Guild Wars 2

I ran into an issue that wiped my modremoth boss fight. Updrafts failed to launch me in the air despite repeated attempts, I’ve seen it in the patch notes so it’s a known issue.

Reason why I’m posting this? When I went to restart the fight I was stuck on the smaller platform… which wasn’t much of a problem until I got the the point of the first rift and saw Brahm walking on air. So… yeah. I couldn’t even die properly to see if how quickly I restarted the fight was a problem, because jumping off the edge teleported me back up in the downstate and Cannack was so OP with rezzing.

As much as I would like to see the updraft bug not happen, it’s acceptable within the context of I’ve done it two and third times and not had a problem. Having to log out and restart ALL the very long instance… that’s a bit of a problem.

OK, so choosing your specialization takes up one of your three specialization talent slots and has a double edge sword quality of changing your profession mechanic. Good. Nice and clear.

What about the costs of the skills and weapon we gain? Are they along for the ride, or do we lose skills and weapons in exchange for gaining new toys?

Personally, I’m more pro exchange than against. If they are just plain additions, then only the most hardcore metagamers will probably ever consider not running a specialization, particular once the system expands to more than one per profession. It would also resolve some of the “off hand only” complaints. If mesmers gain shields at the loss pistols while rangers gain staffs at the cost of greatswords… it might keep things in perspective.

Also, let us be blunt… Arena Net has a history making things under powered to make the alternative seem better; racial skills and the universal skill are the main examples from Guild Wars 2, but there plenty of examples from Guild Wars 1 like… one sec. Yep. Smiter’s Boon is STILL nerfed into Abaddon’s shoe locker in PvP. Just needed to check to see if that was ever corrected sometimes between when I stopped paying attention to the game and when they stopped working on it.

I doubt we’ll never see a mistake as large as Smiter’s Boon ever again, but more recent history has a no less pretty trend. If in the trend I predicted starts manifesting itself in reality, one of two things are going to happen. One, they will nerf various aspects of the specializations until the trend ‘corrects’ itself. Two, they’ll work silently on a multi tier solution that will admittedly be a perfect and ideal solution to all concerns the problem raised… and then look around like confused puppies when we don’t hail the patch as the new messiah.

…there’s a lot of metaphors on gestation periods and expectant mothers bouncing around in my head and I have NO idea why. So, before I poor brain bleach down my ears, the summary is that I would prefer to have less toys to play with in the specialization rather than risk having any of those toys made weaker than our existing toys in the name of balance.

This is one of my two big worries. I know they can’t give us details until they are finalized, but this vagueness of what to do while waiting just kills me inside.

To put things in perspective, I have 500+ skill point scrolls in the bank and eight character with varying amounts of skill points. Some of those characters are sitting on 300 or more, some not. I’m scared of the idea of receiving random Mystic Forge Crafting Ingredients.

I definitely need Augor Stones for Ascended Armor, but bloodstone shards for lengendaries… I don’t know how many, if any, lengendaries I want. Eldritch Scrolls I’ve only ever used so far for completing collections, but some of the skins do look tempting. And while I’ll occasionally use Philosopher Stones and Crystals, I never use a Siege Master Guide.

Basically, I’m scared of things going to either extreme. I don’t need all my skill points converted into the highest denominator, bloodstone shards, but at the same time don’t want the lowest denominator in bulk. I could make a lot of decisions right now, but goals like lengendaries are long term things I shouldn’t be impulse buying for months before I start gathering the other materials. I know I can’t be the only person in this boat; others in this thread have said as much just in different words.

I can prebuy my Augor Stones at least, but I really need to hear on the Q&A tomorrow if we are getting a currency rather than a lottery. I don’t need the weight of whether or not I should buy Bloodstone Shards I may never use on my already anxiety riddled brain.

The argument of how one holds a baseball bat holds some argument against this idea; a cricket bat might be far more likely.

But yeah, sports equipment as optional weapon skins and possibly legendary weapons… I’d be behind that. Legendary weapons are two of seven things. Cool, cute, dark, or noble and then immersive, neutral, or wall breaking. The Dreamer is a classic example of cute wall breaking legendary, but the Predator breaks the wall with equal but different cool force.

The Jugernaut, the existing Hammer legendary, is definitely in either the cool or noble category… and while it’s not immersive I’d ere on the side of caution and call it neutral instead of wall breaking. Since I expect each new legendary to be in as much of a different category as the current legendary as possible, I’d say having a sports weapon for either the hammer or greatsword would be possible.

Csele.1647:

i am confident they are not realizing any dungeons , they haven’t mention anything about dungeons in years .

I think the change to Defiance might be a reason Dungeon’s haven’t been loved recently. When a core mechanic of how all bosses are CCed is being worked on in the background… well it makes sense they wouldn’t change dungeons if they knew a more invasive change was in the works.

I’d expect the expansion to be paid for with cash only, but the digital deluxe to have a gem store upgrade option. So I guess that’s one what you could “save money” by saving up gems. A model like that just “feels” right.

The personal story sections might take hours for the hard core and weeks for the casual, but as for the rest of the content… I’d expect part of their goal with only introducing a small amount of zones it to only add repeatable content. How long those zones “last” will depend on the player base. With Mega Servers no zone is completely dead until it’s literally down to only seven or so people hanging out in the zone world wide.

But yes, there will be Living Story afterwards, that’s beyond any doubt. I’d give maybe a six month pause between Heart of Thorns release and the Living Story Season 3. Enough time for their four month development cycle to get the first half of Season 3 actually developed.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

If these mastery points are anything other than level based, I can see that I won’t get bothered with them.

I can’t be bothered make any new character because I refuse to go and collect traits for them. Anet have said they are going to “fix” their trait stupidity, and I really hope they are not just replacing that with “mastery stupidity”.

They have already stated very clearly that Mastery Points are account based, so if you’re problem is doing difficult tasks multiple times on multiple character they’ve already got you covered.

If you problem is instead doing difficulty tasks made more difficult to even attempt due to the nature of the open world… then I don’t know what to say since that same worry is part of the reason why I’m hoping for a “less is more” type philosophy.

An important component to masteries will be coming from sources other than leveling, though, that much has been made clear. Personal story thresholds, map completion, challenges much like skill challenges, and yes even world bosses are all on the table until they tell us otherwise.

I would imagine that the Mastery System is too vast too time intensive for them to show the true system in an hour demo. So thing were likely not behaving the way they will even during the open betas.

Based on the UI shown in Bog Otter’s video, I would say it would likely only take a SINGLE point to unlock any section of the track, and the numbers represent how many … let’s call them mastery levels… worth of training you need to do in order to actual learn that ability. It would certainly explain why each track starts with a power that has no numbers listed under it but you still need to drop a point into Glider Master to get your glider.

This imagining of the system makes more sense to me on several levels. If you just gain mastery points by leveling, then what is the point of having once per account mastery points laying around in the real world to begin with, while if every tier of the mastery tracks required as many mastery points as those numbers to unlock… I’m sorry, but I cannot imagine them having that much content within the jungle to hide a hundred plus mastery points PLUS what masteries they haven’t shown us yet. They made it sound like mastery point are supposed to mean something, so just gaining 29 listed so far seems reasonable, if there is training time involved as well.

[Edit: 2:15pm]
And gah. At least one hole in my theory/hope. Matt Visual had a much clearler display of the Mastery Panel during his video, and I noticed that there are point for the first trait as well, it’s just that the UI pushes those points to the far left for some reason when you select the mastery trait in question.

So… yeah. Still holding out hope that this is just an accelerated simplified version for the demo, but hope is failing.
[/Edit]

…renaming it might have other benefits I didn’t think of before reading the first few posts in this thread.

Taunt is an action, not a state someone can be in…. how to best express this.

You Confuse someone to instill Confusion in them, making them Confused.
You Scare someone to instill Fear in them, making them Afraid.
You Burn someone, to instill Burning in them, making them Burnt.
You Immobilize someone to instill Immobility in them, making them I mobilized.

The point is that conditions are either nouns or adjectives, not verbs. The only exception to this are when they are a verb in addition to being a noun or adjective.

You Poison someone to instill Poison in them, making them Poisoned.
You Blind someone to instill Blindness in them, making them Blind.

You almost trip up when you do it for Torment, but that sentence can be written two ways.
You Torment someone to instill Pain in them, making them Tormented
You Torment someone to instill Torment in them, making them Tormented.

So what do you get if you apply the same sentence structure to Taunt?

You Taunt someone to instill Anger in them, making them Enraged.
You Taunt someone to instill Anger in them, making them Taunted.

There is no condition where someone can have Taunt or be Taunt. Therefor Taunt as a condition should be renamed to Anger, Enraged, or Taunted. Confusion with some perception of the holy trinity doesn’t have anything to do with it; grammatical consistency is the answer.

I would imagine we would get eight legends in total. Six for the base Reverent profession, and two more for the specialization. The two from the specialization would of course replace two of our base six.

This might result in more elite skills, but they’re elite skills tied to a set of profession heal and utility skills… think of it like the Reverent not coming with a thirty point SUPER ELITE but instead four more ten point elites than normal. Of course, that might mean that each Legend costs a minimum of fifteen skill points.

I also don’t expect to get much versatility with swapping out profession utilities. The reason that little arrow appears above the right hand side of the bar is probably to have the option to sub out a racial utility, heal, or elite skill… plus the two universal skills. I don’t know if they’ll be actually useful on the Reverent, but the same goes on the other professions: your mileage may vary.

WvW for map completion is a problem because it ties map completion to how well your server is doing in WvW. I don’t care how good of a player you are, one person can not carry their server to win Stonemist Castle. Honestly, the fact that the hours of the day that your server has enough coverage to take Stonemist Castle might be an unfair point.

Requiring WvW participation is all well and good since Legendary Weapons are tied to how well you play the game, but the rest of your server and the hours of the day you can play the game have NOTHING to do with how well you play the game. You can earn WvW rank and Badges of Honor even if your server is doing poorly. You can’t get map completion if your server can’t get hold certain objectives.

They’ve just changed the system last Friday, so maybe this won’t be an issue. If it’s STILL an issue two months from now… then we have a problem because a World Transfer to a server that is holding Stonemist Castle shouldn’t be a requirement for a Legendary, I don’t care if you can buy one with ingame gold or not.

Either:
The Sylvari are to Mordremoth as the Dwarves are to Primordus
Or:
The Pale Tree is to Mordremoth as Glint was to Jormag

One of the other. Either the Pale Tree was drawn away from it’s master with just some words on a stone tablet (a weak argument after it was revealed in Arrah Explorable that Glint’s freedom took an elaborate ritual), or the Sylvari are like the Dwarves. And by like the Dwarves I mean similar to the enemy but resistant; the destroyers are stone and lava while the dwarves are (now) stone and ore. This would of course make the Nightmare Court cast in the same like as the Stone Summit.

So yeah… I just want to ping people’s opinion on these two route ANet could take.

I personally choose my personal story options on my Sylvari character to have him exposed to Malyck, so I’m very interested in seeing what the state of his Grove will be. It’s for his sake that I don’t want the Pale Tree to just be a single traitorous champion. I would much prefer it if the Seers or someone put things into motion to make sure Mordremoth would have a large amount of resistance when he woke up, and that Malyck’s difference disturbing presence was because his tree followed a practice similar to the Soundless. Of course Scarlet waking him up early probably puts a wrench in those plans, particularly if my guess of Malyck being one of his tree’s firstborn is right. So many guesses, so little confirmation.

So yeah. What do the rest of you think?

Somewhere buried in the patch notes they mentioned that the Aetherblades have had the Spinal Blades permanently added to their drop table. As such the backpack and all related functionality they have with the Mystic Forge are likely to stay.

I’m of the opinion that it’s the rumored spider god that predated Abaddon. Not a lot supporting that, I just feel that the way the Forsaken served the human gods in Guild Wars 1 and the way we find out in Guild Wars 2 that they were a race that stood against the Dragons before the current six gods arrived on Tyria… it makes me think that there was a circle of gods the Forsaken worshiped during the time of the previous Elder Dragons… possibly the story of those gods during the rise of the dragons explains how the Forsaken are called just that.

Most of the recently releases have been coming out around noonish. Literally, sometimes between 12 Eastern and 12 Pacific. That’s a three hour window that starts in an hour and forty five minutes.

That’s just the recent Dragon Bash content though. In the past they have been known to wait as long as right at the dailies reset. So when today’s update comes out is anyone’s guess.

We have a lot of distance between us and Cantha. The entire big blue sea that the Krait and Kraka have been retreating from bubbles, for one thing. That’s a far more likely expansion route, which is good since it would involve updates to the underwater combat system. While leaps and bounds above other games we could use more options, less bugs, and mob placement that doesn’t remind one of old school Orr.

With that said, I think they are realizing that the fan reaction is the exact opposite of any internal decision making predicted. Fans love the Canthan culture. We disliked the choice of Factions voice acting (B Movie Oriental Dub), we disliked the STEEP learning curve, and most of us have a deep hatred of Togo…. but we loved everything else about the place.

I do hope we see Cantha eventually. I would also loved to see the Great Collapse repaired into a proper Canthan district for Divinity Reach. I honestly hope that the rumors I heard on a recent podcast about Dougal Keane and a yeti having an adventure pans out.

If there is anything I know about Arena Net, they learn from their mistakes. We want more Cantha in our Guild Wars, so they’ll give it to us eventually.

I’ll toss my money behind Lady Kasmeer Meade. Her gradual background inclusion into the order of events appears to perfect for it not to be her.

For those putting money behind Demmi Beetlestone, yes she does officially join the Order of Whispers. She has a role in the Order’s version of the Claw Island arc, and I recall several of the side dialogs not only stated that she had officially joined but that her cryptology training was going well… or something to that effect. It’s been awhile.

I will say that I want large, lore rich content as well… but I also want it to not only be done right, but done with some permanency. The Living Story is temporary. It helps usher in some changes to the world, and gives people something to focus on during the months that are swamped with Holidays.

Flame and Frost provided some good story, and temporarily filled some zones of the world with an increased event density. From appearances none of that content appears to have lingered.

Secrets of Southshore continues the story of Southshore, using many of the characters from that event. I wasn’t around for that event, so they’re all a bit new to me, but I can do my research on the wiki to find out who these people where. Unlike Flame and Frost I’m expecting the Secrets of Southshore to linger, improving the quality of the zone.

Arena Net is currently giving the game monthly attention, which is a VERY good thing compared to how it was for a long stretch of time in Guild Wars. So you cleared the content in one day: that’s GOOD. Some people can only play one day a week and this content might be gone before June is over. There will be more, deeper content somewhere down the road.

Also, if you’re talking about Holidays: we might be getting the Dragon Festival.

This is a two lane road. Some characters will suffer from this decision, others will benefit.
My guardian will love the Soldier stat gear much more than any of the normal exotic accessories.
My engineer has me tearing my hair out as I try to find a useful ascended accessory without pointless Precision.

I do worry what the future will bring. My guardian is good with Soldier accessories because he’s already clad in Cleric armor; if there isn’t something of equal magnitude when ascended armor is released, I’ll be in the same boat as most of you. ArenaNet is going to expand the stat choices beyond the original pairs, and the accessories affect us least of all… but apprehension they might handle the armor like the accessories is palpable.

I’m OK with the odd ball random Healing on some of these accessories, everyone can use a touch more Healing even if some people could use a little less. The odd seeding of Precision has me scratching my head; you only need Precision if you build around critical hits. No one has built in Prowess to my knowledge, so landing a critical hit is literally useless unless you’ve built for it in some way. Only one of my characters are, so all this Precision has me clawing my eyes out.

1) Unbiased
2) Yes
3) No
4) No
5) Unbiased
6) Unbiased
7) Unbiased
8) No
9) No
10) Yes
11) Yes
12) Unsure

Yeah. I didn’t realize there should have been a Mad King in that hole until I read the forum. Currently watching what I can on YouTube.

I blame my graphics card rather then ANet. My computer is just on the edge of playability at the best of times. Still doesn’t stop me from feeling the disappoint.

@Konig: I learned about the statement “sextet of swallowers” sometime after making my previous post. Thank you for bringing it up again. It reminded me to actually check who said that on the wiki. Also, for those of us who like me don’t have the meaning of sextet on the tip of their brain, wikipedia sextet. I play so much fantasy I just assumed it was some sort of ancient tablet.

So yeah, we know there are exactly six dragons for sure now, assuming Jotun legend wasn’t just refering to the on the Tyrian continent. (In which case we might not be able to count “Bubbles” amongst the six, leaving two more sleeping on the Tyrian continent and who knows how many others asleep or awake elsewhere. Scary…) Point is I still don’t see the Pale Tree and the sylvari as having much in common with them. If anything I look at the dwarves turned to stone and how they have a lot in common with the destroyers, and think that there must be a plant based elder dragon and the sylvari much exist to counter that dragon specifically.

…right, going to play devil’s advocate and add some facts to support the viewpoint that opposes my own. The sylvari and the norn might have some motivation to visit Cantha. Though motivation might be a strong word… let’s call them plot hooks. The Sylvari have the Wardens and all the diverse plant life in the Echovald Forest, while the Norn have the Celestial Spirits and to some extent the Luxon totems.

Though remember that the Luxon culture most likely survives strongest in the descendants of their refugees to Kryta. Honestly I’m hoping we see some development of the Norn connection to Cantha come the Chinese New Year. To at least not have some commentary on the subject would be an oversight, and I’d personally want to see something deep and involved evolve from the concept.

Oh, and Kreslin, opinions on the current state of the Canthan Empire and it’s humans are mostly speculation on the policies of Emperor Usoku being consistent over the past few hundred years. We’ve lost contact with them ever since Zhaiten rose from the depths, so things could have changed but the image of them currently being completely xenophobic is what most people are running with until we receive an update.

OK, ignoring the ritualists and profession talk since that is an barrel of worms I don’t feel like tapping the keg on twice in one day…

The Tengu are very likely to be first up for new races, but also a lot closer than Cantha. They’re kind of right next door at the Domain of Winds, and set up rather strongly as a potential protagonist faction. Protagonist doesn’t necessarily mean player character, but still… there are a lot of reasons for us not to go to Cantha.

1) A half dozen or so regions of immediate concern on the Tyrian continent, ranging from the Maguuma Wastes to the Crystal Desert. Personally I’d like to see a bit more of the Blazeridge Mountains…
2) Elona is right next door. Seriously, unless the Dragon Empire invades, I’m more concerned about Palawa Joko than a bunch of xenophobic humans who last we saw where rejecting all things not of the Kaineng culture, including the other Canthan cultures.
3) To get to Cantha we need to cross the big dark ocean currently inhabited by ‘Bubbles’. OK, there is always Asuran gates, but still… we have a lot more motivation to explore the deep sea and see what caused the underwater civilizations to flee than possibly antagonized the Dragon Empire. Once again, discounting the chances that they attack first.

Personally, I do want to see a bit more of the Canthan cultures we know and love, but where I’d love to see them is in Divinities Reach. Divinities Reach’s Canthan descendants are descended from the Canthan’s who rejected the Ministry of Purity’s purges, including I believe the purges of the nonKaineng cultures. So if we’re going to see the Luxon and Kurzick cultures we all know and love, it will be there.

Chessrook.8643:

You’re not the first to mention this… in fact there’s another thread with over 100 replies discussing this exact theory.

Wooden Potatoe’s recent video on the subject probably stirred up some new interest on the subject. Links to the threads in question would be appreciated so we can keep from talking in circles.

Onto the topic at hand, I’d to raise some counter points to see how they can be responded to.

My first point, regarding the Crucible of Eternity, remember that what NPCs ICly believe isn’t inherently true. The Inquest are ultimately after godhood through knowledge, so them treating the plant like nature of the Pale Tree as one of the Dragon’s Minions could literally just be experimentation; experimentation worthy of it’s own lab room in their facility dedicated to Elder Dragon research, but still just experimentation.

My second point once again reiterates that what NPCs ICly believe isn’t inherently true. The statement is five versus six. At the moment we have five ancient races and five dragons. OOC we don’t know which one gets the +1. Statements like this build on our knowledge as players, but commonly accepted isn’t absolute fact in a game expecting plot twists.

My final point for this post, I’ve personally seen a great deal of similarities between the dragon in the dream and Zhaiten’s draconian minions. While it shouldn’t be dismissed, we also shouldn’t take a leap of logic off a cliff when there are much simpler reasons.

I’ve played the Asura personal story quest that talked about the Elder Dragons consuming magic. I find it curious that it was taken as evidence that magic wasn’t a closed system but instead a consumable resource like water. The water system in our world is the prime example of a closed system, so overall I think some of the hyperbole of the quests are examples of Asura not knowing everything but acting like they do.

Overall, I don’t think the Elder Dragons consuming magic can be taken in the same light as animals consuming food. If anything it’s more of an enzyme consuming matter; an endless chemical process that will go on as long as there are raw materials. Replace base chemicals with magic and you get what I think the Elder Dragons are, especially considering taking Oola’s statement of us being the embodiment of magic as fact… a stretch given Oola’s ego, but it fits given the observable atmosphere.

Overall, I think that would be the dragon’s purpose. They don’t literally eat magic so much as remove it from the natural Tyrian environment and inserts it into their own… let’s call it ecosystem. As for why they’re like this… I see most though unfortunately not all the Elder Dragons as a hostile force of nature given motive to expand. Zhaiten is decay, Jormag the frozen waste, and Primordus maga/lava. Kralkatorrik is a bit harder to pin down, breaking this form of classification, so I’m just not sure… it’s just my best reflection on the matter.

As for defeating dragons, I haven’t done of the personal story myself but I see the fight against Zhaiten as a progressive thing. First you cut off new corruption, then you begin cleansing. Once cleansing has started and new corruption is prevented the Elder Dragon can only create new minions by given from itself. During the Personal Story we will destroy the Mouth of Zhaiten, but during the final dungeon we’ll we’ll fight such a monstrosity again. This isn’t unintentional redundancy; faced with attacks from multiple fronts Zhaiten spawns new champions to attack it’s enemies.

People say that those final moments in the story need some tuning (and admittedly I hope it is improved by the time I get around to doing them), but ultimately I see fighting a dragon as one big war of attrition. If anything Primordus will be the most difficult one to defeat due to the difficulty of preventing him from retreating back into the earth. The journey in doing any of this will be in finding out how to reverse their corruptions.

No one says there might not be a positive elder dragon out there, but the nature of what that dragon is heavily depends on what the elder dragons really are. Observation tells us being of great power that slowly converts their surroundings to an archetype compatible with their power, working slowly outward on a global scale. There could very well be an Elder Dragon that represents the soul of Tyria that would work to undo the dragons’ corruption once it awakens, but that opens up an entirely different bag of worms.

That bag of worms is also a mostly divergent topic from the one at hand: origins of the Sylvari.

I closed last night’s post referencing what my Theory B entails: the Soundless, Malyck’s mother, and Urgoz.

Of course this all swings around to Nightmare. If the Soundless are partly under the influence of another mother tree’s philosophy, what’s to say that the Nightmare Court isn’t as well. Nightmare as just the court’s philosophy isn’t strong enough in my opinion to serve as narrative justification for the sudden personality shift those who join the Nightmare Court suffer, but Nightmare as the philosophy of another mother tree’s dream might be. Part of me wants that other mother tree to be in Cantha with some connection to Urgoz and the wardens, but at the same time I realize that there is no reason for such a desire to pan out. Still, if there are two trees, why not three?

And… that’s all I have to say on the matter. I have other theories involving Urgoz and Melandru and how they might together relate to the sylvari and the mother trees, but I think they get a bit too tangent to the topic of the thread. Then again, I am over cautious sometimes.

I don’t read too much into the similarities between the Elder Dragons’ champions and the Pale Tree. Just look at the similarities between the Dwarves and the Destroyers. Someone created living weapons against the Elder Dragons a long time ago, and a lot of those weapons exhibit traits similar to the particular dragon minion they where forged to fight.

I personally connect the Nightmare Court to the Stone Summit. This means there might be an plant based Elder Dragon out there, but the Pale Tree isn’t it’s betraying champion but instead it’s opposing Great Dwarf. We don’t know much about the Great Dwarf and if it once was physical; we just know what was learned when the ritual was completed. When you look at the fanaticism of the Stone Summit next to the Nightmare Court, I find it an easy to draw comparisons. Qualifiers are that there is at least one moment we know of when a Stone Summit turned, but that involved the gods…

All that is just an old theory I’ve had for awhile. A newer theory involves the Soundless, Malyck’s mother, and Urgoz. But it’s 12:30 AM in my timezone so I really should be getting some sleep. I’ll check on this thread tomorrow.

Incident: 120826-011765

I’ve been waiting on this ticket since August 26. It was not a game breaking issue, so the wait wasn’t painful, but I was still expecting a eventual resolution. Yesterday I received a response, and while I can understand the need to cut your losses concerning an issue that will only effect a limited portion of the player base and no future new members… I’m hesitant to take the response at face value.

Dismissing the briefness of the response, the spelling errors, and the fact that the ticket wasn’t closed… proceeding with the resolution as stated in the ticket could put my account at risk for exploitation of a bug. While I have no doubt that referencing the ticket in question in a new ticket with support would eventually get my account back, I would still like to avoid the issue altogether.

I obviously can’t go into the detail of the ticket in a public forum, but the ticket itself is exhaustive enough. All I really need to know is… is this really resolved? Can I walk away with a sign of relief or am I going to be stalking the My Issues tab of customer support for a little while longer?

This is a race idea that has been sitting with me for awhile. With the game released and the programmers running around, this is the time to slip this idea into the designers’ suggestion box, and this is the venue I feel most comfortable doing so.

There have already been some suggestions on the Feedback Wiki, namely Mist’ken and Lyrens, and lengthy discussions on Guru concerning the idea of new races. In the Guru thread I had a moment of cascading inspiration about an insectoid race.
What follows is only re-presentation of that idea.

Premise
I draw attention to Istan and the Scarab Plague. The Scarab Plague was a part Elonian History that native player characters explored in a quest line started by Scholar Chago in the Astralarium. Quick spoiler summary for those who need it; the plague was the parasitic larva of the native super insects that had laid their eggs on the local grain. People died and then scarabs ate their way out of their corpses.

Now, the Scarab Plague happened once, and there is a general fear that it could happen again. Add onto that the fact that Palawa Joko currently rules Elona and you get a disturbing question: what is Joko’s knee jerk reaction to a large quantity of his living peons keeling over? Then ask the question what could possibly go wrong when using necromantic magic on a corpse with large host of living larva inside it.

cough

Now, one of the potential results is you’re left with a humanoid form constructed from multiple insect bodies. The person’s original human spirit might linger as a dominant intelligence amongst the juvenile insect minds that compose the new body, but either way we now have new life.

Hivemind of One
The racial origins have the species coming into existence as a collection of insects in one body. The first generation may have lingering human spirits giving them direction, but future generations will need to develop a level of internal harmony in order to function. This would be another in a long line of unique hive minds in Guild Wars 2, this time being as described: hiveminds of one.

Society of the Hive or Anarchy of the Swarm
Every player character race in Guild Wars 2 has an antagonistic foil that comes from within their own society. When you ask how a species with insectoid instincts and drives might structure a society you two direction: the hive and the swarm.
The hive is the natural player character society; an instinctual bureaucracy formed around whatever starting culture their first generation were raised into. Larvae raised in isolated combs to avoid using another’s skeleton as scaffolding would be a minimum, but also working castes.

In contrast to the hive is the swarm. The swarm live in the same manner as the scarabs that spawned them. Feasting without cultivation, infecting the food supplies of others for reproduction, and otherwise being something no player character would have any remorse killing.

Body Horror
Born from plague and necromancy, we can’t avoid the topic of body horror. In general insect behavior is disgusting to humans, so the topic is unavoidable even without the origin story presented. To put all minds at ease, Arena Net has a history of not avoiding body horror but instead handle it tactfully in a correct manner and we the player trust them to do so in the future.

With a meshwork body there will be some vestigial parts. Vestigial limbs are an unquestionable part of body horror, but an insectoid exoskeleton mutes it slightly. The hive would mute it further with sanitation and clothing, possibly raising it to a strange alien beauty. In contrast the swarm would play this angle straight up, sometimes wearing the corpses they were born from.

The Question of Palawa Joko
How this insectoid race treats its father is the most important question for developers to answer and least important for players to provide. That’s because the answer relies heavily on how Palawa Joko will be treated in the rest of the content: antivillain or straight up villain. The answer is important since their starting point is a human culture as it stod under Palawa Joko’s rule.

Cannibalization
No, not physical act. This is more of a design fallback. Under circumstances that this race is unsuitable, there are plenty of details that can be salvaged for other uses. At the very least it’s origin story is a situation begging to happen. Just lose the hive aspect of the species and make them the swarm that Palawa Joko released on himself in his hubris.