Guild Wars 2

See, the people suggesting that the gold league, as implemented now, is pointless, they’re missing the point a bit. Yes, being in the gold league and not being one of the top 3 currently rated servers pretty much equals “you lose!”, but consider how much WORSE it would have been: the NA servers were just going to be split into two leagues before. Now everyone who ISN’T already in the top 6 or for some bizarre reason desperately trying to be can take solace in the knowledge that they won’t have to fight ANY of the servers in gold league for MONTHS.

Which is frankly the best news we’ve had in ages; the only downside is that there isn’t room in the top 6 for ALL of the servers we want to just go away for the foreseeable future of our matches to fit into, making it a question of which server we want to see climb in rating (and therefore go away) the most. At least the majority of the silver league will be servers that are actually fun to fight.

I got lucky and was actually able to be pulled into our main instance tonight by somebody who was already there (prior to that I could wait around for hours and try joining parties until my mouse-clicking hand went numb and I’d just stay in the stupid overflow forever and ever), so I can attest that with proper coordination, the fight isn’t by any stretch impossible.

For all the people stuck in overflows though, it pretty much IS impossible, and as the OP oh so rightly pointed out, unless something changes, your odds of ever completing this decrease each and every day because the rewards for Tequatl just are nowhere near good enough to justify dealing with the truly enormous hassle involved – trying for hours just to get into your actual world’s zone and then hoping everything comes together after you get to probably wait for over another hour? Yeah, I see just ALL KINDS of people doing that on a regular basis.

Unlike the OP however, I have no reservations regarding nerfing aspects of the fight – keep all the mechanics as is sure, but Tequatl just has way too much health – if an ad-hoc group of around a 100 people that aren’t in voice communication with each other can genuinely try to kill it and wind up knocking off 5% of the boss’s health in 15 minutes, he pretty clearly has too much health.

The margin of error is just too slim for open world content, and the blasted overflows, ability for 6 people to potentially waste the time of 100+ other people, and aforesaid razor-thin margin for error is starting to make people actively resent their fellow players, something that kind of flies in the face of the original Manifesto. All the other aspects of the open world gameplay are designed such that you pretty much never have a reason to be annoyed by your fellow players, but with this revamped boss, anyone who doesn’t know how to use a turret (or is intentionally trolling), anyone who is AFK and taking up spots in a main instance, anyone who is dead and not waypointing back, you REALLY resent their presence because they are directly and quite negatively impacting your gameplay experience.

The majority of my guild have pretty much sworn off even bothering attempting it, and that’s while there are large organized groups of folks on our server still actually bothering with it – if nothing changes this will be a complete graveyard sooner than later.

I really wish people wouldn’t post things like this – that Tequatl kill and very nearly kill? Yeah, I got to spend that entire block of time in overflow, unable to get in and therefore accomplish ANYTHING. No overflow group I’ve ever been present for has even got him down to 75%, and even before we had any publicized success, if you weren’t already in the zone long before Tequatl showed up, you weren’t getting in until there was no point leaving overflow anyways, as the main server’s event would be over by the time you get the prompt to leave.

Now we can wait for literal hours on end, seeing multiple iterations of the dragon come and go, content in the knowledge that a spot on the main server will never open up and we can’t ever leave overflow hell, where your time is always wasted for no reward whatsoever, because that prompt just does not appear.

Stay on your servers please, we have too many people already.

Winsyrstrife.7149:

Adamantium.3682:

There is a spot you can stand for the whole ride, providing you have a potion or two to heal up a couple times.

Yeah I always have full potions for the ride. Funny enough, one time the owls hit me like 4 times in a row, in the back. I didn’t even have time to heal. I guess they saw the bag of potions…

You shouldn’t ever need any potions at all for shortcut eagle actually, as there’s a trick to riding it without getting hit: turn around backwards.

No seriously, as long as you’re sitting behind his head and looking backwards, you’ll spot every flight of owls as they pop and can wait until they form up and are about to hit to simply sidestep to one direction, then immediately step back over to behind the eagle’s helmet as soon as the owls blow themselves up. You won’t be out from behind the helmet-shield for long enough to be hit by a bee coming from the front and when you’re actually looking at them as they approach you there shouldn’t ever be any reason to get hit by owls, and thus you will successfully ride the eagle without getting knocked off or taking any damage. Works every time (in normal mode at least).

So when you added new checkpoints to the world 2 zones, that was all well and good, and for the most part they’re actually helpful, but the placement of the “new” checkpoint in World 2 Zone 2 before the section with the trampolines and pillars, is just the most trollish bit of bullkitten yet.

So there were originally a square of perma-spikes around the center of that platform – the new checkpoint gate is right behind them, such that spawning there INSTANTLY places you a couple steps behind the gate’s buttons, which is DIRECTLY ON THE SPIKES. So every single time you continue, you will die at least once instantly before you get the chance to react (moving forwards quickly after that automatic first death does let you progress). So fine, bad gate placement, but lives are pretty cheap in that mode and it shouldn’t be TOO bad, right? But wait, there’s more!

Not only is the gate terribly placed, but now for whatever reason, it OVERRIDES the happy cloud checkpoint after that trampoline section, making the 2nd to last checkpoint meaningless, and forcing you to jump the trampoline bit each and every bloody time you die from that point onwards, even after you’ve made it past that and activated what is supposed to be a checkpoint.

If I wasn’t pretty much all the way at the end this would have made me rage quit, please please PLEASE fix it, making the zone easier and in the process BREAKING it isn’t helping at all.

For whatever reason, when I use the flute to play songs that are supposed to do something, it NEVER seems to ever work the first time I play the sequence, I always have to repeat it at least once. This is something of a major problem when trying to get to the cave with the elite skill scroll in World 2 Zone 3 considering the spot you stand on consists of 3 disappearing clouds, which if you’re quick give you perhaps just enough time to finish the sequence of notes you need to play.

Well I’ve done that section 50 times in a row just now, and each and every time I get to the end, play the notes, nothing happens, now I fall to my death because the clouds disappear too fast for me to try playing it again. This is ridiculous, if we have to learn songs anyways we should just have a button to push to play them, or they should bloody well WORK when you play them and not decide that no, I think I’m going to do nothing even though the next time you push that same exact sequence with the same exact timing I’ll actually do something.

Seriously, please fix this.

The truly silly bit is that jump isn’t even NECESSARY – after making the initial jump over the chasm you can cut right and then follow the line of trees straight over to the hill, and from there work your way up to the last checkpoint. There are of course traps if you deviate, but you don’t need to jump at all or deal with those annoying rocks, you can just walk straight to where you want to go.

Of course I only found out about that AFTER making that jump successfully, ha ha.

I’m also currently stuck on 31/33, gone through all zones more than once with no joy.

florence.1674:

In light of the fact that being pushed off the ledge doesn’t count as a kill for Crystal Breaker, I know lots of people have tongue-in-cheek said that once they get attacked with a crystal, they are jumping off a cliff.

Having witnessed multiple people do that over and over and over while I was trying to get the Crystal Breaker achievement last night, I don’t think they were actually making that statement tongue in cheek – people are really doing that, and it compounds the problem something fierce. It’s bad enough that stopping crystal runners is way harder than it probably should be without them intentionally suiciding right before you would have killed them to prevent you from getting credit. The way the mechanics work now uniquely favor trolls, and oh boy are the trolls ever out in force.

Just make it so that if somebody dies in a way that gets you a “kill” (jumping off a cliff after you have hit them with skills does just that), the achievement is also incremented. Problem solved.

Happyfool.8951:

Don’t open the pvp chest then, as they stack. Or you can delete the chest outright.

also, the pvp skins you get from them are soul bound for some reason.

It’s how sPvP gear works – anything you get from a reward chest, whether you could use it on that character or not, is automatically soulbound to the character you opened it on. But! If you deposit said item or items into the locker, any of your characters can pull it out and now it will be soulbound to them.

It’s kind of a silly system really since you can (and will!) have duplicates (which is what salvage kits are for in most cases) but might actually want to use said duplicates on multiple characters, and therefore have to put one into the locker, switch characters, pull it out, switch back, put 2nd into locker, etc etc; making them automatically account-bound would fulfil the same “just one item of each type in the locker” constraint while also making moving things around between your various alts much simpler since then you could just put the duplicates into your bank (and actually be able to take them out on other characters, though you would still have to pop into the sPvP lobby to equip them). Here’s hoping they change it to that eventually, as it honestly makes way more sense than the soulbound thing.

If this was a permanent achievement that wasn’t heavily based on factors largely outside many players control such that any perceived “skill” involved in achieving victory is rendered almost entirely illusory because you’re doubtless competing against people who LITERALLY CANNOT BEAT YOU, if those things were true, I could ALMOST see the people being jerks and/or defending their right to be enormous jerks’ point. Almost.

But you know what? This is temporary content! So yeah, frak that, big kudos to all the people playing this game who understand that competing to REACH the finish line first is every bit as satisfying as crossing it first, and by choosing not to do so every time they race even though they pretty much could, are allowing other people to complete achievements in limited-run content before it disappears. And thus they are rewarded twice for their efforts, because they get the satisfaction of knowing they won and the warm feeling one derives from being helpful to their fellow players.

By the logic of the folks showing up here, in this thread devoted to being thankful that there are in fact nice people playing this game, to argue that people shouldn’t ever do that and “oh noes you are devaluing my meaningless in-game achievement that doesn’t matter anyways what the hell is wrong with you it’s a bloody game”, if you DIDN’T spend your entire time inside say… the Obsidian jumping puzzle actively trying to kill each and every player from the opposing servers that might also be trying to jump it alongside of you, then you’re just letting them win and that’s cheating and totally devalues the jumping puzzle achievement for all the people who already have it.

That’s of course nonsense, not killing people who aren’t attacking you in that jumping puzzle is just not being a colossal jerk, but this is the mindset of the folks showing up here to complain – truly, they have a baffling value system.

Sebulon.7683:

I can see people with Bolt liking the Lightning Catcher. When I saw it I was like “oh you two are like made for each other <3”

It also pairs well in general with mesmers, what with how it’s purple and all their particle effects are about that general shade. I got two for mine!

All the celestial items are using the default crafted gear skins, just with the celestial stats. Also, you will not be able to buy any crafted celestial items on the trading post ever, unless ANet reverses course – upon crafting any of them, they are automatically Account Bound, Soulbound on Use.

So if you want items with those stats, better track down the recipe sheets and learn the related crafting disciplines, and then get ready to wait FOREVER to get enough charged crystals (1 per day with 5 needed per item = so much waiting!), because that’s your only option right now.

I’m flabbergasted by this thread’s very existence, really I am… is what I’d say in a world where I was completely naive. Instead I’m just sadly shaking my head at the OP’s completely warped view of the world.

Dude, if you get to the finish line first, you’ve WON. If you decide not to cross it because there was literally no reason to more than once (prior to the last update) or because you feel the rewards for doing so aren’t good enough to warrant what many people see as kind of a kitten move to do to other players, and you let 3 other people cross it before you step across yourself? You’ve still WON. You got there first.

There’s no betting on the outcome, they aren’t fixing the results for personal gain (quite the opposite in fact if they still do it now), they’re just being nice to other people in the race who probably have latency issues. Cheating would be finding some way to get to first without properly running the race; finishing in whatever place you feel like once you reach the end is just a player’s choice.

Consistently placing first every match (prior to the update that gave 1st place a slightly larger reward) is just pointless ego boosting at the expense of everyone else playing with you – the OP doesn’t want people to “play the game as intended”, they want to not be hassled by the folks who quite rightly pointed out that they were being a jerk. Which is nothing out of the ordinary, PvP is where people GO to be jerks, the entire concept is that when you pit players versus other players the fun generated is at another player’s expense; the nicer jerks among us just used our cutthroat competitive urges up along the way to the finish line.

The point of a race is to win, and everyone who let people pass them at the finish line WON their races, they didn’t need the game to tell them that, they already know they won. Asking for a world where we simply abandon any vestiges of (I am putting words here because the forum’s filter is being ridiculous) kindness is a sad indictment on the mindset of a decided portion of the PvP playerbase.

Dailies are a rotating and constantly refreshing source of points, whereas the other achievement categories are static – once you’ve finished them, they’re finished; without dailies the only source of new achievement points would be from new living story content, new jumping puzzles, etc (which the folks on the leaderboard invariably all do anyways), and were it not for how ridiculously time-consuming some categories are now, eventually everyone on the leaderboards now would pretty much have the same score, because we’d eventually have all the achievements and the numbers would only change when new content came out before stabilizing again. So it’s pretty clear that points from dailies aren’t ever going away.

The fact that 6 of the 15 possible points available from dailies (and 30 of the points from monthlies) are optional means that the people who are crazy enough to care about maintaining their spot on the leaderboard have more work cut out for them, but it also means people who don’t necessarily care about that can get anywhere from 4-15 points, possibly without particularly trying. Capping dailies to 5 points cuts down on the work you need to do to stay competitive with other people on the leaderboards sure, but it also punishes EVERYONE across the board in terms of how many potential points they can earn, and as the devs describe the new system, it’s based on your overall points.

Any suggestion that makes it harder to actually get points is therefore a bad idea and you should stop suggesting them. The end.

From the article ANet is helpfully linking to when you log into the game client:

“Don’t worry – the system is retroactive! Every point that you’ve earned while adventuring across Tyria will count towards exciting rewards”

I think it’s pretty clear from that quote that they are not in fact going to be divorcing points accumulated from completing dailies and monthlies from your effective total, nor should they – the notion that new players need to be able to “catch up” is silly. As they describe it, these are essentially rewards for playing as long/as much as we have – would you suggest that people who just created a character in guild wars 1 should automatically receive 8 years of birthday presents, because the people who’ve had characters around for that long have an unfair advantage over the poor newbies who can never ever catch up?

If you would, well you really shouldn’t, because that’s stupid – the people with high achievement scores have been around longer and play more often than you do, ergo, they get more rewards for the achievement point reward system. And whenever you eventually catch up to where those folks were when the new system rolls out, well then you’ll have whatever they got unlocked at that particular tier as well.

Esplen.3940:

Bad Element.4613:

Only getting 5 achievement points per day? Im pretty sure lots of ppl do the bare minimum, neglecting the pvp dailies or pve dailies that they dont feel like finishing up.

What is the actual potential per day? 14-16ish?

14 PvE + 4 PvP = 18 Daily.

It’s actually 15 possible points per day if you complete all your dailies, there are only 11 PvE daily categories (don’t know where you got that 14 number from, there have never been THAT many categories available to choose from). That’s of course the potential right now, Dailies used to be worth a flat… 8 points? 12 points? Something like that anyways, back when they were just the fixed categories, and when the rotation was first introduced they boosted each category to 5 points so finishing dailies netted you 25 points total.

It’s only since the introduction of randomized daily goals and more categories than required for the chest that they dropped each daily category to 1 point (and then progressively added additional categories until we got to 11). I find it pretty funny to see people complaining that dailies give you too many points NOW, when you consider how much they rewarded historically.

Oh look, another mini-game that isn’t Bar Brawl, the game with achievements you can’t get because you can’t play it because it doesn’t exist – why must you continuously tease me ANet, why?!!

This sounds fun though.

Most achievements are fine, and the ones with absurd numbers like Weapon Master aren’t really intended that you sit around specifically trying to complete them (more just an incidental reward for using particular weapons over time that you would eventually automatically complete), but yes, the WvW achievements and the titles that go along with them are all but unattainable for the average player, and it may very well take YEARS for even the dedicated ones to finish any of those categories.

Other things like why the “consume food” achievement caps at 800 but the “drink things” one takes 100,000 (for exactly the same amount of points) are kind of baffling (and killing 1,000 giants for the giant slayer category when there are like… 2 giants that count and they’re both champions? Egad.), but for the most part I don’t really see a problem with how things are weighted.

This isn’t a zero sum game people – yeah, there are folks like me with crazy achievement point totals, and the wording of this announcement does seem to indicate that I will in fact get more rewards than you will, but you have to remember that the reason for that is I HAVE MORE POINTS. Which you can get – if you have 4.3k or so and play regularly, you will eventually get to where I’m at now; I’ll have long since got an even higher number that you will pretty much never ever ever be able to catch up to unless I die or stop logging in, but the point is that my having more achievement points than you do doesn’t prevent you from getting ANY rewards at all.

People with ridiculous achievement totals would just get the reward tiers unlocked FASTER, they don’t somehow prevent the non-overachievers from getting rewards. As for the complaints about how WvW achievements are weighted (and how ridiculous the numbers are for completing them), I sympathize, but only to a certain point – if you’re one of those folks who thinks they should only ever have to WvW and that ANet shouldn’t expect them to have to do anything else, but of course you also want to be rewarded like the folks who, you know, do the other things, well that’s just silly (they do need to add a reliable and not “one-off” method for getting ascended back items that isn’t fractals still, but that’s another matter).

How to phrase this best, hmm… ah, got it.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Your request is absurd and illogical – the achievement points your account has attained shows the amount of work you’ve put into playing the game, and their plan to reward players accordingly is great – why on earth would anyone want them to take points AWAY?!

Sure, new players can pretty much never ever catch up to folks on the leaderboard now (unless everyone on it just stops playing), but who cares? The leaderboard is meaningless bragging rights (just like achievement points were until this patch hits), and the notion that people would only do dailies for their achievement tier rewards because it’s the “easier alternative” is silly for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is, you don’t even know what comprises a “tier” yet).

Right now if you do every single daily category you get 15 points a day. That’s it. The overwhelming majority of players don’t bother, so they get 5 from PvE (plus a point here or there from incidentally completing things without really trying), and 4 from sPvP, IF they do sPvP (a lot of folks have never even tried). You really think people are going to be racking up achievement tiers getting 5 points every day and they’ll have no incentive to do anything else because those 5 points are available?

Don’t be absurd.

Based on the details provided by the announcement there’s no reason at all to deduce that you would only be rewarded for your existing achievement points after you get as many as you already had, that’s not even remotely what “retroactively” means. In fact, the wording here is quite reassuring – unlike laurels, which were only rewarded for completing dailies/monthlies after they were implemented and not “retroactively” rewarded to players who had been doing those things all along, here they’re saying “we’re not going to make it so that all the achievements you already got don’t count and only stuff moving forward from this point on will”.

And there’s no reason at all to suppose it would work like WvW (which is a terrible analogy anyways because ranking up in WvW is actually EXTREMELY easy, even if you have a VERY high rank because after rank 5 the Wxp needed to rank up is capped at 5,000; what gets harder to do as you rank up is get a new TITLE to go with your rank, as they space them further apart), which did retroactively reward players for the effort they’d already made but in a manner that ensured that people starting from scratch and people who were already rank “awesome” got chests the same way – ranking up. The veterans just got 2 per rank until they caught up with their backlog.

The thing about WvW rank chests though is that ranking up to 2 and ranking up to 132 are pretty much the same exact thing: some silver, badges, blueprints, and most likely a green item. From the sound of this though, there will be different skins and other rewards based on each “tier” you’ve reached, so a scenario wherein the previous tiers you’ve already attained only unlock after you reach even higher tiers really seems unlikely.

In short, don’t worry, be happy.

Before this evening, I don’t think I ever really had a reason to use the /laugh emote, but oh man, that group of 4(? think that was how many, could have been 5) Kaineng who flipped our north camp and then dropped not one, not two, but THREE superior arrow carts? And then started working on a superior ballista? Funniest thing I’d ever seen anyone do (well not the “funniest”, that would probably go to the stream of AR who kept charging towards a tower in animal form in 2s and 3s, no idea what was up with that, but certainly the most wasteful and pointless), and man did I ever /laugh.

Whatever your plan was, it was certainly a rousing success at getting us to ensure your antics were recorded for posterity as we rofl-stomped you with ease, so congratulations are in order.

The Frizz fight is annoying but not all THAT bad once you have the hang of it (the golems probably shouldn’t be able to pull quite that often, or at all, but whatever), but the Mai Trin and Horrik fight? Egad is that just not fun in any way shape or form. And I don’t mean the mechanics of the boss fight itself are “too hard” and because I “can’t do it” it should be “nerfed to the ground”, I mean it’s just plain old NOT FUN.

Why is it not fun? Because when you get Mai down to 75%, you have to RUN AROUND FOR ALMOST A MINUTE just dodging AoE circles from cannons. And then when you get her down to 50%, you get to run around dodging AoE circles that appear faster now for OVER A MINUTE, and at 25%? It’s practically 2 SOLID MINUTES FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY!!

HOW on earth did anyone on the design team think that was entertaining? The boss fight itself is fine really, the parts where you actually GET to fight the bosses – any decent group should be able to work out the method for dispatching the pair of them without too much trouble (the shadow-stepping is very annoying of course), but making us run around like chickens with our heads cut off for 1 minute and 50 seconds before we finally get to fight the boss again, with nothing we can do other than just “not die” from the “extremely overabundant” AoE? How is that fun?

There are literally no other boss fights anywhere in the game that have a mechanic that obnoxious – if a boss goes invincible and ports out of harms way, we either have to do something, fight more mobs, or just wait maybe 20s tops for whatever they’re doing to finish, but whatever the mechanic the sense that player agency in the fight has been completely suspended and “here are some bullkitten circles to dodge now” isn’t present.

The FIRST barrage’s length should be what they ramp up to for the THIRD bloody barrage (if you needed to ramp it up at all, I’d say that you do not, a 20 second barrage each 25% health increment would have been fine), starting 10 seconds shy of a full minute before the bosses come back with phase 1 only to make it longer and longer on phases 2 and 3? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!??

Don’t change the damage, don’t change the fight mechanics, don’t change anything else really (other than the blocking bug with Kiel, definitely fix that), but please for the love of all that is holy SHORTEN THE BLASTED CANNON BARRAGES, running in circles for that long isn’t fun and I don’t know how anyone here can possibly suggest otherwise.

After completing this dungeon, only 2 things need to be adjusted, and both are for the bosses.

For Frixx, just get rid of the Golem pulling and that fight will be perfect (since getting hit by the lasers is enough to almost kill you instantly).

For the duo at the end, please lower the cannon barrage time from 1 minute to 30 or 45 seconds. While 1 minute doesn’t seem like too long out of game, ingame it feels like an eternity, and made the duo harder than it needed to be (meaning we only wiped on the barrage, never on the duo themselves).

The group I ran it with never even came close to wiping on the actual bosses either, just that bloody stupidly long barrage. It’s not just in game that makes a minute feel like an eternity though, back when I was working in customer service we had a training seminar where the presenter asked everyone to just sit there and wait for a while, and then try to guess how long it was, the point being that while only a minute had elapsed, everyone in the audience felt like they’d been sitting there with nothing to do for 5.

ANet made the second and third barrages OVER 1 minute – everyone in vent with me was astonished at just how long they kept firing the first time the cannons went active, and it only gets longer!

It probably doesn’t really help much either when you build the golems hours and hours ahead of time and also let us see that you’re doing that, so that by the time you finally get around to using them nobody is surprised – when you DO wind up using them, we aren’t wondering where the zerg with the golems suddenly came from, we’re wondering what took you so long. Just saying.

If I was a low level player looking to maybe farm some coffers and tricked out 80s were 1-shot ganking everything in sight before I could do anything about it, I suppose I might be annoyed.

This is an academic problem for me of course because I HAVE nothing but tricked out 80s, all of whom have full map completion, so I can quite easily call shenanigans on the bit about the influx of those 80s making map completion unworkable: there is only ONE heart in the ENTIRE GAME that has only one possible way to complete it (the stealth-based heart out in Blazeridge Steppes), and simply killing mobs in the heart radius is generally only one of a WIDE variety of ways to finish hearts. The bandit caves? Retrieve the stolen farm goods, and lo, heart completion you shall receive.

And us 80s frequent lower level zones all the time – in some cases you pretty much HAVE to, if you want to complete certain daily categories; on a day where say… aquatic killer and krytan slayer both come up, expect to see a bunch of max-level characters running around 1-2 shotting stuff in Queensdale in the lake. Meta-event boss spawn windows also bring very large influxes of higher level players to Queensdale, Wayfarer’s Foothills, and Metrica Province whenever the timer says the world boss is about to show up, and that’s been going on loooooong before this event started.

The update you saw today was from yesterday, not today – there will most likely be another update today when the effigies go live (yesterday’s updates were not directly related).

Yeah, not even remotely – out of 35 chests opened since they were introduced, I’ve had a grand total of 2 rares and 1 named exotic (which I passed along to an alt so no ectos there); all the rest of the gear has been greens. All sorts of siege blueprints and badges of course, and I’m certainly not complaining, but the notion that we’d see a lot more ecto because world rank chests were added? Laughable in the extreme.

Soronthar.7236:

There is a way, which is how I got my backpack: try to get the crabtacular! achievement. for that you have two options:

- Tell everyone at the arena that you want the achievement, so the last guy will toss you the crab just before the time ends. (didn’t work for me, though, but worth a try).
– Watch the timer and try to grab the crab in the last few seconds (that’s how I did it, took me 4 tries).

or, wait until May 28.

You don’t need to wait until the end of the match at all, you just got lucky when you did that – you earn Crabtacular when you’re holding a crab and all the other players get downed; getting rolled over simultaneously by the karka is generally what causes that.

This thread is kind of silly considering there are currently more than 25 possible Southsun achievements to complete, and the next content update will unlock several more; when Southsun Stalwart is tied to ALL possible achievements, you have no way of knowing whether anyone sporting it did them all, just enough to get the title, used a portal to get that sample, etc.

I main a mesmer myself and I LOVE jumping puzzles, so naturally I jumped and got that one again (did it the first time back on launch day for Southsun and then frequently afterward; most times I was in the zone I’d hit both puzzles), and I happily offered to portal folks up to the end once I got there, because I could. Saving someone else the time and frustration needed to get to various high or out of the way places is just our way of being nice to people.

The real reason not to “respect” the Southsun Stalwart title is that it’s way too easy to get, not that people might have “cheated” to get it.

Siphaed.9235:

Vergil Huragok.3967:

I’m annoyed to even see it announced when Bar Brawl (which has had achievements for months) isn’t in the game yet…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Bar Brawl completely replaced by Costume Brawl? And reasoning behind it was that CB could be done anywhere in the world, even outside a dungeon entrance waiting for more group members; this is while BB could only be done within the confines of a specific bar not even within the area that most population traverses towards.

You’re wrong, costume brawl was actually added before we got the achievements for, but no ability to actually do, bar brawl. I can’t remember exactly which patch introduced that section of achievements under activities but it wasn’t originally in the game at launch and costume brawl certainly didn’t replace it.

Each new patch I keep thinking that this one must be where they finally add in Bar Brawl so that block of achievements isn’t just a tease, and each new patch it’s revealed to still be a tease, heh.

I’m in a relatively small, but quite active guild, with members who pursue all the various aspects of the game so our guild upgrades prior to the guild missions patch were mostly completed anyways, and we had plenty of influence saved up prior to the patch so I don’t have any complaints about the initial Art of War research roadblock (the atrocious build times for the new content and really any unlock though is another story). The issue we have is that while we have a dedicated and active group of players, we don’t tend to have the sort of numbers evidently required by the bounty system to successfully complete them barring a minor miracle.

Put simply, 15 minutes is a RIDICULOUS window of time to find 2, 3, or 6 different champions in sprawling zones, even if you know from external sources which zone to look in ahead of time; when a potential target’s path through a zone takes them pretty much across the ENTIRE zone, and that zone is Lornar’s Pass… yeah, good luck with that.

So right now, you either have to A) Have people in each possible bounty zone find and keep tabs on each possible bounty target prior to activating a bounty so your riduculously tiny window of opportunity before the bounty fails is spent just killing the required champions instead of also trying to find them (requires at least 15 people able, willing, and most importantly simultaneously online) or B ) have so many people searching simultaneously in the X number of zones you need to look in that the time limit doesn’t matter.

Option A is incredibly boring and seems out of keeping with the spirit of the bounty hunt in the first place (but with that criminally (ha!) short time limit, it’s an entirely logical move if you have the manpower to do it), option B only works with a staggering amount of eyes on the ground. Neither is possible if say… you have 5-10 players online at the moment interested in doing a guild bounty.

And since bounties are the ONLY way to earn merits until you’ve earned enough merits to unlock guild treks, about the only way we’re going to get any merits at all is to start massive recruiting drives (not exactly in keeping with our guild philosophy), hold bounties on the weekends and pray we can get enough folks online willing to do the busy work of tracking down the npcs beforehand all online at once (not holding my breath on that front), or via DIVINE INTERVENTION, because as stated, even if you know exactly where to look, 15 minutes is just WAY too short of a time limit to find the targets if you happen to draw the short straw and get ones that happen to have huge patrol routes (oh hey, that’s MOST of them).

The time limit for completing bounties should at the very least be tripled, guilds shouldn’t have to game the system by doing the actual hunting beforehand just to complete them, 15 minutes is a ridiculously short length of time given the scope of the task you’re asked to complete.

I had the opposite issue yesterday – had finished dailies the day before, after reset the progress tracker was properly showing 0/5, and as I set about finishing categories I managed to get 6/5 pretty much simultaneously (leveled and completed events) – no chest popped up. Wound up completing 2 more categories for a total of 8/5, no love, and switching characters/re-logging/etc didn’t help.

Theik.9340:

Quite frankly as a female human elementalist, I would love to see this option to. I can’t for the life of me find any gear that doesn’t make my mage look like a harlot or something that came straight from an anime cosplay event.

I find that hard to credit actually – granted, my female mesmer pretty much intentionally dresses in the sort of outfit you’ve expressed a distaste for, but there’s a pretty decent selection of more modest (or from my perspective, boring) outfits out there. I actually had the opposite problem when my character first started out – all the dropped and crafted armor past the very first tier was sensible and concealing and not at all scandalous (oh noes!), I had to look for the silly stuff (of course at higher levels… that ceased to be a problem, ha ha).

But since you posted here complaining about the impractical and “stripperesque” stuff, I might as well take the time to point out the sets that I think are entirely too sensible to bother with.

Human T1 cultural light armor
Human T2 cultural light armor
(Human T3 cultural light armor is of course exactly what you’re complaining about)
Crafted Devout armor
Crafted Student armor
Crafted Acolyte armor
Crafted Exalted armor
Country armor from karma rewards or drops

On the topic itself
My understanding of WvWvW was that nobody on the other servers actually sees your character model as you have it equipped now anyways, they see a stand-in version of you wearing standard gear instead of what you’re really using, so if this was implemented I don’t think the impact in PvP would really register much (apart from confusing your allies, who do see you as is). Personally I don’t see the need for unlocking transmutation across armor types, but I understand why some people are clamoring for it.

To go into more detail, anyone entering into WvWvW gets their stats “boosted” to up to 80, sort of – since you’re level 4 though you won’t have any trait points unlocked, you won’t have unlocked weapon swapping yet (that’s at 7 (or never, if you’re an engineer or elementalist)), and you won’t have all your skill slots unlocked or elites. The quality of your gear also makes a difference – 1 on 1 a “real” 80 with max gear will probably curb stomp you with relative ease.

But don’t let that discourage you, just take it as your cue to not wander around all by your lonesome when you go in there – there are folks who went into W3 at level 2 and just never came out (essentially), it’s fully possible to level all the way to 80 doing nothing but that, and you can gear your character out in the process (vendors sell leveling armor/weapons for karma, then at 80 you can get exotic gear for badges that drop from killing players/npcs). In W3, just about everything is an event, and they all reward you with money, karma and xp.

As for your build, yeah, you probably want to have the option of attacking at range somewhere, but nobody’s going to hassle you about the specifics of your build in there, they’re too busy trying to fend off sieges, or running supply, or organizing counterstrikes and whatnot. Do what you like.