Guild Wars 2

As of when I logged out (about half an hour ago) here’s what was up and working that I could find, all of it (so far) in Wayfarer:

There is a steady stream of refugee NPCs heading south along the roads. The bulk of the traffic runs from Dolyak Pass waypoint, west to Crossroads Haven, then south to Taigan Waypoint, then west on the road and south through the pass to Hoelbrak, but there are a few refugees along all the roads in the zone.

1) Some of the refugees didn’t survive. Click on the bodies to collect Refugee Mementos. Turn them in at any memento collector NPC (marked with a star on your map) for 1 point each.

2) The first time you see any of the refugee direction signs (can anybody who reads New Krytan tell me what they say?) you’ll see that they’re broken. Fix them for 1 point each.

3) Each of the Memento Collectors is sitting next to an unlit campfire. Light it for 1 point.

4) Some of the refugees are Wounded Refugees. Click on any of them and /kneel or /bow to heal them, for 1 point each.

5) At at least two points along the road, there are short rocky chimneys that weren’t there before. At very long intervals, they will sprout a bunch of Ice Elementals lead by a Veteran Ice Elemental. Kill the elementals to create Ice Block objects. Click an Ice Block object to pick it up, then right-click the Chimney to use it. Once enough of these have been used on the chimney, the event ends. I don’t know how this one is scored, yet.

When you get to 75 points, you receive the Volunteer title. The next time you zone, you’ll receive a mail with an item that, when used, grants Karma.

There’s almost certainly more coming to the event, but that’s what was up and running as of 5:30 pm Central Standard Time on the 29th.

Edited to add: After the last patch, Diessa Plateau is active, as well. Same deal, refugees streaming south: Butcher’s Block Waypoint, south southeast along the road to Nolan Waypoint by way of Charradis Estate Waypoint. There are a lot fewer of them, though. Again, collect Refugee Mementos from corpses, repair signs, light campfires at the Memento Collectors. Again, look for short stone chimneys along the road. I never saw one of those go off, but from what the Memento Collectors say about them, they appear to work like the steam chimneys in Wayfarer Foothills, only with different monsters.

If one full lap from Black Citadel to Hoelbrak doesn’t generate 75 points for you, the fastest way to finish it would probably be to run it with a second character.

GhostHawks.6519:

I am about to create a character for pvp i will be playing with others I cant decide on which one to make if u could give me some pros and cons on how they play in pvp that would be great thanx

First, where I’m coming from: I’m a sick, weak, tired old man with the reflexes of a sedentary 50 y/o – because I am, in fact, a sedentary 50 y/o. Doesn’t matter what build I go in with, I lose way more 1v1 fights than I win. But I get lots of praise for my engineer, on WvW teams, because just about no matter what build I play (and I re-trait at least once a day, just for fun) I bring something to the team.

(What? Don’t look at me like that. All of my builds work fine with full Knights gear, so there’s no extra cost there, and retraiting costs about the same as one long-range waypoint jump, or two armor repairs. Retrait a lot. You’ll learn something.)

Grenade Spec: Grenade kit and 2 situationally chosen elixirs, plus Supply Drop. Enemy siege? What enemy siege? Seriously, it’s amazing how often people think that they’re being clever putting stuff near the edge of a wall, or up by the keep lord’s room in a tower, and how fast anybody who tries to stand on that wall to kill me goes down. And I don’t even bother using Toolkit as a backup kit so I can pull them down. Especially if Supply Drop is off cool-down so I can AoE stun people before throwing all six grenade bundles up there.

Pistol & Shield with Turrets & Static Discharge: If this is how much fun Static Discharge is, with super-fast recharging and reasonably useful toolbelt skills, I dread to think how much fun it must have been before they nerfed it. Although the upcoming Confusion nerf may make pistol & shield less fun than it was, it’s still an AoE blind on a nice short cooldown. Oh, and with one quick switch of a trait (Static Discharge out, Deployable Turrets in) I can throw turrets up onto the wall where people would have to expose themselves to incoming fire to take them down. If they ever fix the bug with Deployable Turrets, it may actually become over powered. Oh, and I can keep a lot of our own siege users up, against modest numbers of AoEs, by parking a Healing Turret just out of the edge of the AoEs, giving our cannon or arrow cart users perma regen.

Flamethrower & Elixirs: Situational, but there are two times that are so much fun they make it worth it. (1) Flame rams on the other side of the door? /whoosh/ What flame rams? (2) Enemy zerg rushing into the tunnel, or clumped up around the keep lord? Good thing I have even one guardian with me to provide stability and some healing. /whoosh/ Bag city, baby!

That being said: it helps that often I’m up against pretty stupid enemies. The kind of person who turtles up in a keep manning the siege is often the kind of person who poses no threat to anybody, no matter what their build is or no matter what my build is. I just happen to have several builds available to me that wreck those people.

But it must be said: most people would prefer that you brought a mesmer or a guardian. But if you don’t want to play a mesmer or a guardian, engineers are a lot of fun.

Rozbuska.5263:

Cloaking device was ONLY one viable adept trait in that line. Healing turret. They said “heal slightly reduced”.. 50% is kittening slightly? Healing turret is now even more useless than before.

It’s not a 50% nerf if you simply double-tap the button. The Overcharge gives you the other half of the heal. AND drops a water field. AND removes conditions. AND can be fired again every 15 seconds. AND gives 50% more regen, AND gives it to a much wider area. AND more than doubled the recharge speed on the already-nice toolbelt skill. Now if we could just get them to “nerf” the rest of our powers the same way!

Q: How many synergeticists does it take to change a photonic emiter?

A: One. Who hands the problem off to a dynamics grad and a statics grad, reducing it to a previously solved photonic emitter joke.

Seriously, I have to congratulate my dynamacist and staticist friends for the combination of stubbornness and intellectual dullness it takes to keep working on a problem once you know how it will turn out. We couldn’t do it without you.

I don’t see any way to make a viable grenade or flamethrower build. Period.
Grenades lose 40% (!!!) of their range, and 100% of their fields. You can only take grenades cause vulnerability or grenades do full damage, not both, so they also lose substantial damage. The only buff they get is that one of the traits causes them to throw faster, so maybe they hit more often against player characters. But still, the most popular WvW engineer build just fell completely off the map.

I also don’t see how to make the most common flamethrower build any more. Yes, the stability in Juggernaut is nice but not at the cost of the extra toughness needed for a medium armor class to front-line; it’s not like we didn’t already have pretty fast recharging stability elsewhere. Also the traits that used to buff flamethrower damage and recharge as well as elixir gun are now elixir gun only, so unless that’s in one of the TBD slots or it got a substantial baseline buff, there goes about 10% or more of its damage.

Unless the Power Shoes trait gets rolled into the Gadget TBD trait or into Robo-Legs, that’s going to be yet another, third, nerf to several popular WvW builds; I know at least two engineers who count on that plus Rocket Boots as their travel skill.
In exchange, at a glance it looks to me like engineers get two new builds: a mortar kit build that does most of what grenade used to do, and a substantial buff to AoE healing builds of all kinds. Oh, and turrets seem more or less intact, other than the slight nerf to turret survivability that was announced earlier (turrets will be damaged and debuffed by conditions).

Did I see correctly that Med Kit’s #1 skill also does damage to opponents? The tooltip went by so fast I couldn’t make it out. That plus the buff turret, if the buff turret has good stats, could end up finally making med kit builds competitive with healing turret builds.

It was pretty clear that engineer is the most in-progress, incomplete of the core classes, but I have to say that what I’m seeing so far really worries me.

It’s worth pointing out that, in canon, the Charr invented combat engineering. And in all fairness, flame-thrower wielding Charr look especially expletive-deleted. The steampunk looking Charr shield, especially when carried by a Charr, looks especially good on an engineer. And I say this despite the fact that all of my characters are Asura.

(But you’ll have to be able to put up with the nearly constantly snarly voice acting that makes everybody sound like a steroid abuser with a 3 pack a day cigarette habit, and the really, really stupid-looking run animation.)

I’ll add: does next Tuesday’s patch include a fix for the fact that Deployable Turrets didn’t get the same damage buff and armor buff that regular turrets got in the last patch?

Also: why do engineers have so many ground-targeted underwater skills, given that it’s almost impossible to hit anywhere or anything with a ground-targeted skill underwater?

As old Oola would say if he were still with us, other races use magic. We Asura are magic. It also doesn’t hurt that we’re the first race on Tyria to discover the scientific method, nor that we integrated it into our educational system at all levels. And, yes, that we were the first race to learn to govern ourselves via merit-based adhocracy gives us a nimbleness that the other races can only envy.

But it also must be said that all of the rest of the Tyrian “sentient” species are, compared to us, as dumb as a box of rocks.

It’s not just you. It’s the basic tier-2 matts: iron ore, soft wood logs, and cotton; I’m perpetually out of all three. And linen in tier 3.

My main problem with Daily Dodger is that it requires me to (a) find mobs with easy “tells” and long-animation attacks, and (b) let them live long enough for them to fire it. But I think I finally found a way to do it, that knocked out the last 25% or so in a hurry: round up a bunch of mobs, spam my AoEs, and just dodge at random. If there are enough mobs, one of them is bound to be attacking whenever I hit the dodge.

Seriously, I’m a bunkered-up Bomb Kit engineer. Unless it’s a Champion, dodging actually lowers my survivability, because time I spend dodging is time that I’m not firing AoE confuse or AoE blind or setting everything around me on fire. I hate this particular objective, because it requires me to play stupid.

(wry grin)

If Anet didn’t want you to look like a hobo, they wouldn’t offer you the Universal Multitool Pack as a starting costume piece.

Listen, as an Asura, I share your feels. Imagine wearing our racial armor with one of these low-tech backpacks. But we’re probably pretty thoroughly stuck with it, because there probably isn’t any way for them to provide per-character customization options to powers.

Dinny.5310:

You can view almost all of the helmets in-game by going to Heart of the Mists (the PvP zone) and going to a PvP Armor Locker.

And by helms do you mean heavy armor? Because yeah, there are quite a few heavy armor headpieces I can think of that hide the ears.

Too kitten many of them, if you ask me. I don’t think any Asura helm should hide the ears, it’s like hiding the horns on a Charr. It just plain looks wrong.

Humpink.2306:

I am not oceanic myself but I was usually online while HIRE was active. Compared to other guilds I would describe HIRE’s recruitment effort as low to moderate at best.

Wow. Then I’d hate to see what really aggressive recruiting would look like. Because that last week they were on EB, I couldn’t go anywhere in any zone without getting a blind invite from them. And I was in PvE that whole week. As far as I could tell, it must have been guild policy to send a blind invite to anybody they saw who didn’t have a guild tag, every time they saw them. What does an aggressive recruiting push look like?

Not apropos of what I quoted above: I don’t know that I’m part of any kind of organized boycott of wuhvwuh this week, but I had so little fun and got so little XP that I’m not convinced it was a good use of my time. I can’t really motivate myself to go back just to feed loot bags and achievement points to the Kaineng swarm. If I were motivated by the urge to learn to be uber leet, this would be the good week to do so; you learn more about what you can and can’t do, and you learn more about organized fighting, fighting against hopeless odds than you do in a balanced fight, let alone unbalanced in your favor. But it’s not my idea of a good time. If you want me to be the Washington Generals and lose every game, I’m not getting paid enough.

TaCktiX.6729:

… It rewards speedrunners while not adjusting the system based on them. A speedrun team will finish a path faster than the average group, but they’ll get the same reward. And due to their speedrun, their actual completion time stands a greater chance of being ignored by the algorithm when generating the next week’s values. …

Systems that reward speedrunners are half of why I don’t do dungeons. A system that disproportionately rewards speedrunners is a system that rewards “elite” players for kittenish behavior towards “non-elite” players. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, then new people get kicked from dungeon teams. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, anybody who didn’t copy-paste their build off of MetaBattle gets kicked.

I’m really not crazy about any system that back-loads the rewards. I know that they made the dungeons so crazy long and so crazy big that nobody has time to clear every trash mob between the path beginning and the boss, but I’d rather see that fundamental design flaw fixed (via what Carbine, a rival NCsoft studio, is now calling “boss in a box” designs that have shorter maps and a lot fewer trash) than see endless putzing around with the existing instance designs.

The subject line pretty much says it all, but in particular: I was running a new alt around the capital cities the other day and it really jumped out at me how much I miss the look of the town clothes. Yes, I know that they’re available as limited-use potions by converting your old outfits on pre-existing characters, but that’s really not enough for me. If even heavy-armor characters can wear obvious streetwear like the Formal outfit and the Wintersday outfit as their combat outfit, why can’t we have the old town clothes as Outfits? Or, at the very least, why can’t we have them as light-armor or medium-armor skins?

I’d be less annoyed by the “complete 5 dungeons” objective if the game had a built-in LFG tool (yes, before anybody says anything, after fighting with it all evening I finally did manage to find an open group for the dungeon I wanted via the Android version of gw2lfg.com, but something integrated and in-game would have been a lot easier to figure out) and if even the lowest level, supposedly easiest dungeon (CM story) hadn’t trashed my armor. I’m a casual player; I don’t actually enjoy working that hard at my fun. But I’ll grudgingly put up with it, 4 more times this month, rather than accept a 25% cut in my Laurels. (That being said, it’s better than being forced into the PvP tournaments, which I just flatly refused to do. REALLY not my idea of fun.)

They’ve made it clear in interviews over the last month that they want to incent people to try parts of the game that they haven’t tried before. Well, here’s my opinion on that: “Earn the achievement for doing something once if you haven’t already done it at least once” is an objective that encourages people to try something new. “Do it 5 times even if you’ve done it before and hated it” isn’t an incentive to try something new, it’s a 25% tax on people who don’t like every part of the game equally.

I’m not going to get into arguments about what’s the “fair price” for the expansion plus one character slot. I’m just going to say this: it’s not worth it to me. I had already made up my mind how much I was willing to pay for season 3 of the Living Story plus one character class that I might not even want to pay, and it was at most $30, $40 if it came with a character slot. $75 isn’t even in the same ballpark as what I was willing to pay. So I’ll go play something else.

AstralDusk.1670:

How many bookahs does it take to install a polyphotonic emitter?

Three: One to hire an asura, and one to call a medic for the third.

I prefer to tell that one the other way around:

Q: How many Asura does it take to install a polyphotonic emitter?

A: One. Who summons three bookahs, reducing it to a previously solved polyphotonic emitter joke.

(looks around, sees only Asura)

What a relief. I have something I’ve been dying to say, and I don’t want to say it in front of a crowd of bookahs:

On your way up to Dolyak Pass, where all the weirdness is going on right now, did you go up the west side of the pass? Past all of the skirmishes between the Norn and the Grawl? Did you listen to them? Really listen?

We’re all intellectuals and grown-ups here, yes, I know just as well as you do that that fight is really about territory and resources, not religion. But here’s what I want to know about the religious excuses for the fighting. Are the Norn putting us on, or what?

The Norn … are mocking the Grawl … for worshiping just any old thing they find in nature. Considering what the Norn worship, that’s either so stupid I can’t believe even a Norn would say it, or else it’s such subtle meta-humor, so sophisticated, that I can’t believe that any Norn would think of it. There, I got that off of my chest. I feel much better.

(looks around)

Oh, hello, my Norn colleague! How goes the fighting and the drinking and the bragging?

(pretends to listen to and care about the answer, interrupts)

Say, while you’re here, would you go carry that heavy object so I don’t have to send a golem to do it instead? Thanks!