Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

Yumiko, are you speaking about in-game message or mails? The warning is included only in mails, so conversations continue as always.

This is a symptom of a general problem I’ve noticed in the patch notes: sometimes they use what I assume is an internal name for some game term, and not the name that’s exposed to the players or that the players actually use.

For instance (I’d link examples but the Wiki’s down), I occasionally see the patch notes refer to items of “uncommon” rarity. From my experience in other MMOs, I assume that’s the second-lowest rarity tier. But the game UI always calls that Fine, and players usually call them blue.

I think it’s really hard to separate DEs in the Living Story from their rewards. For instance, Tower of Nightmares has an event in SW Kessex Hills, “Help the Lionguard reclaim Mudbay Digs.” It’s a new Group Event, but it doesn’t spawn champions or have an achievement tied to it, so nobody ever does it. Which is sad, because I remember pre-Tower Mudbay Digs, and am sort of curious about what happened to it.

I think the balloons in Queen’s Jubilee were a good example of events supporting the Living Story even though they were a little grindy:

• You got a sweet balloon for doing them! (see prior comment about rewards)
• They were spread out over the world, and the achievement required you to travel pretty far, so they weren’t zerged unless they spawned next to a world boss or something.
• There were just enough variants (steam creature spawns, the five different champions, the Aetherblade captain) that you’d still see new things even later in the grind.

If you’re doing a poll, I’ll throw in my two cents: (Caveats: I’m starting with the every-other-week releases, and not considering the ones I skipped – Sky Pirates, Cutthroat Politics, and Twilight Assault)

Favorite: Bazaar of the Four Winds. As trite as it is to just say “we want more zones,” it’s the closest we’ve come to a new zone since Southsun Cove. It’d still be abandoned if it were around permanently because there’s not a whole lot to keep players there, but there was actually stuff to do.

Honorable Mention: Super Adventure Box. SAB World 1 is outside the time window I mentioned and didn’t really connect to the overall world, but it was a ton of fun. World 2 did better on both those fronts, but came with its own issues that we’ve all discussed. (And yeah, seconding that hearing the devs talk about what they think worked well and didn’t work well is really helpful.)

Least Favorite: Dragon Bash. It was another festival, without any real highlights. It just felt like filler, and of the recurring events it’s the one I’m not really excited to see return. You’ll notice that the list of patches I skipped started after Dragon Bash, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Dishonorable Mention: Blood and Madness. Halloween was great, but this year didn’t really add to it. The Mad Memoires scavenger hunt and the instance were more compelling than the story this time around, so it feels like a step backward. Its one saving grace is having the Labyrinthine Horror show up when the zerg’s fighting one of the other bosses- that’s hilarious.

1. Grind.
2. Permanent open world content.
3. Viability of different builds. (Zerker über alles)

I enjoy the trend in the last few patches of having account-bound minis tied to specific tasks/currencies. It makes mini collection a matter of “I did this specific thing,” rather than “I spent X gems/gold.” I’d suggest extending these to the dungeons as well: for 500-1000 tokens, you could buy an account-bound mini related to the dungeon. Who wouldn’t want a Kohler or Lupicus mini?

The tonics sort of fill the role of being a fun dungeon-specific item, but since they drop and are unbound they just become trash drops for the folks that find them and don’t want them, and are cheap on the TP for anyone that does to just buy. So there could be an account-bound endless version of each of these tonics that’s a rare drop from the dungeon’s chests or bosses. (Probably not replacing the Bag of Wondrous Goods like the other rare drops do, so people won’t complain about getting them)

VorZorV.5127:

Nay of the Ether.8913:

We did Zho Qafa last night with our all necro group, about 25-30 of us total and a few people that hopped in to tag along and no sign of the staff. The risen eye at the end hardly seems to be a unique boss imo. After doing this event, considering it kicks off fairly regularly, I am not convinced this is the place where the staff drops.

I am also surprised that so many people think the Zho’Qafa Catacombs is the place to farm. Let’s not throw all our eggs in one basket folks!

I think the best thing folks can do is document their runs. If we know the Zho’Qafa Catacombs chest has been opened 10,000 times by Final Rest-hunters, that’s enough evidence to consider moving on.

What about the High Priestess in the Cathedral of Eternal Radiance? I have never once seen anyone attempt this event on Darkhaven and I farm Malchor’s Leap for ori on a regular basis.

This is not an easy event from what I’ve heard…the Priestess goes invulnerable and spawns waves of veteran and lesser minions. And she’s also on a timer, so if she is not killed in a certain (unknown) amount of time she will reset and the cathedral will be locked.

I think at least a few of us should be focusing on farming the temple events in Orr rather than just everybody zerging Zho’Qafa.

Tip on the Priestess: The reset isn’t really a timer. The defend events on the seals still start while you’re fighting the priestess, and she resets if one of those events is failed. What you have to do is keep an eye on the minimap and watch for the event icon to show up (the meta event text won’t change). At that point, you need to send a couple people over to that seal to pass the defend event. I know 2-3 people can do the Cannon defense, not sure about the others.

PlasticHippo.8934:

I kinda agree with em, not that swamp fractal is hard, but that it hardly scales up at all as you progress to higher fractals. it starts out as the group has no idea what there doing so it appears hard, but once you figuer it out at around scale 6 or so the dificulty barely goes up at all. the difference between scale 1 and scale 48 is like mabey a couple extra traps and the mobs hit harder /mossman running around throwing his axe with agony that one shots you, but easy to avoid that. I think the swamp should scale a lot more as you go up through the fractals, change it as you progress a bit

This. The problem with the first half of the Swamp is the difficulty curve.

They could make it scale a lot more just by playing with the timer. Maybe once you reach the 30’s or 40’s you have to run the wisps in 20 seconds, or below 10 you get an extra second every time the clock runs out.

What I’ve thought about is pulsing the event icon if people are actually there. If you’re close enough to see the full event notification in the UI, you might see that a bar is moving anyway, but if you’re in the meta event range, all you see is the map icon. It’d be nice to know before I trek halfway across Mount Maelstrom if anyone is actually fighting the champ golem to start Megadestroyer, for instance.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Aspeon.3520:

The dragons are easy because they’re heavily zerged, and they’re heavily zerged because they’re easy.

I think they are heavily zerged because there is the dragon-timer. I’m not sure if this is a good thing (too much people = no more scaling = too easy), but on the otherhand… I probably would have never seen a dragon.

The timer’s definitely a factor. What’s interesting is that the timer is only reliable when the event’s heavily zerged. Without a zerg, the pre-events can get abandoned (Megadestroyer and Lyssa) or nobody updates the timer when it’s done. The timer strengthens the feedback loop, but yeah, it does make it a lot easier to find those bosses up.

And of course, for events with short cooldowns (Maw, Penitent/Shelter) nobody needs the timer, since if they’re farming it they just stick around in the area. But for those it’s less about difficulty and more that more people = more adds = more loot.

The dragons are easy because they’re heavily zerged, and they’re heavily zerged because they’re easy. Temple of Grenth is the boss people talk about when they talk about hard bosses; I routinely see it failed, even though it’s popular. There are some other ones that are tough without a zerg- I recommend trying the Golem Mark II in Mount Maelstrom with two or three people, which is all you’ll ever get for it because nobody knows about that boss. It’s got a similar give-and-take to the elemental fight in the ice fractal in that the boss keeps you moving, but moving will aggro more adds.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I wonder: do the big Metaevents have failing-conditions, do any other follow-up-events spawn it those events fail. Currently I’ve won each of the big Dragon-Battles I participated… is this 100% win-ratio working as intended?

There is no fail condition for the dragons, or many of the other open-world bosses. Even if everyone wipes, the boss will sit around waiting for somebody to kill it- worst case is it resets.

There are some bosses that close the door behind you, so getting back after a wipe requires redoing everything that you did to get to the boss in the first place (Misplaced steam ogre, Rhendak). There are some bosses with conditions that will fail the event, mostly timers (Modniir High Sage, Megadestroyer, Balthazar) occasionally something else (Grenth).

I remember having problems with the vista Jezath is talking about. It’s the one in Cornucopian Fields in Gendarran Fields, where you follow a pipe and jump up to a straw roof: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cornucopian_Fields

One of the keeps’ vistas in Eternal Battlegrounds is quite a bit harder than the other two, but I don’t WvW enough to remember which one.

I’ve been experiencing this too, though not for personal story; the character I’ve noticed this on has finished the personal story. It’s on most/all world instances (home instances, throne room, Caer Aval, etc.). I first saw and /bug-ed this before Monday’s patch.

While you can get the PoIs and WP on Jinx Isle without actually doing the event chain, wandering by it while working on map completion made me curious about that particular storyline.

The Wiki says you can access Jinx Isle via the underwater tunnel on the east side, but when I’ve checked there’s always been a locked door at the end with a console that just says “ACCESS DENIED” when you interact with it. But the NPCs for the event are on the other side of the door, suggesting that there’s another way in. There’s an Asura gate inside the facility near the Versoconjuring Array PoI… is that the way you’re supposed to get in to start the chain? Or is it just bugged?

BurnWeed.5902:

There’s one ghost “working” on desolation. What i found was that if you can protect the logger (after he’s returned to his body) from 3 spawns of shadow fiends (one each time) then the next spawn is 3 shadow fiends.Only had to do this a few times to get the heart.

Yeah, that’s where Blackgate is now. (And if the shadow fiends spawn too slowly, you can kite the nearby spider or doe to kill him and get credit for the res.)

It started with the corporeal “Lost Spirit” standing around not doing anything. Kiting a mob to that and making it die got to the ghost spirit and things proceeded from there.

When standing near the entrance to the Arah dungeon, if I reorient the camera to face out of the entrance, it “backs up” a little and a lot of stuff turns invisible. There are a couple blacked-out character names where the name renders but not the character.

(The second screenshot shows where I’m standing. From here, I can reorient the camera to repro the issue.)

This is a PvP at expense of PvE issue, I think- if I understand correctly, resetting the servers also resets upgrades and siege in WvW. So daily resets would make all the WvW players complain.

As a compromise, why not have a weekly reset along with the weekly WvW match reset? People who want to do Arah/Balth/whatever would know that they can probably get it done over the weekend.

I saw this in PvE during the Ancient Karka event. Tried to waypoint back to the Karka Camp after my overflow wiped, and got stuck in load screen for 5+ minutes before I relogged.

Female Asura thief on Blackgate (but was on an overflow at the time)

Based on GW2DB, it looks like there’s also an Ascended version of the Fractal Capacitor (with the same five sets of stats as everything else). Don’t think anyone knows how to get it yet- I haven’t even seen any posts of people with the Exotic version, since it requires so many tokens.

Heck, that’d be a good thing that we could do: sort the jumping puzzles that are already in the game by approximate difficulty. (And maybe call out the ones that have more gimmick/puzzle elements than just platforming) It’d be nice if that tracked similarly to the level of the zone, but I assume there’d be some outliers- I hear the one in Metrica Province is really nasty, for instance.

And one Clocktower-specific remark: when you have a forced wait/repeat, add a little variety. I suspect the Clocktower wait would’ve been a bit less grating if you’d just randomized the order of the taunts, so that we could hear the Charr talking about apples without having to die in the first five seconds.

My female asura thief has the same issue, at least in hero screen. (with no other weapons/armor equipped at all) I submitted a bug via /bug last night.

Didn’t check if it actually displayed in the world, since I’ve got a better back item and am holding off on transmuting it until the event’s over just in case.