Guild Wars 2

The Labyrinthine Cliffs is a very nice little map, it should be accessable permanently imo.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Festival_of_the_Four_Winds

It is unfair that newer players will never get to experience this fun event. We have too few events during the year, and since the once we have are repetitive too, why can’t this one be brought back?

I wish Anet would be more focused in their storytelling. Right now it seems like they’re just throwing in any idea they can think of to see if it sticks. That means that no single plotline is getting the attention it deserves, and what should be important turning point moments quickly become irrelevant or fall by the wayside when the plot suddenly whiplashes in a totally different direction. Rather than half a dozen false starts and side stories, I’d rather see a simpler but more solid narrative arc with a build up leading to a resolution.

It seems they’re trying to make it all payoff with no breaks from the action – but without the leadup that’s merited to make it meaningful, the payoffs don’t count for as much.

I also think Anet needs to remember that even though they know in advance how their story all fits together, the audience does not, and it’s not like episodic television where you only have to wait a week between installments with a long hiatus coming only at the end of a season. There are months between every episode of living story, so with so many plot threads left in the air at any given moment, it can be a very long time before an idea is revisited, and by that point it’s hard to remember or care what’s going on.

What it all boils down to for me with the plot is that I would rather see Anet do less but do it better rather than do more but make it all so superficial. I think the pendulum has shifted way too far toward quantity of ideas over quality of ideas, and it would be easier for me to stay engaged if it could swing back a bit.

Another sad thing is that since Heart of Thorns was released, there have been 112 gem store skins added to the game (Dominator, Soaring, Timekeeper, Merciless, Plasma, Immortal, Improvised). No problem allocating resources to that, was there?

It’s pronounced ‘gall-uhm’ and ‘wiv-urn’ now because that is how it is pronounced by people now.

And while I am at it:

• decimate does not mean ‘to destroy to one tenth’ (not anymore)
• there is nothing incorrect with split infinitives
• you can use ‘literally’ as an intensive rather than as precisely ‘literally’
• dialects like African American Vernacular English (so-called ‘ebonics’) are not a sign of inferior education but rather a fully capable language system in and of itself
• there is nothing special about the oxford comma – it’s a stylistic choice and nothing more.

Language is very different than the rules you learned in English class.

Here I was thinking you were going to bring up killing off players in real life if they died in the game.

Sir Not Appearing In This Game

Ever.

Dwergling.2761:

So yeah,

After searching some food for thought I was wondering what happend to the Mantid that could be found mostly in the Sjing Jea Islands of Factions in Guild Wars 1. I have found no lore or anything about them in Guild Wars 2. How come?

Because we can’t even go to Cantha right now, much less that island.

That comparison chart to the Enterprise is pretty cool. I remember how in awe of his appearance I was that first time, regardless of the mechanics of the fight.

Also, in terms of the OP’s title. Father Ted explains it pretty well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS12p0Zqlt0

People for years have ask Anet to come up with an alternative way to earn Legendary weapons. While the original Legendaries did require a lot of “legendary effort” to get (i.e. lots of Gold or Luck), people complained that since you could buy Precursors or the Legendary itself from the TP, it didn’t mean as much.

Fast forward to HoT. Now, all new Legendary weapons require having access to HoT, and you must play all different types of content to get it. People will say “I’m being forced to play WvW or PvP”. But in the grand scheme of things, this is ok.

Anet is doing the right thing here. Legendary weapons and even armor needs to have prestige. It’s a luxury item in game. Now, in order to earn the right to own one, you must put in “legendary efforts” to complete collections, succeed in PvP, and run WvW. If you manage to do everything that’s required, that means you’re worthy of the Legendary. If you decide that you don’t want to play the other types of game modes, you’ve decided that new Legendary weapons and armor aren’t for you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have one, as the original Legendaries will still be available to get.

What does this mean for the other game modes? Well, for a time, things are going to get a bit unbalanced. I’ll break down my thoughts.

PvP

A lot of new players will be entering PvP because of the new requirements for Legendary weapons and armor. This means that there’s going to be a lot of players who might be unfamiliar with PvP tactics. This would actually affect Solo players more than anything else. Full, coordinated teams will have more of an advantage going forward, as newbies may end up on teams with Solo players, making for a sharp learning curve. Overall, having more players interested in PvP is a good thing. It expands competition by introducing more people to this game mode.

WvW

As we know, there’s only so much space on each Borderland server. WvW has no preference to being in a Guild, or how high you’re ranked. It’s first come, first served when logging in. The added interest in WvW for Legendary mats will attract a lot of non-WvWers, creating giant queues on the BLs. This will cause problems for Commanders trying to get their people into the same maps. Higher Tiers usually have the most WvW interest, so they’ll probably feel the queues the most. And this could snowball down to more server shuffling, as Guilds may leave higher Tiers for lower ones will less activity. But when you think about it, this is ok too, since player initiated server rebalancing is good to keep competition fresh.

“Whatever you do – DO NOT open the box!”

Dearest Anet,

As a fervent player of your game, I’m really excited about what the expansion has to offer and all your announcements.

Still, I’m fearing that like in other MMOs, raiding might leave a large portion of the community behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m honestly glad hardcore content is coming for players who want to experience this kind of stuff ; I myself loved raiding back in the days. It’s totally fine if those players get their hands on great stuff (especially since in Gw2 it’s mostly aesthetics, achievements and titles).

But what I fear is that a whole portion of the storyline will be locked behind raids. I don’t want to get into the Maguuma jungle and really get involved into the story, if the most important bits of it are only unlocked by doing 10 man instances. Who hasn’t already played a MMO, doing all the side quests of an area, getting really involved into the story, only to discover that to enjoy its conclusion, you had to go through a time-consuming horribly-repetitive raid content ?

In the core game, you managed to get around this problem by providing a personal storyline and a story mode for dungeons, which allowed more casual oriented players to actually enjoy the story without having to get through difficult and time consuming content.

Since I think it’s quite obvious there can’t be a “story mode raid”, I hope all the important events will be happening in the living world. Especially the potential fight against Mordremoth. Please leave all the story elements in the living world.

Have you ever seen headless chickens? I can guaranty you that they do not stack, at least not initially.

XxsdgxX.8109:

Omg leave Celestial alone

I tried to resist, I promise. But the flesh is weak…

I’m pretty sure that one of them was a cow before Lion’s Arch has been rebuilt.

Tapioca.9062:

So I was exploring Seraph’s Landing and found these two bulls chilling in their home. What struck me as strange is that there is not a single cow in this entire village. Now, I’m not exactly a farming expert, but from what I know, bulls without cows aren’t of much particular use in an agricultural sense beyond their magical transformation into beef. It’s possible they could be stud bulls, but I don’t recall seeing cows anywhere in the Harathi Hinterlands.

Now I just happen to have the farming expertise that you lack.

There was an interesting case many years ago where a stock breeder advertised a stud bull for sale in a newspaper. He provided a picture to go with the ad. When the ad was published, he saw to his shock that some city-boy photo editor had airbrushed out the, um, dangly bits lest some reader be offended. The breeder sued the paper and won, given that any actual farmer looking at that altered pic would conclude that the animal was not fit for the advertised purpose.

Looking at the image you provided, my expert eye immediately notices something missing. Take a close look between the hind legs of that “bull” on the right. Or even a far look. What’s missing should be quite notably present on any bull in breeding condition.

Yep. Them h’ain’t bulls, Jethro. Them’s oxen!

I think the key problem behind the current condi damage debate is what should conditions be. People fight but all constructive argument is prevented by a disagreement on the core problem. I see basically 2 possibilities:

1) conditions are an alternative to direct damage. They just represent a way to have variations in builds and gameplay

2) conditions are meant to be a way to keep pressure while having a defensive gameplay.

I believe, the game was balanced around 2) initially but tried to evolve towards 1) which leaves us in this current non-satisfactory situation.

I personally see arguments for both:
1) some people just like conditions. They are very thematic, torment and confusion are super mesmery, fear is necromancery, burning is what a fire elementalist or guardian do… They exist in both burst type (burning, confusion, fear) or real DoT (bleeding). Some classes are almost designed around them (the necro is not best at applying condi, but particularly good at manipulating them). They also introduce variety in tanking since they ignore toughness. + they can now be played in PvE where defensive stats are usually useless (hopefully HoT will change that)
2) conditions are often paired with defensive attunement (bleeding for earth ele), defensive weapons (staff or torch for mesmer), defensive stats (rabid, dire…). They take time to reach their full damage, so you’d better survive in the meanwhile.

The reason why it is so important to choose a side is that that has a large impact on how to balance them.
To balance 1), you need to make sure that conditions also need 3 stats to reach their full strength (I suggest condition damage, precision and condition duration, allowing conditions to “crit” on application). They should be balanced around medium armor to give a bit more damage than direct damage to make up for the possibility to cleanse them. Burst conditions should be on cooldown so that you can’t apply them all the time while bleeding can be even on AA, thus having the same difference as direct damage with high burst which you can counter.
To balance 2) reduce significantly the burst possibility, pure conditions should be weaker than berserker but with higher survivability. The condition cap should still be like it currently is (because a cap is unfair and stupid) but the damage from conditions will anyway be low.

I personally like nr1 better. I love conditions, I would like more variations in both PvE and PvP and conditions are one way to do just that. But then many balances issue have to be fixed (in particular, the 3-stats system).

What do you think? If we could at least agree on the premises, we could send a stronger signal to ANet.

Valgar.9576:

Hey everyone

I’m just interested in the most expensive item you have looted

A girlfriend…and now she’s account bound. . .

Get hyped so your hopes may be dashed to tiny pieces.

If people are harassing those legitimately doing that heart, and killing those ambients is part of that heart, then they might find those ambients taken away from them and the heart objective changed. ANet has done things like that before. By acting like that they are endangering their own farm.

It’s just a beta. It’s not a big deal.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Good luck to everyone who’s trying for a portal!

(And yes, it’s truly random, not determined by your astrological sign, the number of letters in your name, or the color of your socks. )

…So,sacrificing those goats to RNGesus might have been a little excessive?

Shucks. >.>
<.<

segman.3560:

The game is easy for you because you learned it.
Now get a fresh 80lvl player with 500 AP and tell him to do any explorable dungeon. Not so easy, eh?

This. It’s not so much that we need harder content, we need new content with new mechanics and challenges that we haven’t mastered yet.

Hi there :)

As the Super Adventure Box has once more been removed from the game, I had to find another way to get my daily dose of 8bit-super-fun-content. Inspired by DusK and his approach to turn the SAB-Soundtrack into metal, I began working on a “Super Adventure Symphony”-Collection.

And as it is kind of stupid to just listen to my compositions myself, I wanted to share those tracks with you – especially the SAB-lovers amongst you ;)

This is what I got so far:

Hillbilly Hoedown (w2-1)
https://soundcloud.com/pxlsounds/hillbilly-hoedown-pixelsounds

Dark Woods (w1-2)
https://soundcloud.com/pxlsounds/dark-woods-pixelsounds-edit

Warp Worm (in w1-2)
https://soundcloud.com/pxlsounds/warp-worm

I would love to hear some feedback and, if you should like the tracks, you can always request your favorite SAB-songs – I will do my very best to turn them into an orchestrated score or full-band-version :)

So long!

It is funny how people have been complaining about the lack of PC voice since the Living story started. And basically claiming that it would be the most important thing ever to bring back.

But now when they finally add it back in, people complain about that as well.

The irony is people don’t want to go in the water because its broken. In return people are not drawn to that content, and it gets pushed to the back of the table by the devs.