Guild Wars 2

Kalavier.1097:

Frotee.2634:

I just don’t get how you can allow a character like scarlet to make your whole gaming experience so miserable you want to leave? Most living story updates take what, 3-4 days to ‘complete’? With the rest of the world still there, even a little larger than it was at release?
If you did like the game without Scarlet, why not simply ignore her?

Because people can’t remove/view things without that. It’s like the ME3 endings, for some reason after playing them you have some which LITERALLY declare the ENTIRE mass effect canon to be null and stupid. Then you have reasonable people who like everything up to the ending and go “I dislike this part and that part. everything else is okay.”

I like how you said that only the only people who could be reasonable were the ones who held the same opinion as you John Smith.

But even we savages put just as much rational thought and logic into our conclusions as you did and I imagine perhaps more as we actually had to consider the entire corpus of the series in light of the constantly changing lore between all 3 games, between the constantly changing motivations and the constantly changing technology. ME1 and ME3 nullify each other where for every A statement in ME1 there is an equal and opposite contradicting statement in ME3.

For example, why was it so important for the Normandy to get to Eden Prime? Because the humans had exhausted the archives on Mars and it was hoped that the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime would advance the humans technology further than the now exhausted Martian archives had been able to. Now fast forward to ME 3 and the entire plot revolves around plans that were just discovered at the very last second in an archive that not only couldn’t have been exhausted but still contained oodles and oodles of undiscovered morsels like the one Liara found. I’m not going to mention how completely stupid the story of ME3 becomes when you ask yourself, if the Prothean data was so important, why didn’t they make a backup of it? Why were no copies made of the archive itself? It isn’t like the file was that large, they transferred the whole file over to the human mind within a few minutes of boarding the ship. And how likely is it that the plans for that weapon would have remained completely undiscovered for 20 years? Were the Protheans that bad at optimizing their databases?

We don’t need to talk about plot armor Kai Leng and his aura of Shephard incompetence -20, the magical teleportation beam or 3 colors of magical light that simply throws ME1’s concept of a technology grounded in some sense of realism completely out the window.

Was the story in ME3 presented well? Did it flow well? Did it have its emotional moments? Yes to all 3; however if you view it in light of the entire series then you must conclude that it was a complete betrayal of ME1. Not to mention that the overarching plot of ME3 was just stupid because every single part of the overarching plot of ME3 raises the same big questions as the Prothean data example, especially the last part.

Come to think about it, the plot of Mass Effect 3 gets rehashed in Iron Man 2 where the story is so ludicrous that the entire plot revolved around a 30 year old Easter Egg left behind by Tony’s dad who decades knew that his son would keep his old diarama, put it in an impossible to predict magic hologram that can display an impossible amount of detail in order to reveal an impossible to create element that Tony immediately synthesizes in order to wrap up all the lose ends of the plot.

Chaotic Storm.2815:

If we had more variety in events scarlet wouldn’t seem so bad. I think the main issue I and other have is its always her. every time. The Womens got so many back-up Doomsdays devices its started to look stupid. I’d be more willing to believe she was behind things if it was more like The molten alliance days. little manipulation here. misdirection here. Not “Meet my NEW army of the week”

Slip in some stuff like the consortium trying something new. or This guy/girl is trying to rally his people to over throw an area (without scarlet) with some new device they created or unearthed.
or heaven forbid one of these Elder dragon actually do something. For a game whose main story in tied into the awaking the of elder dragons I’m feeling ripped off.
The only thing that would redeem this is if Scarlet WAS this rumored Jungle Elder Dragon or at least being manipulated by it and it was all his doing.

If Scarlett was the actual Jungle Elder Dragon or a minion of said dragon, she wouldn’t have need for all this magi technology garbage. She would simply have all the power she needed from magic itself which is in reality far stronger than the magi-technolgy she is using now could ever be as the magic is the primal force giving power to the magi-technology.

Things about Scarlett I like:
1) She’s a Sylvari just like all my characters.
2) She’s hilarious

Things I hate about Scarlett:
1) Her backstory paints her as a Mary Sue
2) She has no story or character development at all
3) For the most part everything she did was form an alliance between two mismatched groups whose reasoning for working together was never explained even though it needed to be. Likewise Scarlett’s purpose in forming that alliance not only wasn’t explained but was clearly nonexistant. The reason why we weren’t told what her actual purpose was is because the Anet team couldn’t figure out what it would be. They were simply passing the ball from week to week to drag out some easy releases in the hope of gaining more time to work on the time consuming content. In short has been no actual story involved in the living story for months.

I mean the reason for all those lackluster releases was because something amazing is coming along right? Right?

Well regardless, once you take into account that Scarlett’s purposelessness was simply Anet’s way of passing the ball back and forth you will come to understand that it wouldn’t matter whom Anet chose to be the villain for any of the living story updates as they were all guaranteed to have no purpose due to Anet not being able to deliver a fully fleshed out and well thought out story every two weeks. So Scarlett wasn’t any better or worse than any other villain would have been during this time period. All the issues can be laid at the feet of the concept of the static living story where your participation is just as irrelevant as the story itself.

Scarlett and Trahearne should fall in love, get married, and just fade out of the game.

I think that’s the most fitting way for characters who themselves aren’t innately bad in and of themselves to go out as they are only bad in the way they were used as plot devices.

Or maybe Lord Farren should steal her panties, show them to the world who all start laughing at her so that she gets so upset and ashamed that she throws herself off a cliff.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Part of being a casual player, as I am, is you have to realize that you won’t have the same opportunities for items or to earn as much gold as those that play more. That just goes with the territory of casual play in an MMO. The other option is to buy gems and convert to gold. That’s just the way it works.

But there is no reason why that is the way it has to work. That is simply the way it was implemented.

Just because there aren’t as many skills doesn’t mean that the combat has left depth. There is much more to combat than the number of skill names and icons.

For example you could also look at the number of things that people have to do during combat, the affect that decisions have in combat, the number of characters affected by actions taken during combat, the length of combat, etc.

Frankly GW1 combat was actually pretty shallow. A lot of the skills were just repetitions of other skills.

ronpierce.2760:

Ellisande.5218:

Anet added insult to injury by not only using the Tier 3 cultural armor skin but also making it way better by adding flame effect to it.

Anet completely ruined the very concept of cultural armor by selling it in the gem store and allowing all species to wear it. They further screwed it up by making the gem store version way better than the normal version. Anet needs to immediately reverse this decision and either remove the skins from the gem store or make the gem store version the boring normal version and the cultural armor skin the one with the cool flame effects.

………. You’re a little late to the party……….

Having to cook for and and then clean up after a huge family Thanksgiving party on top of studying and final paper writing will do that to a person.

Anet added insult to injury by not only using the Tier 3 cultural armor skin but also making it way better by adding flame effect to it.

Anet completely ruined the very concept of cultural armor by selling it in the gem store and allowing all species to wear it. They further screwed it up by making the gem store version way better than the normal version. Anet needs to immediately reverse this decision and either remove the skins from the gem store or make the gem store version the boring normal version and the cultural armor skin the one with the cool flame effects.

lordkrall.7241:

And how do you suggest they earn money if they are giving everything for free in the game?

Sell substantial content updates. But that would require putting actual work into designing well thought out content.

It’s way easier and cheaper to just make a single skin or two and then put it up for $10.00 per outfit rather than having to make an entire story with all new artwork, voicework, mapping, etc. for $10-15.

Anet is looking for maximum profit for minimal to no effort. You can see this with something so basic as needing to use dollars to buy another character slot, buy more inventory or warehouse space, etc.

If endgame was supposed to be about getting new skins and not stats, then why is it that we don’t have a vanity slot and instead need to give Anet dollars in exchange for to make one single item for another? If they were good game designers who appreciated their customers they would stop gauging us like this. No one in the Anet staff has to actually do anything when you use a transmute stone, so why do we have to pay for it? Why even make it use up a transmutation stone?

Anet only deserves money equal to the effort they put into getting that money, just like the rest of us have to do.

Think about it this way, Anet first told you that the entire base GW2 game only costs $60, including multiple dungeons, many enemies, many areas, many weapon and armor skins. And now they are telling you that somehow one new armor skin costs 1/6 the price of the full game? No one is going to believe that lie.

Given the incredibly low quality of the living world updates I don’t think anyone would be sad to see it go in return for well designed and substantial content released less frequently even if that content had a cost attached to it.

roachsrealm.9284:

Its a living, breathing world in a virtual universe.

I think you need to define what you mean by living, breathing world.

Because to my mind GW2 is a static unchangeable world.

You have a million Karma. That’s nice. I still don’t.

A Massive Headache.1879:

I didn’t think there was a single good thing about this living story, it took everything bad from queens jubilee. There’s rewardless zerging to get to the top, cakewalk instances, I felt the cinematic was just pointless and dull yet still somehow cheesy. and everything that looks good is either in the cash shop or locked behind rng.

Pretty much this.

draxynnic.3719:

As Ellisande says. I’ve seen a lot of people throwing lines out along the lines of “gold sinks are good for the new players” – but in practise, a lot of the things called gold sinks in GW2 serve to keep those newer and less experienced players from being able to establish themselves, while being merely a pittance for the super-rich who are driving inflation.

You could see this in the TP prices – GW2 essentially has a two-tiered economy where the stuff that newer players are likely to be selling stagnates or even depreciates (see greens before the introduction of essences of luck, and even with that they’ve been steadily dropping since) while the stuff that’s of interest to the rich such as gems and precursors soars further and further out of reach.

For a gold sink to have the desired effect, it needs to be sinking gold from the players that are driving inflation. Things like waypoints, repair costs, and now the golems just don’t affect them, while they do affect the poorer and newer players that gold sinks are supposed to protect from inflation.

At last someone who can see reason.

Seras.5702:

To be honest, I’m glad they designed it the way they did. With 1 WP, travel golems costing 5s each, and no port to the top, it forces players to actually fight/run their way thru the content. It keeps people from trivializing the tower and just bypassing all the content.

Contradict yourself much?

And what content? There is NOTHING new here that doesn’t exist everywhere else.

Want to fight mobs? You can do that kitten anywhere.

Want to run around the map? You can do that kitten anywhere.

Durzlla.6295:

Vanthian.9267:

A lot of you people equate difficulty with massive amounts of mobs. Having 15 mobs swamp a player is not difficult nor fun/challenging in anyway. It is lazy design.

Nothing in this game is truly “difficult content” it is all Zerg Content.

If you are not running through trying to skip anything there is absolutely no scenario you’ll get swarmed by more than 5 mobs, let alone kittening 15!! The only time you’ll get swarmed by 5 is if you get unlucky with a patrol anyway.

I seriously have to wonder if you’ve actually been in the tower.

And even if you somehow manage to not be near 5 mobs, they respawn so fast you might as count yourself as fighting 7 or 8 mobs at a time, especially with all the champs, vets and elites that are scattered through the normal packs of mobs and respawn just quickly.

Especially kittenty are the mobs that get downed state which you apparently have to spend 4 seconds standing over even though you already too many other mobs trying to eat your face to actually stand through the animation for.

The tower is high risk extremely low reward. And the DR makes sure it stays that way.

And I don’t understand why mob respawn doesn’t work like player respawn. Why are mobs allowed to respawn where they died? Why don’t they have to pay a ridiculous fee simply to port back to the closest stone and then have to run all the way back? Why are champs given unrealistic stats? Why is it ok for a champ to be able to insta kill a player but not ok for a player to be able to insta kill a champ?

Doggie.3184:

Xae Isareth.1364:

In defence of Trahreane though, he was the one who sat up the Pact. If he wasn’t there, I doubt the Pact would actually exist. Your character was powerful in the story, but he/she sure didn’t display much negotiation or leadership characteristics.

And being a god is great. Why else do you always having mortals aspiring to be gods but never gods aspiring to become mortal one day?

That and he’s the only person who knows how to help Orr and the only one who knows how to use Caladbolg to heal it. =/ Story-wise, if everything was up to the player you wouldn’t have much of a clue on how to stop Zhaitan being a newbie and all, or a Sylvari only a few days old. :x

If Trahearne wasn’t there then our character would have been the Pact Leader. Trahearne was of no importance in regards to forming the Pact. In fact if it wasn’t for our characters speech then the Pact would have fallen apart before it even formed. The only reason why Trahearne was made leader of the Pact is because he was in the right place at the right time.

As for Trahearne having some special knowledge of Orr, we never see it. And it is unclear what the purpose of such knowledge would be when our quest is to kill a dragon who is a nonnative of Orr. Sure there is some overlap in far as there are undead all over Orr and Zhaitain raises the dead, however that is essentially a superficial similarity.

Trahearne is the Hopper of Guild Wars 2 (CinemaSin’s everything wrong with battleship [the movie] http://youtu.be/1kmatKUBBck?t=1m35s).

Xae Isareth.1364:

Ellisande.5218:

Xae Isareth.1364:

In all honesty, the biggest Mary sue in the game is our own characters. He has no personal flaws, knows what to do in every situation, and masters skills and abilities which took others years to perfect after swinging a weapon around a few times. On top of that, he earns titles and ranks as if they’re nothing. I mean, what did you do at Shaemor which the other Seraph soldiers didn’t that made you the ‘Hero of Shaemore’, you didn’t fight the earth elemental alone, Logan and a whole battalion of other soldiers were there too, many of which presumably died or were heavily wounded, and no one gave two kitten s about them.

If you are a Sylvari then you aren’t really a Mary Sue. Sylvari are gifted with all the knowledge and skill that they will need to carry out the purpose of their creation when they are being grown. So a new born Sylvari isn’t really compareable to any of the other races who actually have to slowly learn.

Of course that also means that the Sylvari are basically just robots or AIs.

It’s doesnt work like that I don’t think. For a start, why isn’t every sylvari born equal then? Scarlet is clearly more intellectually superior to most sylvari. They are only given the basics like language and the ability to walk, they learn the rest on their own.

The Syvlari wouldn’t be very interesting if they were all the same.

Plus it wouldn’t make sense for all Sylvari to be the same when they are all meant to serve a different function. You don’t give the janitor a desire to be a ballerina or the ballerina a desire to be a janitor. Nor do you give your top scientist the brawn to win the heavy weight boxing championship but not enough brain to get even a C- in astrophysics.

Each Sylvari is created and designed to fill a specific role within the Sylvari role and they are perfectly tailored to fill that role.

If Scarlett is unnaturally bright and inquisitive, then she is only that way because she was designed to be that way.

In order for this to be an effective gold sink, it needs to function as a graduated cost that increases with the wealth of the player wanting to use the waypoint and decreases with the poverty of the player wanting to use the waypoint.

A static cost cannot serve as an effective gold sink because it removes too much gold from the poorer players and way too little gold from the richer players. A gold sink needs to remove a lot of gold only from the richest players.

VOLKON.1290:

I’m still trying to figure her obsession with Faren’s “panties”. She looking to cross-pollinate or something?

I think she’s just jealous that she has to use leaves like a savage while Faren gets some cute looking “panties” made out of expensive silk.

Scarlett gave us a clue that she has no actual purpose.

I’m in fact at a rather large loss as to why any of these groups even agree to follow her in the first place.

Floor 3 on my server is either run and hope for the best or die a slow painful death to attrition.

While other people want to kill off Trahearne, I want to kill off all the male members of DE who are nothing but a bunch of useless cry babies.\

Except for Caithe I care nothing for DE and wish they have never been created as they really serve no purpose.

Xae Isareth.1364:

In all honesty, the biggest Mary sue in the game is our own characters. He has no personal flaws, knows what to do in every situation, and masters skills and abilities which took others years to perfect after swinging a weapon around a few times. On top of that, he earns titles and ranks as if they’re nothing. I mean, what did you do at Shaemor which the other Seraph soldiers didn’t that made you the ‘Hero of Shaemore’, you didn’t fight the earth elemental alone, Logan and a whole battalion of other soldiers were there too, many of which presumably died or were heavily wounded, and no one gave two kitten s about them.

If you are a Sylvari then you aren’t really a Mary Sue. Sylvari are gifted with all the knowledge and skill that they will need to carry out the purpose of their creation when they are being grown. So a new born Sylvari isn’t really compareable to any of the other races who actually have to slowly learn.

Of course that also means that the Sylvari are basically just robots or AIs.

Qawsada.4251:

A Massive Headache.1879:

as for trahearne, he spent his entire life dedicated to stopping the dragons or at least zhaitan, you not so much. of course he’s in charge and not the player character

Trahearne spent his life researching Orr, not fighting the Dragon. Hell, the whole personal story is basically finishing HIS wyld hunt and has nothing to do with the elder dragon at all. Even then, cleansing Orr did nothing in the battle against Zhaitan and judging Teq and how he got buff recently, it did nothing to the risen at Orr either. Did his knowledge of Orr did anything to help the Pact Soldier? Nope. The Pact Soldier just invade and hell, did a better job in cleansing Orr with the Temple Event than Trahearne could in his life time.

Omg it’s like looking into my own mind.

I completely disagree with the opener.

1) When there is a lot of kitten going on and a lot of particle effects on screen, especially in the tight corridors of the tower it is extremely hard to see those red circles that let you know you are standing in something.

2) Players have fewer dodges available than number of things that need to be dodged in the tower.

3) Some of us either lag or just have kittenty reaction times. We are being penalized for things that are essentially out of our control. And then you are calling us crap players simply because we aren’t you.

This content wasn’t challenging, it was just way overtuned. There were too many mobs doing too much damage with too much hp who were given too many CC and debuff abilities.

I think Scarlett would have worked better if she was introduced in content that made her into the next Sierran and along the path of completing that living story Scarlett was driven to keep searching for more and more knowledge to counter an enemy whose strength only existed in her mind, growing more obsessed as the story progressed until she became the enemy that she was always worried about.

And she needed to have not continuously been defeated so easily so consistently. Villains need to have the occasional major success in order to be taken seriously.

Ronah.2869:

Of course, some will go with the “solution”: join a guild and ask hep. This kind of answer strips you off your dignity as a hero and transforms you into a beggar at others mercy

Precisely. We are the heroes, we should be on par with the Champs. It is we heroes who should have to be raided by the mobs and not the mobs who have to be raided by us.

Becka Williams.4978:

And what do you do after you’ve used up your two dodges? This is one of the problems with the game. They give us mechanics, and then come up with ways to spam things that take more than the 2 or 3 times we can use the mechanic. See the end of the Aetherblade dungeon, or the tower. Or stunbreaks, where you break out of immobilize, only to be knocked down. What’s the point of a stun breaker if every mob has a stun mechanic, and you can only counter it once?

Or any ranged champ. If the attacks are all ranged then we need an infinite amount of dodge to avoid all the attacks, especially since champs are immune to CC for no reason that can be explained within the confines of the game.

The final cutscene at the end of the last “storyline” quest was a complete ripoff of the exact same scenes found at the end of storyline instances in DC Universe Online.

In fact Scarlet could be replaced by the Joker or vice versa and both games would be exactly the same as they are now.

Raziel.4216:

Erick Alastor.3917:

Raziel.4216:

SpyderArachnid.5619:

Frontier.2536:

I will never understand the desire of some “players” to solo every single content of massively multiplayer role playing game. And not just the desire but entitlement as well. If you wanna play entire game solo w/o anyone bothering you just go play Skyrim (or any sp game, I believe there are many of those on market).

Raziel.4216:

Oh crap, it looks like some parts of a massive multiplayer online game might not be solo-able.
Who could’ve guessed that?

You both need to think before you speak. Stop with the bashing of other players who want solo content and read first.

It’s the patch notes that state this is solo content. So before you go on your rants of how this is an MMO and that players need to go play single player games if they want solo content, realize it was Anet who made this solo content. Anet released content that is intended to be soloed. Yes I know, solo content in an MMO. Anet’s decision, not the players.

So if you want to be rude and bash on someone, do it to Anet. They are the ones who added solo content to your MMO that you think should always require a group. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.

Anet said we’d have solo content, you can solo ALL the instances inside the tower, you require a group to get there for the 1st time. Nevertheless, you’re still getting solo content.

So it’s both solo + group content, if you want to play a 100% single player you’re in the wrong genre.

Nice try tho

So when the zerg is gone, voilà, you’re locked out from your solo content and never be able to experience it again until the zerg comes back.
I don’t know if the worst thing is a content designed for the zerg or a content designed also for solo players but whose access is gated behind the zerg.
This remind me a lot of Queen’s Gauntlet.

Zerg? You dont need a zerg for this, I got up there with a group of 10 people.
So you could say that – in this massive multiplayer online game – you have to team up with other people to reach the end, kitten , why cant I solo everything like skyrim?

Massive Multiplayer has never meant you must group or that only people who like to be in groups need apply.

It just means there are a massive number of players sharing the same server.

Steve.5197:

If anyone of you watched Sword Arts Online (anime), Then you will see the resemblance of a tower with levels to clear. I am so excited as for how people interact with the nightmare tower. Huge zerk on lower levels of the tower, and then you begin to split up as you progress tower floors, just like SAO. AWESOME JOB AREANET! Love this game and the anime, best of both worlds haha.

It isn’t even remotely similar.

In Sword Art Online, there is a big reward for completion, and the actual game is well designed and allows for player skill (the combat that the players experience is a cross between a game like Bayonetta and Street Fighter) and item selection to carry the day (see the character who is nearly invincible because he put defense and regen on his gear).

GW2 is all about rockemsockem robots.

And Sword Art Online just copied the tower idea from the .Hack series.

Stx.4857:

I guess this is just a classic example of how you cannot please everyone. I thought this was one of the better living story segments they have ever created.

Fighting your way to the top of the tower can get boring… but if that is the case then just run past the mobs to the next floor… if I can do it on my necro(that has no vigor) and in an overflow server, then so can you!

The only part of this update I find disappointing is the end… you learn nothing new. But it still leaves you with a little sense of accomplishment.

You can try running past the mobs but eventually they will do enough damage to kill you anyways.

That’s at least what keeps me from being able to move any higher than the first floor.

Taku.6352:

Don’t walk into the spore mines… They show a clear AoE marker around them and pop few seconds later.

You mean right after the red lines appear. That is assuming you even see the red lines at all.

kailin.4905:

I kinda though the biggest flaw was there is no reason to keep doing the tower. I played about 4 hours and got all the achievements done already and I’m no great player. At first I died a good bit but nothing that felt too cheap other than the mobs CC. I just don’t see much reason for people to go back other than a rare chance at a gasmask skin that you get anyway for the meta. The meta is pretty easy, there’s no other skins to get, and its hard enough that its not a good farm.

I am just the opposite. Everything feels to cheap.

The mobs deal too much damage, have too much hp, there are way too many of them, the plants that explode which you can’t avoid are mega cheap.

The whole thing is cheap, pointless and completely unrewarding.

The Master.2893:

Because the tower is engaged in “Magically Awesome Super-Doom Defense Mode (of Science!)”?

In other words it is behind an illusion, so in reality there is nothing actually protecting it.

Atlas.9704:

(shrugs) Meh I’ve seen … one drunk human comment that he thought some Asura gal was flirting with him, and so the idea of those two being an item isn’t odd to me.

So in your view homosexual relations are only slightly less perverse than interspecies mating?

You think players and mobs are alike?

Let me know the next time you one hit kill a champion/boss, are immune to CC an entire boss fight, take only 0.1% hp damage from a boss/champ attack, are immune to damage that isn’t turret damage, and have a constant supply of minions that automatically respawn when they get killed.

If you want more realism in the game, then make bosses/champions similar to players and not have unrealistic stats.

For that matter, make damage animations reflect the actual damage being dealt. If the animation shows me splitting an enemy in half with my sword, that enemy should be dead and not taking 10% hp damage. I mean making mobs go into a recoverable downed state after that is the most unrealistic thing imagineable.

The Master.2893:

You has discovered something important about the failure of Living Story concept without observing it thus: What happens when Living Story engages Personal Story?

Remember that the centaurs have been bought out by Minister Caudecus (human personal story) and have a non-aggression pact with Lion’s Arch. How long will this continue? Forever if the personal story is never advanced.

Thus a failure with the Living Story concept indeed…

Those centaurs violate the nonaggression pact on an hourly basis. Just take a walk through Queensboro.

Ayrilana.1396:

Why? Gather friends and guild mates to kill them. Three people can easily kill the champs.

My guildmates have no interest in doing them and I play too infrequently to really make any good friendships.

VOLKON.1290:

That fact that so many people love as well as hate Scarlet to me indicates they’re doing a great job with this “bad guy”. Love or hate, she’s making people care about her presence returning.

It’s the bad guys you never remember or don’t care at all if they return that suck. If Scarlet is getting under your skin for good or ill then they’re doing it right.

You are refering to different types of love and hate.

You would be correct if the hate you are refering to was hate in regards to how evil and insidious she is, implying that she is a well written and developed character.

However the hate people have is over how poorly written she is and how poorly she is used. So the people aren’t hating her as a character so much as they are hating her as a plot device (does that remind you of any other Sylvari Anet has created for GW2?) That is a completely different type of hate than what your statement would require in order to be correct.

People aren’t complaining about the presence of Scarlet per se, they are complaining about Anet’s poor storytelling. And I have to agree, omniscient omnipotent characters who are pulled out of thin air to be a plot device leave a poor taste in my mouth as they simply are not believeable characters.

Doggie.3184:

DarkWasp.7291:

You guys forgot Trahearne and Trahearne

My Sylvari and Trahearne, you mean.

That two timing kitten!

You can’t take my man!!!!

As for Marjory and Kasmeer, I think it is pretty clear that the reader is meant to understand that they are lovers. Their conversations are far too flirty, private, and familiar to be anything else.

Jeff.4680:

1. Write every enemy faction’s name on a slip of paper.
2. Put these slips in a hat.
3. Draw two slips of paper. These enemy factions will form an alliance.
4. Hint to that this alliance was forged by a greater force.
5. Reveal that this force is Scarlet.
6. Rinse & repeat

This is sort of like the very long Civ 5 game I played, only it involved a lot of betrayal and backstabbing as well.

Sir Morgan Malory.2069:

If you don’t like zergs there are 4 other maps other than Kessex where these events take place. The new content looks great. But with no use of the games combat mechanics it gets boring really fast.

Yeah 4 other maps that are empty on my server, except for Queensboro that also has a champ train. They don’t do the events, just the champ train, so the map is effectively empty as far as trying to complete the events is concerned.

Heck our Kessex map is empty as well. If you aren’t part of the champ farm zerg there is nothing to do but solo grind on my server.

McFly.2134:

Am I missing something? When I did this daily achievement lat night, I only had to kill three champs to complete it.

Honestly though, OP is arguing that this achievement can’t be completed faster but also arguing that he hates zerging (whose very nature is completing content far more rapidly than intended)? Isn’t there just a LITTLE bit of a contradiction in there? Maybe an oxymoron or two? At the very least somewhat hypocritical.

There is nothing hypocritical there.

Zerging doesn’t mean finishing more rapidly than intended, it means using so many people that each person’s contribution, individually, is unnecessary.

So this is a case of Princess Bride syndrome where the word doesn’t mean what you think it means.

And honestly I think the achievements for this are ridiculous. While this might have to do with my server being a dead server so everything that I have to do has to be done solely as there is no one to do them with. And the content needs to be constructed to be completeable by all players on all servers which means that is needs to be soloable. So either the events need to made to scale down when there is only one active player participating, or they need to make the meta and achievements giving nonachievement awards only the soloable achievements.

Good luck getting this done though, no one does these champs. they are too busy champ farming in FG or Queens.

These achievements should always be strictly limited to content that is soloable so that everyone is able to get it done.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Let’s be honest here: the mobs have obscenely low HP to compensate for having the downed state given to them. It doesn’t really make them harder or take longer, and because of the option to stomp them, it gives the player some play/counterplay options against the mobs (ie. Do I AOE the downed mob when his buddies run over to res? Or do I stomp to simply get rid of it?). This also gives stealth added value in PvE beyond just for skipping because you can stealth stomp (which is rather fun, I’ll admit). This sort of mechanic would be cool in dungeons for some variety, though I definitely agree that not everything should be like that.

That all said, it does kind of suck for condition users because when they get downed they lose all of their conditions. Conditions need a lot of love in PvE, but that’s a battle for another thread I’d say.

If you were being honest you would be pointing out that mobs which enter the downed state have the same hp as mobs which can’t enter the downed state and that it takes too long to finish the mob once it enters the downed state whether you use the finisher or attacks.

I think people are getting too excited over the novelty, and once that wears off they are going to realize what a bad idea this was.

Acidicore.3264:

What people don’t realize is the insidious enemy is the child of Scarlet and Trahearne.

FLEE, FLEE TO THE HILLS!

I’m pretty sure that Sylvari can’t reproduce.

Of course that didn’t seem to stop the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

The purpose of the downed state serves a function in PvP. And that function is keeping players in the game which is the carry over function from the purpose of giving players a downed state in PvE which was a necessity when they gave mobs ridiculous damage on unavoidable projectiles and one hit insta kills.

In other words, the downed state exists to keep PLAYERS in the game. Since mobs are clearly not players (especially since mobs already respawn within a few seconds of where they get killed anyways unlike players) then the downed state doesn’t serve any necessary function. And mobs don’t need a downed state as they already have a function to get back to the fight quickly and that function is called respawning.

So unless GW2 is going to allow players to insta kill bosses champions and elites, respawn right where they were killed without taking any equipment damage, allow players to go invulnerable because they jumped onto a rock or moved too far from their respawn point, to have their hp regenerate during combat because they moved too far from their respawn point, then the game shouldn’t be giving a function necessary to keep players in the game to mobs who already have their own functions to keep mobs in the game.

This is just a terrible waste of my time.

The animation takes forever (I have to sit there for a ton of time while my character does absolutely nothing worthwhile), ruins the point of choosing to make a PvE character devoted to AOE damage, this effectively increases the hp of mobs by 50-100% or more thus increasing the amount of time it takes to kill the mob, and really serves no function. This isn’t making me think more during combat because my options are exactly the same as they were before, it just makes me waste more time to kill the same enemy.

If you want to implement a change that makes me think more during combat that give me more options, such as the ability to block attacks or dodge more than twice in a row (I think the only thing dumber than overly limited GW2’s dodge energy is Aion’s flight energy).

There is nothing I like about having my time wasted and just breaks immersion even more. If I slice something in half with my giant greatsword, it shouldn’t be ready to get back up into combat as soon as I turn my back.

For the people who say you can just spam more attacks on the downed mob, I say that only shows how ridiculous and pointless this change was as Anet has effectively increased mob hp by 50-100% or more (if you are forced to switch to a different mob /set of mobs which allows this mob to get up at 50% hp and then still requires killing off again from a downed state) with this change. Having to spam extra attacks to kill a mob that the hp meter says you already killed is no less a waste of time than having to sit there twiddling your thumbs for 4 seconds waiting for the finisher to go off. Both are nothing more than an immersion breaking waste of time.

And I also contest the assertion that giving mobs downed states will cause Anet to decrease mob hp. In fact I would claim that this was a change to effectively increase mob health and not decrease it.