Guild Wars 2

This price spike is actually the result of this year’s birthday gift NOT including the jormag dyes. Some TP barons probably didn’t want to risk investing into these dyes untill they knew whether it would be included or not. As they are not included the price has spiked dramatically as they quickly bought out a bunch of the stock. Unconvenient timing on your part but that’s most likely what happened as many veterans are getting their 5th year character birthday gifts this week.

If you do play FFIV then a monthly fee is all the difference between your ‘will pay 40’ and ‘wont pay 50’. Regardless, HoT is not mandatory for PoF and should be fully playable without it. You’ll only miss out on HoT specific stat sets and class traits/skills/weapons. Last weekend there was a demo of a small portion of PoF, which would have been a good oppertunity to check out the game. This weekend you can try out the new specializations (traits/skills etc) coming in the expansion so that may be worth trying as you already own the game.

On another note, I think the game could benefit from a HoT trial period so people can check that out if they have played the base game. That way people can decide to get a bundle or just PoF.

I’ve tried not to spoil myself with too much content so I haven’t played for long, either way, here goes.

The mount handles really well, I like how you can decide how much of your dodgebar you want to use by how long you hold spacebar & how the mastery is introduced.

The map felt very flat, which is a shame (but it’s just one out of 5 and only like half of the first so I can get around that). The art of the map is great, just like HoT maps were so that’s a plus and it seems some parts of the map are designed for the other mounts so that should be nice from an exploration point of view, just as with HoT.

I managed to fight one of those giant living cactus/melon/fruit monster bounties which had it’s own combat mechanics, a big plus for me. I feel like bounties could be something to last a long while as far as content goes if certain skins or rewards are tied exclusively to them (if there already are, good).

Some of the minigame masteries were also quite fun to do, it is much more interesting than simply communing.

Hydras… obviously the decapitation mechanic is pretty cool, hopefully it’ll be used on some other monsters/bosses. (missed oppertunity on mordrem vines here though :P ).

It does look really nice, but in my opinion Maguuma already did too. You can see they spent a lot of effort on getting the art right at least (as you could also see between HoT and living story). I do prefer the vertical aspect of HoT maps but perhaps that may be part of another map, either as caves or structures as this is just about 1/10th of the new landmass.

Here is my idea: Make all the rarity classes (except maybe exotic and ascended as those are rare anyway) seperate unidentified gear stacks. That way people can still salvage all blues/greens but know when they have valuable items. It doesn’t remove the identification process (which imo should be free, no clue why suddenly loot should COST money? Are we going to get showered in money?). I do like that it takes far less inventory space, that’s one thing that always annoyed me in the past.

It would be nice if char select background & music was optionally random or selectable. But it’s such a small thing I doubt they will go through the effort of adding it.

They purposely made these green so they can be all salvaged at once. It may seem counterintuitive now, but when you’re used to it you’ll be glad it is the way it is.

For me the mount controls work really well when you enable the action camera. Maybe give that a shot, it could improve the feel you have when running around.

I agree that the map feels very flat, but I’m also willing to accept that this is just one out of five. They can make vertical maps even without gliding, the question is.. did they? I was worried when heart quest dailies popped up in LS3 and it appears that they are also in these new maps. This seems to indicate a shift towards trying more desperate methods of keeping players in the game. When do devs learn that dailies keep addicted players in the game, not those that are there for the fun.

Some good points however, the map looks great visually just as HoT maps did (and certainly better than the living story maps). The mount controls feel very smooth to me, especially in action camera mode. Some of the new enemies are pretty cool such as the hydra decapitation mechanic. Just running around with your mount and climbing/jumping along places has a good feel to it.

I try not to spoil myself too much in this demo as I did the same in HoT, but there’s definetely reason for concern. I’ve already read up on the identification of items and the way it works has me worried because it seems to be another gambling mechanic.

In the past HoT stats have been HoT-content only (and LS3 since it’s technically HoT too). I’d imagine they keep PoF stats exclusive to rewards from that expansion.

Soule hasn’t done any music for GW2 since launch, the last bits were during the first few seasonal events (probably recorded before launch). All music since has been done for a large part by Maclaine Diemer, some by Stan LePard and Lena Chapelle.

I think with Guild Wars 2 you may want to try going out of your comfort zone, for me it is great being able to decide what to do yourself. I never liked hearts and still dislike them in the latest Living Story season. I can definetely understand that some kind of guide (even more so than hearts are in this game) is a type of thing some people want. But the truth is, if you go one way and see mobs are still within your level range then you are not making any mistake at all. You don’t have to 100% each map, it’s optional and only needed for legendary weapons anyway. Just go where you feel like and when you run into dangerous enemies take another route or waypoint out.

As for talking about gearing and ingame explanations for that… honestly Guild Wars 2 is hardly any different from other games. Nearly every MMO I’ve played never told me how to gear, I had to figure stuff out myself or ask others. In some cases you just had to accidentally stumble upon the right vendors. In Guild Wars 2 however you can gear through PvP (rewards from loot), crafting, dungeons (token rewards), random loot (rather rare though) and even heart vendors.

The major benefit with GW2 is actually it’s wiki, not that many other games I’ve played have a first-party hosted wiki that you can even access quickly ingame. People have already explained here how to do such things. Worst case, this game is not for you, but I think if you put at least some effort into it you can get very far.

At the end of the day however you do NOT have to play this game as efficiently as possible. The vast majority doesn’t. The one thing that makes this game shine over other MMO’s is that you can do almost everything in sub-optimal conditions. You don’t need TierXX gear just to be able to do a dungeon or world boss or WvW and so on. This is a game after all, something most MMO’s seem to forget as they shackle their players into daily grinds and shallow ‘follow the marker’ quests.

P.S. Opening champ bags at lower level and providing more value is not something that was originally designed that way. It’s a byproduct of >player< driven research that reached that conclusion.

Log2(4294967199) gave me 31.99~ on my calculator (or a 2^32).

What worked for me is high dmg and stuns. As a warrior mace offhand stun can take down a whole group while you mow them down. She did seem very frail though and because of that I didn’t make the timer on the first try, I’ll give that achievement another shot later.

Looking back at season 3 and comparing it to season 1 and 2 for example it feels like going from a bicyle to an F1. We went through so many different aspects and (somewhat) closed down a whole bunch in just one season. I have a feeling they want to divert from dragon stories and took this oppertunity to quickly get it done so they can focus on other things in the expansion. Perhaps that is also the whole reason it’s set up this way. I do like the map design and battles in this new story.

My main is also a Charr and I agree, would absolutely never join the Shining Blade. Even if he’s not an anti-human racist I think he shouldn’t be in the spot even if he’s being offered one properly.

I got him down to like 36% the ‘painful’ way and was hitting 40 second cooldowns on skills when I said screw it and just went for the fearful achievement instead. Breaking his breakbar before doing damage sounds like a good idea. I only did the instance once so far and it was too late for me to use that tactic as you can’t seem to reset the fight unless you die (which.. well, warrior with passive health regen doesn’t die to his meager damage).

I simply made sure I had a spot where two were on next to eachother and then kept throwing the stone 2 slots further each time untill either all were off or all were on. Works every time for me as the fragment hits and flips the spot it hits, plus the two next to it.

Coordinates are pretty much all about what you can fit in an x, y, z box and to make the most use out of a map that’s i.e. 200 × 100 meters they fill up most of the area. It’s also easy to align with other maps. What other games do is trick you by using a smaller part of the actual map size, you’ll never know that it’s still made up of blocks like that but under the hood they definetely are.

Just draw a grid on a piece of paper, how do you get the most play area out of that single grid? You fill it all up. The good thing with having a third axis is that you are far less limited if you’re willing to go underground or over the ground level and you can see it in Heart of Thorns maps, the last 2 don’t use the full ‘grid’ that’s available. At least not for regular play.

I’m guessing they simply thought it was the best way to create big maps at one point in time, you have to realize GW2’s engine is very old and they started on it when PC’s were far less powerful.

It’s a tough question to be honest, you can judge on gameplay, appearance or layout.. or combinations. I doubt I can come up with a proper list where I can say ‘yea those are the worst imo’. There are definetely contenders for it, I mean Southsun Cove looks amazing but the enemies are frustrating, the map has far too little going on apart from the queen meta. I can’t rate it as one of the worst because if they’d put in HoT-style rewards in a map like that and actually add a ton of fun event chains it couldbe a fairly good one purely because of the aesthetics. It’s like that with a lot of maps for me. In vanilla I ignore 90% of the maps apart from map completion simply because once you’ve seen it there’s nothing to keep you there.

I suppose I’m in the minority here but I do like Tangled Depths as a map. It’s more that some classes suffer more vs the chak than others. Navigation is not nearly as bad if you actually take your time to learn the map layout, which you will if you do 100% completion without teleports on several chars + do metas etc.

If I do really have to name one map at least, it would’ve been pre-nerf Cursed Shore.. god that was a nightmare to travel through once upon a time, but no longer case.

I feel like LS3 maps are very meh in layout, Draconis Mons is the type I enjoy the most out of those as it actually introduced an interactive way of transport and has quite a few secrets to uncover.

I’m pretty sure they learned from HoT, but map design in HoT is still my absolute favourite at this time. Draconis Mons felt comparable though, but unlike HoT maps that map has quite a lot of ‘dead’ space that you really have no reason to go to other than because you can.

There is actually a personal story questline that touches on the subject of world domination by Asura. I don’t recall exactly what you have to choose as your starting invention, I think it was that weird box.

The maps are quite nice but they are very much designed for ‘daily’ players. There are no big metas on these maps comparable to the ones in HoT/SW/Dry Top. I personally hope that the expac will be more like HoT/LS2 maps, not LS3 maps. They aren’t bad but they feel very much like you go there for a while, get your rewards and then never come back.

Honestly if you were around during LS1 you’d understand that the story was not as great as it might seem in a movie. The first release(s?) was just people fixing sign posts for achievements. People got burned out from constant short-period achievement grinds (content was only around for such a period). Often with ridiculous achievements, people wanted to get them to avoid missing out on AP which lead to AP chests (which were quite rewarding because of PvP skins back then and a couple of other stuff in them). But that’s just one aspect, many players did not like missing out on a chapter because of real life. Add to that the fact that the story was not cohesive as it might seem to be in a movie that was made after the fact. Most players hardly knew what was even going on, it was quite a common complaint by players. Why were things happening? No explanation came for many things untill we got into season 2 with Mordremoth and such.

Some episodes were pretty cool however and I do think it would have been nice if it wasn’t all temporary, I just don’t expect them to ever drop it back in. If they do, I doubt it would be all in 1 go, but perhaps one chapter at a time or so.

The current max mastery level (using them) is 186, but my account has quite a lot of spare points at this time so I don’t find the 217 to be odd at all. All I can think of is that the list is incomplete or perhaps does not include living story masteries.

You can keep both, you can always save some gold for an extra character slot.

P.S. Asura are the best species.

Grabbed it too, I rarely check these vendors but this one was a nice one to grab.

Aresian.1872:

Randulf.7614:

Tomorrow, go to the Pale Tree, do the final bit of dialogue interaction there, return to your home instance and spend 1000 unbound magic to change to a different weapon you like at the NPC who will have moved in there.

ok i try tommorow m8 ty so much !!!!!!!

You should get an ingame mail from the NPC about 24 hours after you finished the weapon, then you can find her in your home instance in each city to do the trade Randulf mentioned. It’s actually an easy way to unlock all skins if you have lots of unbound magic. You now have the greatsword, if you have 4000 unbound magic you can pick all 3 others you don’t want and then pick the weapon you want last so you also unlock the collection skin.

There was a long period of time where you could technically make several legendaries without ever playing WvW as Gift of Battle was could be purchased without any requirements (using achievement chest badges of honor). Later they added a WvW rank requirement (still a fairly low one though) and now it is tied to the reward track. It has always been the intention from the devs that you do things in all gamemodes except sPvP, which has it’s own legendary.

I don’t know if you’re on a free to play account or not, but if you are on a paid account you get laurels every few days of logging in. You can spend those at a Laurel vendor in Lion’s arch for example (southern bit of the map) to buy ascended accesories for a pretty large stat boost. Without HoT it’s probably easiest to get exotics through dungeons or outright buying them from either Orr karma vendors (limited stat combos) or the trading post.

If you do ever wish to get ascended items (it’s for later really.. I’ve been playing on and off since launch, only have 2 full ascended chars). Ascended weapons give a meaningful stat boost, the same is true for trinkets. Armor is hardly worth it due to the tiny stat difference on those.

I do want to add that Heart of Thorns provides you with 1 lvl 80 booster that also comes with a box with a full set of exotic gear and weapons/trinkets. Plus the Heart of Thorns maps give a lot more access to exotic equipment in general (either from map rewards or achievements), even some fairly easy ascended weapons.

Can’t believe this thread is still going, but I am against mounts in the traditional way. Maybe as some special mastery for specific areas it could work, but the game has a ton of big fluff on characters already. They’ve added tons of giant wings and gliders, lots of glowy stuff. Combat flashiness is still out of control as it is and adding mounts is just going to make the game feel even more generic ‘get as shiny as possible’ like many others. I remember in other MMO’s where people would block NPC view, I really do not want that in GW.

I’d just like to add that I believe it was on reddit that devs are looking into the Sylvari racial elite and it’s not completely out of the question that it’s going to get nerfed sometime down the line. No idea when or if, but I would not be surprised. I’d just go with which race you think has the best looks for it.

I think they should have made it possible for non-raiders to continue getting spirit shards after earning all non-raid masteries in HoT zones. I personally took time to take down the Vale Guardian ages ago, it isn’t a skill issue for me, just the fact I can’t predict beforehand how much time I have to do something such as raiding. I have levelled up an immense amount of times since then so honestly for those playing HoT it can be important to just do at least Vale Guardian or the escort mission to unlock the masteries.

Spirit shards have monetary value afterall (if you look up how to convert them to gold, there are many methods with various returns).

You basically have to try and interact with them at the very first chance you get. That’s how I got it ages ago. Once you get the first one it’s a matter of doing the rest in order.

I think it could be nice to have some sort of small emblem in your map UI for each ‘region’. So like you say the current emblem for core Tyria, one for LS2+HoT+LS3, one for XP2+LS4 and so on. At the same time they could then also change the small UI bit on character login where it says XX% map completion into each emblem with a %. Those emblems could be grayed out till you complete them after which the % disappears and you’d get a colored version.

Anyway that’s just an idea I had in my head for a while now. They could seperate LS and expansions too, but they have to keep space in mind.

I think it would be a good thing if you could (optionally!) choose to have dailies always displayed regardless of tracking specific achievements. I personally track achievements because I dispise dailies in games and only complete them by accident most of the time. For me it’s convenient being able to hide the dailies with a single tracked achievement. On top of quality of life such as this I think the achievement interface could use some touch-ups in general, especially as some categories are starting to become longer and longer lists.

When you play you choose a build, that includes gear with stats, sigils, runes and weapons. You can’t use everything at the same time so you have to choose, the same thing is with traits. You can only have 3 lines, now the only difference is that elite specs add additional skills and a weapon, it is simply an extra choice compared to what we had pre-HoT.

Only because the first elite specs are in most cases so good people felt they were mandatory so much of the decision making had been obsolete in that case. When the new expansion hits we will finally have actual specializations because not every single necro will be a reaper (hopefully anyway..). That’s why I think the elite spec system is interesting, it gives players a meaningful choice, so long as the new specs are ofcourse somewhat balanced compared to the current elite specs. It’s likely that some of them will be role-specs such as the druid but only time can tell.

I prefer to keep it account-wide. I have one char of each class and it would take too much time unlocking everything on all of those just to properly experience all content on them.

I do however agree it would have been awesome if masteries were tied to actual missions, perhaps sort of like how ‘current events’ are running and some of the LS3 story missions are. I just don’t think it will happen because if they keep them account wide they will be one-off missions that take a lot of resources to develop. The current system isn’t great but it works and gives players a reason to use exp food or buffs. The only downside is that the actual mastery points you earn are in nearly all cases unrelated to the masteries you learn.

It has been requested even before HoT though, it isn’t completely out of the question for ArenaNet to lock it behind the gemstore. However, being able to climb certain objects (perhaps with masteries) would be nice. The new grappling hook mechanic in Draconis Mons already gave us a new adventure tool. At this point I am just going to let ArenaNet surprise us. I just hope we won’t get mounts a-la other MMO’s. They clog up your screen in cities and since the arrival of all these wings people already look absurd as it is (not to mention all those glows and aura’s that have been added).

I suppose something that I sort of expect but do really want are new armors and weapons (and not just the less-than handful we received with HoT in the case of armors).

They could instead make a vanilla elitespec, like Warrior traitline or something like that. This way everyone should always have an elite specialization, but vanilla players use the ‘base’ version. However, I think due to the way they have already set it up and their plans for especs I think they will remain expansion-only features. By the time (and if) there is a third expansion people should have enough options to feel like they truly are choices. That leaves one other option, which is already mentioned.. a balance patch. But I’m sure they are either already working on balance in some form, or perhaps they are preparing for expac2 balancing and are busy with that.

I don’t think I will permanently quit the game if the expansion isn’t as good as I hope. HoT was a lot of fun for me, even if my opinion wasn’t shared by many. I just hope that the expansion will have a lot of non-raid content that isn’t as easy as the living story open world maps. I really hope they will add at least 2 or more meta event chains in HoT/SW style. Since the second expansion doesn’t focus much on adding new systems and such we might get much more content. I just hope that the new maps will be more like the recent Draconis Mons or HoT, LS1-4 maps were decent but they really feel like maps I will never go to ever again once I finish my achievements and get the last couple of items I miss. It’s completely understandable that those LS maps aren’t as elaborate with meta events and big rewards (like a full weapon/armor set or something) as they are made with a different intention. I just hope that instead it’ll reappear in the expansion.

I could see them adding Mystic Forge recipes to change vendor-value items to another, or perhaps make them a requirement for a set of weapons to craft. Nothing will solve the problem entirely though without giving Luck capped people an advantage.

Last time they added that RNG item you could get in SW/DT plus prepurchasing got you access. I personally hope they will find a better way than grinding mobs to get a chance at entering.

Map design reminds me a lot more of Heart of Thorns, a big plus for me (using third axis, less flat). The only risk I see with this map (and saw with rising flames) is that there is quite some ‘dead space’ where it seems like you found something cool to explore but end up in an empty area or hole that’s not meant to be accessible. My feedback regarding that is like in HoT maps it may be worth reducing map complexity slightly in some spaces to avoid this.

Only having 4 hearts and 3 waypoints seems like a good balance to me, one wp for each ‘section’ of the map. New mastery is awesome and one of the best parts of exploration in the new map. The story went a bit fast with the introduced character, new druid collection is a nice method of acquiring lore.

Like mtpelion already pointed out, at this time there are probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of legendary weapons in the game. If a large portion of those players suddenly wants to keep a fair collection of sigils on them it can cause a significant drain of sigils from the trade post. At the same time it is also possible sigils lose their value even more, but I don’t think expensive sigils will lose their value if this happens.. It may have opposite effects on a per-sigil basis. Where some people finally find it worth getting a super expensive sigil without the risk of never being able to re-use it. Whereas dirt cheap sigils may end up being bought up quite a bit. I only own 1 legendary weapon and that’s likely not to change, but I do hope they add this feature by the time the next expac comes out (or sooner). That way they can take things into account for potential new sigils.

As someone that doesn’t even own the weapons, the Dreamer does sound incredibly annoying. I actually don’t mind the sound that Quip makes. I’d be in favour of changing the sound of the Dreamer or being able to mute it (instead perhaps let it use generic bow sounds if you ‘mute’ it). Thankfully I don’t encounter the Dreamer often so perhaps my opinion is not as important as those who actually use them all the time.

drunkenpilot.9837:

Wait, you can only get one backpack skin per account?

So… that stinks. I had assumed that we would at some point get access to the additional backpack skins, either through a fifth year birthday present or some other avenue.

I now regret having chosen the Grove Hydria. I picked it because at the time it meshed well with my character’s appearance, but I should’ve chosen the Rata Sum Apparatus. Soon after selecting it I changed the look of that character and no longer use the Hydria.

I understand that it’s my mistake for not doing my due diligence and researching the skins more thoroughly, but being that it was a birthday present I had naively assumed we would eventually be able to get all five skins unlocked.

I really hope we get another chance at earning those extra skins.

Nobody knows the answer at this time, but it’s very likely you will get to choose the other options in the coming 4 birthdays.

I really liked how you went back to the Artesian waters and the fact we get some easy to get new skins (and an ascended weapon added to that). These current events are really nice, I hope they continue doing them. They also made sure to get the lore facts right and led us to interesting locations on the map.

I agree inventory management has become increasingly worse over time despite the change to the wallet etc. I think anyone playing will realize this is going to push people away, not everyone wants to sort their bags every 10 minutes because you get swamped in high quantity, low quality loot. Every time I take a break and come back I eventually get annoyed by the constant task of salvaging, despite the quality of life change a while back for salvage all I still think it’s not enough.

Since it’s an mmo some management is fine, but people should be able to focus on having fun rather than checking the inventory all the time.

They should just make all the collection items you don’t need to keep junk items with a small price attached so you can auto vendor them and never even have to wonder ‘should I keep it?’.

They could bundle in S2 with a new purchase of expansion nr 2. But the logical way (from a player perspective anyway) would be to bundle S2 with HoT and S3 with expac 2. I guess they will stick to their current format though.