Guild Wars 2

I run a small (15 members, 7-8 active “core” members) guild, and the changes that came with HoT / Guild Halls have thrown us back quite a bit. Claiming the GH was easy, the event scaled quite well. But we are already struggling with basic Tavern Restoration 1 – not badly struggling, but struggling nonetheless. When I had a quick lock at the material costs needed to upgrade the buildings/services to a level that I can provide the same services (banners, boosts, etc.) to my guild members that I could before HoT, it was quite a shock. It will take us ages to just get back to the “functional” level we had before the patch.

Guild Halls, we were promised, would open up new and exiting possibilities for us. We knew that it would take us a bit longer than the big guilds to unlock all that fun stuff, we didn’t expect to be thrown back to the stone age, though. The guild hall provides no benefit, no fun activities/functions to us in its current state, it doesn’t even foster social aspects at this level. And it’s not that guild members don’t want to contribute, most of them simply can’t, or only in very small amounts – our guild specifically caters to working people who play the game with laid-back, mature, like-minded people after getting home from a long day at the office; there are no “farmers” here that swim in gold to buy the needed resources.

Some people have suggested “don’t be so elitist and simply recruit more people”. And sure, having more members makes it a bit easier to shoulder the burden, but that pseudo-argument completely ignores the fact that a) there are good reasons to not want to exceed a certain guild size, and being a bit “picky” about who you want to play with, and b) recruiting members – especially if you cater to a specific demographic – is everything but easy, seeing how you compete with tons of other guilds that all want to bolster their ranks.

For large guilds, as their members progress through the HoT content, they will naturally earn a lot of the things required for their guild hall to progress with them – because they each just have to contribute a bit (also in a large guild the chances are way higher you have 1 or 2 players that actually enjoy farming, sit on a lot of gold, and don’t mind spending it on upgrading the GH). For small guilds, we have to make a decision: do I want to progress in the HoT content, do some fun stuff with my guild mates, maybe play a bit of WvW, show the newbies the joy of jumping puzzles? OR do I want to spend the evening farming, so we can afford the next upgrade in a week or two? This is quite crippling. It incentivizes players to leave small guilds and make the larger guilds even larger, it punishes players that enjoy playing with a more familiar/personal circle of friends.

A first step to better this situation would be to make access to banner and boost creation available (or at least a LOT easier to unlock) to the guilds that had those capabilities before HoT, so that the guild actually provides some material benefit to its members again.

In a next step I wish the ANet guild team would take a long and hard look at just how much smaller guilds are being left behind, and then a) clearly communicate if things are working as intended in respect to smaller guilds, and b) if they agree that the current guild hall upgrade system disproportionately punishes/hinders/gates smaller guilds, put systems in place that allow small guilds to have a noticeable guild hall progression over time. There are games out there that successfully have implemented tiered clan/guild structures, it’s worth taking a hint or two from them. Would a tiered system be exploitable? Possibly. But there are ways to limit this with some effort.

I’ve done it a couple of times now with 5-player groups. It’s not that hard, however you might get screwed by RNG from time to time.

1.) First of all, make sure all players can use updrafts. Without that ability you will lose a lot of time traveling to/from the maws, splitting your group, etc.

2.) Bring decent damage and CC skills. The time limit can be quite a challenge sometimes, so you need to bring a decent amount of damage. Also make sure everybody knows how the defiance bar mechanic works, and there is enough CC skills to effectively break the bars on enemies.

3.) Pets, minions, clones, etc. can help staying alive quite well, since they provide additional targets for the enemies.

4.) Do not simply focus on the vine tenders. Some maws have heavy hitting enemies around, like Thrashers, Teragriffs, or Arrowheads. Those can really ruin your day. Focus them down before taking out the Vine Tenders.

5.) After defeating (or failing) a maw, orient yourself back to the center of the mal (around the marketplace area). IGNORE maws that are in the far north, north-east, or east. Because of the way the buildings are laid out, getting to those locations takes a LONG time, as does getting back. You can afford to ignore up to 3 or 4 maws, so don’t panic. Engaging the maw at the north-eastern ground-level position has proven to be very hard, and costs us usually 2 failures (not getting there in time, not getting back in time). It’s a bit random, but if lady luck smiles on you, sticking to the center, south, south-western, and western areas of the map provides the best chances to kill a maw in the time limit.

This is a suggested group setup similar to the ones I’ve been successfull with:
Tempest for damage (Fire/Air overloads for AoE, fire to burst down enemies), Chronomancer for support (Time Warp if you need that extra bit of damage when time runs out, Null Field to strip conditions, clones/phantasms to provide some damage and extra targets for the enemies, Shield 5 for very good break bar attack, etc.), Warrior or Burn Guardian for tanky burst/burn damage, Ranger for single target burst and pet. And whatever feels right for #5. This might not be an optimal group, but it worked very well for us so far.

GreyWraith.8394:

Any tips on avoiding the rocks during glider phase?

I found them to be quite easy to dodge really. When you go up, aim for the next updraft, then turn your camera to face Mindremoth. As Soon as you see him throw a rock, quickly close your glider to drop down a bit, and open it up again. You might take a little bit of damage when you come too close to the electric ground, but generally you should easily be able to catch the next updraft.

I always found the claims that Trahearne was some kind of “Kormir 2.0” immature and largely unfounded. During the Zaithan story, his character suffered from a couple of badly written lines, and sub-par voice acting. The biggest problem might have been the fact that a lot of other characters tell us about “that one time back then when he totally saved my kitten ”, etc., but we don’t get to see the rather bookish Trahearne do such things while we are with him.

The important thing – at least to me – however is that he does threat us (= the player character) with respect, he gives us plenty of credit for the things we do for the pact (while Trahearne is stuck doing strategy stuff – do players really envy him for doing all that organizing stuff instead of being out in the field?), he seeks our council, lets us hear his thoughts, and in general treats us like a friend!

Compare that to, for example, Caithe, who betrayed us, stole from us, and does even take a second and try to explain her motives to us – after all the things we did for her during the Zaithan story, like rescuing her from Faolin, reuniting her “worst soap opera cast in tyrian history”-type of guild, and taking down an Elder Dragon! I’d rather having Trahearne at my side than her any day.

I can’t say was surprised to see Trahearne die at the end of HoT ( I predicted Trahearne, Zoija, and Eir dying. 2/3 I guess…). The moment you see him in that vine pod, you know he’s not coming back out. But I do wish they would have given Trahearne a little bit more agency – he opens the “portal” to the mordrem dream for us, allowing us to strike at Mordremoth’s weak spot; decent enough storytelling. Now imagine after we defeated Mordremoth Trahearne would have told us, he couldn’t be separated from the vines anymore BECAUSE he did that dream portal thing. That would have turned his actions from a were plot device into an actual willing sacrifice, and, in my opinion, a stronger (and more worthy) death.

What I really dislike is how there is no epilogue whatsoever – and no, those few lines your comrades say to you after you are put back into the map don’t count, and the cinematic, while pretty, is a classical sequel hook, not an epilogue. I would have expected a ceremony to commemorate all the pact soldiers that died fighting the mordrem, including the pact marshal. He earned that much during the Zaithan story alone. And I would have also like to see a more personal epilogue between the player character and the companions, checking in with Taimi, Logan/Zoija, etc. And bringing back Caladbolg to the Grove. When I saw that item after the mission I was sure I would be going to bring it “home” to honor my dead friend. Turns out it’s just a souvenir from when you finally we allowed to shank that stupid salad who always stole the spotlight from you. It’s very disappointing.

Over the last couple of days I have helped various small guild claiming both Gilded Hollows and Lost Precipice, each time with a 5-player group. The expedition is challenging, but doable. Because of the size of the map and the random spawn location of the maws, it’s also a bit dependent on luck.

Simply use the LFG tool to search for people to help you claim your guild hall. It IS doable with a 5-player group, and the players don’t even need to join/guest your guild (they’ll get a dropdown selection when entering the map).

From what I remember from one of the POI streams on guild halls guilds can switch to a different guild hall map by paying for the second expedition and then fighting the Mordrem on the second map.

I need to know if, when you want to switch back from the second guild hall map back to the first, you will again trigger the Mordrem event and have to liberate the map – or does the map “remember” that it had already been cleared?

Background: After helping a couple of players claiming their guild halls, me and 2 guildmates were offered help claiming ours ("we’re here anyway so let’s just do this). We should not have done this. To us it might have been more or less a chore, but we have done this multiple times now – we ignored that other guild members will likely only do this event once, and that – even if it’s not really “epic” – it has an important social aspect. I contacted support if there was a way to “unclaim” the guild hall, the GM replied that wasn’t possible. So here I am hoping that switching guild halls twice will allow us to again claim our selected guild hall map properly by fighting off the Mordrem again.

Paying gold for the expedition again won’t be a problem, the important question really just is: Will there be a nother fight to claim the crystal and guild hall?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

irrumatio.4893:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Honestly if you couldn’t be bothered to get ascended gear then you have no buisness being in a raid as you clearly aren’t serious about the game.

You aren’t serious about the game unless you spend 6 months gearing up! :^)

If it takes you 6 months to get ascended gear then you aren’t good enough to be doing raids. Maybe focus on improving your ingame efficiency before thinking about raiding.

Getting full ascended gear isn’t a matter of skill, it’s a matter of time or money spent. It doesn’t take any skill to do SW chestfarm for 3 weeks, what it takes is a lot of time. And it takes tolerance for brain-dead grinding – and at least in my guild there are a lot of players who like GW2 explicitly because of the no-grind philosophy. This doesn’t say anything whatsoever about their skill. If players are unable to finish the raids – no matter how skilled they are – simply because you need certain expensive and time-gated equipment, you’re locking out skilled players that don’t enjoy mindless farming/grinding.

Since we learned we would be fighting Mordremoth next, I’ve been waiting for a (fan)trailer to use “Welcome to the Jungle” as background music. Got tired of waiting, so I made one myself. Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/EWPmCIJhGig

I have the same problem. Pre-purchased HoT, can’t select a different mist hero. Worked fine last Stronghold Beta. I have not seen any other heroes so far, so I guess it might be bugged for everyone (or working as intended)

The event violates some core design philosophies of GW2, it’s really sad to see. GW2 has many mechanics that foster playing together. In this event however it’s everyone for himself. The way the personal reward levels are designed reward players that “tag & run” and punish players that commit to actually do the fighting. When I see people bragging at the 20 minute mark about how many stacks they already have, I can’t help but dislike them – because I know the reason they are “winning” in this event is because they let other people do the work for them. It should not be this way, not mechanically and not socially. Was this concept tested? And if so, how did it get approved? We got so many new players coming in over the last couple of days, and we tell them how great this game is, how there is no kill-stealing, node-stealing, etc. And then, with the first “living world”-ish event you roll out for all those new players to experience, it’s this…

With HoT on the horizons a friend and I have decided to restart our guild “Brains over Brawn [Geek]” (originally founded back at GW2 release day) from the ground up, and we are looking for players to help us do so.

• Name/Tag: Brains over Brawn [Geek]
• Playstyle: PvX – whatever we feel like doing that day
• Hardcore-level: Casual / After-Work
• Server: EU – Riverside (only relevant if you want to play WvW)
• Languages: German or English
• Time: After work / Mostly in the evenings EU time
• Leader/Contact: Hypergrip.9673 / mail “Kadiron” in game

Our goal is to make [Geek] into a small-ish, mature, and casual guild of players that enjoy exploring and experiencing all the different facets of the game together after a long day at work, be it story missions, dungeons, fractals, junping puzzles, map completion, PvP, or WvW. Because of our current size we can’t run guild missions, but if our numbers grow, we plan to add that to our list, too.

“It’s a magical world, let’s go exploring!”

New and free account players are explicitly welcome!

We believe that gaming should be fun, not a chore. Therefore we do not have strict requirements. It would however be nice if you gave us a short notice if you are away from the game for an extended period of time (holidays, etc.). We’d also prefer it if you had a headset and would join us on Mumble/TeamSpeak/Discord for better coordination and fun banter.

If you are looking for a “Hardcore” guild specializing into a specific area of the game (Dungeons, PvP, etc.) [Geek] is not the right place for you.

See you in Tyria!

Where do Charr come from?
Well, I can tell you it has to do with kitten.
What I won’t tell you however is if that was the forum’s bad word filter in the previous sentence or not :p

I mastered Jewler and Letherworker with my thief. I just visited Ebonhawke and wanted to buy crafting supplies form the Master Jewler, but I didn’t get the normal dialogue options, just an empty list with “your funds: 9 silver, cost: 40 silver” above it (retrain/change crafting discipline I guess). The dialogue is fine at the Master Crafters in Lion’s Arch.

I’m a big fan of the Ebon Vanguard weapons skins (i like the simple elegance and). They were not changed (thankfully), however my Thief’s shortbow skin was resetted to a rather ugly one. (Greatsword skin on my guardian is not affected though.) You owe me some karma and a transmutation stone, Anet. kthxbai.

Well, at least in an alternate universe my Asuran Necromancer has conquered the world with his steam creature army. And alsmost suceeded in taking over this one, too. Very cool personal story line
btw: Even the race selection screen during character creation says that sooner or later everyone will bow to the Asura.

There are absolutely no secrets hidden in Divinity’s Reach. Now move along, citizen!

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

The asura have offered to experiment on the sylvari and determine why they appear immune to corruption, but so far no one has volunteered.

I know a certain Marshal that would be perfect for those experiments! I’ll knock him out and you guys ship him to the lab. For Science! For Tyria!

(although I got a feeling that “this won’t end well”)

I dodn’t know how close this is to the actual Lore, but this is how I picture it:

I think of WvWvW as some battle of “possible alternate Universes” for the spot as “real Universe”. The Mists contain all the stuff that was, is and could be (if i remember the fractals background correctly). So now you have 2 slighty different versions of Tyria (for example in one all the people have a french accent for some funny reason). They both try to take the place of the “real” Tyria (which happens to be the world you are on – from your perspective). So you fight in the mists to keep the other 2 alternate universes from taking your place in reality (whiping out your whole reality in the process for dramatic effect).

(Let’s just hope the devs don’t use that "ever-shifting alternate reality stuff as excuse to simply relabel all those culling problems a lore-realated feature)

If you define “gods” as omnipotent, omniscent entities worthy of your worship and prayers, then there are quite a lot of things that could have made your character become an “atheist”.

If you play a Charr, you basically are an atheist. Back in the days of GW1 the Charr had gods and were basically ruled by a priest caste (the flame legion). Around the time of “Eye of the North” the Charr began to fight what had become a sort of theocratic opression and nowadays the only authority they respect “is the clentched first of their legion. With engines of destruction we killed our gods.” (From the Charr intro cinematic). They call them “gods”, but they were “false gods” or “very old and powerful beings” that could be killed anyway. When Charr talk about the 6 gods the humans pray to, they will likely aknowledge their existence as “ancient, very powerful beings”, but not as “all-powerfull, all-knowing entities that are worthy of worship”.

I’m not sure if the concept of the Eternal Alchemy has room for “gods” that are all-powerful. They would likely view the 6 gods as entities that are very powerful, but still are part of the Eternal Alchemy and are therefore bound by its “laws/principles”. My Asuran Necromancer would LOVE to meet one of the 6 human gods – there are about a tousand lab tests he would like to do with them. Worshipping is not on the list though.

The Norn have the Spirits of the wild. They are visible in the world so there is no denying their existence. They do have power and they show it by actively using it to help players (and the Norn in general throughout the backstory). But spirits can also die (Owl Spirit was killed by Jormag). The closest thing to an “atheist Norn” that is still within believable roleplay would be a Norn that questions what kind of spirit actually “deserves” the status of “Spirit of the wild”. In the Norn starting area there is this woman who thinks that Hare deserves to be reverred as a Spirit of the wild and gives you her reasons for it. The Sons of Svanir think Jormag is a Spirit of the wild! So if you want to roleplay something outside the “standard Norn believe” system, I think you could either reverred something as Spirit of the Wild that is not widely considered as one (join the followers of Hare for example) or be more extreme and openly doubt the status as Spirit of the Wild for one of the “big 4” for some reason.
With regards to the human gods I think the typical Norn might even doubt their existence. The spirits of the wild are visible/active part of the Norn life, whereas the human gods are silent. Maybe they died, just like Owl did?

I have no clue what Sylvari believe or think.

So, a human atheist. I think it might be possible without breaking the boundaries of the lore. The gods are silent so there is no visible proof. Just because people believed in the gods for generations does not mean their belief is right. But even if it was right and the entities that are called gods actually do/did exist, they might not be “gods” in the sense of “all-knowing & all-powerful beings”, but “only” a lot more powerful that the average human. If you go back in history of Tyria you find the Mursaat, a race of very powerful spellcasters that were worshipped as gods by the White Mantle.
So for a human character you have a lot of options to play different more or less “ahteistic”. You character be asking one or more of these questions:
Do we have any factual evidence that the gods do exist or is it all just stories? If the gods did exists, might they “just” be really powerful beings that we call gods because we are tiny compared to them? If so, why do we worship the 6 gods but label the Mursaat as false gods though the tales of their power are amazing as well. And if you say the reason we worship the 6 gods and not the Mursaat is because the 6 gods help Tyria… where are they now, and are they still “worthy” of being called gods if they stopped helping us?"

Maybe some of this rambling is actually useful for you. Have fun roleplaying.

Really love this change. Now my Ranger can get from lake to lake much faster!

It’s good to see the devs are actively working on the culling problems (which for me personally are one of the most frustrating things in the game).
Sadly, as others already reported, there seems to be no improvement. I’ve run into at least 3 invisible enemy zergs since the new matchup, lying face down in the dirt before I could see any player models. And of course the thiefs… 3sec “revealed” debuff + 5sec culling = “perma invisible”. And we are talking about small fights without a large zerg nearby (I prefer small group fights over zerg clashes).
I’d be very interested in what other methods you (= the devs) plan to use to resolve this issue.

I agree that the Guardian’s ranged attack(s) are pretty bab. But I don’t really care that much, because we have lots of utility skills that let us a) mitigate (and even reflect) ranged attacks against us and our teammates and b) close distance to our enemies.
The damage on the scepter is mediocre at best (not the “raw” damage but the lack of any condition/effect), the projectile of the auto-attack is to slow. #2 attack isn’t too bad if the enemy is rooted, but the damage still is sub par and there seem to be some bugs where it doesn’t hit reliably. #3 is a root, always nice to have, but no real ranged attack (has some minor synergy with #2, but is far more useful if you switch to melee).
I basically only use scepter to attack oil and cannons in WvW.
Staff has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread – it has a ranged attack, but I wouldn’t consider it a ranged weapon. The support skills are quite nice in WvW, #1 can be quite useful to find/annoy stealthed thiefs or do some cone-AoE damage in zerg fights. #5 is a lot of fun if the enemies are trying to storm a breached wall/door.
So… if you find yourself in a ranged fight, my suggestion would be to either mitigate the damage for you and your teammates or use your skills to get your team into melee range. Fighting is a waste of skill slots imho.
(however I would really like to see how you guys would skill/trait for a ranged Guardian. Could at least surprise the enemy)

So when I play catch with children I now actually have to run after them? This is unacceptable! Fork this! I’m rerolling a Thief now, hoping they will not fix those nice culling bugs that basically let’s me kill unseen in WvW.

Miniature Giant Space Hamster.
I’ll call him Boo.

1.) Fix the bugs!

2.) Trait/Skill overhaul. Hopefully leading to more build diversity. (1h-sword/dagger skirmisher? spirit support? trapper? sharpshooter? beastmaster? …)

3.) Talk to us. Seriously, Anet. Please TELL us what your “vision” for Rangers is. What roles do you see them in and how do you want to enable players to fill these roles? And please also tell us what we the players get wrong in your oppinion.

My Assassin – after having defeated a Lich, an undead assassin, a dragon champion, titans and a god – wanted to settle down in his homeland Cantha. But he left shortly after the new eperor showed his true face. He travelled with the Ebon Vanguard for a while, what happened to him after that, nobody knows. A young Thief from Divinitiy’s Reach bears the same first name (and profiency with daggers) as his anscestor, but having grown up as an orphan, he’s not aware of his Canthan ancestor and only recently found out that his parent’s worked for the Shining Blade.

My Ranger and Warrior stayed in the Shiverpeak Mountains, living with the Norn that to this day sing the jolly song about “that bald little guy who beat up 20 norn in a tavern brawl but was knocked out by the kitchen help with a frying pan”.

My Mesmer left Cantha and settled in Kryta. While he lived the rest of his life in relative luxury, his distand descendant – who bears the same name – grew up on the streets of Divity’s Reach. He has no knowledge of his canthan ascestor, and he doesn’t care. However he inherited his talent for illusion magic.

My Dervish and Necromancer – both plagued by the tought that they helped free Pavala Joko – joined the Order of Whispers, ultimately giving their lives to defend their home Elona.

My Paragon bacame a tailor, specialising in skirts and skin-tight tops for men. While he was very popular with the ladies, he never married or had children.

My female monk and male elementarist married (some called them the “reverse Mhenlo & Cynn”… most of them got away with some minor burns). They planned to settle down in Shing Jea, but the change in imperial policy brought them to leave Cantha.

The last of the bunch, my Ritualist, traveled the Shiverpeaks to learn more about the Norn spirits of the wild, earning the friendship and respect of the Norn shamans. He always wanted to go back to Cantha someday, but that plan was foiled by a marauding flame legion warband desperate enough to attack a Norn settlement. It is said that one of the Norn shamans visited his spirit in the mist so they could finish a game of Canthan chess.

Best swordsman in tyrian history? That would be Little Thom, hands down. He owned everything with his hamstorm build.

I’m not going to write all the stuff about Trahearne’s flat and unemotional voice acting down all over again, there are more than enough Threads just for this one voice.
However I have to agree that in general voice acting is sadly not one of GW2 strong points. While I think the voice acting for most of the Asura NPCs is pretty good, the Norn are on the other end of the spectrum. The norn voices feel very “artificial”, either because the voice actors tried to lower their voices’ pitch or the pitch was fiddled with in post-production. Too often I hear the same 2 or 3 Norn voices over and over again, and too often it seems like the rule of thumb was “Norn are big, so try to talk with a deep voice”.
There are some NPCs with reallice nice voice acting. Tybalt and Rytlock are quite good and the other member of Destiny’s Edge are not too bad either, imho.
Some NPCs suffer from severe “over-acting” – Magister Sieran would be very high on my list. I know that she is supposed to be lighthearted, have a cheery spirit, etc., but when every single scentence is intonated as if it was the bet thing that has ever happened to this character, all the important room for nuances is lost. And a character that seems to be delighted about pretty much everything she seems becomes less believable and “shallow”.
A lot more common however is “under-acting”, especially when it comes to topics like fighting, injury and death (or loss in general). Trahearne is the king of under-acting, but a lot of other NPCs suffer from it. In general a lot of the battle/fighting related shouts, commands, etc. feel as if they were read, not as if they were shouted. Some of them lack the “flow” that spoken languages has (and that differs from “read aloud” ductus), most of them lack loudness. It’s almost as if the voice actors were afraid that the neighbors would come knocking if they actually shouted, so they just raised their voice a little bit. This way the sense of urgency is lost! Scenes where a NPC is injured or might even be dead are another very good example. Here the other character does not sound worried in a lot of cases. You would expect the voice to be louder, more compressed and a bit faster in such situations. Yet we get the “normal” ductus, as if he/she was just casually asking if everything was fine. We have “We need a medic here!” lines that are said in a “slightly worried” tone, but not shouted… in the middle of a large battle.
As I said before there are some quite nice voice-acted NPCs in this game, but in general the Norn as a whole feel sub-par and too many lines sound “read, not acted”.

The problem with Trahearne is that he has to fill not one but two leadership roles. First there is the role of military leader. And you could make the case that, in order to do his job as marshal well, he has to be distant, unemotional, calculating, etc., thus defending what many many players critizise as “flat” as being actually fitting.
However Trahearne not only has to fill the role of military leader in the game universe, he also has to fill the role of “dramatic” leader on the narrative meta-level of the game. This role is set from the point where the Pale Tree basically tells you that her kid is not only coming along from now on but he’s taking the lead (gee, thanks…).
So now we need to look at which of these two roles is more important for us as players: do we keep on playing the missions because a) we feel the need to obey the military chain of command or b) because we want to know how the story progresses. I’m pretty confident that in most cases it’s the latter. And in this role Trahearne fails an aweful lot of times. And not for a lack of trying, but because it’s executed very poorly. He does give the “motivational speech before a big battle” that we find in western literature/drama from shakespeare to braveheart – but the “emotionless”, monotone intonation of the voice acting feels more like “I don’t really care”. Trahearne gives us our missions, thus technically allowing us to progress through the story, however he often fails to provide more context. As a pure military leader he doesn’t have to explain anything, but as a narrative leader he should try to keep us engaged, to make us “care” and show us (as should cutscenes, etc. btw.) the “big picture” and “larger scale” results of our doing, giving us feedback on how to feel about / react to the outcome of our missions.
And, as I said before, it it’s not like the game wasn’t trying. At one point one of Zaithan’s minions is trying to damage Trahearne’s reputation. Trahearne tells us about it and DOES provide the grand scale of the situation – “if we can’t win the orders’ respect NOW, the pact will be history and all hope will be lost”. But this is “sabotaged” by the way in which Trahearne delivers this grave news to us. Again the “flat” voice acting combined with a choice of words that sound like a stereotypical british gentleman do not convey any sense of urgency at all…

The relationship between the player character and Tybalt is very well “balanced”: he has knowledge of how your new order works internally and is very inventive. In return we give him the support and trust he needs to achieve his goal of becoming a field agent. He goes from being your mentor to being your friend and partner. Tybalt comes across as someone that genuinely wants to help other people which really helps to give the whole Order of Whispers a better, more positive character (so we see that the OoW is NOT just an assassins’ club). One might argue that Tybalt is mostly a comic relief character, but I’d disagree. Though his “pirate talk” during the rescue mission can be quite silly at points, this is actually played staight – the guards calls his bluff “you gotta be kidding me”. And in while he does have quite a large number of snarky comments and one-liners, I actually think he is quite a serious and earnest character. Lighthearted, yes, but not silly or “funny”. When he tells us that our support means a lot to him, we believe him, because he is earnest. When he helps Demi confront her father’s henchmen outside the Chantry, he shows both his compassion and his determination again.
With the “visit” to Claw Island, the story really hit a nasty bump for me. Tybalt’s character had a LOT of potential, not only as your sidekick/partner during missions, but also for other personal matters. Especially with Demi joining the Order. Similar to Tybalt Demi is eager to prove herself and overcome past events. This in turn could have been the point where Tybalt becomes a mentor to Demi, seeing much of himself in her…
I would have loved to save Tyria with Tybalt and Demi by my side. Seeing so much potential go to waste hurts twice as much if the character replacing your friends is Trahearne. (And I won’t go into Trahearne here, I’ve already written a much too long analysis why following Master Togo in GW:Factions felt good, while playing sidekick in The Trahearne Show feels baaaad).
So, yes, I agree: The Order of Whispers has some very interesting, engaging and endeadring characters. I really enjoy interacting and fighting with them.
(Sooo much potential… why… Trahearne… why…)

Join the Vigil. You will see plenty of head-on confrontation there. Engineers fit well into all of the 3 orders. The Vigil makes use of your “offensive” side. The Priory play more to the “inventor” side of being an engineer (if you play Charr one of your warbandmates recommends you join the Priory because they have the most powerful atillery). However as your personal story progresses you don’t really delve into neither research nor investion much, you basically play Indiana Jones and try to protext your over-eager mentor. At the Order of Whispers your mentor actually IS an Engineer. It’s somewhere between the other two orders… I’d describe it as the “improvisation” side. You will not feel “out of place” there, but as I said in the beginning, the Vigil really sounds like the best choice for the kind of personality you want to play your character with.

Most likely a placeholder texture for “normal mapping”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping

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And while we’re talking about rewards… 1.8 silver for those long event quests? Really? Every little 5 minute “roast 5 marschmellows” quest gives you more reward. You designed those quests to be challenging and I do like that. But did you really intent for people to earn 5 silver in a couple of hard quests so that they can’t even repair ONE of their broken armor pieces? Or was this just another oversight? Because the events were full of annoying oversights. Just to give one very simple example: You introduce new enemies that drop new crafting materials. We get new resources to gather and new recepies to use them in. But the bank doesn’t recognize those materials so we cannot deposit them.
Yes, it’s a very complex game with sooo many mechanics interacting with each other, it’s easy to miss some things. And I know from my own work that scripting, testing and QA can be a lot more difficult than most players think it is. But can you honestly blame all those people who ask “did you guys even test this?”

Finally I want to say some things about the fractals dungeons. I do like the idea. I do like the variations. I do like the little gimmicks, jokes, lore related stuff, etc. I do like the different mechanics the dungeons throw at you and I do like the overall difficulty. However I do not like the gating mechanism and the ascended gear. Not one bit. The threads about ascended gear are filled with posts explaining why it’s a very bad step into the wrong direction. So, just to give my “+1” here: You ARE starting a gear threadmill. You might call it “vertical item progression”, but that doesn’t change the situation. You promised your players this would not happen. Your manifesto, you might remember it, was to have people work for aesthetics, not stats. And here we are now…

But let’s end on a high note. As I said before I really like the look of the new zone, the new enemies, puzzles, etc. And while I think the events were an epic fail in so many different aspects, at least the patch finally brought us the long promised fixes and improvements for the Ranger class… OH WAIT.

I do like the look of the new map and think that the Karka are an interesting new type of enemy (I’m sooo sick of the undead). And I the build-up to the event.

That aside the weekend was pretty much a giant disappointing bug filled lagfest!

The Phase 1 event was one giant lagfest with lags up to a minute for your input. After 12 minutes of basically not doing anything remotely productive the server “mercy-disconnected” me, only to find the same lag after I logged back in. The fact that you couldn’t see most of the enemies at all didn’t help. These culling problems are well known – WvW players complain about them since release! How could you not take this into account when designing your events? Same for the phase 3 event. On my overflow server we got whiped by invisible Karka multiple times, what great fun. And of course lag again. Lots of lag and disconnects. I know I’m repeating myself, but these problems where known, the players have been complaining about them forever!
And let’s talk about event steps not working. So many of them. On none of the overflow servers (and my home server) I was on during the events I could finish the treasure hunts, because NPCs refused to fight, talk or show up at all. Speaking of not showing up at all… the start of Phase 2 was completely broken, too. It took those guys 40(!) Minutes to build that trebuchet on my overflow server. And when they finished… nothing happened. No enemies, no fight. But at least the phase 2 event on the island worked ok-ish. Only 30 sec lags instead of 1 min and two Karka that didn’t lose their armor and thus had an infinite number of health bars (at one point they just both died, as if somebody from off stage reminded them that no health means death). And the final event – and the already mentioned lags, DCs and massive culling problems definitely didn’t help – felt too dragged out, especially the parts where we had to defeat the reinforcements. My overflow server took over an hour for the first reinforcement part. People were trying. Hard. As much as the lag allowed. And people were dying. Hard. Over and over again. And if you were unfortunate and died because of “lagged damage” (you find yourself lying on the ground at a spot you were over a minute ago, surrounded by invisible mobs, while the rest of the zerg moved on) you had to walk forever until you made it back to the zerg. I really do give you guys credit for trying to make that “boss fight” epic, there were a lot of nice mechanics in there, but it was so drawn out (when the second “defeat the reinforcements” segment came, a lot of players basically went afk) and suffered form some bad design choices and a lot of technical problems. In the end a lot of people will not remember that event as “that epic event where we fought through endless hordes of karka, drove the ancient one back into it’s lair and then blow the whole thing up! Boom, Baby!” but as “That looong event where we had to fight endless hordes of invisible enemies, spend one third of the time not being able to move because of lags, the second third of the time lying around in steaming puddle of green poison of horrible death +1 and the last third fighting reinforcement.” Of course players (that were not disconnected…) will remember the loot. Be it either because they got precursors, or because they got a bunch of level 78 exotics that didn’t even have a nice skin. The 20 slot box is a really nice thing and the shell is… meh. Why don’t you give out some token and have players select their reward from a selection of equally good items? This worked well in GW1, why do you insist on random drops with a HUGE range of quality for such long / one-time events?

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Riverside[DE]:
Canach stays friendly.
Lagos is nowhere to be found.
Neither is Noll.

You have to check all the cargo and debries. Some will give you hints leading to the Consortium. The last one you can then break open and get an item.

let’s make NPCs advertising really really annoying so it’s just like in reallife! Woot for realism!

I’m not sure if Anet didn’t do the math – or did and thought that we wouldn’t. As if it’s not enough that people use the label “charity” to scam in reallife…

“I think sword and longbow are both good weapons”
Yeah, being glued to your target and not being able to dodge properly is fine.
m(

Dear ANet, thank you very much for all those fixes and improvements to Rangers this patch. I was skeptical when you said we had to wait last patch, because some of the changes and fixes were just too risky and needed further testing first. But boy was it worth the wait. That harpoon gun buff opened a whole new world to me. I can now defend the ruins on that capricorn map in PvP so much better, I almost pitty the other classes trying to take it from me. And lurking in the water in WvW, waiting for some careless enemy to jump in feels so intense. Like jaws or the kraken! woot. Add there I was all these days thinking I could do some damage with my bows, have my pet actually hit moving targets, lay traps or even use a sword without being glued to my target and not being able to dodge properly. Thank you for opening my eyes.
Now please add something to the gem shop so I can change my Ranger’s name to “xX teh krakken Xx” or “Jaques Custeau”, Thanks.

Unlocked the wolf form for my norn guardian. Her spirit is wolf so it fits and I hoped it would be a nice skill.
Wow was I disappointed.
You basically lose all mobility. You are “rooted” when you attack, NPCs can get out of range very easily and hitting players in WvWvW was near impossible. The two shouts (or “howls”) are not too bad, but having to stand still for a couple of seconds is too much of a trade-off to be viable. Last but not least the cooldown feels way too long. This might not be the fault of the cooldown timer itself but the time the transformation is active in contrast; and because of the “rooting” the time you actually play as the wolf feels shorter because you can not “actively use” the whole 30sec.
All in all the wolf form in WvWvW felt like a sitting duck, landing one or two lucky punches on NPCs. It’s not “fierce” or “dynamic” in any way. I’d really like to see that changed.

O was trying 1H-Sword on my ranger just now and noticed that I don’t gain any might from the #1 Skill Chain. Is the skill description outdated/false or is the skill bugged? And can anyone reproduce/confirm this?

Kadiron, human thief entrepreneur. Raised by common folk, member of the Order of Whispers Lion’s Arch Apple Merchants’ Association. A calm and honourable man. Most the time anyway.
The outfit is a mix of different sets, but I think they fit well together and look quite nice.

I’d like to see the completion on the worldmap, too.
I can already see myself spending a huge amount of silver/gold porting to every area to find out where I’m missing a spot when I reach the 90%+

For my human thief the Order was an easy choice. And I was rewarded with a very interesting, funny and overall quite well written character as a mentor.
My Asuran necromancer joined the Priory. It promised my knowledge and artifacts (wich, if used right, can give you unlimited power! muhahahaha! ehem…). I liked playing the Order mission, too, but in the end Priory seemd to be a little bit more fitting.

I still have not yet joined the Vigil with any of my characters. I thought about joining with my Norn ranger, but the Vigil representative is making this really hard. Fighting to protect the weak, attacking the problem head-on, etc. all seems fitting for my Norn, however the plans the norn Vigil representative has are just so plain stupid and even contradict the image the Vigil has of itself (they say they fight to protect the weak, but the rep’s plan is to NOT protect a priory outpost but instead avenge dead vigil soldiers…).
SO my Norn ranger might end up in the Order instead of the Vigil.
Still have an Charr Engineer who will ahve to decide soon (leaning towoard Vigil but I was just told by my Warband that “All I know the Priory has awesome cannons”. My Engineer is a sucker for big explosions.)
I almost got the impression that if I want any of my characters to end up joining the Vigil (in a way that is somewhat “fitting” and “plausible” for said character) the only way would be to roll a Charr Blood-Legion Warrior with feriosity as main personality

Agreed, a filter option for armor class would be very useful

I have to agree with the majority of posts here.
There are many reasons I don’t like Trahearne and I think that many things that could have been “redeeming” for this character were missed/left/broken/etc.

The voice acting is very bland, not much emotion there at all, no sense of urgency, etc. Compared to the voice acting of the other “main cast” characters (and some minor characters) it’s just sub-standard.

I actually want to give Anet credit for trying to avoid another “Kormir”-style problem (players complaining about how they do all the work and Kormir gets the reward/fame,/godhood/etc.). At least I think that’s what they tried to achieve when they made Trahearne a “weak” character that needs your strenght and support for the pact members to respect him as leader. However I doesn’t work that way. At least for me. Helping Trahearne feels too much like a chore, I have to help him because if I don’t the whole pact will break up. A lot of times it is mentioned how he saved character XYZ, did amazing stuff, etc. and that is supposed to make me feel some sort of respect for the character… but it just doesn’t.
Let’s take GW:Factions as an example where the situation was solved – in my humble opinion – way better. Master Togo was a character that I would consider to be well written. He was a strong, wise and therefore respected character. My (factions) character saw him as teacher, fighter, diplomat, etc. When Togo sent me on a mission it had a “because I can’t do it all on my own and because I trust you” wibe to it; Whereas with Trahearne it feels like “because I can’t do it at all” from him.
Togo also “dodged” the Kormir problem… by dying in the final act and leaving us to finish the fight.

I wish I could put my finger on more details. But in general I just feel that in GW:Factions Master Togo “earned” my characters respect and gave the impression to respect my character and the others fighting with him as equals. In GW2 my character is forced to respect Trahearne because the game / some NPCs say I should. And it doesn’t help that Trahearn clearly respects my character a lot… because it comes from someone who I don’t respect…

Hope that made at least some sense…

DF? yes please!