Guild Wars 2 Patch Notes: October 7th 2012 Update

Guild Wars 2 Patch NotesArenaNet have put another game update live, and this one contains quite the list of bug fixes including  a number of dungeon fixes.

Have a read through the patch notes in full:

General

  • Fixed a bug in targeting that was causing left-dragging to deselect/select targets incorrectly.
  • Fixed a bug in targeting that was allowing users to deselect all targets using the select next target functionality.
  • Fixed a bug with human female sword and pistol animations.
  • Fixed a bug that was causing quickness to get stuck on players and enemies indefinitely.
  • Fixed the Mystic Forge recipe for Melandru’s Gaze that was rewarding the Mystic Staff instead.
  • Fixed a potential bug with skill challenge conversations not closing for all parties speaking with the NPC.
  • Fixed a bug in weaponsmith Destroyer recipes being swapped for Valkyrie and Berserker weapons.
  • Fixed the Mystic Forge recipes for platinum and mithril ingot conversion taking cloth bolts instead of the appropriate ingots. This also fixes the issue with linen and silk bolt conversion recipes sometimes rewarding ingots.
  • Fixed the Mystic Forge recipe for Immobulus requiring a defunct item. It now requires giant eyes instead.
  • Fixed a bug with Rune of Divinity that was causing it to do 50% more critical damage than listed.
  • Removed laughing audio from crafting stations in Divinity’s Reach.
  • Raised the maximum karma limit.
  • Superior Rune of the Adventurer is now set to give 50% of endurance on heal.
  • The character select screen now reflects hidden armor choices.
  • Updated Rune of Earth and Rune of the Grove to have a 25% chance to grant 4 seconds of protection and 30-second recharge for superior runes, with 45-second recharge for major runes.
  • We’ve relaxed our anti-exploiting system for loot and events.

Camera

  • We’ve updated the camera to reduce the amount of camera smoothing currently in the game in order to lower the frequency of related bugs. We’re still looking into other camera issues, but we decided to make this quick change because it greatly improves the gameplay experience.
    Events
  • Fixed a bug that could block “Escort Order of Whispers agents to Jormabakke Stead” in Snowden Drifts from restarting.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause duplicate versions of Agent Briathell to spawn in Snowden Drifts.
  • Fixed a bug that could prevent the repair event for “Cascade Bridge” in Lornar’s Pass from triggering.

Dungeons

Caudecus’s Manor

  • Closed map exploits.
  • Updated the reward vendor for Caudecus’s Manor to include the missing exotic light helmet.
    Citadel of Flame
  • Closed map exploits.

Twilight Arbor

  • Upper Spider Path: Increased the attack range of the Nightmare Tree. The area attack and its effect now take place at the same location.
  • Nightmare Tree Spider Path: The area attack now correctly does damage at the point of the effect.
  • Forward Upper Husk Path: Added damage to the Nightmare Tree’s immobilize skill. Also added damage to the Nightmare Tree egg launch skill.

Story

  • Reduced the health of the final boss in “The Source of Orr.”
  • Forging the Pact: Implemented changes to ensure that the cave section completes reliably.
  • Pets and Walls Make Stronger Kraals: Fix for possible stall during the taming step.
  • Battle of Fort Trinity:
    • You cannot pick up the water orb until you defeat all of the saboteurs.
    • It’s no longer possible to trap players by closing the fortress doors on them.
    • Fixed a stall during “Retake the docks” objective.
    • Fixed a stall if players did not choose a greatest fear earlier in Chapter 7.
  • Lines of Communication: Batanga will now help you fight the Arcane Eye.
  • Fixing Blame: Warmaster Gurnn should now kick off his cutscene correctly.
  • Fixed a rare bug in “Shards of Orr” where Herboza would not become visible.

World versus World

  • The northernmost keep in all homelands has had its collision adjusted on the inner western gate.
  • Numerous items have been disabled for use in World versus World to prevent exploits and imbalances. This includes the Experimental Teleportation Gun, ettin gunk, drake eggs, seed turrets, and more.
  • Fixed WvW Orb of Power duplication on player disconnect.

Profession

  • Attributes gained from traits now apply to the downed state.

Elementalist

  • Glyph of Renewal: This skill will now revive downed allies only, not dead ones.
  • Signets of Earth, Fire, and Water: These signest have been updated to not fire at targets behind the player.
  • Signet of Fire: This skill is now able to hit targets at its indicated range.
  • Signet of Air: This skill now displays a hovering signet effect over the user when activated.
  • Whirlpool: This skill’s damage has been decreased by 33%.

Engineer

  • Grenade Kit: Grenade skills now have the same cast time underwater as they do on land.
  • Explosives Trait Grenadier: This trait now gives a bonus to underwater grenade skills.
  • Big Ol’ Bomb: This skill has been updated to be a blast finisher.

Guardian

  • We are moving towards retaliation being more of a counter to taking many hits rather than a general boon to keep up all the time. We also wanted to improve the combo finisher of the guardian, so we reorganized guardian greatsword skills to the following:
    • Skill 2: Whirling Wrath (10 second recharge)
    • Skill 3: Leap of Faith (15 second recharge)
    • Skill 4: Symbol of Wrath (20 second recharge)
  • Updated Bane Signet and Signet of Wrath so they can’t be fired at targets behind the player.
  • Updated Signet of Judgment to apply three seconds of retaliation upon activation with or without traits.
  • Decreased the activation time of Signet of Judgment.

Mesmer

  • Signet of Domination can no longer be cast on targets behind the mesmer.
  • Added a much faster breakout for mesmer underwater mantras.
  • Phantasmal Warlock: Increased recharge to 20 seconds.
  • Chaos Armor: Decreased recharge to 35 seconds.
  • Chaos Storm: Increased recharge to 35 seconds.
  • Phantasmal Duelist: Increased recharge to 20 seconds.
  • Phantasmal Swordsman: Increased recharge to 18 seconds.

Necromancer

  • Updated Chillblains to properly function with the Greater Marks trait.
  • Signet of Spite can now be cast while on the move.

Ranger

  • Crossfire: Increased casting time by 40 milliseconds. This was done to fix some glitches in the animation that caused problems with this skill.
  • Removed the broken audio that played with Natural Healing whenever pets were in combat.

Thief

  • Pistol Whip: Reduced damage by 15%.
  • Basilisk Venom: Increased stun duration to 1.5 seconds. Stun breakers now work on this skill.

Guild Wars 2 Patch Notes: 25th September 2012

Guild Wars 2 Patch NotesAnother big update from ArenaNet – kudos to them for the speed in which they’re getting a lot of these fixes in.

The full patch notes for you:

General
• Fixes to LOD on numerous objects in the world.
• Fixes to maps to prevent players from moving outside of the playable area.
• Fixed a bug that made pet footsteps excessively loud, especially in water.
• Fixed a bug with assists not working in keg brawl.
• Fixed numerous blocked events.
• Updated text and functionality when purchasing bank slots.
• Fixed loud sounds on portals to the Underworld in Godslost Swamp.
• Fixed several bugs that were preventing some skill challenges from resetting properly.
• All recipe items are now account bound. Many were previously soulbound.
• Updated Superior Rune of the Ogre Rock Dog so that it doesn’t summon when the player is underwater.
• Updated Sigil of Demon Summoning so that it doesn’t summon when the player is underwater.
• Summoned rock dogs and fleshreavers die when they enter water.
• Removed the lone 1 copper from city map completion rewards.
• Removed Mystic Forge recipes that were being used to reduce surplus supplies.
• Enemies in tutorial areas will no long drop loot. Instead, an award of 72 copper has been added to the rewards for completing the tutorial. This is to dissuade players from lingering in tutorial instances to farm the creatures in them.
• Obsidian Shards are now account bound.
• Box of Berserker’s Draconian Armor and Box of Rampager’s Draconian Armor now reward the proper items.
• Fixed various crash bugs.
• Added the rank 30-39 wolf finishing move.
• Fixed recipes for the Mystic Artifact, Mystic Barricade, and Mystic Trident.
• Fixed visible map completion percentage errors and the achievement not completing.
• Applied 10-second cooldown to Bowl of Saffron-scented Poultry Soup buff. This was done to keep elementalists from spamming condition removal with Signet of Restoration.

Black Lion Trading Company
• Added functionality and improvements to the Black Lion Chests, including a chance to receive new items like a permanent version of the Black Lion Trader Express.
• Black Lion Salvage Kits now properly display the correct percentages for rare materials.

Story
• Adjusted difficulty for the following story steps: “A Fragile Peace,” “Breaking the Bone Ship,” “Killing Fields,” “Political Homicide,” “Sabotage,” “Set to Blow,” “Stand By Your Krewe,” “The Ringmaster,” “The Stone Sheath,” “Track the Seraph,” “Unscheduled Delay,” “Unwelcome Visitors,” and “Welcome Home.”
• Fixed bugs in the following story steps: “A Fragile Peace,” “Against the Corruption,” “Bad Blood,” “Forging the Pact,” “Stand By Your Krewe,” and “Tower Down.”
• Fixed exploits in “The Sound of Psi-Lance.”
• End of Story Loot Bags:
o These have been improved to only give green or better gear of level 78 or higher.
o The number of bags received has been reduced from 5 to 3.
o More improvements will be made in coming weeks. Players who complete the story before the final update will be equally compensated once the new rewards are in.

Dungeons
General
• Updated vendors in the Ascalonian Catacombs and Caudecus’s Manor to sell level 80 versions of their unique skins rather than level 60 and 70. Players who purchased the level 60 and 70 versions will soon be given the opportunity to upgrade those to level 80 without having to use transmutation stones.
Citadel of Flame
• Fixed an exploit in Magg’s chain that was allowing players to skip the entire dungeon and still be rewarded.
• In Magg’s chain, if Magg happens to die in the lava field, he’ll teleport himself to the start of the area just outside it.
• In Magg’s chain, Magg must be much closer to things to draw their initial aggro. This only affects the escort to the magmacyte rock.
Caudecus’s Manor
• Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to skip content.
Honor of the Waves
• Fixed a bug in the Butcher’s chain that prevented a boss from spawning.
Arah
• Fixed a blocking issue.
Ascalonian Catacombs
• Fixed blocking bugs in Detha’s chain.

Dungeon Rewards
We’ve made some significant updates to dungeon rewards. I wanted to try and clarify them here. All of these changes have been the result of an original exploit which was letting players receive upwards of 20 levels by completing a single dungeon run. We initially closed this exploit, which caused some new problems. The result is this new system which should increase dungeon rewards for players who play though them normally but help curb inflation of rewards for those who are using exploitative methods to farm them.

1) Dungeon tokens are now rewarded at the end of an explorable chain. This was done to stop players from repeatedly entering a chain and farming the first boss that dropped tokens rather than playing the entire chain. At some point in the near future, we will make up for this by making dungeon tokens a rare drop so that even players who are not completing a chain can make partial progress toward the rewards.
2) Dungeons reward 20 tokens for completion and now reward an additional 40 tokens for the first time they are completed each day. This means that if players can complete all 3 chains of a dungeon in a day, they’ll receive a total of 180 tokens, which is enough to purchase some of the smaller rewards.
3) Dungeon tokens should be account bound. This will allow players to have a single character farm tokens for their other characters.
4) Last week, to limit the most extreme cases of dungeon speed-clearing, we introduced a system to limit rewards for rapidly repeating dungeon clears. However, a bug in that system caused it to impact more players than intended. This week, we’re updating the system to not impact clearing different chains of the same dungeon. We’ll continue to evaluate this system in coming weeks.

Professions
General
• Implemented a fix to make Heartseeker, Lightning Leap, Flame Leap, and Monarch’s Leap hit more reliably.

Elementalist
• Fixed bugs with Flamestrike and Ice Shards so they can’t be fired behind the player.
• Quick Glyphs: This Air Magic trait has been updated to apply 20% recharge reduction to the elite skill Glyph of Elementals.

Engineer
• Grenade Barrage: This Grenade Kit skill should now be usable underwater.
• Short Fuse: This trait is no longer overwritten by the Grenadier trait. Also, this trait now works with underwater grenades.
• Speedy Kits: Added a 5-second recharge to the trigger for this trait. This was to prevent players from exploiting it to gain vigor buffs of extreme duration.
• Invigorating Speed: Added a 5-second recharge to the trigger for this trait. This was to prevent players from exploiting it to gain vigor buffs of extreme duration.

Guardian
• Merciful Intervention: This skill has been updated to work with the Meditation Mastery trait. The tooltip for this skill has also been updated to display the healing amount when affected by traits.
• Elusive Power: This trait has been updated to not grant might when aegis was blocked.

Mesmer
• Fixed text on “readied” mantra buffs.
• Veil: This glamour skill has been updated to show the appropriate active duration when not affected by traits.

Necromancer
• Taste of Death: This skill’s healing fact has been updated.
• Spectral Wall: This skill has been updated to apply the correct amount of vulnerability (10).
• Vampiric: Fixed a bug with this trait so that it now functions with projectiles.
• Close to Death: This trait has been updated to provide its listed 20% boost instead of the previous (unlisted) 10% boost.
• Banshee’s Wail: This Curses trait has been updated to apply extra swiftness.
• Spectral Walk: This skill has been updated to be more active and to work properly with its recharge trait. Also, Sever Spectral Bond has been changed to Spectral Recall.
• Minion Master: This Death Magic trait has been updated to properly affect the elite skill Summon Flesh Golem.
• Putrid Mark: This skill has been fixed to make it properly unblockable with the Greater Marks trait.
• Mark of Evasion: This trait can now trigger the Soul Marks trait.
• Reaper’s Protection: This trait has been updated to properly work with a variety of crowd-control effects.
Thief
• Bountiful Theft: This strait has been fixed so that it doesn’t apply 15 seconds of vigor twice.

Races
Norn
• Call Wurm: Autocasting has been removed from this skill to prevent an exploit. Additionally, the skill may now be cast on the move.

Player versus Player
• Legacy of the Foefire: Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to teleport past one of the gates.

World versus World
• Experimental Rifle: This item is no longer usable in World versus World.

GW2 Patch Notes: 17th September 2012

The full patch notes for you from the latest GW2 game update – enjoy! :

General

  • Asuran players will now aim toward their targets when using a rifle.
  • Fixed various broken events and skill challenges.
  • Fixed various locations that allowed players to move outside the map.
  • Fixed various locations on maps where players could become stuck.
  • Discovery crafting may now use items directly from a player’s bank.
  • Fixed bugs in the Exploration achievement so players can now receive 100% map completion.
  • Added a system to limit the experience and gold that players can receive from speed-farming dungeons.

Story

  • Fixed bugs in “A Different Dream,” “A Fragile Peace,” “Dredging Up the Past,” “Forging the Pact,” “Pastkeeper,” “Ships of the Line,” “Stealing Secrets,” “The Priory Assailed,” and “The Source of Orr.”
  • Reduced the overall difficulty in “Dead of Winter.”

World-versus-World

  • Retaliation: This boon no longer reflects damage received from siege weapons.
  • The Experimental Rifle is no longer usable in World-versus-World.

Professions

Warrior

  • Smoldering Arrow: This skill’s casting time has been reduced.

Mesmer

  • The Prestige: This skill now requires full recharge if it’s interrupted at any time.

Thief

  • Descent of Shadows: This trait’s effect can now only trigger once every 8 seconds.

Engineer

  • Rocket Boots: This skill is no longer usable underwater. This is a temporary change until we can figure out why players can launch themselves into the sky using this skill.
  • Detonate Mine Field: This skill is no longer a blast finisher.