Guild Wars 2

I also have this problem with Maritime Defense. I have had many kills over many games on capped points, but my achievement shows only 1 kill (which I got months ago).

Glider skins based on legendary weapons. For instance the Sunrise glider skin would have the body “skinned” with the same graphic as the blade of the weapon uses, and the trail would use the same graphic as the footprints.

I would like to see these only useable by people who had the actual weapons.

The wiki says it shows once you have collected the items.

I would say Goemm’s Lab in Metrica Province. You already have the first two that come to mind (Not So Secret and Skipping Stones).

Mainly I miss the ambient dialogue. “What is evil anyway”, “Where are the outhouses?” And of course “By Oghden’s hammer, what savings!”

I played a bunch of MMOs on Steam that were f2p during the content drought on GW2.

Wildstar was good fun, but close to empty. There were also a few quirks that usually get ironed out as the devs go back and clean up stuff, but I’m assuming didn’t here because of lack of resources.

Riders of Icarus was fun for a while, but combat was tedious. LotRO is dated, mostly empty, but still OK.TERA seemed pretty good, but I had problems with it that GW2s design philosophy doesn’t allow for. Neverwinter seemed promising, but has gone pay to win according to reviews, so I didn’t bother returning.

The big thing though is that there is no reason to believe that any of these games will be better supported than GW2 in the future.

If a sub model is too expensive that means that WoW and FF XIV are out.

Of the games that I have any experience with that leaves ESO as an alternative, but I think only played that for a little under a month. At the time it gave me a feeling that I was playing alongside people, rather than with them. Apparently it got better. Will it be stronger than GW2 in two years time? I have no idea, but my guess is that they’ll be at similar levels.

In the end though, my most pessimistic outlook would see at least 3 years until GW2 gets into any trouble with losing its player base (unless the expansion is horrible in a way that is worse than anything they have done so far) so it is definitely not a waste of time building up your characters in GW2.

Thanks for linking to the patch notes. I wondered why I was accruing dishonor whenever I played PvP and now I know why I can’t access signet of virtue.

Rognik.2579:

I don’t think Evon Gnashblade and Ellen Kiel can put their squabbling aside to be running the kind of secret organization E seems to be running. I’d be especially surprised if Gnashblade had anything to do with it considering how human-centric most of his actions have been.

My theory goes like this. Kiel and Gnashblade bpth like following down leads. Kiel as a Lionguard and Gnashblade as a businessman, err, charr. Around the time of the Molten Alliance they both do some digging and become aware of something deeper at play (dedge tunneling puns not intended). They also become aware of each other and decide to pool their two very different resource sets.

One thing they decide that they need however is a seat on the Captain’s Council. So they decide their best chance is to both run. The more vicious the campaign the better as not only does it convince people that they aren’t working together, it also scares off the opposition.

There is also Marjory’s interaction with E. She doesn’t see E but there is a male voice and strong grip, which she sort of likes the feel of. This implies a human male, but it could also be Gnashblade talking and Kiel holding her. I admit though that the implication that Marjory liking the grip of a woman on her as a clue would be pretty trashy writing, but hey, she’s supposed to be a pulpy character.

Ashantara.8731:

Xula de Neiva.9508:

Did you trigger the second letter somehow or did it just pop in your mail box?

It just popped up. I am sure this is going to lead somewhere eventually.

I don’t think it’s leading anywhere. I remember Droobert and there’s no way I’m lending Blaine money, that’s for sure.

Sartharina.3542:

My Sylvari ranger now is running Sword+Dagger/Greatsword, because one can never have too many Caladbolgs.

You should totally rename him Calag the Bold.

Amaimon.7823:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I am number six?

I think that was an Austin Powers reference

The Prisoner was a classic surreal spy series from the early 70’s

-I am number 2.
-Who is number 1?
-You are number 6.
-I am not a number, I am a free man!

But I may have drifted off topic, unless Lake Doric starts spawning large white balls to attack us.

On topic, I am 80% sure that B is just comic relief. Sure, E had operatives in the area, but dropping down a well and shouting for help is not consistanr with E’s MO. Personally I am still hoping that E is the name used by Evon Gnashblade and Elen Kiel working in tandem.

I really enjoyed having something to work towards in the months after HoT came out. It’s a pretty minor thing to have locked away behind a mastery, but it was cool to get as you could feel its effects. Unfortunately the “I want it now!” brigade has been pretty vocal since HoT came out so in the future it looks like the only long term goals we will be given are going to be skins and worthwhile stuff like specialisations, gliding and even auto-loot are just going to be handed out with minimal fuss.

Braham may actually be becoming the new Eir. Eir started out the story of “Edge of Destiny” by bringing in a disastrous attack of icebrood. I think the direction the devs are headed is by having Braham responsible for his own disaster and then to look back at how his mother recovered.

I am hopeful it’s a bit more like Caithe and that his actions are partly due to Jormag whispering to him, because in the latest episode he became a lot less likable.

The new zone is excellent. The story is progressing reasonably well, though I am partly reserving judgement until I see some of the payoffs.

The two major problems I have are that the instances don’t seem as much fun this time around. The concepts are OK, it’s just that on the first walkthrough it is not at all obvious what needs to be done. Also, the amount of time it takes to knock out those oozes makes it more tedious than anything.

Also, inventory bloat is getting way out of hand. Not only do we have berries, we also have Svanir disguises (in three pieces), bits for the elixir and a portal stone for the egg chamber.

It really looks like a case of “We have this asset and we can either spend hundreds of man hours of development to do a thorough job, or we can ship it now.”

Given the choice of not having it at all and having it this way, I am glad we have it. But it is a far inferior method of acquisition if I understand correctly that there is no associated achievement.

That I will no longer be playing. I am logging in much less already.

Fundamentally, at the old rate it was more desirable to pay gold to get gems than it was to pay cash for gems to get gold. This is probably due to a change in the ease of making gold.

Look at how much personal story there is for any one race up to the point that they join an order. Then look at how much story there was in HoT. Then add a starter map, and all the armour (admittedly a lot of assets already exist in a form that can be adapted, but we are talking thousands of items). I would like to see a new race, but I don’t have faith in ANet’s ability to create one in time for xpac2 without it feeling very much less than the other races.

Desert borderlands didn’t strictly break the “waiting to have fun” rule, but if you were in the wrong position you could find yourself running long distances to try and get to the fun. Aside from the navigation issues though I quite liked it, and Alpine seems pretty bland afterwards. Stick with the plan to rotate them I say.

Anyone who thinks that they can’t play a sub level 20 fractal with a four man squad is not an elitist, they are a bad. I feel sorry for your friend, but my gut instinct is that this is just bad luck with one or two idiot groups. My personal experience is that elitism is less of a problem in fractals now than it was in dungeons before HoT. I have an AP level that far excedes my skill level, so I usually notice it when other people kick, and the only time I regularly see people get kicked is when they are insta-downed by agony.

Paulytnz.7619:

I feel your pain, my 200-300 ping keeps this adventure well and truly out of my reach….

I have 200-300 ping if everything is going well, and I can get silver on it. There are times when I can’t try it but that’s usually when I am suffering lag spikes.

When I attempt to enter the jumping puzzle I am frequently taken to the Winter Wonderland loading screen and then back to the Divinity’s Reach loading screen and then back to Divinity’s Reach. And when I say frequently I mean 80% of the time.

Palador.2170:

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I have to say, yesterday at Teq some cat was waving that staff around and I thought I was on the set of Hitchkitten’s The Birds.

10x more annoying than Pony Bow.

Suddenly, I want it.

Suddenly I want to see a movie by Alfred Hitchkitten. Maybe “The Manx Who Knew Too Much” or “North by North Rex”.

On topic: Now I don’t feel so bad about farming lumber and ore slowly rather than buying it off the trading post. The design goes against a design philosophy they have had since launch so it is obviously an oversight (like introducing the requirement for heavy supply bags in the same patch where it became impossible to obtain them was).

I tend to hover mid to low 200, but in peak times it gets close to unplayable, often around 600 for extended periods. I am not sure how much of this is the Netflix effect and how much of it might come under ANet’s control. I do know that this stopped me picking up raiding when it came out because I didn’t want the fact that my ping suddenly jumped to 1400 to cause the other 9 members of my party to wipe.

Nini.8941:

Is there any fix coming in the near future?

I have absolutely no desire to even try this fight again if the freaking rifts are going to spawn in mid air where it’s impossible to get to them.

I got this bug and was about to try and suicide when I noticed that there was a second rift that I could get to. If you encounter this bug it is worth looking around for it.

Jayne.9251:

You might be able to find your heavy bags here?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Restoration_Refuge

Basically I’d imagine any level 80 centaur gives the same chance? Worth a try?

The centaurs there are all allies.

So, whoever designed guild upgrades obviously didn’t look at what was happening in the new WvW borderlands. There are currently only extremely limited ways of obtaining Heavy Supply Bags (a PvP reward track) whereas before there were centaurs in WvW maps which would drop them. This wouldn’t be an issue except guild halls need them for an upgrade and the bags are trading for over 5 gold now.

So, if the guild team doesn’t want to fix this, can the WvW team please do something about it?

The thing that bugged me was Trahearne right at the end. It just felt like a sop to all the Trahearne haters who had asked for exactly that sort of thing.

The interaction with Caithe felt awkwardly handled.

Taimi was way too mobile out of her golem. This was a little bit of a disappointment too. I thought that the charr she was speaking to back in the Silverwastes was going to become the archetype for the Scrapper, and leaving her at Rata Novus with a group of Scrappers to help her defend herself would have been more comfortable.

In retrospect the disaspointment regarding the Nightmare Court angle is more of a product of overhype than bad story telling. Had nobody mentioned the Nightmare Court beforehand I would have been quite pleased with that aspect.

The way Eir died seemed to ignore the fact that Eir is at least as important to us as Braham is. The effect on Braham pushed the right emotional buttons, at least when Taimi noticed he’d shaved his hair. They should had Belinda die at that point in a similar way, and it would have worked well.

The encounters were pretty good, the last one would have been extremely satisfying if it weren’t so buggy, but there was too little story to make it feel is big as it should have. Four or so scenes concentrating more on exposition than on battle would have worked wonders.

Having said all that, I still think the story eas OK, it’s just that I only give it a six, when I was hoping for an eight or a nine.

This is why they should have used the opportunity to add Tengu*. Some nice, easy classic low level maps to wander around in and chill and three easy chapters to complete from the classic personal story for the casuals. Then the Heart of Maguuma stuff for those who want a bit more of a challenge.

*Of course, if they’d done that we would have had to wait another six months.

Shukriyya.7629:

Have you checked if you can buy that component on the trading post?

It is not available on the TP.

Having started the legendary crafting track for “The Flameseeker Prophecies” I picked up a copy of the recipe for Anthology of Villains, which is a necessary component. The recipe requires Sheets of Quality Paper, which looks like it is crafted by Scribes. As far as I know you can only become a Scribe if you are in a guild which has a guild hall.

So if you are not in an active guild, you can’t proceed with making the precursor, or am I missing something?

Bugs I have experienced against Mordremoth include:

Mordremoth’s skills do not reset (not sure if this is a bug)
Rift sometimes appears on inaccessible platform
Shelter does not work at all
Air vents fail about one time in three

I also had the bug where Mordrem- Canach becomes invincible in the previous fight of this story step.

I had this problem, but it seemed to fix itself once I had downloaded the entire patch.

Kravick.4906:

Cormac.3871:

Xoei.1597:

Had I known that after purchasing HoT you wouldn’t even get the full experience due to locks on mastery skills and what have you, I would have never purchased it.

I wonder if anyone ever writes on WoW forums that they wouldn’t have bought the expansion if they had known they wouldn’t be able to play at the new top level right away.

No, what WoW did is called progression. Quests and an actual sense of you know, progressing. The new elite specs in GW2 do not improve your character in any way as they are balanced to be equal to the rest of the class, and are intended to be an expansion on to an existing platform. Its not the same.

You’re right, it isn’t the same. That’s why it was called “Horizontal Progression”.

It is pretty clear that they didn’t put much thought into underwater combat, which is understandable I suppose.

The first legend you get you can’t use underwater, which means if you use underwater combat early you don’t get a heal skill.

Xoei.1597:

Had I known that after purchasing HoT you wouldn’t even get the full experience due to locks on mastery skills and what have you, I would have never purchased it.

I wonder if anyone ever writes on WoW forums that they wouldn’t have bought the expansion if they had known they wouldn’t be able to play at the new top level right away.

So, on the positive side, it isn’t quite a 66% nerf. The dungeons that gave 1 gold + 26 silver before now give 35 silver + 26 silver, which is closer to 50%.

On the negative side, dungeons give a lot less experience, which is what I thought was going to be their saving grace. This is quite annoying given that it is not what I thought was meant by “liquid rewards”.

On the very negative side, they paid absolutely no attention to our recommendations back when they were collecting them because they wanted to pretend they cared about dungeons. The one piece of feedback that was almost universally given was that Ascalonian Catacombs should be brought into line with other easy dungeons. This was ignored. You can count me among the cynical now.

I experienced the prologue bug, which seemed to right itself after I downloaded the entire patch.

Can’t finish prologue. I travel to the last quest marker and the game freezes. It has happened three times now.

Ok I Did It.2854:

They wont be worth doing, you have to read between the lines, when Anet says they are going to restructure and move some of the dungeon rewards out of dungeons, what they mean it, they are stripping dungeons of all loot and rewards so that no one will do them, so the next board meeting they have they can say, see dungeons are not what the players want, no one does them.

Part of me wants you look at the fact that John Smith is the game’s economist and know that when he says “liquid rewards” he means something very specific from an economic point of view.

Another part of me remembers when Gaile came here and asked for suggestions back when the Dungeon community was last upset at being ignored, and nothing seems to have come from it other than the fact that they came back and said we are going to give you even less reward than before. This now feels like little more than an insincere exercise in damage control as others suggested at the time.

You know what currency is going to have value again after HoT comes out? Experience. You should be able to get at least 3 levels an hour running dungeons, which is faster than anything other than crafting, so all of a sudden people wanting to fill up their mastery tracks quickly are going to be looking at dungeons.

Windsagio.1340:

People running for tokens (as the original intent one might add) will not be terribly impacted just the gold farmers.

Unless lfg dries up, because the gold farmers and people who are after the dungeoneer reward have moved elsewhere.

People doing the dungeoneer achievement will probably switch over to PvP as the main method for getting them if the drop in gold rewards for dungeons is significant. OP is right that 500 tokens (8 runs worth, because you get at least 63 per path first time you complete it, and why would you run it more than once a day given that most other parts of the legendary take far longer) will now be a grind because either the player has to through 2 and a bit complete PvP tracks, or they have to now wait longer to have fun in lfg for the dungeons unless they are in a helpful guild.

Hopefully if dungeons really do tank they will revisit the rewards policy. I am not optimistic though. If you are going for your dungeoneer title it will probably be quicker to do it via PvP for any given path.

I heard that they got the writers in from Leisure Suit Larry to write the dialogue for the Roxx and Braham romance. They teach other to become druid and dragonhunter starting with Roxx’s line “I’ll let you play with my quiver if you let me hold your staff.” 90% of their involvement in the story is Braham trying to find a place to spend canoodling time only to be thwarted by, in no particular order, an unfortunate siege engine malfunction, a curious quaggan and Rytlock’s sudden return from the mist “Heh Braham, I see that I am not the only one wearing no pants today!”

Also there will be gemstore tie ins, and though I hate marketing I am still going to purchase “Braham’s wedding leisure suit” as soon as it comes out.

I know the OP wants to get an idea of how many people are actively playing, but the numbers aren’t publicly available. In lieu of hard numbers, here is an article from massively rating MMORPG health on publicly available metrics:

http://massivelyop.com/2015/06/11/perfect-ten-the-top-10-healthiest-live-mmos/

Another suggestion:

If you are going to take drops away then things like the Memories of Scarlet box should guarantee a non-insulting reward. In one opening I got some ascended material (dust and shards), aetherised metal which salvaged into platinum, blade shards and a gift from Scarlet. Given that this is effectively half my reward for the entire event it is insulting to think that I could have been almost as well rewarded for walking up to a platinum ore node.

The nourishment drop at a decent rate and I am fine with the fact that the valuable stuff is pretty rare (I can live without a realistic chance of getting the eyepatch), but please guarantee at least something that will make you glad you chose to do this rather than a champ train.

Zalladi.4652:

binidj.5734:

1. At the end of each event spawn a chest containing some blooms.
2. At the end of the meta-event (in addition to daily bonus) give blooms to all participants based on the number of events completed in the zone.

1) However, what would stop players from doing what they are doing now in order to maximise the number of reward chests they get from events? – Players will still be running around tagging the events to get as many of those chests as possible. (Though of course, I wouldn’t complain at some extra blooms, but the tagging issue would still be there).

I would prefer to see a harvestable bloom at the end of each event (or box) instead of having the end of invasion reward based on the number of events you “participated” in. However, as this suggestion stands it would probably still work, assuming you could complete at least ten events by staying until the end, which would yield at least 20 blooms.

If there was a reason to hang around at the end a lot of the problems would be gone. Remove the count and make sure whoever has contributed can harvest a bloom at the end, like the toxic alliance events.

Also, I missed out on Saturday night Oceania time because of the routing problem, so it would be great if you extended by a day, or even revisited with a tweak like the one I suggested.

Some goals you may like:

Ascended weapons and armour.
Obviously you can grind for dungeon skins
Legendary weapons

Things you can do with greens

Salvage for luck (magic find makes a difference)
Throw sets of four into the mystic forge. Especially throw in four great swords at a time, or four staves at a time, these seek for more as rares. Cheaper rares can be salvaged for ectoplasm.