Guild Wars 2

Guys, really. Everyone needs to just STOP BUYING THESE.

And don’t think it’s ok to trade gold for gems and buy them that way. Even if you spend only in-game money, you are trading your IRL time for driving the gem prices up, which is what they want! (Time = Money!)

If you want to spend money in the gem store, buy their non-RNG items. If people buy non-RNG stuff and ignore the boxes, the boxes will have to go away eventually, but it’s not going to work unless a majority of the player base gets on board with it.

Having literally JUST played that mission for the first time, infamous cannon fight and all, I think I finally understand it.

The final showdown with Zhaitan ISN’T a fight. People all get disappointed because they’re expecting to fight him, but think about it: when was Zhaitan ever a fighter? All along, he was a chessmaster, using a large and varied stable of minions to put pressure on the heroes. Once you defeat all the pieces, he’s nothing but a helpless King. He can move one space per turn and he loses automatically the second you corner him.

The final mission isn’t a ‘fight’ with Zhaitan. It’s a chase scene.

That said, I am totally expecting we will be ‘fighting’ Primordious in the traditional sense. If that one isn’t a Warrior I don’t know who is. And I SWEAR TO GOD if they give us another “throw rocks at the boss” battle I am going to be super irritated.

AlphaWolf.2709:

So the prestige of having a legendary is completely gone. We will see level 1 key farmers with legendary weapons and T3 cultural. Tell me ANET, what incentive do we have to keep playing your game?

Nobody is going to waste valuable Transmutation Charges to make their key farmers look fancy..

Drakkon.4782:

MastaNeenja.1537:

The only interaction I would like to see between these two involves the Mad King, his favorite choice of salad dressing, and Sporkcalibur.

I fully endorse and support this option. Make it happen, ANet. Scarlet needs to go.

It sounds like a joke, but wouldn’t that be AMAZING if it actually happened? Like, just completely out of left field the Mad King kills her off like it’s nothing. It makes more sense than you’d think:

(1) Scarlet received a great deal of player criticism and in my opinion has been largely ineffective as a convincing villain. (She’s very Mary Sue, honestly.)
(2) She arrived with little to no buildup. Having her depart in the same way has a nice symmetry to it.
(3) Who the heck doesn’t love the Mad King? Having the star of GW2’s best-reviewed patch kill off the worst-reviewed villain would be a master stroke, and nobody would expect it because holiday characters usually never get to have a lasting influence outside of their yearly event.

I mean, realistically it will probably never happen. Heck, I am doubting there will even be any Scarlet <—> Lunatic Court connection at all, because that’d be way too cool and tidy to end up in a Living Story release. BUT I CAN DREAM

DOLYAKS FOR NEW PLAYABLE RACE.
You can’t equip weapons or armor. You just have one button to graze and another to moo.

MAKE IT HAPPEN ANET.

Living Story is fine in my opinion. Could the writing be a lot, lot better? Yes, probably. But that’s not what this topic is about. Here’s my issue with the achievements:

They don’t just guide you through the content, like ANET keeps saying they’re supposed to. They also try to set a minimum for how much you play the content. Wouldn’t it be far more enjoyable if the achievement checklist was just there to make sure you find everything ok? Then you could decide for yourself how much to play the content.

I know people are going to say “you aren’t forced to get every achievement”, but honestly I’m a completionist and if I can’t someday check off every box in the game I don’t even feel like playing at all. Missing temporary one-time achievements isn’t an option for me. (I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.)

There are definitely things they could have handled better, and I’m not saying I agree with their gameplay decisions. They could have made the chase more exciting, certainly. All I’m saying is I agree with it being a chase as opposed to a fight.

Here’s how I would have LIKED to see it end:
(1) Same chase / laser cut-scene fight as usual. Laser overheats / breaks after Zhaitan is shot down. Cannons fail to do fatal damage. He regenerates and starts getting ready to fly away again.
(2) In a desperate last-ditch action, we fly that big airship directly into his neck, impaling him. All the players run down the ship and must spam melee to literally chop his head off. (How do we kill zombies? Remove the head!) During this whole process we have to dodge breath attacks and fight off summoned minions.
(3) Airship is toast, and we need a new way out. Run across his decapitated body INTO that building he was clinging to, and you fight your way down through different Risen-infested floors to reach the ground before the whole tower collapses.
(4) Fight your way across Orr to an extraction point. (Those helicopters are way too cool to not use as an emergency escape vehicle.) The death cries of Zhaitan have drawn HUGE swarms of undead you need to fight through.

Special bonus: If they want to bring Zhaitan back later, we just hacked his head off is all. Who knows where it landed when it fell, or if that actually killed him for sure.

I think this would do a better job of empathizing that Zhaitan is not the real problem. His ability to summon and control huge hoards of dangerous minions is the problem. At the same time, it would be way more exciting and involve far more actual fighting than what we did get. (I like my version way better. I am rewriting it in my head. That is how it actually happened, as far as I’m concerned.)

I like to think that the whole Sylvari and Risen conflict is secretly an elaborate Plants vs. Zombies fanfiction on the part of one or more content developers at ANet.

Gizmo.9178:

Oh god everyone is doing it now in Lions Arch. Never give players items that can be used to make annoying sounds. It will and has been abused

I would pay for an in-game vuvuzela. How epic would that be? So epic.

BBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

My gf has a character she named “Disco Dolyak” because she thinks yaks are cute and it’s a funny name. I decided to make her a friend, who I named “Mambo Moa”. It only got sillier from there.

Silky sand is supposed to be annoying and largely useless, guys. It’s a flavor item. When you’re in Dry Top, everywhere you go and everything you do causes sand to get into your bags, and every so often you have to stop and clean the sand out.

It’s a little bit annoying, but it’s totally appropriate to something you would have to do while running around in a desert tundra, and very infrequently you find something good in the sand as a bonus.

Engineers are an “Adventurer” profession. Indianna Jones is an adventurer. We should have whips so we can pretend to be Indy. BAM, EXCUSE’D.

Some sample utility skills from Scarlet Briar’s Revenant legend:

Heal Skill: “Plot Armor” – Signet. Passive makes you immune to all damage at 0 HP. Activate to gain full health and teleport any distance ignoring line-of-sight and pathfinding requirements.
Utility 1: “Gold H4X” – Activate to gain infinite gold and supply.
Utility 2: “Impossibly Expensive Master Plan” – Spend gold and supply to summon at random one of the following: infinite army of robots, one really huge robot, two PvE enemy factions who have horribly conflicting ideological beliefs but for some reason have formed an alliance anyway, enormous cloud of poison that kills everyone in the map.
Utility 3: “Diplomatic Invisibility” – Passive. No matter what you do, what you break and destroy, whose life you threaten, the local rulers and government will completely ignore you and let you have the run of the place.
Elite: “Lore Vortex” – Destroys 1 – 3 preexisting storylines by retroactively inserting Scarlet into their history, and creates 1 – 6 new plot holes in the process.

By the standards of scammy Korean FtP-Pay2Win MMOs it’s very fair. But this isn’t some scamgrind Korean MMO, this is GUILD WARS 2, and we all expect better of Arenanet.

Realistically, the RNG boxes probably aren’t ever going away, because there are enough people who hate their money to keep them profitable.. and if that is the cost of Anet keeping Nexon happy and staying in business so be it. I just hope that they will continue to offer adequate content and rewards for people who outright refuse to participate in it.

Sil.4560:

ThiBash.5634:

A well timed kill shot will be blocked by Aegis fortunately.

Apparently that’s what Signet of Might will be for. Unblockable, boon-hating sniper rifle. HEAD SHOT.

Let me fix this for you:

BOONS, HEADSHOT!

GOSU.9574:

virus.4370:

No it’s Glitched..and they haven’t fixed it..been trying to get an answer for when it will be fix..but the trolls in this forum keep telling me to “play without minions”..they are just trolling..and anet hasn’t said anything about fixing it.

Giving someone sound advice is now considered trolling.

“My car doesn’t run, don’t tell me to ride my bike cause I have THIS car! I want to get to work but I refuse to ride this bike! I have this car!”

Yeah……….

If somebody was on a car-related forum, asking for advice on why their car is broken, and you told them to ride their bike instead, then YES, that would be considered trolling.

Is there any chance this is going to get ACTUALLY addressed, ANet? Because expecting all your players to just grind more until the system decides to throw them a bone is not acceptable. I have a job, and I can only play this game a few hours each day. I already devoted my entire day last Sunday to this nonsense and am still stuck at 12/13. Seriously, just lower the requirement for the achievement to 11 maps and be done with it. The playerbase should not suffer for your shoddy implementation.

Lord Faren is amazing.
The fact that he’s got an in-lore connection to Chauncey von Snuffles is amazing.
It’s all just too much. I cracked up for like 5 minutes.

FAREN FOR PRESIDENT.

Guys, karka is not OP at all. It takes forever to surface and can be dodged.

The Mist Walker mechanic is amazing, because it prevents the game from becoming Southsun Dragonball. It forces you to really think hard about killing somebody, because if you do they’re going to try and haunt you to death.

If you are getting killed by mistwalkers a lot, here’s what you need to get a handle on:
– Kill lots of people for their food during the grace period. You get food, and they get a respawn somewhere else away from you – no ghost to haunt you!

- Avoid killing people if you don’t have to. If they have no arrows and no food, leave them alone. If they have no arrows and you have plenty of food, leave them alone. If they have tons of arrows and no food, use Disarming Shot and they can’t bother you.

- If you do need to kill somebody, you now have 2 options: (1) quickly kill more people so you’ll be haunted by a group. They will fight over motes and you’ll get hit by fewer traps. (2) Avoid scavenging at all costs. A single walker with lots of motes is far more scary than a group with no motes.

- Avoid areas where idle walkers congregate, such as the starting area. Bored walkers will haunt you just because they’re bored!

- Learn to dodge the karka. Seriously it isn’t that hard.

Topic title. I’d like the ability to be able to right-click any given non-player character and mute / unmute them. Then I can shut up the NPC chatter at the bank, places I hang around, and so on, without having to turn “Dialog Volume” off entirely.

Erukk.1408:

I see <NCSoft> are morally corrupt business men/women, though not evil.

As for why they are exploiting <ANet>, they are trying to at least break even on their “<GW2>” project. They sunk a lot of money into trying to make it a <WoW Clone>, which was a total failure. When <ANet> came into <the MMO market> from the <players’> <demands for a sequel>, the <NCSoft> saw an exploitable resource.

They played the “nice guy” role with offering <ANet> supplies, resources, and a offering them a new ‘home’. All they needed in return, was for them to sign on the dotted line. Once they signed over most of their rights, <NCSoft> was then able to use them <to run a skeezy RNG gamblescam>.

As for why the <US Government> can’t intervene, while probably a bit more than shady, the <RNG gamblescam> <ANet> <was made to add> were legal, and they were signed willingly.

Corrected your post for clarity.

Holy Whirlwind.2067:

Have you never seen hunger games? You are trying to survive, not necessarily kill everyone. This is not a shooter, you have to use some restraint and strategy.

THANK YOU. Somebody understands!

Holy Whirlwind.2067:

The one thing I have an issue with however, is that you seem to get more points for killing and trapping, and nothing for surviving longer.

Being final survivor nets you 50 points, which is pretty substantial. It also upgrades your guaranteed chest to a better version. (More karma, gold, and better item drop rates.) The only benefit to winning points-wise is you get announced as the winner. You don’t actually get better stuff than the final survivor.

Smoothy.1085:

Yeh imo the mist form is plain stupid as a whole. people can team up even after they are dead >>

Did you even READ the thread, or did you just skip right to the “new post” box at the bottom?

Shiren.9532:

—snip—

THIS is exactly what ANet needs to be doing with the living story. This would get me excited about things again. We need to be using the LS to resolve things that in other, more static MMOs would be stuck in time forever, when sensibly they should be moving forward.

I love the idea of this as a collectible card game, but I HATE the idea of having to kill the same monster over and over again to get their card, especially if it’s a boss that I need to run a whole dungeon just to get one swing at.

Here’s a better idea for obtaining cards: when you kill enough monsters to get their related ‘slayer’ achievement, you get a booster pack containing all the cards relating to that group of monsters. So when you get “Bandit Slayer”, you get a pack of cards containing “Bandit Scout”, “Bandit Outlaw”, “Veteran Bandit Leader”, etc.

For dungeon bosses, you get their card after the first time you beat them. Or if we want this to be harder, you get cards for all bosses of a dungeon after you beat story + every explorable path of that dungeon once.

That’s how I would WANT to see it done. I know what would ACTUALLY happen is ANet would lock all the good cards behind a monster-killing-grind and then optionally let us buy them from the Gem Store instead. (And/or make us use a dumb Gem Store RNG to get them.) -__- This whole thing would just become total Gem Store fodder like the Wintersday minis were. Which is sad because if they did that I totally wouldn’t bother trying to participate in it.

I think the best case scenario would be if you can get a bundle item usable only in jump puzzles that gives you a skillbar something like:

1 – Swiftness 3s duration, 10s cooldown
2 – Something similar to Rifle Jump, 60s cooldown
3 – Personal Portal (works only for person who placed it), 120s cooldown
4 – Stability 3s duration, 120s cooldown
5 – Shrink character to Asura-sized, no cooldown

That way you get all the essential JP skills from every class but if you want to totally use them as a crutch you have to spend a lot longer waiting on cooldowns. I mean, aren’t all characters supposed to be equals in the JPs, and rely only on player skill?

Because Becka, that wouldn’t horribly break basic functionality, which as you know, horribly breaking basic functionality is a requirement any time Anet updates something.

To be more serious though, +1 I was going to suggest the same thing.

The Living Story has been nothing but GLOOM AND DOOM THE WORLD IS ENDING for months now. I think lots of people, myself included, could really use a break for something a little more lighthearted.

And it’s not like Scarlet is going away. She’ll still be invading zones after the current LS ends, just with less frequency. The point is she’s still at large.

Well, this is an ancient sea creature. I imagine it’d smell strongly of fish.

Forget mounts! I would KILL for a Wind Waker -style Deku Leaf.
(It would break so many maps though.)

Yeah, killing the same mook for hours gets boring and grindy. With as fun and varied and fast-paced as the rest of the game is, it really felt like the ball was dropped on this one.

The biggest highlight of my last AC attempt was when my ally, sitting in the same room as me, spent upwards of 15 minutes kiting the same guy while the rest of the party was dead. I put on Wacky Sax and it was AMAZING.

Exactly. I don’t know this ‘Scarlet’ you’re talking about. But it’s a dye variety, right?
Surely there has never been a ‘Scarlet’ in the living story, and never will be again.

(PLEASE ANET)

Anybody notice that despite being cute and fluffy and babyish (no chitinous armor to speak of, yet), he’s LARGER than other normal-looking devourers?

I propose that normal devourers look like this as hatchlings, but are also tiny little bugs. (But have we seen devourers hatching in person before? I think we may have.. that may throw a wrench in this..) The next logical step from that theory is that if Frostbite is so large as a hatchling, he’ll be HUGE as an adult. So maybe he’ll be a siege devourer someday?

Or maybe not. Maybe Anet just wanted to make a cute and fluffy companion for their cute and fluffy Charr because baby baby cuddles rainbow googoo. BUT I CAN HOPE!

Did it occur to you that maybe having everyone stack in a corner isn’t the way the fight is intended to play? I get that this is a farming / optimal strategy thing, but really I doubt Anet is going to change anything to make it easier for you.

Tell me what’s better:
(a) Kill a lvl 5 champ in 1 hit, receive level 5 loot.
(b) Take longer to kill the champ, receive level 80 loot.

And that’s not even getting into:
(1) Low-level play would be boring and awful if high level players were constantly just facerolling all your mobs on you.
(2) Without level scaling you can’t play in any area below 70+ and have any challenge.
(3) If you have played to level 80 and are still getting stomped by low level champs, you need to learn to dodge, because you should be better at the game than that.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

It’s a Scarlet conga that’s in an infinite loop.

It’s Scarlet all the way down!

No guys, listen. I have the best one:
Call them a “kark” of karka.

And then try to say this ten times fast:
Kiel killed a kark of karka.

Yes. That there is a masterpiece.
(Even though realistically Kiel would get SLAUGHTERED by just one karka. Anybody know of a really powerful NPC whose name starts with K? Do NOT say Kormir.)

I’m guessing it went something like this:

ANet Middle Management: Hey so we are not doing a new Halloween event this year. Just cappy-pasta that skritt and get back to making LS2.
Some Overworked ANet Dev: But sir, Halloween is a favorite with the players! Shouldn’t we at least work /something/ new in?
Manager: Whatever. Add some items or something.
Dev: Not really what I meant.. like, a new story?
Manager: Nope. Use the one from last year.
Dev: And about that.. it seems like 2012 was reviewed a lot better than last year, shouldn’t we repeat Halloween 2012 instead?
Manager: What? I thought that one gave too much stuff and messed with the economy.
Dev: I mean kinda but we could just re-bala-
Manager: Listen don’t waste my time with this. Just copy-paste last year and done.
Dev: -sigh- Can we at least do a website story blog or something?
Manager: No. Also, we got a lot of complaints about Mad King Says being a one-day thing. Make that happen the whole event.
Dev: But sir, that has all sorts of lore-breaking implica-
Manager: I swear to god if I hear the word ‘lore’ one more time you’re all fired. Get out of my office!

Oh good god what the heck have the done to Rox? Her eyes are back to being FREAKY ANIME HUGE like they were when she was first announced. I like the way she looks currently, with reasonably sized eyes. I hope they aren’t making her look stupid and horrifying again.

Yeah, I thought they were going to leave the chest, and have the three new Kessex mini-bosses occasionally drop the keys, one color assigned to each of them. That makes perfect sense to me anyway, no idea why they decided not to do that.

Yeah, but there’s only so many dailies to choose from, and when Crab Toss is taking up one of the slots every day, it makes your daily harder because there’s fewer (non-BS) options to choose from.

The problem is certain skills just take SO MANY POINTS. It’ll take basically forever to afford all of them. (I’m looking at you, increased supply carrying!)

Don’t forget that the Aetherblades make extensive use of hard-light hologram technology, which they stole from SAB / Moto sometime around Dragon Bash when they first appeared. Seems like a pretty solid link to me.

Trahearne needs to die. Not because of some personal vendetta you, I, or anybody else might have against him, but because it would be the most narratively succinct and perfect way for Mordy to endcap a complete routing and shattering of the Pact.

Make no mistake, shattering the Pact would be the best possible thing ANet could do for the game’s story.

Take a look at this image-post for a far better thought out and skillfully written justification than I could ever write:
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/143977/ThreePointsNumberTwo.jpg

It’s from Shriketalon.1937’s excellent thread “Narrative Lessons From 15 Months of Scarlet” which is sadly now buried deep in the lost halls of the “LA: Aftermath” LS subforum. You can find the original thread in full here…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Narrative-Lessons-From-15-Months-of-Scarlet/first

…and for posterity, here are the other two thirds of the “Three Points” post that “Pact Must Die” graphic is part of:
(1) https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/143976/ThreePointsNumberOne.jpg
(2) https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/143977/ThreePointsNumberTwo.jpg
(3) https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/143978/ThreePointsNumberThree.jpg

He also has another 5-part graphic article in his original post on that thread.

This, this, a thousand times this.
The Living Story is campy and fun, but the achievement grind is KILLING ME.

WvW used to be my favorite part of the game, but I haven’t played it in months because I feel like I need to constantly work on my checklist instead or run out of time. I don’t have enough time to get everything done in this game!

Slow down the Living Story!

I solo’d this as a D/P thief and it was way too easy.

1) Beat on statue until mender spawns.
2) Ignore mender until he’s actually in the room, keep killing statue.
3) Steal to mender and DPS. Fear him with stolen skull. Infiltrator Strike to immobilize. DPS and he’s dead long before I run out of CC.
4) Repeat.

I didn’t even hate Trahearne that much. I hate the way the living story converges after Claw Island, so it feels like your previous choices don’t really matter anymore, only choices you made one or two story steps ago determine your mission path. I’d rather have less branching later on and have a different story for each of my characters start-to-finish. As it is now, ALL ROADS LEAD TO TRAHEARNE. There is no escape.

Reason number 4: because he’s goading you into drinking Raw Omnomberry Juice, which tastes terrible.

Kidding aside though, yeah. The Adnar fight is IMPOSSIBRU without a regen booster. I was lucky to have already had one in the bank from a while back. And it still look me 45 minutes of repeated failed attempts to beat him.

This is just another example of ANet missing obvious opportunities in their writing.

Here’s what I would have done:
If you’re Sylvari, you can volunteer to be the one who sets up DE2.0’s meeting with the Pale Tree. Then when you go to her yourself any time before the next episode, you get a short exclusive dialogue path with her where you do just that. The wait for the next episode is then explained away by DE2.0 needing time to get themselves ready for the trip as well.

To store two sheathe-on-back weapons, you could simply flip the second one horizontally, so they’re attached to your back in an X-shape. I think that would look pretty awesome in most cases.

And again, being able to toggle this off, and auto-hiding in high-latency situations fixes all the potential problems mentioned thus far.

This whole Flame & Frost story feels like it was haphazardly thrown together in three seconds, so I really don’t think they put much thought into it beyond “Dredge are badguys, Flame Legion are badguys, let’s make them be badguys together”. But you’re right, basically the whole story makes no sense.