Guild Wars 2

New zone seems quite fun and the story was ok. That said, I wasn’t a fan of the final boss encounter – it felt poor & lazy, instead of coming up with actually fun fight mechanics it is yet more of the same old tons of aoe, conditions & adds – except this time in a tiny room.

DDRitter.1872:

Best option should be: How many gems do you want? Fill field form. Then you show the costs. Accept or Cancel. Simple.

If the intent really was to make the UI less confusing, that is exactly how it should have been implemented. It can’t possibly get any more clear and customer friendly than that.

Rather than this current UI which not only makes sure that the smallest conversion rate costs a sizeable chunk of gold (70-80 gold is quite a lot for the newer players who are supposedly the target audience for this change) and also cleverly uses big conversion rate gaps in order to create some excess gems – which in turn are supposed to cause the “Oh, I got X amount of gems and this item only costs Y more… Maybe I should get some more gems” -reaction.

What a terrible change… Currently I’m missing 50 gems from a store item I want to buy and I most certainly don’t want to waste a significant amount of gold to get 400 gems because someone out there thought that it was the best option for smallest conversion rate.

That being said, I have difficult time believing this change was made to help “new players” who found the previous UI confusing. Because quite frankly, this newer UI is not only less clear than it was before but it also screams of trying to strong-arm people to use their credit cards more.

A timesink devoid of any fun, this achievement represents everything that is wrong with bland kill quest designs in MMO’s.

When I first obtained the item, it seemed like a really cool reward for completing the meta achievement. However, that impression faded out really fast after realizing the illusion lasts for 5 minutes and can only be used every 30 minutes… Which turns a potentially cool reward in to a useless gimmick item that will more likely end up occupying a bank slot than one of my inventory slots.

Adding such a lenghty cooldown alongside with an incredibly short duration to a purely cosmetic fluff reward seems like a poor design choice and the only message it gets across is “no fun allowed”.

On my guardian I did this achievement on Deadeye Dunwell with Exhausted, On Fire, Frailty, Hamstring and Crowd Favourite gambits.

Weapons/Skills wise I used sword+focus & hammer, with Judge’s Intervention, Wall of Reflection, Retreat and Renewed Focus.

I started the fight with hammer as my weapon and instantly used Retreat in order to get to Deadeye faster. Immediately after that (expect a lot of incoming damage, so you might need to burn through some virtues) I used hammer #4 to punt the Quaggan mob to the opposite direction of where Deadeye will teleport and then switched to sword+focus.

Once Deadeye teleports, you can use sword #2 to teleport to him immediately and then cast Wall of Reflection which will block a lot of damage during this phase. When Deadeye teleports again (usually to the opposite end of the arena), you can use Judge’s Intervention to teleport to him – if you still have Renewed Focus up at this point, you can use it for additional safety (to block the sniper shot, as the lag sometimes makes it register as full damage shot rather than recognizing that you are standing right next to the mob). At this point he should be almost dead, so you should have no issues finishing up the job before the next teleport.

If they actually sold some really good looking armor sets like Marjory’s or Kashmeer’s armor in the gem store I’d gladly support them by buying those armors.

However, I cannot justify spending money to support them when they put out armor skins like these new Aetherblade ones. In my opinion, the Aetherblade armor skins look like goofy costumes straight out of some low budget B-class fantasy movie from the 80’s, which is about the last thing I’d wear on my norn character.

I’m sure there is an audience for costumes like this though, since after all opinions are opinions. But I think that they are awful and certainly not worth 800 gems.

It looks pretty nice, in a creepy way.

Although it seems to be slightly bugged at the moment, when you preview the item those tentacles actually move around slightly. But when it is equipped on your character, they are just static.

GOOD

• Environment art / World design for Southsun Cove, beautiful zone with some really amazing looking locations.
• Stepping stones jumping puzzle
• Event phase 3: Ancient Karka – Using environment as a weapon was quite a nice touch and things like that are something I would really love to see more of.
• Event phase 3: Final encounter, from pursuing the Ancient Karka through the hive to the last fight at the bottom.
• Event phase 3: End rewards, I really liked that there was a 20 slot bag as a guaranteed reward along with the earring. As this ensured that you got something to remember the event by, even if you had some bad luck with the RNG regarding other drops.

BAD

• Despite being advertised as a smaller/medium sized map, Southsun Cove still feels relatively void of any interesting activities.
• Event phase 1 and server lag: The phase 1 event at Lion’s Arch on friday evening was completely unplayable due to the server lag. Shortly after the event started, a huge ability delay kicked in and by the end of the event it was at the point where my character was firing up abilities from 1 to 2 minutes ago.
• Event phase 2: As a whole the phase 2 event that occured on saturday felt like a gigantic waste of time. After showing up on time for the event many of us spent the next roughly 30 minutes watching the engineers build up the siege weapon, only to have the following action part of the event end in less than 5 minutes. Not only this was disapointing, but it wasn’t fun at all and it certainly didn’t feel like “Retaking Lion’s Arch”.
• Event phase 3: Mob culling / rendering issues: This was probably the biggest issue for me during the phase 3 of the event. Whenever you had a massive amount of players and mobs in a small area, the player character rendered up but the mobs didn’t. Which was certainly a problem during the bomb arming phase and the reinforcement phases, as I often ended up having to wait quite a while to even see what I am fighting and more importantly where the mob I am fighting is.
• Event phase 3: Ancient Karka – Reinforcement phases, too much is too much – the amount of karka mobs made these phases feel incredibly dragged on and boring.

Overall though I liked the event, however I felt that there were things that could have certainly been handled better.

Did something like ~12 runs of the instance: Exotic berserker ring (lvl 78 or was it 76), recipe: superior sigil of the night, 5 x Fine Transmutation Stone, bunch of different minor items from gem store from various boosters to those one use bank access items.

And of course, the usual green vendor fodder and ToT bags.

Yep, same issue here… Everyone in the party is ending up in a different instance.

Similar issues on Gandara server:

- Queensdale meta event status says that “Adventurers can now enter the Mad King’s realm”, however there are no haunted doors spawning at all.

- Kessex Hills meta event status says “The doors have been reversed. Access to the Mad Realm is available.”, but just like with Queensdale there are no haunted doors spawning at all.

- Gendarran Fields meta event seems to be permanently stuck in a loop of rebels trying to take over the power sources. Even if you manage to stop them from capturing a power source, a few minutes after they appear to have taken them over anyway. The advisor also seems to be completely missing.

Seems to be the case on Gandara as well, except at Gendarran Fields. Also at Kessex Hills, the meta event seems to claim that the doors have been reversed/accessible but none of the doors are actually showing up at the moment.

Vistal.2906:

Since when can you go farm dragons or boss events in the world and get a exotic every chest ever 15 min respawn?the drop rate is fine.2x chest a day is extreme it should be 4.

Except the labyrinth chests don’t drop exotics every time either, all I’ve had from them are the usual green trash and ToT bags.

If it is a 24 hour timer, then it certainly seems a rather overkill fix for the issue especially when comparing to any other champion event out there that rewards a boss chest upon event completion.

The clocktower jumping puzzle is incredibly fun: Figuring out the route, then actually executing all the jumps properly within the timer offers such a nice amount of challenge that at the end of it you get that rewarding feeling from actually managing to do it all.

Aside from that, I really like the environment art there and especially the background music that plays during the actual jumping puzzle. Not to mention the end reward itself was certainly worth it, definitely the best jumping puzzle in the entire game.

Human, Mesmer 80
No speed buffs

Maddeth.5893:

If there is no long term achievement there is no game, if everything is handed out easily, people will just not bother playing.

It isn’t like all those legendaries and other named exotics suddenly disappeared from the game? While it is true that MMO’s do need to have long term goals to keep people playing, they also need other goals as well as some carrots that cater to various different groups of players.

Now feel free to label me as one of those entitled (such a popular word these days eh?) kittens, but in my opinion you can’t force longevity to an MMO by simply creating new gold grinds (or new ways to gamble) all the time. There needs to be a balance between content that is fun and rewarding, and long term goals that reward players for their efforts (and not just luck).

This Halloween update is turning out to be quite a disapointment when it comes to the event related gear, with a significant number of the stuff actually hid away behind either a gem or a significant gold sink.

In my opinion, seasonal holiday events should be about fun and the weapons/gear related to them should be reasonably easy to obtain – at least to the degree that players should be able to enjoy their holiday themed items during the said holiday event itself – after all, obtaining exotic weapons in this game isn’t difficult and there are already plenty of the very costy prestige weapons to choose from (if you want to work towards one).

By including the 100 lodestones to the recipes, you are already looking at spending 100g to 150g on the stones alone for a single gift (never mind the costs of what else the weapons actually require). Now if the goal was to implement Halloween themed weapons that a regular player is able to afford maybe in January – then I guess these will do the trick… Maybe it is just me but that sort of defeats the whole idea of seasonal holiday themed weapons.

Before making any more huge nerfs like this (-15% damage for your primary attack skill in S/P weaponset is rather substantial, no matter how you look at it) ArenaNet should really start to consider splitting some of the skills in to PVP and PVE versions similar to what they used in GW1.

The pistol whip change, while obviously aimed to satisfy the crowd complaining about quickness + pistol whip causes S/P to be significantly less desireable in PVE, bit more nerfing like that and you might as well remove S/P thief from PVE all together.

Now before anyone comes up and says, how about using those other skills on your skillbar? Well, besides the auto attack there is a shadowstep, ranged interrupt that does barely any damage at all and an AOE blind… So yes, if you aim to kill anything in a reasonable timeframe the choices are either your auto attack or pistol whip.

I don’t know about everyone else, but if these pistol whip nerfs continue (seeing as the real issue is the quickness buff, those complaints aren’t going to stop even if the damage output was nerfed) I’m a little worried that soon the S/P thief gameplay in PVE will be all about auto attack… But hey, I guess then it will be pretty close to “I swung a sword, hey I swung a sword again!” which doesn’t exactly qualify for fun or interesting gameplay.

I don’t really understand what they are attempting to prevent with the current system, if the dimishing rewards would only kick in when you farm the same couple of events over and over, or by finishing multiple events really fast – it would seem as a fair attempt at trying to prevent potential exploiting and botting.

However, in its current form it just punishes people who are attempting to grind karma for the legendary weapons, as well as those who just enjoy doing dynamic events (or participate in the only form of content available in Orr zones).

For example, today I hit the DR till karma was in single digit rewards in 55mins by doing the following events: Escort Fia, Veteran Gorilla, Jofast defense, Shelter defense, Keeper Jonaz escort, Grenth priest (failed), Keeper Jonaz escort, Pact cannon defense, Veteran spider, Gavbeorn’s landing defense, Shelter defense, Champion broodmother, Keeper Jonaz escort, Rakkan escort, Plinx escort, Plinx landing point defense, Free Rakkan, Tar elementals, Plinx escort 2, Champion risen abomination.

With the exception of jumping from plinx landing point defense to free rakkan, I did stay to finish up every event I participated in. Of course, perhaps stating bit of the obvious: I wasn’t there from the beginning on every event and arrived to some of them when they were already close to being finished.

Either way though, if I am being punished after getting 6-7k karma per hour (without a booster) and I am supposed to grind roughly ~1 million karma depending on my RNG luck… Something definitely needs rethinking.

I quite enjoyed the Norn personal storyline until the Claw Island part started and where the entire story shifted in to another generic main story (or Trahearne’s personal story if you want to put it that way).

While I don’t mind if my character isn’t the hero, or if she is following some mentor/being a sidekick to another character etc. But I would at least expect that another character to be someone who my character could look up to / respect lore wise.

Take Eir for example, she has a proper background and is already established as a hero in the lore – sure, things are going bit rocky for her at the beginning of GW2 story – but that doesn’t take away her achievements and she still is someone my norn could look up to and hope one day I could establish a similar legacy. (After all, isn’t that a huge thing for a norn?)

Now on the otherhand, there is Trahearne: He suddenly appears in my story, with barely any background to speak of – besides that he knows stuff about Orr and some people also know him – and then he proceeds to blatantly hijack it by taking credit for a lot of things that others actually make happen.

To make matters worse, each time Trahearne appears in any story mission it is very rare that outside of scripted events/cutscenes he does anything else but:

A) Pretend that he is fighting
B) Followed by waiting face flat on the floor while everyone else is clearing the risen
C) Pose in his own glory (while invulnerable) and do nothing to help while everyone else is fighting

It certainly makes me wonder why my norn appeared so eager to follow him, after all, he seemed to have no combat prowess, everyone seems to be doing just fine without him and my character knew next to nothing about him expect that he pretty much just pointed himself to be the marshall so he can bark those Commander, Roll over, sit, fetch, play dead orders.

Perhaps he was intended to appear otherwise or perhaps you need to play the Sylvari storyline to get a better impression of the character. I don’t know and to be honest, after finishing the core storyline – I can’t say I care or even want to find out anything more about him.

In my opinion Trahearne was an awful character and I dearly hope that is the last we see of him in any GW2 storyline, though given his role in the Pact it seems rather unlikely which is a shame.

I can’t say I’ve had any troubles with my primarily S/P thief (with SB or P/P depending on situation for when ranged is needed) in PVE, this goes both for soloing and for the explorable mode dungeons.

While it is true that some mobs/bosses in explorable dungeons are incredibly melee unfriendly, but that goes across the board for all professions and not just thieves. However, in most of the explorable dungeons you can melee a good chunk of the mobs & bosses as long as you take advantage of your abilities (such as Infiltrator’s Strike, Black Powder, Signet of Agility and Smoke Screen for example) and know when to dodge or back out/temporarily switch to ranged.

That being said though, as a thief your base HP is rather low so if you choose to spec purely for a glass cannon type of build traits+gear wise (something that a lot of thieves seem to do) don’t expect to have a great survivability when trying to melee in dungeons. Having a more balanced setup (tough+vit in addition to whichever damage stats you prefer) in my opinion anyway, will achieve a lot better results.

Elan.7523:

Ayarai.3985:

My norn thief..

What sword is that? HoTW?

It is Sylvari t3 cultural sword, for some reason it previews wrong when you check it from a link/vendor (lacks the blue blade in the preview window and as such it appears only as a branch/twig) which is probably why not too many people use them.

Ran a couple more dungeons during the evening:

1) Arah – explorable, Forgotten path: Took about ~2h, full reward
2) Sorrow’s Embrace – explorable , Military path: Took about 40 minutes, 19s 50c and 133 350 XP

Definitely looking like it is punishing you for running multiple dungeons in a row, which is a shame really.

Yeah, the dungeon rewards are definitely not working as intended at the moment as it simply seems to punish you for running multiple dungeons. No matter the lenght of the dungeon run, what path it is and which dungeons are being run.

Yesterday I posted https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Updates/162688 about the subject and thus far today I’ve ran two dungeons, out of which on the 2nd I already had diminished rewards:

1) Twilight Arbor – explorable, up path: ~35 mins run, full reward
2) Sorrow’s Embrace – explorable, inquest path: ~55mins (Infinite spawning grenadiers are an awful mechanic), diminished reward 19s 50c, 133 350 XP.

Probably going to do a dungeon or two more at the evening and update the post with the results.

JonPeters.5630:

You should not see any diminished returns unless you.

1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.

This doesn’t seem to be working as intended at the moment then, as it seems to be diminishing your rewards regardless of dungeons or paths you do. (once it starts the dimishing rewards)

Today I did the following dungeons:

- Earlier at day: Twilight Arbor – explorable, Up path (longer than 30mins run)
- Few hours later: Twilight Arbor – explorable, Up path (longer than 30mins run)
- Right after that, Twilight Arbor – explorable, Forward -> Up. Longer than 30 mins run but diminished silver+XP end reward
- Followed by Crucible of Eternity – explorable , Front door path. Also longer than 30 mins run but even more diminished silver+XP reward at the end.

My norn thief, probably going for at least 1 more piece of cultural armor at some point but for now I’m pretty happy with the looks.

I also refuse to believe that this fight is working as intended, considering in one of the streams prior to the release they even mentioned Zhaitan as one of the fights you don’t want to miss. But I have to say that in it’s current state, the encounter is about as anticlimatic as it could be and pales in comparsion to Lich, Shiro and Abaddon.

While I was impressed by the sheer scale of the Zhaitan (easily noticeable if you compared him to those Tequatl sized dragons on the sky) and especially his ingame appearance, which must have been a nightmare to animate.

However, after that it just simply goes downhill: First up we fight a bunch of adds with no background music at all (what happened to the epic combat music? After all, even those dragon lieutenants you fough aboard the smaller airship had an epic combat music playing in the background). Then Zhaitan gets shot with a big cannon and immediately after a completely silent cutscene follows where he gets zapped with some smaller beams – did we suddenly skip an entire phase of the fight? Or is it intended to be like that.

After that you kill a few more adds and then we get to the last phase, where we finally get to fight Zhaitan… And then for the next 5 minutes (during which Zhaitan doesn’t actually do anything) we just click “2” to blow him up with pretty looking explosions from cannons that do not even align up properly with the boss. I mean, what?

There is no way that could be working as intended, not only it cheapens the entire concept of elder dragons being a threat/dangerous but it also makes the “final” boss easier than the bosses you fight at level 1 at the tutorial instances.