semi-necessary evil in order to make money. Here's what I'm getting at: 10 mins for home instance, 5 mins guild hall nodes, 5 mins in Drytop for quartz, 5 mins for Matriarch, maybe another 10 mins on the really quick S03 and S04 dailies worth doing. The old dailies could usually be folded into all that fairly easily. Now it's more like 15 mins WvW and 10 minutes OW dailies. I can easily spend an hour and not have done anything fun yet. And festival dailies are fairly constant as well. Now there's a mandatory (for some toons) 10 mins to get jade bot buffs. It used to be something like a half hour on basic money/daily stuff which was manageable. Now it's closer to an hour which is not. I don't bother much anymore. This all is going in the wrong direction. Clearly there are some specific suggestions above. But the real point I want to make is one of mentality. I feel like GW2 has taken the road most travelled recently when they used to be on a better path. The drive should be towards removing obstacles to the gameplay people want, not inventing new ones. Thanks for your time.

I don't post often, so this will be long. Mods, please pass this along to relevant developers/managers. Thanks. There are two (semi-) competing theories in game design. 1. Keeping eyeballs on the screen always eventually leads to income. The idea being that it doesn't matter how you keep a person playing, just so long as they're playing. If they play, eventually most will fork over some cash. There are games that ascribe to this theory that deliberately tap into compulsive behavior and addiction-oriented brain chemistry (reward response). MMOs tend not to focus quite so heavily on this sort of thing as say a slot machine, but elements certainly still apply. 2. Quality of play matters more. The former seems to have a good short-term financial value, but people tire of repetitiveness, grow weary of spending money, and of course, there's the diminished reward response that sucked them in in the first place. This begs the question for major franchises: how to keep people ingame permanently? Usually, developers turn to the above theory, but the correct answer - obviously beyond keeping things fresh with new content - is to not annoy your players with repetitive nonsense. When I first came to GW2 I thought, "Here's a game created by developers after my own heart!" All currencies are account bound, for example, so players don't have to waste time moving currency between toons by some tedious method. Same story with crafting materials. No endlessly shifting of mats around. Some games consider making players spend hours fussing with this a good thing. It keeps them in front of the screen after all. But even the most fastidious of organization-obsessed players will tell you that that that sort of thing gets old really fast. Even people who usually thrive on that dopamine end up hating it. That is why theory 1 is just plain stupid. Sure it works for awhile, but not for long. Players who grow too annoyed leave, and many will never return. If they do, they often may play new content for a bit but will soon say to themselves, "Oh yeah, now I remember why I left." The better option is not to simply make addictive content, but to make fun content. It's all about quality. WoW, for example, does this well, but unfortunately they pair it with a lot of grind, and a ridiculous amount of travel time (at least historically). Travel time is not fun content. The original GW2 crew knew this so they put waypoints everywhere. Fractals are super quick dungeons with little downtime between bosses. Smart. Another WoW problem (at least as I recall) was that they added a lot of buffs that you can acquire, but if you were going to go raid you had to prep several yourself, and go do various events around the world in order to have them. You could literally spend an hour just buffing up (repetitive boring content) BEFORE you ever got to the fun content you were after. Dumb. I point all this out because it seems like Anet has hired a bunch of Blizzard coders. Things are getting way more like game style #1 and a lot less like game style #2. Some examples: A) I have to park my toons in Arborstone to get the rested XP buff. I can no longer park them where they are most helpful like sitting on chests or at a flax farm, or convenient like at the raid portals, if I want the buff - which of course I do. Now I have to teleport around adding load times (and server load) to everything I do. Additionally, why would any player buy access to Lily of the Elon or any of the others if they have to park their toons in Arborstone? B) If I want the Seitung Province training heart XP buff - which of course I do - I have to teleport to Seitung, spend 10 minutes buffing up, then go wherever I'm headed. C) If I want the EoD Offensive/Defensive Jade Bot buffs - which of course I do - I have to hop out of Arborstone into Echovald, take ziplines and grab batteries, go back into Arborstone, return, repeat. 10 minutes. To make matters worse, the first buff takes annoyingly longer than the additional. And even more infuriating is that while the max is 2hr 15min, if I end up with 2hr 4min, I can't simply top it off and cap out at 2:15. Oh no. It stays at 2:04. Of course, somebody thought it would be a good idea to consume the charge anyway - which means they were either horribly lazy, or they were outright intentionally making things annoying for the players (if so fire them, they are costing you players). In the end the player is forced to decide if they want to leave right away or wait around for 4 minutes so they don't have to interrupt play so soon to come back and rebuff. Which of course, people also have to do, or choose to go without. The feeling is something like this, "Oh my buffs are gone. Ugh." That's what this buff system in lieu of direct power creep has imparted on your players - every 2 hours or so. None of these are at all enjoyable for players. The last two are particularly burdensome. I'm sure some are saying that those are all entirely optional. Well, I would agree, but C isn't anymore. More on that in a bit. Part of the problem is that game developers are essentially playing 2 roles. First, they're the Game Masters a la D&D. They're the people pitting monsters against the rest of the players. Second, they're the people who are writing the rules of D&D altogether. These are definitely not the same roles. GM's have to abide by the rules of the D&D world as designed by the authors just like the party members have to. They are not allowed to bend the rules whenever it suits them. They can't for example change the laws of physics. In video game development, however, the devs can do that anytime they wish.

Clearly, whoever made this decision does not. How many years have people been complaining about this? How long have you been working on the armory and nobody took the time to fix this? And it is about **fixing** it. I don't want to have to make all my toons a ghostly puke color just so that soon-to-be completely unavoidable effect doesn't make my toons look ridiculous. I don't care that much about the Fashion Wars, but making everyone in the game use the exact same effect is mindbogglingly indifferent of company that is trying to profit from selling skins for different looks. Seriously, I'm amazed by this choice. This was the time to do it, and the decision came down to skip it yet again... and presumably forever. Just wow. As to the technical difficulties, I still fail to see the big issue. Why not code up a different toggle for just those 3 items? If it's checked then you get the buff, if it's unchecked then no buff. Insert the on-off toggle on the buff activation, not the effects. No recoding of effects necessary. Or, at a lazy bare minimum, add a toggle to turn the whole thing off for all equipped trinkets of this set no matter how many there are. Is that the "significant engineering investment to build a one-off solution" you're talking about? That seems like the quick and dirty option to me. The bosses said no anyway? Too much time to invest in making everyone happy eh? Just wow.

As has been reported here, here, and here the Kasmeer chain that is needed for the Teacher's Assistant achievement seems to be permanently or nearly permanently bugged. There seems to be just 1 open map (IP: 35.171.180.220:0) for Grothmar and as of today this is the fourth day that 5 cubs have been stuck in the same place. Before that it was bugged in different places every day or two going back almost a week. I presume because those maps closed to reset it. As other threads suggest, this does NOT get fixed with daily resets. It is either the first or second event in the chain that is getting stuck, I'm not sure which. I am aware that the Doomlore chain can get bugged in a similar way, but at least those events will time out. Could someone at Anet please either start manually resetting this on a regular basis, add a timer to the Kasmeer events so if they do bug they will time out, or look into the cause of this bug and fix it? Thanks. IP: 35.171.180.220:0Event Chain:Help the cubs defeat Kasmeer's illusions!--> Help the cubs defeat illusory foes to build warband cohesion------> Defeat the very real devourer before the cubs are forced to retreat!

This is the third day the 5 cubs have been standing in the same spot. It does not get fixed at reset. Could an Anet employee start going in there and resetting it for us please?

This is the third day the 5 cubs have been standing in the same spot. It does not get fixed at reset. Could an Anet employee start going in there and resetting it for us please?

I have been in this map multiple times during the day for the last 5 days and Kasmeer has been bugged in different places the entire time. It's getting bugged every day and remains that way.

I have been in this map multiple times during the day for the last 5 days and Kasmeer has been bugged in different places the entire time. It's getting bugged every day and remains that way.

What was the point of giving us a preview if not to get feedback from the player base? Why get feedback if Anet is just going to ignore it? I mean ffs, they didn't even increase the max number of slots, the topic of so many forum posts. It's absurd. Same story with the outrageous pricing. The obtuseness of these decisions is dumbfounding. This is truly the first time I'm absolutely irate at Anet. No more money for you guys. You lost a loyal customer today.

I have some suggestions for the Anet devs regarding the new build templates. ==== Intro Stuff ====If I purchase an additional build template slot, will that slot be attached to only one character or will it unlock an additional template for all my characters? That is, the preview shows three locked character build templates, if I purchase an unlock, does that 4th slot only unlock on one toon or all my toons? If it's attached to a specific character, can I chose to move it to a different toon later on if I decide to shelve the first toon after a nerf? For the remainder of this discussion I'm assuming the answer is that it only unlocks on one character and that I cannot move them. ==== Suggestion 1 ====Anet ABSOLUTELY needs to keep ArcDPS's template functions active for at least a couple weeks so people can load their templates from there and save them into the new ingame templates. There are going to be a lot of irate players if they can't get their current templates out of Arc and they have to rebuild them all from memory. I'm getting old. I don't remember anything. Please be kind. A couple weeks' grace period won't affect the company's ultimate bottom line. ==== s2 ====Speaking of irate... I do hope that while deciding how much this is going to cost us per slot y'all take into account the fact that certain professions like Warriors have viable condi and power builds and also play multiple roles. That confluence creates lots of builds. For instance, I have both a condi and power build for Fractal banner slave, then a condi and power build for Fractal DPS (for when another Warrior is banner slaving), then a similar 4 builds for raids, then an additional variation of both that includes tactics [now defunct], then a power build for Fractal Spellbreaker. Then there's a condi and power DPS for Open World play. And that's just PvE. Beyond that is a WvW commander Spellbreaker, a WvW zerg support Spellbreaker, a WvW zerg DPS, a WvW solo roaming DPS. And then there's PvP which I don't really do. That's 17+ builds for my Warrior alone. ArcDPS is free. I'm sure Anet will be making them take down their loadout support to protect their profits, so when the powers that be at Anet decide how much to charge I hope they keep in mind exactly how many builds some people run on each toon and that right now everyone is used to having all this functionality COMPLETELY free. The potential for people rage quitting over "yet another microtransaction-happy money-grubbing game company" that already charges a fixed purchase price is quite high on this one. I don't mind throwing y'all a few bucks here and there, but do consider the sheer number of slots some of us are looking at with this. Disallowing a free version of the same (possibly better?) thing (I'm not trying to be mean here but I'm really thinking ArcDPS's method was probably more convenient - see s3 below) and forcing us to pay exorbitant fees to replace it feels a bit like we're having our current hassle-free gameplay taken hostage. My suggestion is to heavily discount tabs right off the bat and give us current players a good chunk of free ones to begin with (free character tabs, not just free account tabs). Three tabs isn't even enough for the professions I don't play much (I think I have at least five builds on each toon). It's nowhere near enough for the ones I do play all the time. I'm facing having to buy tons of these things, and like I said, I'm used to all this functionality being completely free. I'm not rich. I better not have to spend all the gold I've saved from the past year just to get set back up again to where I currently stand with ArcDPS. I'm really not kidding here. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me stop giving a company any money ever again on general principle... especially considering I recently spent a lot of gems buying bag slots to hold all my gear whose sale in the gemstore I was anticipating all year and whose slots are now being rendered superfluous. So let's take a conservative (for me anyway) average of 9 builds per toon times 9 professions less the 3 automatically unlocked character tabs per toon. 9 9 - 3 9 = 54 tabs I have to buy. (Let's also ignore the need for a few more equipment build tabs for various toons.) Even at just 200 gems that's 10,800 gems, more than 4000 gold at current exchange rates. Or, alternately, well over $100 USD. Let's say you bump the initial tabs to 6 instead of 3. 9 9 - 6 9 = 27 tabs. That's still 2000 gold. I have maybe 1000 gold if I liquidate a lot of stuff and abandon all my goals for future advancement. How much gold do you plan on sucking out of my meager savings? How far back do you think it's reasonable to set my progress which I finally achieved after a year and a half of play? All for something that is essentially a standard quality of life improvement stored in a simple text/xml save file on the client side or single database entry server-side that I currently enjoy for free already. I hope that puts into perspective people's fears that your company might have turned horribly cynical in terms of cash grabbing. I fully understand that the suits want to charge for convenience options like this, but I suggest they provide a good number of free slots from the start and heavily discount additional ones for several weeks. Let the big profits from this come later as new people join the game and old players slowly add more slots to their accounts. Don't make all the current users of ArcDPS hate you. ==== s3 ====Currently ArcDPS is (usually) smart enough to handle conflicts between weapons and trait lines. For instance, a specialization like Chrono can hold a shield, so you cannot equip a shield unless you have already set the trait line to Chrono. Arc would handle the weapon swap and trait swap seamlessly. With a system that separates gear loadouts from build loadouts there are going to be problems. I know you've coded to gray out an equipped weapon's skills that have been rendered unusable, which is fine, but the issue leads to what I think is a better and much more useful suggestion. I'd suggest that a drop down box be added to the trait/utility build tab which, if the user so chooses, allows them to select an equipment build to attach to the trait/utility build. That way when the user selects their trait build it will automatically handle the equipment/weapon/rune/sigil swap as well. Separating the equipment from the build seems like it allows more functionality, but I think it's going to cause a much greater headache for people with many specialized builds. This also solves the problem of separation between item-based loadouts and freely changeable trait/utility loadouts mentioned in the stream. Devs would simply add a field to the build database entry that a bit of code can check and then also load the attached equipment loadout. It also removes the need for an additional set of keybinds. Put simply, I really like having the whole thing taken care of with one click, not having to figure out which equipment build is supposed to go with which traitlines, and still possibly having to personally deal with weapon choices. For example, I have two very similar Scourge builds for WvW: one for scepter and one for staff. The build change is entirely focused on the difference between those two weapons. Separating the equipment from the trait line defeats the purpose of having a single loadout. As it stands it seems I'm still going to have to keep my weapons in my bag and hand swap them. It's really only 2 traits and a weapon or two. I might as well just swap it all by hand if I'm having to load 2 different tabs in the UI anyway. That example is certainly trivial, but think of the difference in gear swaps that are attached to open world versus boss fighting environments? It's the difference between wanting expertise gear and similar traits versus pure condi damage, and the equipment and trait builds will naturally always be swapped together. ==== s4 ====Make the maximum number of tabs in all cases really huge. Six per toon is ridiculously low. Laughably. Seriously. Let the user choose how they want to use this new interface. Either a ton of account-bound slots, a ton of character-bound, or a mixture of both. Let us choose what we think works best for us. In the case of my previous suggestion with attaching equipment to a build, lots of character-bound slots with attached gear slots makes the most sense to me, but I only really use one character of each profession. On the other hand, I suspect people who have many toons of the same profession will prefer more account-bound slots. Give the user the choice and don't lock us into any one method. From what I gather from the preview here is what will happen. I will fill 5 slots on my Warrior with my most frequently used builds. The other 12+ will have to go into the account-bound slots. Whenever I want to use those I will have to load it into the sixth character slot and activate it. After I'm done I'll delete it from the character slot to make space for the next time I need something different. This is going to be a pain. Ideally, make each tab slot unlock we buy in the store a generic unlock that can be applied to any of the character build, account build, or character equipment build types. Then allow us to freely move free/empty slots between any build type we like. This way people don't get screwed with a bunch of empty unlocks on a toon that got nerfed and they no longer play. They could just drag-drop the slots to make them account builds, switch toons, then drag-drop to whichever build slot on the new toon they like. Preventing this might seem like a good way to make more gemstore bucks, but the plainly obvious effect on players' gameplay will be to stifle willingness to try new toons and new builds. People already quit games when nerfs disable their favorite professions, you don't want to add another incentive for people to go play other games rather than change things up. Beyond that, the fact that GW2 is so cheap to set up a new toon compared to many other games has been one of its biggest selling points to me, and no doubt to many other players. You really don't want to hinder this. Options, options, options. That's how you keep people playing your game for years on end - and spending real dollars over the long term. ==== s5 ====As of now we have equipment only handled on a single character at a time. I understand the reason for this choice on the devs' part from a coding standpoint. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is horrible from a user-friendliness standpoint. This has always stuck out to me as GW2's one major flaw. Currently, if a player wants a legendary weapon or armor on 2 toons they have to unequip -> move items to shared inventory assuming they have enough free spaces, which is highly unlikely with a whole set of armor plus trinkets plus weapons plus runes/sigils... so really we're talking about the user traveling their toon to a bank -> deposit -> switch toons -> also travel the receiving toon to a bank -> withdraw -> equip -> set the build -> then travel their toon to wherever it needs to be to actually do something fun in the game. And it usually entails other people waiting around impatiently twiddling their thumbs while the player does all this. This is horribly clunky and burdensome, and with the cost and time needed to create legendary weapons and armor it is unlikely that players will create multiples of the same type of legendary gear, one for each toon, so we all have to do this moving process. Even sets of ascended Minstrel/Viper's gear is too cost-prohibitive to have multiple sets from the same armor class. Now that the devs are creating a separate inventory-unspecific storage I think y'all really need to take some time while the code is still fresh in your minds to find a way to make this storage account-bound instead of character-bound. Consider this: is it really reasonable to expect us, the players, to create 9 sets of legendary armor (1 for each profession) just so we can easily switch characters and gear without wasting 5-10 minutes between every fractal? It took me over a year to get my first legendary armor set. It'll be at least another 1.5 years to have one of each armor class. Assuming no more professions get added, how many years until I have a set for all 9 professions? It's not really feasible until someone has been playing for many years and is working towards all possible legendary sets simultaneously. And that's not even bringing into account the limited availability of legendary trinkets, or the high cost of legendary weapons. Having 9 sets of legendaries is an insane expectation that can be fixed by simply making the new equipment templates take gear from an account-wide storage space/armory - say something like a new gear-only bank space with 200+ slots (probably via a separate database table or perhaps by new fields attached to the current account entry). All gear/trinkets/weapons/runes/sigils/infusions would be stored here. Thus, a player would only have 1 set of medium ascended Minstrel's, 1 of Viper's, 1 Zerker, etc. And they would have 1 set of such trinkets as well. (Or perhaps a couple sets with different infusions for WvW vs fractal AR.) When a user loads into a toon, the game looks for the last used gear template, grabs the gear from the armory, and equips it automatically. When they log out of a toon it returns the gear to the armory so the next toon can use them. (Honestly, a dynamic linking system would make more sense rather than an unnecessary removal/replacement method unless the coder really wanted to reuse the old code instead of rewriting, but that's a question of efficiency I can't really guess about.) Legendaries would be handled the same way with obvious advantages to the user. Same story with harvester tools (this is important! stop making us swap these every character change! get the damn things out of our shared inventory already!). This game is great for making so many things account bound, that this is a blaringly obvious weak spot that stands out to anyone who has been playing for even a short while. It's a huge waste of time that takes away from actual fun gameplay, the sort of fun that keeps people coming back. A standard rule of user interface design, particularly regarding games, is that if a coder can spend a few dozen man-hours to remove a burden from the users that causes them to waste hundreds or thousands of man-hours in tedious repetitiveness, it is worth the cost on quality of life grounds alone. Consider: 5-10 minutes several times an hour between fractals/raids/WvW situations/PvE situations/et al., multiplied by thousands of users per hour, multiplied by 24 hours in a day, multiplied by however many days this game has been active... versus how many man-hours to code and debug this? The devs said the inventory handling coding is messy, but the value added of templates with an account-bound armory like I suggest is enormous. Please give it some thought. ==== s6 ====I'm really not sure why the devs don't want people to be able to change builds on the fly in WvW and PvP. Getting out of combat and changing to a different build, then returning to the fight and attacking a foe with a more effective counterbuild is precisely the sort of surprise tactical advantage whose well-timed use WvW thrives upon. Does entering combat with someone and being forced to run away to break combat long enough to change loadouts somehow assign your opponent the right to kill you in the same method until you get to a keep? They tag you a bit and now they own the right to re-engage and finish you with exactly the same tactics if they chase you across the map and finally catch up to you? All this really does is delay the ability of people to adapt to their situation. Quick adaptation is often the hallmark of good players. I feel like all this does is allow gank artists to more easily kill zerg build players running back from respawn, which is already a real annoyance for every zerg fighter (I'll digress a second to say that this new Warclaw Lance ability is the same nonsense; please stop catering to the PvP whiners who complain about not being able to gank WvW zergers with their specialized 1v1 builds, this is already far from a level playing field; there is a place where it's fair, it's called PvP, let them go there). The person who can adapt the best to a rapidly changing situation should be rewarded, not doomed. Same thing with entire zergs switching builds quickly to perfectly adapt to an opponent zerg. I really don't see the purpose of this limitation, and its effect seems to dumb down gameplay rather than improve it. I'd say just make the rule that if a player can exit combat and change their build before getting jumped again, they should be able to do so, just like is currently the situation with swapping weapons/traits/et al. by hand. If someone is chasing you, you break combat, change builds, and they jump on you again without a bit of caution then they get what they deserve. ==== Complements (aka Blatant Brown Nosing) ====I really like a lot of what you've done. I know this post might appear pretty negative, but really it's meant to suggest ways to improve and explain why. I do really like the build linking and I LOVE the build inspection window. Good idea including the build sorting options. Great job with the copy/delete/etc. options. It looks like you've anticipated a lot of situations, like for instance the need for an 'Unequip From All Equipment Templates' option. And seriously big props for including keybinds. The whole interface looks pretty smooth and intuitive. I really mean this when I say that after coming from other games, Anet's programmers clearly have their heads screwed on straight. You pretty much always see the big picture and account for all the edge cases well before going live. Sometimes you avoid the major reworks, but nowhere near to the degree of half-assed solutions I so often see in other games. The fact that rather than do things the easy way you usually do things right the first time is one of the reasons I'm still playing this game after a year and a half. Thanks for that, and keep up the great work.

This is more a request for a change than a bug fix. I use Action Camera (the camera follows the mouse at all times). In WvW it gets me killed much too often. No doubt this problem exists because when Action Cam was added to the game they didn't alter the code to deal with these scenarios: 1) I'll be fighting and an objective gets taken by my team. At this point the dialogue for claiming the objective for my guild pops up on the left hand side of the screen. This wouldn't be a problem except that it also pops me out of Action Cam and my mouse cursor goes free. If I'm fighting for my life, the delay while I suddenly have to take my fingers from combat keys to go press the Toggle Action Cam key and then get them back where they're supposed to be is more than enough to get me killed, not to mention that I'm suddenly not targeting directly in front of me but somewhere else. It's especially annoying when some camp or keep I passed through an hour ago suddenly gets taken by someone else and boom there goes my control. 2) Similarly, if I've placed myself in map queue to transfer to a different map, when my turn comes Action Cam toggles off, a popup appears in the middle of the screen, and now not only do I have to deal with trying to get my game to work right again in the middle of a fight, but I also have to deal with this dialogue box right where I'm looking and trying to focus my damage. You guys really need to fix this. I've been complaining about it since I started WvW. Yesterday, my friend and I were about to win a little 2v2 roaming fight (1 guy was already down), when my q popped. It turned the fight around as I dropped a bomb out in no man's land after my targeting switched to free cursor mode. I had to drop q so I could get back to fighting normal, but it was too late. We didn't take the camp, died, and lost our spot in q. I absolutely blame the fact that my cursor quit behaving like I'm used to, and had a transfer box in my face so I couldn't see. This is not the first time this nonsense has happened. And it always feels like a bad beat, like I got completely screwed. Please change the code so these dialogues stop stealing my cursor focus, and please move the map change dialogue box to the side somewhere. Thanks.