Guild Wars 2

The next update is clearly going to be Sons of Svanir wielding Skritt armed with Scarlet’s magitek, riding Centaurs into battle against the rest of the world.

Bumping this thread because this is still bugged after a year. The bug is well-documented on the wiki: if your character is downed during the 3rd wave (suicide plague carriers), no more waves will spawn and you’ll have to reset the instance. Nonetheless, this bug still exists and haven’t been fixed.

Hope Anet can resolve this at some point.

My primary motivation has always been more along the lines of OOH PRETTY SHOES rather than any concrete sense of achievement. That being said, I’ve also given up on the Living Story achievements.

It’s an odd feeling – considering that I haven’t missed a single LS achievement to date, but I burnt myself out proving a point to myself by finishing the 8 orbs Liadri achievement. After that, I realized that I was really being led by the nose, and decided I’ve had enough of it.

I used to do all the LS stuff instantly – on the day it comes out. Now I just randomly wander Queensdale as a giant candy corn. It definitely feels better.

To be fair, it’s awfully hard to generate character depth in like, 30 lines of text or less.

Man In Zero G.8312:

Some people just want to watch the world burn… Some just want to make Farren soup.

Calling this as our next LS update now. Would be totally sensible, too, given Scarlet’s capabilities.

Did I get that right? 8D

Got mine earlier today. Am inclined to second the opinion that some arenas are broken. Also finished mine in the asura arena due to the “easier” spawns of the swirly lights, but had 9 on Liadri in the norn arena and failed to get achievement despite killing her with ~10 seconds left on the timer.

Did it two days ago and yesterday on thief with 8 orbs, no achievement.

I’m not sure if I’m motivated enough to try it again when I don’t know whether or not I’ll actually get credit.

Scarlet didn’t immediately grab my attention like some of the other GW characters (Koss, Zho, Gwen, Pyre Fierceshot, Lazarus & Anise off the top of my head), but I think it might not be inappropriate for them to do such a character.

Many times people want the staggeringly complex, darkish grey antivillain characters, but I don’t think people realize that those characters require much more build-up than a few line of text in a game (that most players will probably just skip through anyways to get to the shiny).

Scarlet’s personality is clear. A player within about ten seconds or so immediately gets that she’s the crazy type of bad guy. Good. I think insofar as a plot device goes, that’s sufficient. Sometimes simple is best.

If Scarlet’s supposed to be the Joker, does this mean Countess Anise is her Batman?

… Which means Logan = Robin? ._.

I just finished my first Scarlet attack on an overflow.

It was epic in every sense.

When the event first started, no one had any idea as to what was going on. Commanders were shouting on the map giving contradictory orders, and we were just all confused, and just tried to do my own thing. I picked a direction, saw the first event, and went along with it. It was me and just one other guard trying to fight off an entire portal’s worth of enemies. We were getting pulverized until the nearby NPCs from the town swarmed out to help us …

Only to be crushed by Scarlet’s minions (normal NPCs against vets and champions… they didn’t have much of a chance). There were so many downed Charr, it was almost cinematic. In hindsight, I don’t think your portals would have spawned so closely to a town, but it definitely added something to the moment to see the NPCs respond in a way I would expect them to do so: defending their “homes” from hostile invaders.

That’s when the story started coming alive. The whole thing felt H.G.Well-esque. There’s something about witnessing these events showing up that made it better. In one instance, the small zerg I had following suddenly had a huge shadow over us. I think half of us stopped to look up – saw the airship – and then literally got parachuted on by what felt like a bajillion Aetherblades. We ambushed NPC bosses, fought from event to event, and all the while, the clock WAS ticking – as we’re reminded by the little thing in the UI. I normally hated timers, but somehow, this one wasn’t that bad.

Close to the end, a particularly nasty spawn with AR and Scarlet minions overlapped with each other (yet another unintended thing?). We had like four minutes left on the timer. The big zerg was coming back, but there were too many for the ~10 of us to handle. Out of nowhere, I saw in /say something along the lines of “Warband, roll out!” and suddenly an entire legion of color-coordinated Charr PLAYERS (I’m guessing an RP warband guild – a lot of their characters had some kind of lock in their name) showed up blasting their way through the mob. At that moment I sort of understood why RPers enjoy RPing – that was probably a big kitten heroes moment – the sort of things that makes stories come alive.

And then as if on cue, the Ascalonian Ghosts in the zone swarmed in, too. It was one thing to see players fight swarm with swarm or adding to the immersion, but to see the ghosts of Ascalon rise up from the ground, “FOR ASCALON”, and start “helping” us – that, was something else.

Three minutes later we got Scarlet. /cheers erupted around the map. And, as suddenly as they had came, the zone was silent again. I haven’t even finished looting before I realized that it was all over. :P

I’ve done most of the “hard content” of the game – AR achievements, high-level fractals, Arah, whatever you might want to consider hard. But I think to date, this is my fondest memory of GW2.

I get that it was sheer coincidence that the event just happened to trigger, and I just happened to have landed in overflow with an RP guild who somehow managed to load in sizable numbers at the same time. I recognize that yes, mechanically, we’re still moving around and killing stuff, but something happened. Something made the story come alive. It wasn’t the writing. It was the game itself.

I guess what I’m trying to say, Anet, is that my sense of wonder have been rekindled by the random way in which your events have interacted. I don’t think I’ve changed much since last August, but I felt like that level 8 mesmer seeing Shadow Behemoth spawn for the first time in Queensdale again, and it’s a good feeling – one that I haven’t felt for quite some time playing any game, period.

Thank you.

Just beat her after many, many tries. My reflexes aren’t the best, but I did it in the Flame Legion arena, on thief, with 10-0-30-20-10. Traits were mug (damage orb on steal), regen on stealth, blind on stealth, and heal while in stealth. I also had caltrops on dodge from 10 in stealing, +50% movement speed in stealth, and dodge to remove weakness/cripple in acrobatics.

Weapons and armor were a mix of mostly carrion and zerker stuff with 5 krait runes + 1 chry orb. I ran P/D. Utilities were spider venom, shadow refuge, and signet of shadows. I had 1100ish condi damage with about 17k health.

In hindsight, I spent a lot less time in stealth than I had thought, so I think I probably went overboard with all the stealth stuff. I used to run blinding powder like JustinProCrew’s guide, but I found that I couldn’t damage Liadri fast enough (likely due to my inexperience).

Couldn’t remember much of the fight, to be honest, other than staying calm really helps. I mug the orbs as they come up instead of C&D (again, I’m a bad thief), but it worked well enough for me to get the mini.

Last thing I think is to not get frustrated. At the end of the day, this is just a game. :P I usually give her about 5-10 tries a day, and if I fail, I log out and go do other things.

Andele.1306:

Funny because no its actually from a Reddit post, not konig, he just posted it as fast as he could later on the forums.

This. There are more people into lore than I think the lore forum gives credit to. Most of them just don’t really share much for obvious reasons. :P

Zaxares.5419:

Not as amusing as the time the Whirling Edge Champion killed ALL the Charr in Butcher’s Block. XD Luckily it seems neither Queen Jennah nor Smodur heard of it because I’m pretty sure that would have resulted in the treaty being torn up immediately.

I can attest to this. My level 18 necromancer was just minding her own business when SUDDENLY SPIN TO WIN.

I think Jennah should seriously consider sending a squad of these guys to take on the Elder Dragons or something after the Queen’s Jubilee. At the very least they should be able to farm Ulgoth considering how clumped the centaurs are in Harathi. 8D

Kiel, noble? Please, she does the same thing as Evon in her personal instance, which is sending you to do her dirty work.

I really wanted to vote for Trahearne-with-female-bits, but I think it’s posts like these and the attitude of my server’s WvWers that’ll persuade mostly neutral players into voting Evon. Spite begats spite, after all :P

I may be in the minority here, but I would rather see the Fall of Abaddon executed “well” – i.e. a long dungeon like Arah 4, since we don’t have campaigns expansions- rather than putting it into a Fractal, which is going to gut most of the detail and background on it. Kind of like sushi – delicious but not very filling.

The reactor, at least, is something that I think would easily be self-contained in a Fractal-sized thing. A bit of exposition at the beginning – a paragraph’s worth of dialogue at most to give us context – a build-up, and then a boss fight. It would be simple and satisfying.

Of course, I think it’ll end out to be about the same. People will whine because it’s yet another piece of forced content. A few more people will probably quit outright because they didn’t get what they wanted. The people who don’t care about lore can have another thing that they can speedrun, and the people who do can now bicker all they want about how many asura scientists it takes to make a very large explosion or whine about how their theory about the build-up is the best and how everyone else is wrong and should be barred from presenting their obviously wrong opinion.

Mursaat.

I’ve been a long player of the Guild Wars series, and I can echo the opinions of many of the players here. If you feel like you have to grind out the achievement points or laurels or karma jugs, consider asking yourself the question: what for? What do you hope to get out of the game? Why do you want X?

“To look cool”.

Ok, but is that for yourself, or is that to impress other people? I think something to consider is: to what extent does the opinion of others affect your own enjoyment of the game? For that matter, what makes you happy (online or offline), OP?

If I’m understanding you right, I think you’ve identified the why in your problem – you’ve invested a lot of time and effort and money into it, and don’t feel like you’ve enjoyed the game as much as you should. Were I you, I’d try to figure out what makes you happy, and see if GW2 has enough of it to warrant your time and effort. Don’t fall into the trap of “I HAVE TO PLAY BECAUSE I HAVE ALREADY SPENT SO MUCH TIME” – that doesn’t do anyone except for maybe your subscription company good. If you feel it’s no longer worth your time or money, then don’t bother sinking more resources into it.

I’ll paraphrase the words of someone else on the forums here. I’m a “hardcore casual”. In occupation, I’m a medical scientist. Most of my tryharding is during my normal “day-job”, where we try to figure out what’s going on in the human body. Tyria is one of my retreats in which I can come to whenever I want, or if I just want some “me” time.

Sure, I like being efficient, but I also like cosmetic rewards, and I like to randomly wander up to things and just do things as they come along. Laurels are more of a case of “oh, I can still do this today” rather than “MUST DO IT FOR GEAR”. For me, the enjoyment is intrinsic because of the path taken towards it, and not necessarily the rewards. I don’t have a legendary. Never had one dropped, and only had Dungeon Master because we were trying to dig up some lore to use in a friend’s RP.

I’m a simple person at heart, and it doesn’t take much to make me happy. One of my favorite things to do, despite the potentials of it being frustrating, is to pug content like higher-level fractals or Arah. I like randomly picking up people in WvW and go off slapping yaks.

Now, you might see it as stupidity – “You’ll never get past Lupi!” or “You’re just wasting your time with bads”. For me, however, I find it extremely rewarding when a random group of people can come together and cooperate in order to achieve some goal. That’s what makes me happy. A random ranger pug singlehandedly saving an Arah 1 run. Logan’s Journey playing the first time I entered Divinity’s Reach just as a few RPers walk past discussing the fate of humanity. Baiting the Eye of Zhaitan into a bot train. That sort of thing.

In the end, what I’m taking away from GW2 are all the random instances of awesome that has occurred without intentional orchestration. In a single word: memories.

Vote for this man. He promises to reduce LA loading times.

I think OP is talking about the location-specific aetherblade slayers achievements…

Kormir so she can steal credit from Trahearne.

I think this dungeon has a high degree of frustration intolerance.

As people wipe on dungeons, their abilities to play becomes somewhat diminished. Folks who are spending three or four hours and stuck at one thing might be better served to take a break and come back tomorrow with a fresh set of eyes – I don’t think it’s a lack of skill, but rather, if even one person in your group becomes vastly frustrated, I think it’s much harder to concentrate and do well as a whole.

We managed to unstuck her by having four of us jump to our deaths and then the last guy WPing back.

Unfortunately, now she’d move around but not opening doors. Tried every solution on forums and reddit to no avail.

Personally, I enjoy playing with random people . Sure, I run into the occasional five-signet warriors or what have you, but I feel as a whole, most of GW2 content is doable even with a random group, and I enjoy the feeling when people who don’t know each other come together to accomplish a common goal.

Tonight, though, the atmosphere on mapchat (I’m on TC) has been anything but positive, as people seem to be fairly split between “LOLL2PNOOB” or “WTFFFFANETTHISSUUUUCCCKKKS”. It kind of reminds me of when everyone was trying the old AC for the first time back in August – except, y’know, we have a short little asura instead of Kohler.

I’m simply interested in hearing your experiences with random folks. Do you guys feel, as a whole, that the four random guys you’ve picked up are adequate for the content? Was it easy for you guys to learn how the mechanics worked? Do you think this thing was meant to be pugged?

Well, when you server’s winning, I think it makes sense that some players would take it out on PvE folks trying to get an achievement. I don’t fault them for doing it, but it sucks to be on the receiving end, especially when one’s not particularly good at jump puzzles in the first place.

The logic behind all the explanations about RNG is very sound, but please forgive those of us who are, as Mr. Spock would’ve put it, “emotionally compromised.”

If ranting about it on the forums make people feel better, so long as it’s not actively impeding other people’s enjoyment of the game, I think there’s no reason to not complain.

I dunno about your particular server, but one of the great cultural traditions on Tarnished Coast is to dance at the spawning location of major world bosses. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the events spawn faster, the things go down quicker, and legendary precursors are often dropped in abundance if the correct dance is performed.

With the above precedent in mind, I see no problems with dancing to light effigies on fire. 8D

Because they can. I’ve been a longterm player of both GW1 and GW2, and I actually think the ease is a huge plus for the game.

This is a game where both the learning curve and the “refresher” curve is surprisingly low. There’s no subscription fee. There’s very little forceful farming. While the game can be complex, it doesn’t have to be. In the end, I think one should actually play a game because they enjoy playing. If anything, I think there’s something wrong with the mentality that one should stick to something forever out of … whatever reason.

Softspoken.2410:

There’s a sort of ‘transparency filter’ that makes areas at your depth render on the map when underground / underwater, so that you see tunnels and such instead of the mountains on top of them. The borders around this area use the typical GW2 painterly aesthetic like the rest of the UI, so there’s brush strokes and spots that move around uniformly with the character.

I would have never seen the skull in it, but I hope that explains what it is. Try watching the map slightly zoomed out when in a large underwater area, I think you’re more likely to see all the edges at once that way.

Yup, that explains everything. Thanks

So, I’m not sure how to explain this, but there appears to be an odd skull-like graphic (a few dots that look like a grinning skull) floating around my world map. I’ve attached some clippings of screenshots to the best of my ability, but I think this is really something you should log into the game and see for yourself.

If you leave your worldmap open and have your character move around, the “skull” (stuff I’ve circled in red) seems to just stay out of your vision zone on the map. It’s definitely a little creepy…

Currently broken on Tarnished Coast as well, as of 4/23/13.

If you could read what I wrote… My commentary is towards the people who got stuff from the chest at the end. If you got crashed out of that, I think you’ve every right to lodge a complaint to Anet. Be angry. Smash things. Whatever makes you feel better.

Everyone in my overflow got at least two exotics in addition to the 20 slot box and the trinket. I’m sorry to hear that your particular run didn’t work out. Again, I think you have all the right to rage in that regard. But there are just as many people whining about the fact that they didn’t get a legendary precursor and how everything is still terrible – a cursory walk around LA overflow should show you what I’m talking about.

I’m pointing out that some of the most common complaints that are surfacing in our community can easily be reversed in logic. The idea that “why should other people get item X” can just as easily be reversed with the question “why should you get item X over someone else.” The weight of that particular argument is neutral, as per the nature of RNG. Neither seniority nor passion nor anything else really has any bearing on how the RANDOM number generator works.

The other thing, about people who logged in at the last minute and gotten the rewards – see my post.

Yeah. Those people have all of my sympathies. But at least it’ll be a learning experience for Anet, right?

I know a lot of people are feeling indignant at the moment. There are a lot of people who slogged through the event in its entirety, only to watch other people on their server get the precursor that they wanted.

Note: this post is explicitly addressed at those of us who did manage to finish the event and loot the big crab chest.

The thing is, Anet didn’t tie any of us down in a chair and force us to play through the whole event. Each one of us who did the thing chose, out of our own free will, to finish the event chain and go through the thing. We can blame everything from advertisements of the Lost Shore events to bad luck to whatever, but in the end, we were the one who did the whole thing through. If nothing else, the process – if you think about it – was fairly remarkable. It did tell a fairly reasonable story, after all.

“But there are people who logged in during the final phrase and got all the loots! omg unfair!”

Yes. But there are just as many people who logged on RIGHT as the event ended. Or people who couldn’t make the event at all. Or people whose overflows got glitched and got nothing at all. What about them?

“But that other guy got the [insert item here!]”

Yes, but to everyone else, they’re all the “other guys.” That is just how RNG works, and if nothing else, it’s a testament to the power of social psychology. Furthermore, we had no way of knowing what was going to be in those chests. They could’ve been all greens and blues and whites for all we knew. Shouldn’t we be at least a little grateful that we got stuff out of it at all?

I think it’s very easy for us to be pointing fingers. But we can just as easily take a step back, take a deep breath, and go outside or do something else. The event’s done. It wasn’t perfect, but you did it. What has happened happened. Are you seriously going to let someone else’s good fortunes be a roadblock for your own happiness?

Think about what motivates you to play, or what motivates you to participate. I think we have a tendency to awfulize too much.