Guild Wars 2

So not fair. :’( I was trying to get in to work on it last night, but I kept getting stuck in overflow. I have such bad luck. lol
Are they going to do it again tonight?

The current kick method is screwy. I’ll leave the house for a McDonald’s run, eat, and be on the character screen when I come back. McDonald’s is less than five minutes from my house, so it’s maybe 30 minutes tops. But I can sit in Sparkfly for an hour without touching the keyboard, reading a book at my desk while I wait, and never get the dc message once.

Does that make any sense? Nope.

The last part is for doing the daily so many times I believe. And since we can only do each daily once a day, we have to wait at least four days (or three if we got in two yesterday) to get all the achieves. I have no idea for sure, but that’s how I think it works.

It would really help if the details on the achievement were more specific on that. :/

Fight Teq two more days in a row and it should be done. At least I think that’s how it’s going to work.

Not entirely true. I played all roles in WoW. For a while I was a kitten good tank, then I got tired of being nagged by guildies every time I logged in. So I played on a DPS toon for a while after that. Then I healed, and got pretty good at that too.

Do I miss the trinity? Yes and no.

Yes because I miss the fact that someone else can keep crap off of me, and I miss feeling that sense of accomplishment after we get through a tough boss and no one died on me once. No because it takes off the pressure from everyone.

Think about it. The tank gets crap if one really high DPS pulls aggro. So it must be the tank’s fault. Said DPS ends up dying, so it must be the healer’s fault. The boss goes down too slowly and causes the healer to run out of mana before the end, so obviously the DPS sucks. So with no trinity, there is less pressure on any one individual.

So basically, we have to keep ourselves alive and work as a team to get through dungeons. What’s wrong with that?

To me it looks like an issue with how much the computer can handle. I’m just guessing this by the fact that it seems to take so long for the Lion’s Arch map to load on the video.

Or it could be the internet connection at the time.

I’ve had the character not appearing issue a couple of times on my desktop when porting into Lion’s Arch, especially around the bank. I haven’t had any trouble on my laptop so far.

Did you look in your achievement menu? That’s where the luck bar is. Luck is the experience for your magic find. Once it levels up, we gain another magic find percentage.

I definitely agree about the mass guild message thing. That would help with a lot of things. Sure there are plenty of sites where leaders/officers can set up forums, but how often do members actually check those? The average player would rather just log into the game and get the info there. And the Message of the Day only holds so much.

Clearly there’s a problem here. Look at the time stamps. Seven minutes since the last message, and none of the names pictured were me anyway.

The excessive message warning is… excessive.

Well, we were going to just chop down some trees, but the poor thing was corrupted anyway. We just made use of the body.

lol Kind of a neat idea. Sad thing is, I made something similar for the front of my laptop. The edge of it dents my arm and sometimes bruises it after a while, so I made a little sleeve of sorts in the same way. Slides up about 2 inches or so and solves that problem.

Sure.

1. We killed the bacon.
2. We went to get some wood to build a fire to cook the bacon.
3. Troll stole the bacon, so we killed it.
4. Got fire pit from bandit lieutenant.
5. Chased wasp from fire.
6. Spider ruined bacon, so we had to kill it too.

Better? ;-)

Queensdale Rotation: A Story of Bacon

Written by:
Asteria Selene (me)

Concept by:
Asteria Selene
Nina Xelu
Caramon Mahjere
Fire Flamebrand

Do you ever wonder exactly why the champion rotation in Queensdale is BOTBS: boar, oak, troll, bandit, spider? It’s not because of convenience, my friends. No, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

You see, a bunch of us were hanging out at the Hunting Lodge in Queen’s Forest when Lodgemaster Carthage decided it would be a great idea for us to have some bacon. Now who doesn’t like bacon? So we all gathered our weapons and headed out to hunt a giant boar. It was a fierce battle, but in the end, we had our meat.

Now how to cook it? We all headed over to Greatheart Weald to get some wood for a fire. Sadly, one of the oakhearts had become corrupted and needed to be put down. We were less than happy to complete the chore. At least we had some wood.

When we returned to the Hunting Lodge, our catch had been stolen by a troll! We hurried to Altar’s Windings to get it back. Once that was finished, we decided to visit the bandit caves and borrow their firepit from thier lieutenant. It would be more than large enough to accomodate the huge boar. Unfortunately, the lieutenant thought we were there to take him to jail, so he attacked us. We had to kill him, but at least we got the firepit out of the deal.

Finally we were ready to cook ourselves some bacon. It seemed we wouldn’t have any peace after all. A huge wasp intruded once we began cooking. We chased it away from our fire, eventually managing to kill it. Our group had certainly worked up an appetite after all this unexpected fighting. Weary and wounded, we hurried back to our food only to find a giant spider beat us to it. Again, we fought to protect our bacon, but it was too late. The spider and its young ruined everything.

It was time to start over.

So there you have it: the reason for the boss rotation in Queensdale. It isn’t a random set of events, no. It’s a quest for bacon.

I wanted this on my Ele so much! lol My Engineer could use it too.

Pantsdragon.5703:

Yes…. video is a whole other ballpark. If only someone developed a fully functional model viewer.

lol Yes, that would be nice too.

Pantsdragon.5703:

Or you could use a photo-editing program. Even if you had a single-color background, no one in the right mind would use a quick and dirty method, which has the potential to leave behind so much stray pixels on a given pictures, for graphic or video purposes.
(I can only assume you’re planning on using a quick and dirty method such as using magic wand + delete, given the nature of the suggestion.)

If you really wanted to get a good quality cutout, I’d recommend using photo-editing software like GNU Image Manipulation Program, Paint.Net, or Photoshop, creating a layer mask with the hardness down to 50% or so, and then carefully block out the background and undesirable elements.

The current method I use for static images is similar to your suggestion. I just usually take the screenshot somewhere in Shiverpeak with a mostly white hill just behind the character. Then it’s a combination “quick and dirty”/“correct way”. (I generally don’t want to take the time I would need to do it the right way completely, so I cheat.)

For video, it’s a whole other ballgame. It’s much harder to get rid of all the little particles, especially the constantly falling snow. While it does work in a way, it makes for messy quality. I’ve tried using green hills also, but then to get rid of the more yellow shades, the chroma filtering on my video editor takes away pixels in the character’s skin too. Then there’s the darker shades of grass that end up taking away weapon and armor pixels, or darker hair. I’ve even added several different layers of chroma filters, but the results don’t differ much.

It would just be nice to have a quick fix for that. If not, oh well. There are ways to make do; they just aren’t ideal is all.

Agreed! And then give the people who already did it some sort of suitable compensation. Not sure what that would be though. shrug I know I’ll probably never get 100% as it is.

Hm… I like this idea.

Maybe is could be some kind of Asuran box thing (like the Adventure Box) that we could go into that has all four walls, ceiling, and floor in a single player chosen color. It would be awesome to have a background that is easy to “cut” our characters out of for graphic or video purposes. I for one could have way too much fun with that! :-D

I don’t like that whole d/d mentality either. I just prefer the staff. I actually decided to use the 0/0/10/30/30 before I started looking up ele info. lol It just seemed more logical for my play style.

I love to play support roles when I’m with other people, and the 30 in water helps a lot with that, not to mention my abuse of cantrips. Being able to switch back and forth between elements from the 30 in arcana makes a big difference too, especially with the boon applications. It does suck that we’re almost forced into that one just for the faster element changing. Unless you’re one of those that just sticks to one element, in which case, what would that matter?

I can’t stand the whole “you have to use this build or you suck” attitude. It drives me nuts. When I see someone talking/typing like that, I just speed read through the post and end up missing half of what they said anyway.

I don’t know about other people, but I had TONS of trouble staying alive on my ele until around lvl 45 or so. I’m not sure if it was just because she was my first character, was abandoned for several months at lvl 43, then returned to after my engineer was at 80 for a couple of months. The whole karka thing REALLY taught me how to dodge!

Hey, mods! This need to be a sticky!

I know, off-topic. But I think more than just noobs can benefit from this thread.

Which trait/skill give engineer 50%? I haven’t seen that. I just use the one that let’s kits grant swiftness when equipped. That’s just 33%. I’m curious now.

lol I agree about the gameplay of an ele. They’re just fun. I love my engineer with all her flashy grenades, but my ele is just more fun. Uh-oh! Health getting low! Switch to water, throw down a heal. A few seconds later, switch to something else, or pop a cantrip for more regen and protection. I generally run 0/0/10/30/30.

They do have their quirks and a few things could be changed, but overall I love how they play.

That was cute.

I don’t think we can embed things on the forum; I think all we can do is attach images. Don’t quote me on that; I’m not 100% sure.

Dude…. Where did you get that? So jealous! lol

lol That was kinda funny.

What server are you on? I was messing around killing stuff before Tequatl last night and saw a bunch of comments about a broom, but I didn’t see what was going on. That would be pretty funny if it was at the same time.

Episode 3 is up! Sage and Aisa are off to find a sword so they can teleport wherever they need to go. Humor is a bit lacking in this episode, but there really wasn’t much place for it this time. It’ll be back for Episode 4; don’t worry.

http://youtu.be/TECGYLSaSHA

Another agreement. ~_^ I love lots of emotes, and more dances would rock too.

Eldin.3429:

Give us scrunchies, or give us death.

I lol’ed at this one. More ponytail styles would be cool. I don’t like that the only human one is on the side, up really high, and very short. Pigtails don’t count.

Vayra.3290:

Thieves get 50% in stealth

I haven’t leveled a thief very high and didn’t realize that. Nice! Guess I’ll have to get her leveled just to play around with that. ^_~

I think the only idea I like is making summoned weapons like engineer kits. That would be pretty neat. The rest seems a bit overpowered to me.

I know, they’re really only situational and not as powerful as main weapons, but that’s to be expected really.

If you want them to stack as in 33% + 25% = 58%, then no, that wouldn’t be right.
If you mean just time stacking, then I haven’t noticed a problem with Swiftness stacking myself. As far as I know, there aren’t any classes that get a speed boost higher than 33% ever.

Wow. Very well done.

killeraled.1950:

yep agree:D. but weather also slows down most computers and you dont wanna lag in a fight so add a weather disable button so that person cant see the weather but everyone else that has enabled weather can see it.
night/day cycle is cool and darker nights is a good idea. but i want campfires that last untill day. a cheep item that you can buy to make nights epic. imagine pitch black and a little fire light then centars attack you

I love that idea! lol And I completely agree.

Cabalist. That set has to be one of my favorites. It’s sexy without showing everything off. I really love the style of the winged set, but to me it’s entirely too revealing in places.

Revealing does not = sexy

Maybe the boys/men like more eye candy for their females, but not that many women/girls do. More skins that are a bit less revealing would be awesome.

TheUndefined.1720:

These are just my opinions after playing the game since beta and some ways I feel GW2 can be improved.

Pros:

• Fun Whimsical Tone (dialogue, characters, objectives)
• Beautiful Artstyle
• Beautiful Characters
• Interesting unique combat goals (no trinity)
• Dodging
• Quaggans

Cons:

• Not enough weapon skill variety (few weapons are effective while others feel not effective at all)
• Not enough effective utility skills (per cooldown / damage / practical in game use)
• Not enough effective build variety
• Too many high risk monster abilities with little margin for mistakes
• No motivation for leveling
• Dungeons are not challenging or fun
• My character doesn’t produce any real change in Tyria
• Enemies are very 2-dimensional and not interesting
• Very disheartening rewards (horrible drop rates, no sense of achievement in downing bosses, etc)

I would like to keep this constructive so I’m going to point out some very small adjustments that could impact this game in a huge way.

First of all, as a gamer I feel communication in ANet is lacking among themselves and to their players.

• Example: Multiple times I’ve seen red posts completely contradict with other red posts, then corrected a few days later only to be totally retracted a month or two later.

I have no idea how difficult developing a game is, especially an MMO, but when I, as a player, get suckerpunched (so to say) with off the wall game adjustments or look forward to misinformation, that really falls on the team’s poor communication not only to the gamers but also amongst their team members.

How to fix it: I feel if everyone on the ANet team (even the little guys) were on the same page with changes and focused on priorities for the game it would reflect so well to players in general.

Secondly, while playing GW2 I feel the game is very unfocused. There’s so much to do everywhere at all times without a lot of direction. Between dungeons, jumping puzzles, dynamic events that randomly happen, dynamic events that can be initiated, dynamic events that can be prevented well it can all become quite confusing and overwhelming. The problem with this scatter-shot approach, I’ve found, is I end up missing a lot of what makes this game fun.

• Example: I’m just going to stick to dynamic events here since there’s so much in this post already. I can’t even remember the name of the event, but let’s start with the Orrian ship that attacks Fort Cadence in Sparkfly Fen event. That event took four people well over 15-30mins to complete. The rewards were absolutely inadequate for the deaths, armor repair, and time spent on the event but afterwards I felt I had achieved something. I saved the fort’s waypoint. Yay! Immediately after the event I waited a bit because I naturally wanted to put up defenses to help prevent the same battle from happening. Nothing triggered. Oh well. I continued questing for probably an hour and guess what? Yep, the ship event happened and the waypoint was lost. All the work I spent was for nothing. After similar situations, I just ignored the higher level dynamic events all together.

How to fix it: Please consider more substantial chains of events leading into dynamic events, quests leading into the dungeons (not just a letter in the mail), and giving a more fruitful backstory for these amazing jumping puzzles. I understand some events should be random but as a developer I can only assume you are asking me as a player to care about what happens in this game. Why else put these events in the first place? In the end events, dungeons, jumping puzzles, whatever are really difficult to care about when what I do does little to nothing in the end.

I could continue, but I’ll stop here since I believe I’ve rattled on enough. Small tweaks could edit a lot of the shallow experiences in game to really fulfilling gameplay.

Thank you. Just thank you.

Do I agree with all of what you said? Not really. But I love the delivery. A negative post that gets folks thinking instead of ticked off. (Or at least in my case it did.) Very well written.

Hey! The rest of you downers! Write like this guy and you won’t get bashed as much! I’m not being sarcastic; I’m serious.

Find an event that tons of people participate in. The dragons, Maw. People go down a lot in those. It’s easy to get all 10 in places like that without rezzing NPCs or suicide jumpers.

Um… You want me to take you seriously? “Tread” and/or “treat” has a completely different meaning than “thread”.

And back to my normal self.

There is a big difference between leveling in WoW and GW2. In WoW, you run through the levels as fast as you can to get to end game. All the content between is pretty much the same (with the exception of some of the dungeons and raids). In GW2, leveling is a main part of the experience. You aren’t meant to rush through it. When dealing with leveling, WoW is beer and GW2 is fine wine. With beer, you want to hurry up and get drunk. Wine you want to savor and enjoy.

Should GW2 have more to offer in the end game? Yes, I think it should. Do I expect it to happen instantly or even within the next few weeks? No. From what I understand, Anet is concentrating on the PvP aspect right now. Those players have been a bit neglected. Personally I can’t stand PvP, but I know there are plenty who love it.

joneb.5679:

Players are what make these games and player led content is what is necessary to keep it from going stale at end game and in between new content. I think when a character hits 80 and completes the story it should then ascend into a semi open world pvp status. The whole open world outside cities should then become a little more volatile but only if players choose to take part, marking themselves for pvp. Of-course there will be rewards for taking part so that a player kill drops good loot. Also organise areas around chests to become automatic pvp for level 80s so that to get a chest players will have to fight over it. Obviously you can only use the chest once that day with that character but you may choose to camp it and stop others getting to it which could initiate some fun scenarios even those not good at pvp could take advantage of.

More ideas along these lines that are not necessary but add an edge to exploring in the end game if players so choose.

Please no. PvP… I avoid like the plague. I really don’t like it at all. I love how it’s completely optional, unless of course I want to finish my monthly, which I usually don’t. A fix like this would almost make it required. Notice I said ALMOST; I know there’s still a choice.

lol I’m one of the unlucky ones, and I never thought “Foul!” Even running full magic find with magic find food, my luck doesn’t get any better. I have next to no luck with chests either. On the upside, when I salvage the rares I do get, I almost always get at least two ectos. I guess that’s a plus at least.

I completely agree about the random NPC conversations. I forgot where it was, but I was just hanging out at a vendor, selling/salvaging crap. Then the golem nearby starts talking to a deer. It was pretty funny.

Healix.5819:

From what little info google has on it, it seems legit. Note that it does not have the direct approval of ArenaNet. ArenaNet just allows parsing of their trading post website, which they could take away or limit at any point in time, which is what this program is relying on.

Is it worth it? From what I can tell from screenshots, it’s essentially just gw2spidy but it in real time and the profit margins are spelt out for you. They claim to refresh their data every minute, which is like 426 requests a second or 852 if they’re pulling all the data (assuming they are in fact using real time data and not ArenaNet’s cached data). They either have multiple accounts on different IPs to pull the data, or I wouldn’t doubt it if they get blacklisted by ArenaNet for spamming, which wouldn’t hurt you, but would cause a loss of service for the program.

But is it actually worth the cost? Well, from what I’ve seen, I made the same program in about 30 minutes, so probably not, so you’re basically just buying your way into their forums. For someone that doesn’t want to waste time looking through the TP and doesn’t know even basic programming (you could even write it in javascript), it’s probably worth it.

What it will get you: Assuming mine and theirs does roughly the same thing, the program will allow you to make around 100g a week, casually, as in you “play” the TP once, maybe twice a day for 10 minutes, with a very low risk of losing money, unless you’re intentionally being risky.

How about you post your little program for us to use? ;-)

If it wasn’t for the real money cost, I would be tempted to try it myself. I’d hate to pay real money for something that might soon fail.

I agree. I wish the cooldown was a bit lower on some of them. Others, like the engineer supply crate, I think are good to have on a longer cooldown. That one has a bit too much “oomph” to be used that often. Others, like some of the summons, don’t really add that much to the battle and should be on at least slightly lower cooldowns.

I like the idea of guild/group instances; that would be fun. Just like how story mode sections off a piece of the map, group instance could do the same. Perhaps not make them quite as hard as a dungeon, but they could be “challenge mode” for the normal chain events. That would be something extra at end game that I don’t think would take too much from a programming stand point. Just make the “magic find” chance higher in these instances.

Would this take away from the grind? Not really. It would just be one more thing to grind through really. But it would add some variety in the end game at least.

Very nice. I love the color scheme.

Nice. At first glance I thought she looked confused, then I looked again and actually clicked the attachment. lol

Good job though. It looks really nice.

Yeah, I really liked the character creation too.

Playing with friends… Yup. I play a lot with my husband. And many of our guildmates we know in real life. It’s more fun that way to me. These kinds of games are meant to be played socially, but Guild Wars is fun to solo also simply because it is so easy to run across people doing the same things as you. (Whoa. Bad run-on there.) The events make it easy to “group” with others, then move on. Because there is no mob-tagging, players are more likely to jump in and help one another with difficult enemies out in the world. And now I’m rambling. I will shut up now.

A wonderful drama free thread has suddenly stopped. Let’s bring it back!

Do any other MMOs have the rally feature? I think that’s another great addition. Yet another way to help out other players.

I really like the dynamic events. It just gives you one more reason to return to lower leveled zones.

Running around… Ooh! An event! More Karma and xp! lol

I’m not a fan of WvW either. Probably because I’m terrible at PvP no matter how hard I try. lol It’s like insta-death for me.