Guild Wars 2

DietPepsi.4371:

I’m impressed. How did you manage to replicate her soo well?

I took two screenshots of her face and put them up on my 2nd monitor. This was done a couple of months after launch, so those makeover kits didn’t exist then—had to do it in the character creator. I could change it to be an exact match, but I kind of like there being a little variation. The biggest difference is her size: mine is max size and bulk while Almorra is a rather small Charr by comparison.

Talonblaze.3175:

Haha the sneaky buggers equipped Heritage gauntlets on her though. Came close, would fool most people at first sight. Kudos.

Yep, in that shot I still had those gloves. These days I generally run her around in a combination of T3 and Vigil, though I do have the full set of Vigil now. Regardless, that’s still the funniest shot of her! XD

Almorra is probably my fav Major Charr NPC all around.
It’s kind of surprising how good some of the NPCs look if you pay attention in your travels. Another one I like is Crea Irontooth (CoF P1).

I’ll bite. Guess which one’s mine? =p
(There's a pretty easy clue!)

Xyonon.3987:

Want an Iron Legion one for my Ing

Iron Legion one is available from Crucibis Forgeweld in the Charr level 1-4 area (Gunbreach) just outside the east Citadel gate.

It’s about time. The “Ash Legion Shield” you used to get was a blank one, even though your warband support heavy had it. Thanks for bringing it up.

Tei.1704:

Rednik.3809:

This is IRL military practice btw. All those armored bikinis are fictional.

First, the entire game is fictional. Second, you’re missing a key word from the OP. He said “always.” Charr are not always on duty, and this is especially true for the player characters.

Technically speaking, “always” is not true. It’s true for all the original armor in the game, and for what you see NPCs wearing (cultural casual clothes both available and unavailable to the player). However, the townclothes released over the past year do indeed switch to the female human version for female Charr in the cases of some shirts and the shorts.

So if you want to have that look in townclothes, the option is kind of there. I personally think the frilly low-cut shirts look ridiculous on Charr, but far be it for me to tell you what you like.

Obviously, he’s Game Genie®, the radical video game enhancer.

Go to any level, jump higher, stay bigger, live forever.

I spend a huge amount of time in the Black Citadel and Ascalon. There are some very specific areas that cause my (also beefy) rig to drop to 11-15 FPS. They’re well-documented, I’ve sent at least a million bug reports on them ever since beta 2.

That said, I have found a work-around that works for me:

• When you hit an area that tanks the FPS, hit F11, go to the graphics options tab, then select “Best Performance” from the “Settings Preset” drop-down.
• Now re-open the same “Settings Preset” drop-down and choose either “Auto Detect” or “Best Appearance” (For me, both options do the same thing).

This essentially reloads all the textures and such and while yes, it is annoying to have to do this several times in a play session while wandering around, it does seem to work for me. It will cause my FPS to jump from 18 to 50 inside the Imperator’s Core (one notable trouble spot). In some cases when I’ve been playing a long time, this workaround does not work, and only rebooting the game (not computer) fixes the mem leak.

There is something going on with the way everything is loaded and the kinds of textures used in this area which causes this issue. Funny enough, while everyone on the planet complains about FPS in WvW, I run in WvW on max settings and FPS never drop below 50, yet the Black Citadel Imperator’s Core will punch my FPS in the face every time I enter it.

Maybe it will work for you, too but of course your mileage may vary.

A little something for all of my Charr brothers and sisters out there. We put up with a lot and keep moving on in true Charr fashion. We’re a special breed. Keep on rockin’ it in the Citadel.

We are the fighters.
We are the conquerors.
We are the godslayers.

We have the solutions.
We have the industry.
We have shaped the world.

And so the world is ours.

We are the mighty.
We are the militant.
We are the misunderstood.

We are Blood.
We are Iron.
We are Ash.

and yes, We are Flame.

Our clothes don’t always fit,
But we are more than our appearance.

Our size makes the camera lose it,
But we maintain our control.

Our leap is hard to judge a bit,
But we always land on our feet.

We are the proud.
We are the enduring.

When the world turns its back on us,
We press forward with sheer determination.

We are the 13%.

We are Charr.

~Ary

Consider the fact that games of this type, including the ones Josh himself referenced as his inspiration for Tribulation Mode, all give you infinite lives as a rule.

Whether you buy an Infinite Continue Coin or you stock up on regular ones, the fact is you will need a lot of lives because death is an intrinsic part of the mode’s design. That’s why games like this give you infinite lives…

And so did ANet.

I felt the coin was worth it simply by virtue of the fact SAB isn’t going away any time soon and I fully intend to finish TM on all worlds in the future, so its value is greater than a singular release. Judging that value is something left to each individual. It does not diminish the time, effort, and practice it takes to finish a zone on TM. Those of us who do so enjoy the journey and take pride in its completion.

This is an actual NPC in the game. It is a generic soldier model found walking around the BC and is clearly supposed to be this concept realized, although I would have personally chosen a different face/proportions if it were up to me to do it.

She wears sort of copper-colored armor and there’s a bunch of them around. Just look for the ones wearing those gauntlets, then you will be able to discover the entire armor set as it appears in-game. I’d love to see how much more closely you can approximate this concept piece. It’s one of my favorite GW2 Charr concept art.

After reading so much about it and its lore, and having an image of it in my mind from the concept art, it was really quite something to finally walk up the ramp and enter (I intentionally didn’t come from the DR gate for my first encounter).

All the better for atmosphere that I arrived at night time. ANet really does a good job using amusement park style foreshortening to great effect, particularly with Human cities.

Then, all those things mentioned above with regards to interaction as a Charr just made it sweeter. My main dislikes Humans and hates visiting their settlements. It was a perfect match.

ANet I want to believe you can release an expansion-level amount of changes and content. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet, but I want to believe you can do it.

Even if I haven’t liked everything in every release so far, there’s always been an aspect of it I did enjoy. As soon as I saw the quote the OP posted, I knew it would be cause for reaction. With Whiteside saying “entire new landmasses are on the list,” that gives me hope.

The things that define expansion content for me are akin to the feelings I got when the game released: A sense of wonder and excitement to explore wonderful new areas with memorable art and design, New mechanics, skills, professions, classes to create builds for and learn how to use effectively, Ever-evolving complexity and creativity in dungeon/boss mechanics that make those encounters fun, engaging, and help you improve at your chosen classes, and the idea that with story and lore, nothing is forbidden (Assassinate the Queen, truly cleanse Orr of the Risen, reveal the Pale Tree really is the final dragon =p)

Content spread over frequent releases is great and all, but don’t forget the power behind a huge release that rekindles the sense that “Oh gosh, there is so much to do, I’ll never get to it all!” like an expansion gives.

I noticed the inconsistent height on the jump pads too. My workaround was just to jump on one and hop straight up and down on it a few times until I noticed the height was consistent again. I didn’t have any issues with the “leap-across gears” but I don’t even get on them until I have a perfect angle already set up.

There’s an NPC in Ashford near the starting area skill challenge with a very Human-sounding name. When you talk with him, he snaps at you to mind your own business.

So I think there’s argument for just about anything. Although if you’ve got something fairly unusual, better have a good story to back it up so you can snap at people not to talk about it too! ;p

There’s a running joke I’ve got that ANet runs with their camera off the left shoulder because they keep putting walls on the right-hand side of their JPs (I run camera off the right shoulder) xP

That said, try moving the camera position slider and practice setting it optimally for the jumping tasks at-hand. Yes, the camera can be a spaz and there are a few JPs out there with collision issues, but that’s where practice makes perfect. Now if you’re talking about Troll’s End, I can’t help ya. You can either handle the forced 1st-person view and like it, or you can learn to like it if you wanna finish that one regularly.

Or, get your mesmer friends who are awesome at JPs to port you to the chests.

Just let us go naked already. The Charr models are fully textured and well-modeled at a G rating, and Charr have no concept of modesty.

(Still supporting a change. We always roll our eyes at all the tail clipping and horribly stretched textures. If a 100% across the board armor fix is reached ever in the game’s lifespan, I’ll probably be happy. EQ2 took a while to fix Iksar, but they did it eventually.)

The condi dmg thing is frustrating. The pet thing is really awful. Combine the two and you completely render condi rangers, mesmers, and necros completely worthless, if not actually a complete detriment to have in your party. Zerker mesmer, 3x warrior and a guard need only apply, as usual.

His shield activation seems to be completely random following de-activation. Sometimes you have nearly a full minute to burn him down, sometimes the shield is back up almost immediately with no downtime.

But none of this even matters. Because the one bug I haven’t seen mentioned yet that happened to us is the one where the reward chest at the end de-spawns after 3 seconds so nobody gets the loot reward!

I haven’t done Canach solo yet, but I did do the group instance with some friends. The exact same problem is present. Pets trigger the traps and they seem to intentionally path right through them, even when the straight line back to me when I recall them goes nowhere near any traps!

Most of the time they hit traps because there’s really only a small path between them all and your pet being out to the side, pretty much always triggers them.

As far as I can tell, the best and only thing to be done is to have someone always focusing on turning traps green so pets aren’t constantly sabotaging the effort by blowing them up all the time. Still, it’s a lot more effort and 1 less DPS for the fight just because you have a pet class in the party.

This happens to me about 95% of the time I take a fall that would cause damage. It needs to go away. Forever.

Halcyon.7352:

Daww… was kinda hoping to see my own engineer in the collection. And I know a number of those at least were from TC. =P

I might post some screens of my own Charr later.

All of them are from TC ;p We still point out new WFC’s to each other whenever we see them.

Josh Foreman.8250:

If we put him in he will just loop “YEEEEEAH BOOOOI!” over and over at maximum volume.

Shopkeeper is obsessed with Flavor Flav: CONFIRMED.
In my mind, I’ll always picture him wearing a wall clock around his neck as he hypes your ability to whack at a cage with a stick.

Nihlus.9724:

There’s a guy on Tarnished Coast named “Tribune Brimstone” that’s done a pretty good approximation.

Funny enough we also have a “Rytlock Grimstone” on TC, same look XD

Starscream.6498:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

my main is a female charr
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/51926/Kodin_1.PNG

Ooh, that looks like quite a decent medium armor set on Charr, may I know what it is? Would love it for my thief in the future.

He’s sporting T1 Cultural “Drover’s” with Fractals weapons. I could guess at the dyes, but I’m sure if you ask him in a PM, he’ll tell you.

Oddly enough, while trying to suggest to friends it compares to a Mario 64/Zelda cross, I felt like a much better description of it was Mystal Ninja Starring Goemon on the n64. But nobody ever knows what I’m talking about when I say that; I guess I’m the only one who ever played that game D=

There are many opinions on how Rox looks, but I think we can all agree that her concept art is awesome.

Too bad it’s not quite what we got.

Esper.7410:

Hey
Thanks for reply. Could you please specify which one of the default faces is Rytlock’s modified face is based on?

The one on the bottom-right. It has the little bands around the jaw fur, which is its distinguishing characteristic.
(link just in case the image doesn’t load for you.)

Yes, she’s supposed to be young, but I must summarily dismiss a claim of that’s why she has giant eyes. Only very young animals have such a disproportion, and if you were to look at any cub in the game, you would see they don’t even have the proportion shown here. They wouldn’t get more disproportionate with age, only more proportionate to adults. Since she is clearly older than a cub, I must dismiss the “she’s just that young” argument.

Therefore that’s just how she is by nature. And it is not consistent with anything I’ve seen before in the game.

An exact replica cannot be done.

You can get pretty close, but his hair color and face are not available in character creation. His hair is a very saturated, lighter red than exists, and his face is a modified version of one of the normal faces with different textures, slider settings that cannot be done on the creator, etc.

The armor is completely do-able. It’s just cultural T3 heavy and the sword skin is available to people who have the appropriate Hall of Monuments points from Guild Wars 1.

sirthosiris.1078:

Bringing this up because I’m wondering if you’ve found these leggings. I know the rest is T1 cultural, but I haven’t found the leggings yet. They seem to be on various ash legion, this one from Fireheart Rise.

As far as I can tell, these aren’t available to players. Much like most of the cultural town clothes, there are some items NPCs wear that we can’t. They also mix n’ match across armor types (heavy/medium/light), which we can’t do. =(

We ran all 3 AC paths last night to check ‘em out. The overall consensus is that we enjoyed it more, and didn’t find it much more difficult. As I only joined in for Tzark/Detha paths, I can only comment on those. (Subjective report is based around a scaled guild team of 80s in full exotics/some ascended. My dungeoneering character is a warrior running a convoluted tanky/support build with decent damage through boons.)

Common

• Spider Queen: This felt pretty much the same to me. The poison ground AOE was slightly more worry-some than before. Previously, I could just ignore it with my passive regen. Seemed tougher to fight pinned in a corner, which is good. I agree with the changes made to spiderlings to get people off the fence (literally). In a way, I miss the old “breeder” behaviour from beta, but I wouldn’t want it on an at-level run.
• Gravelings: We didn’t mind any of the changes made to the graveling types. After run #1, we knew to bring stun break and stability for it and had no problems. I was surprised that Scavenger eating was removed—something that was needed to prevent average teams and PuGs from going insane.
• Kohler: We like it. He was my personal fav fight in the entire dungeon. Now he’s easier to melee, his adds spawn at a reasonable rate, and flimsier characters can survive longer.
• Bonus Troll: Hard to say because we pulled Kohler into him like usual and it felt much harder to hang around nearby. The Troll still has a problem with his AoE skills over-reaching their “red ring” boundaries. The fear was annoying because of its frequency, inevitably it happens when your stun breaks are on CD.

Detha Path

Fighting the gravelings and breeder at the spikes. Coming down into the water and having the three pulling chains part.
As soon as this event starts, everyone takes a MASSIVE video lag hit for the duration of the fight. Terrible! You have to face away from the spawn area in front of you to stop this lag, but trying to fight this way = bad. Please fix this.

• Confirmed. Personal framerate drop from 53 FPS to 17 FPS as soon as the first wave of hatchlings ran in. It was a miracle I survived tanking that first wave before I could switch to performance graphics and finish the fight. Everyone else in the group reported the same, even the mezzanine trappers.
• Ghost Eater: Our particular run had no bugs in it. As such, we really enjoyed the new mechanics on this fight. Our method was to have one person (me, with the highest toughness) distract the boss while two teams activated all 3 traps. Then we just drag him around into each trap and burn him down easily. Good fight, way better than the “stand and hit until it’s dead” fight we used to have.

Tzark Path
*Everything on this path felt the same to me until the Colossus. We out-paced the spawn rate on the burrow event and sat around doing nothing from 97% to 100%. Had a fun “pinball” moment on the ghostly burrows section what with the new graveling knockbacks but that was all I saw that was new.
*Colossus Rumblus: I’m not sure what I think because it feels like he’s a one-trick pony and you can just stand under the shield for that trick. I’m sure this is just purely subjective as my build is absurdly survivable and I saw some teammates dropping in one-shot but I couldn’t figure out what it was from since there was nothing he could do to me that even halved my HP pool. We didn’t seem to have much difficulty with him.

Other Thoughts
I like the new bosses and I’m curious as to how often things bug-out. I must wonder how it feels to a PuG or a group of true level 35’s—probably very difficult due to some of the concentrated damage thrown out. I feel like the HP pools of some gravelings were boosted (graveling hatchlings didn’t die in 3 hits) which is fine for us, but troublesome for a level 35. I think I would have to agree with others who comment that a PuG is going to have a hard time with this. I personally don’t ever set foot in a dungeon without at least 2-3 guildmates on the team so I am not one to talk about PuGs—I’ll let them speak for themselves.

The framerate hit in the spike room needs to be investigated. I’m happy to PM my details and a full bug report, or even a video of it if you need it.

For an “endgame team” who regularly facerolls explorables, speaking overall, we like these changes. Now to fix HoTW…. =p

Another decent option for mediums is the high level Duelist coat. No tail clipping, not terribly expensive (a few gold on the TP) and takes dark dyes really well.

I also wear the Leather Coat (level 40s Coarse Leather crafted) but I do it primarily for lore reasons more than its looks.

LameFox.6349:

When are you going there? Can you even tell the time in this game? I’ve literally just been using ascalonian items because night isn’t dark and the clock is my local time.

He’s not in the ruins.
He's...down in the Ligacus Notos, directly underneath the Stormcaller monument at ground level. There's a little "indent" of land with shrubs and a tree or two there. If you wait there for a while, he’ll pop and you can have a little dialogue with him. He popped at least 3 or 4 times over the course of sitting and chatting with a friend for a few hours there.

Iron Legion dye colors are:

• Gunmetal
• Blue Shade
• Sky
• Dust
• Ebony

(As seen among Iron medium and light armor wearers. I am told the heavy colors are the same, either Dust or Gunmetal but I haven’t sourced heavies. It’s a good place to start and all those dyes are cheap. In any case if you wanted to dress up like an Iron Engineer, those are the dyes used.)

Riot Inducer.8964:

I’m not so sure about that part of it. A lot of the ranches, quarries and mills in Diessa Plateau are manned by charr that share warband names. That suggests to me that warbands are as much work groups as they are military units and can be assigned to “civilian work” like running a ranch.

I agree with your assessment. My thought was that they are put with other Charr like themselves and end up becoming a “laborer” warband, or possibly they are dropped into one such warband and thus take on their name. It seems that no matter what, Charr are either A- In a warband regardless of what you do, or B- A Gladium.

I can think of many where you will absolutely never be found, but they require skillful breaking of the map.

Otherwise:

• Top of the scaffolds at the base of the Gladium Canton (enter from the shallow pond, Ruins of Rin WP. There are ramps and the scaffold walls will hide you).
• Deep inside the Priory house.
• At the back end of the artillery platform area (west of trading post).
• Inside the open building at the Factorium (east of the SB tavern).
• Under the ramp to the Stockades.
• Behind the ruined wall that towers over The Bane.
• Lots of places down in the Ligacus Notos, just stay away from obvious places. I find that people tend not to look near the Citadel down there (such as where the lost ghost spawns).

I’d love to hear a response from Jeff or Ree on this.

My take on it was simply that the warband is formed while in the fahrar among that graduating “class.” Upon graduation, they would be inducted into the Legion under which they studied (an Iron Fahrar produces Iron warbands). They would be given a place within the hierarchy and placed under a Centurion, possibly one who has had a warband killed off and as such, are placed where there is need.

I assume there are those who don’t make the cut, but from what I’ve heard in the past and through NPCs, it seems those who aren’t fit for soldier’s work are placed on ranches, as merchants, crafters, etc. It is not known for sure if one could be “held back,” graduate later, and then join up with the warband of their former class.

Aizle.4359:

[…] As near as I can figure out the items that look like the Ash Legion Spy outfits are:

Helm: Archon Helm (Tier 2 Charr cloth)
Chest: Invoker’s Coat (Tier 1 Charr cloth)
Gloves: Invoker’s Gloves (Tier 1 Charr cloth)
Leggings: Unknown, but many leather and cloth leggings are close
Boots: Archon Boots (Tier 2 Charr cloth)
[…]

This is correct for light armor Ash and is much more descriptive than my original saying simply “T1 and T2 cultural.”

We’ve since discovered a few more canonical options:

• Duelist medium armor has been verified on several NPCs known to be or have been Ash Legion, especially the coat, shoulders, and gloves.
• Pitch dye seems to make an acceptable low-cost alternative for heavy armor and some other styles (such as Duelist). Abyss and Black remain the best picks.

I agree that the (Coarse) Leather Coat is too “grey” with Abyss dye. I don’t really like how light it is when compared to say, Duelist and most heavy armor which is a very dark black.

With male Charr, the tail clipping isn’t as awful as most due to the fact there’s a layered flap covering where it exits the coat, but it’s certainly far from the optimum of having an actual tail-cloth.

Kromulous.4291:

Still in the process of collecting, very few have been added from outside sources (people other than me) :

krm plz

You’re turning the vast majority of our servers’ Charr into internet stars.


. . . and we can’t have that, can we?

P.S. Cass is Sand, not white.

One from in-game:

“What do you get when you cross a Charr and a Lionguard?”

…

“Death or Jail, depending on which you cross first!”

~canned laughter~

Brutalistik.6473:

If they had their own language it would probably sound like “Roar rawr grrrrl Ugha” “sniff sniff meowa sup man”

It sounds a lot like that actually. Hang around where there are pairs of NPCs in the Black Citadel and you can occasionally hear a random audio clip which I could only describe as Charr speaking their native tongue.

Though come to think of it, they must have changed the frequency it happens because I haven’t heard it in a long time….

I haven’t really found a definitive answer to chocolate in any NPC conversations.

We can extrapolate from the evidence we do have that Charr are capable of metabolizing theobromine, and thus chocolate poses no risk to those with no other issues such as specific allergies.

Charr are not Human, but neither are they simple animals. They have qualities that can only be interpreted through the lens of the real Human experience, so we have to go by what we’ve got, which is to say they’re probably “human” (I use the term loosely and with all due diligence) enough to eat chocolate =p

1H swords almost always also clip through the floor due to this. There is a thread to post character art bugs here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Issues-with-character-art-weapons-or-armor

It’s not high priority, but they do make periodical changes to size and position of equipment in patches at times, though it’s usually not in the patch notes.

Dante.1763:

Could anybody please tell me what different parts of armor she is wearing?? i know the pants are the tier 3 charr armor, but what are the shoulders, chest and gloves?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elexus_Shredskin

All of the other pieces are Banded Armor. Can’t see her feet, but chances are it’s either T3 or Banded as well. This is very common among Charr heavies. They wear cultural, Banded, or Armageddon.

Greiger.7092:

…it seems charr chest armor is trying to be just as skimpy on the females as the human is.

Charr have no armor distinction between male/female and in fact all wear “male variant.” A decision I very much appreciate. I’m so used to it, that seeing any gender-based armor variation always catches me by surprise.

Light armor also tends to suffer from the “robe” syndrome much as we suffer from the “trenchcoat” syndrome. Options are out there, but can be hard to find. HotW chest is another medium chest item that does not have a “coat” look to it.

I liked this mechanic.
It’s only confusing the first time you get hit off-sides by it. It’s not terribly difficult even as it is but the counter to this mechanic was taught to me by Valiona over a year ago.

I’m almost of the mind that Howling King’s should be 360deg and last just long enough to require timed double-dodge rolls or being out of range to counter.

Then again… it is the first explorable dungeon people are supposed to be doing.

Same thing happened to me yesterday, 4 times in a row.

Winter Wonderland Jumping Puzzle
There is a bug which was I was able to reproduce, however the circumstances under which it presented itself are unknown. Simply put: completing the puzzle results in no reward, as the loading for the reward platform re-routes you to Lion’s Arch instead of the puzzle destination.

My observations:

• The puzzle was completed on a single character, at different times of the night. Level 80 F Charr War.
• I tried it twice in a row at approx. 9:30pm PST Dec18, then a few more times closer to 12:30am PST Dec19. Each time, I was in an Overflow instance of the puzzle.
• Completion of the puzzle was done normally, ultimately using each of the 3 available paths.
• Upon reaching the end, I simply fell into the exit box (no jump, no rolls, just walk off the edge. I’ve literally died in mid-jump over the box before so I don’t do that anymore) and what I would see is a half-second of the “Winter Wonderland” loading screen, followed immediately by the “Lion’s Arch” (winter version) loading screen. I never saw the final platform
• Arriving in LA it dumped me at the teleport point for that map, just before the dual bridges to the Mystic Forge area.
• I have completed this puzzle approx. 5 times with that character the day before (Dec 17) and twice on a separate character that same day (17th).
• I did not log out of the game or switch characters to see if that fixed it, as doing the puzzle was just to entertain myself while waiting for people to show up for Fractals.

BaergusMaximus.6904:

They should just open it up, no one uses home districts anyway.

This. Same goes for all home instances. Just have the option to instance for PS, or just enter the un-instanced version.
Also recommend other instances (Citadel Command Core, etc) should be treated more like overflow instances in that a high number of players can enter them, and they are not destroyed until the last person leaves.

Honor of the Waves, Butcher Path

We also do HotW quite often and this is my observation of Aldus’ spawned adds behaviour:

• There are 3 silvers that are present at the start of the fight. Sometimes within the first 10-20 seconds, they despawn for approx 5 sec, then respawn again (full health, etc).

• If you try to focus down adds, they tend to respawn within 15-30sec, sometimes this triggers a full spawn, and now you have anywhere from 3-6 silver adds to deal with, which gets to be a cluster right quick.

• If you do absolutely nothing, ignoring adds and focusing Aldus, and move 4-5 party members up onto the mezzanine floor, the adds will despawn after a random period of time (1-5min after spawning, estimated). They will remain despawned (no adds at all) for about the same amount of time before respawning again. This repeats the entire length of the fight, and this is how we won.

• It is possible to kite the adds around the upper level, especially with jump-shot or other ground-target leap to cross from one side to the other. This is the other tactic we used to buy time for the despawn.

• We saw one instance where the adds got stuck in their pathing when we had 2 people on each side of the upper floor, the adds ran back and forth on the rear stairs, changing their mind on who to attack over and over. We were unable to reproduce this pathing bug. It was likely caused by a “perfect storm” of agg tables, distance, positioning, and timing.

Conclusion
We like the addition of the reflect stacks mechanic, but had a difficult time with the erratic de/re-spawning of the adds. Adds should be present at the start, be able to be focused down without them disappearing and re-popping randomly every few minutes. If they are intended to be a persistent fight mechanic, then we have no problem with additional adds appearing at specified intervals (for example, at 50% boss health) who can also be focused down with team effort. The real problem lies in the totally bizarre adds behaviour.

Edit: Oh gosh I forgot to mention, we 4-manned this dungeon and often had 3 up and one down (to melee off the reflect buff). All adds were almost universally agg’d on us up top. If not, we would pull them up there.

• If you get good, you can shave some time off by skipping over some snowflakes and floating mints. It takes an extreme jump, but every path has some spots that can be “leapfrogged” over.

• I want to stress what Healix said about the exploding gifts: Use the path 2nd from the furthest on the right and go straight up. None of those gifts explode until they all explode and a straight line is faster than a ridiculous zigzag. You can actually observe the exploding pattern from the starting platform.

• Dodge-rolling is faster than running if you’re pressed to avoid the snowballs (or beat your friend to the finish).

• The explosion of candy and gifts at the very end serves to confuse—use the longer blue presents and the candy canes up the middle to make it up to the finish.

• There is a way up on top of the castle at the end if you look around!

Tons of them in Ash Legion as far as lore goes. Duelist armor looks decent on Charr and is highly thief-y, if that concerns you.