Guild Wars 2

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.

“Albert Einstein, when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: MMO forum QQ! Nothing can stop a PvE scrub from crying when his sub-optimal armor configuration gets him killed in competitive play.”

Renkencen.6127:

Yeah it doesn’t set well with me that I kept one alived just becamse it make a cute sound (from the description on Princess) when I had killed 50 of her brothers or sisters before getting to her.

I kinda figured this was a Metroid reference. Y’know, because we went around killing all these facehugger-type monsters with a gun, but then saved the last one for some reason.

“Watch the ledges!”

I feel like this reply will get lost in the deluge, but I just wanted to pop in and say my bit. This will be my first and last post on the matter of HoT’s pricing.

$50 seems like a lot for an expansion. I’m still kind of on the fence about it. That said, it’s nice to see this kind of good-faith effort to care for existing players even after all the yelling and vitrol.

At the very least, I’ll keep watching the HoT info as it becomes available, and seriously consider pre-purchasing just before launch.

The change to stack limits won’t affect you while solo, but the change to condi damage scaling with the corresponding stat will mean that anybody with 700+ condi will do more damage post-patch than they are currently.

Underwater’s many bugs and issues aside, my real issue with water content in GW2 is that swimming feels clunky and un-fun. I don’t want to slowly and awkwardly shift up and down while remaining fully horizontal facing, it makes navigation of water areas feel like a hassle.

Here’s how you can make it fun: make swimming feel like flying. That is to say, allow freedom of movement in any direction and allow the character to be MORE maneuverable, not less. Allow us to use the endurance bar like a speed boost rather than just a fixed-distance dodge.

Flying-based MMOs can be a lot of fun. Anybody who played Space Cowboy back in the day can tell you this would be totally excellent: youtu.be/BZNumfSjgJE (Basically, it’s Starfox Online.)

Additional want-to-haves: finish making all ground-target skills into enemy-target or projectiles. Find ways to enable all skills / utilities. Allow ALL weapons, not just the aquatics.

I really hope they’re planning on fully revamping underwater content when it comes time for handling the Deep Sea Dragon. If we just get a bunch of fight-water-themed-monsters-on-the-beach maps I’m going to be pretty dissapointed.

I mean, we’re getting ENTIRELY new traits. Stuff is being replaced, moved around, merged etc. I’m expecting I’ll need to fully rebuild all my characters, and am looking forward to finally have an excuse to do so.

Take this opportunity to be glad your ascended gear is Account-Bound now, so at least if it’s no longer useful to one character, you can give it to an alt instead.

Not sure how much this helps you, but my approach to naming Sylvari has always been as follows:

1) Completely ignore Sylvari’s usual lack of surnames, because I am a GW1 vet and I love having a surname on every character.
2) First name is something stereotypically elven that I think sounds nice.
3) Surname is some kind of stupid pun relating to my character class and plant genus.

That sounds like a pretty dumb process when you write it out, but so far I’ve been liking the results it’s gotten me:

Lithrael Drosera – thief. I have been using ‘Lithrael’ for thieves and druids in roguelike games for years, so it seemed like an obvious pick for my first sylvari. ‘Drosera’ is a genus of carnivorous plants known for using traps and occasionally poison.

Amras Opuntia – guardian. In LotR, Amras is a red-headed youngest son of Fëanor, who crafted the Silmarils. He survived most of the War of the Jewels but died later on in the book. I created this character to function primarily as a Mist Warrior, doing all his leveling and play in Edge of the Mists, so naming him after an ultimately dead elf seemed appropriate. Opuntia is a genus of cactus topped with red fruit. I like this for a green-and-red guardian, he’s a plant who defends himself with sharp objects.

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.

Here’s a fun idea: maybe because Revenants are related to the Mists, which are related to the fabric of reality and by extension time as well, Rytlock returning to Tyria as our first Revenant retroactively rewrites the timeline backwards from that point a certain ways, so that Revenants become a thing that existed already before then.

I really hope they do something like this, because I am SO sick of this game randomly crashing for world bosses on my brand new gaming PC, when my crappy old laptop used to run it just fine.

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 might be kind of a weird idea, but I think it could be fun. A lot of times when I have a friend over, I want to show them a cool game we can play together. GW2 is what I spend the most time playing, but sadly there isn’t any easy way to share it with people!

That’s because they would need to buy a copy, get the client installed, make a character, and then they can play with me but they’ll still be horrifically under-leveled! So what do I do? I show them a different game instead.

But here’s my idea:
1) Let players install an essential-parts-only version of the client. It only downloads the neccesary stuff to run the game, and big files like map data are downloaded as-needed, like how it worked in GW1.
2) Without owning their own copy of the game, additional players on the same LAN may tag along with a copy-owning player, who acts as their ‘host’.
3) They get a pre-made character of the race/class they want, but their customization options are very limited. This is a ‘hireling’, like you’d see players use frequently in old-school D&D. They are locked to the same level as the host, cannot be played on without the host, and stop existing after a certain amount of time inactive.
4) Any cool stuff they find can be stashed in their bank, and accessed later if they choose to buy the full game.

I think this would be a great way to let us share GW2 with our friends (and convince more people to become paying customers for Anet ;D).

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.

So THAT’S why I can never pull / kb warriors, even though I make sure to check them for lack-of-stability first! That is pretty obnoxious.

I thought the whole point of time-limited stability skills is that you have to use your best judgement and pop them when you think you’re most likely to need them. Having 8s of stability just waiting in the wings like this.. isn’t that pretty overpowered? Good GOD it’s not even a Grandmaster trait!

NERF WARRIORS PLZ OKTHX

celicynd.9420:

But even more importantly… what’s with the human male who in the middle of the song yells “FOUR!” in a robot sounding voice?

Maybe it’s a joke about players accidentally map chatting their skill names while mouse-clicking them?

WATER BAKLOG
BURN DOWN BOTILNEK

It sounds like the Skritt have a plan to get this boat floating once it’s done?

Player Character mesmers are trained as soldiers and adventurers. All of their magic is combat-oriented, for the most part. Turning somebody into a Moa Bird is in the Hexes category of magic, and in the past we’ve seen Kasmeer mostly specialize in Illusions.

As someone who was previously more of a courtly noblewoman than a combatant, it’s unlikely that she knew very many combat-oriented spells before.

There is no excuse for having tons of perfectly good Halloween content ready to go from previous years and not reusing it. They could have easily put in “Ascent to Madness” and “Reaper Rumble” for no extra effort.

The fact that this year is a literal copy paste with a couple of bare-bones little item rewards just comes across as remarkably lazy. One programmer spending one hour in one afternoon could have flipped a few switches and repositioned a few NPCs to get that content back in.

Also: For someone telling me to “do a little of research” (nice grammar by the way), you want to cite some sources there? Or are you just being intentionally vague in hopes I won’t turn your own reasoning against you?

It sounds crazy, but I think this is an excellent idea. ANet will need to act as the curator and editor, and get used to REALLY QA’ing THINGS, which they’ve had problems doing in the past, but if they would do this, and could get it to work, it would be amazing.

ANet: This is how you make Minecraft levels of money. This is how MINECRAFT made Minecraft levels of money. Think about it.

It’s just a marketing buzzword. Every time I hear that phrase my eyes roll so hard they get whiplash.

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!

Harper.4173:

I’d rather my epic fights and encounters were fought without small pandas running about.

There is no epic battle that can’t be improved by the addition of tiny battle pandas. (That said, I am more partial to Mini Plush Griffon myself.)

But yeah, this is a sensible feature and should be in, if for no other reason than it would be helpful for those with computer specs on the lower end of the spectrum.

Zero Day.2594:

DaMunky.6302:

…

You missed a step somewhere between 1-3 where you get butchered by various AoEs.

Honestly, most zergs just aren’t that smart or quick on the uptake. Most of them try to shoot everything with ranged, which doesn’t work when you’re reflecting, so it’s ONLY the melees and AoEs hitting you, which tends to be like 1 poison field and 1 Necro well and maybe a Lava Font. The healing from SoM is more than enough to sustain through those, and then the moment DS ends you Shadow Return to safety before anybody manages to hurt you much.

Personally, I mostly use DS in WvW, like this:
1) Shadowstep into enemy zerg
2) Dagger Storm + Signet of Malice = healing + reflects = tagged everybody and I’m not dead!
3) Shadow Return, my zerg rolls over them.
4) PROFIT

So really for me it’s a gtf IN there button.

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.

Isn’t this what /threaten is used for?
And on Charr, they do literally roar.

Goemm’s Lab might be worth a look:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Goemm%27s_Lab

It’s a huge abandoned Asuran lab high in the sky above Metrica Province. The cool thing is it’s actually visible from the ground if you know where to look, and if you fall (and manage to miss the metamagic safety nets) you can accidentally actually go skydiving back down too!

The entrance is a well hidden overgrown cave / forested area, so that seems to fit what you’re describing as well. Plus, because it’s a jump puzzle, you will occasionally have visitors to hassle. You can follow them around and yell at them to “GET OUT OF MY COOL FORT”. Or like, invite them to tea or something. Might be fun either way.

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 got it twice on one character, but I suspect that was a bug.

That said, why do you need more than one? Once you’ve crafted the backpiece, it’ll be available to all of your characters via the skin wardrobe.

9/10 – ‘Triallair’ shortens nicely to ‘Trial’ if somebody wants to address you quickly, and is aesthetically pleasing to write what with all the vertical lines. If you remove the first letter, it’s also nicely symmetrical (same spelling forwards as backwards). I like that you’ve got a proper meaning for it in Gaelic, and that it conforms to the Sylvari naming pattern of having two vowels next to each other.

My Sylvari thief is named “Lithrael Drosera”.
As a GW1 player I like to always have a last name, even if it isn’t something that’s done in-lore for this race. I don’t recall where the first name comes from, but I’ve just always used it for elves and druids since my days playing ADOM. ‘Drosera’ is a type of plant known for using traps and in some cases poisons.

There’s another important difference here to consider.

When Ceara was in the machine, the Pale Tree tried to save her, and Ceara basically went “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO MOM” and pushed forward into danger. I’m pretty sure that’s when Mordy really got into her head proper and broke her.

The Sylvari player character on the other hand is shown to be on good terms with the Pale Tree, and wouldn’t do something like that. I think that we see her symbol in the vision with us is relevant, almost as she’s taking us safely through our little guided tour of the Alchemy. (Player is seen floating alone, but the falls into the Pale Tree symbol before they see anything really actiony. It’s like she scooped us up and carried us through the dragon orbs half of the vision under her protection.)

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.

We actually know for sure that a dead dragon’s remains will hold onto the magic they gathered (or at least some of it), because the Zephyrites were able to use Glint’s bones to grow and cultivate aspect crystals.

If all the magic of a dragon were released at the time of its death, I imagine the resulting blast would be some kind of crazy chaos nuke and probably wipe out a huge swath of Tyria. After how tamely Zhaitan fizzled out, I think we can mostly eliminate that possibility.

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.

Oh god yes. If this isn’t how they cap off finally releasing the full map, I’m going to be all sorts of pretty sad.

Guh, yeah. I like the voice work on Taimi, but Belinda’s voice is so jarring to me. I would expect her to have a voice at least somewhat similar to Majory, given that they’re sisters and were raised in the same home.. but no, she sounds like a weird bubbly cheerleader. Also didn’t she sound totally different when we heard her talk last in the Dead End Bar?

My initial reaction was something like “Is that Sarah Palin? O_o”

The Pied Piper.9827:

That purple color does not go with ANYTHING

Fixed this for you. We seriously do need a way to dye that hat, it’d be so much better for so many outfits if you could.

The Pied Piper.9827:

the hat is very unique to the game

Also you know the Wizard Hat is like.. an exact copy of the one Gandalf wears in LotR, right? They released it as a freebie the same time as one of The Hobbit movies was coming out. ;p

OP: The problem with making every Defiant boss big and heavy is that it would become way too easy to cheese the fight with kiting. (Running away while shooting at range.) Kiting is a perfectly valid strategy, but we don’t want it to become so good that nobody ever does anything else.

Electro.4173:

Minis are toys / animated figurines. The devs have said that themselves at some point. They aren’t the actual “thing”.

There isn’t an army of Frostbites running around, there’s one actual Frostbite and a million little toys modeled after him.

^This. Just imagine that after Rox helped to take down Scarlet, she became well known along with the rest of DE2.0 and the BLTC decided to release a line of Frostbite toys to capitalize on their popularity. Frostbite is basically the team mascot, in my opinion.

Minis are just Tyria’s version of action figures, harmless little illusion golems that look like a cool thing and follow you around.

Edit: I was just thinking about how WEIRD it is for the Scarlet mini to be a thing, though. That would be like a child or an adult collector in the real world proudly displaying their LIMITED EDITION HITLER WITH KARATE CHOP ACTION.

PopeUrban.2578:

[snip]

For some reason I legitimately feel like this would be pretty interesting and fun. I think there is probably something wrong with 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.

Zaxares.5419:

So basically, Balthazar is one selfish son of a centaur who’s more concerned with his own amusement than helping his worshippers overcome the greatest challenge to their existence.

Not really. Think about it; people who fight in the Mists get valuable combat experience, and what happens when they die? They just respawn! Balthazar has given us a safe and reliable training ground to prepare for our fight against the dragons.

I don’t care if the LS -ever- comes back, unless they really get it together on the quality-of-writing front.

You know what DOES need to come back, though? Weekly announcements every Tuesday. Even if they aren’t ready to release anything! I wish they’d just let us know what’s going on. Type a little paragraph up about whatever you’re working on, no biggie!

Neural.1824:

Gold coin is 24k, gold ore and the gold ingots are much lower quality (MUCH lower)

This is actually a really sensical explanation, more so than I thought we could have in an MMO. Good job!

That said, how do we explain copper ore being more valuable than silver? Lol. I guess maybe copper coins are smaller, so one copper ore makes more coins than one silver ore? -SHRUG-

GW2 salvage kits follow this essential law of MMO Physics:

Whenever something is broken, only 0 – 3 small usable pieces remain, if any at all. The rest despawns.

When you kill a wolf, you don’t get a head, four paws, a tail, a full pelt, all the organs and so on. You get 0 – 3 sharp claws. And maybe also a blue or a green item.

Naturally, when your character pulls apart a coat, they will only get a couple of barely usable scraps. Because that’s how breaking anything in MMOverse works. If salvaging worked sensibly, the economy would implode.

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..

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.