Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

I just wanted to pop in here real briefly to let you all know that the team discussed the complaints we’ve been seeing here about the masteries gating story progression, and with tomorrow’s patch we’ll be removing the Itzel Poison mastery gate from chapter 14 “Sign Cutting”. If you were already on this step, when you next log in, your story step should automatically advance as though you had earned the mastery. If you haven’t reached this point, you shouldn’t notice anything different (apart from the fact that you can progress the story faster). If you’ve already advanced past this point by earning the mastery, well there’s just no other way to say it: you’re a rock star, and you deserve an ice cold beverage and a toast from the story team at Arenanet! :-)

I don’t have an exact ETA on when this fix will go Live, but we just wanted to get the word out there ASAP so that if you’re currently on this step, you might want to wait as you will have the ability to bypass this gate sometime tomorrow.

We wanted to use mastery gating as a way to try and prepare you for the challenges ahead the deeper into the Maguuma that you went, but we realize that in this particular scenario, it ended up not being the experience we wanted for all of you and we wanted to correct it.

See you in the jungle!

That’s it…OK everyone, shut it all down, they’ve found us out. :-P

Narcemus.1348:

I love it when old threads are re-animated necro-style :P I would definitely say that I’ve got a good feeling that they have SOMETHING planned for this. It just doesn’t seem like them to throw out a thread like this without something behind it. I mean there are dozens of other monster types missing that have no mention whatsoever.

Hrm. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but I’ll have to take the blame for inflating this beyond what it is. At the time I was creating the content in Black Citadel, everyone was abuzz about waves of “mysterious” bird deaths and thinking it was a sign of something apocalyptic, when in every case the deaths were quite ordinary and not notable.

When I thought about the absence of gargoyles from the areas of Ascalon where they used to live in large numbers (which, as a player, is a detail I would have noticed), I wanted to say something about it, but without saying what actually happened to them. With the conversation on the scholar in the Black Citadel, I didn’t set out to answer that question as much as I wanted to explore how some people in Tyria, just as they do in real life, respond when presented with things in nature they don’t have an explanation for.

Gargoyles and Mergoyles have disappeared, and at least one person is looking into it. Whether we expand on that story in the future comes down to whether the story of their absence is interesting enough to be worth exploring, and fits in with other stories we want to tell.

Dear lord, what have I done?

This change has actually been needed since launch. As noted, we’ve already been using these difficulty mobs in content, though in a more limited way. That was due primarily to the fact that both species ended up being named “Veteran”, but one was solo-friendly, the other was not, and all it did was cause confusion. There will be more updates in the future to bring the rest of the species at this difficulty level in line with this change.

Queen Jennah has simply discovered that shoes are overrated, and lives her life barefoot. Think of how much money she has saved the kingdom, not having to buy her shoes for every occasion! ;-)

Seriously though, there are at least a handful of us devs who practice a barefoot lifestyle. I’m sure some people will always think it’s “weird”, but at least around the studio, it’s become just another facet in a diverse workplace.