Guild Wars 2

Mmmm… ascended pie

Projectile reflect played a big role in our success as well. I’d say it took 2-4 attempts (not wipes). The elementals die very easily. Only tricky bit was aggro control but again once aggro switched to the ooze, wall of reflect tended to give enough time for the ooze to get further away and elementals killed. Two guardians in the group did help I’m sure.

Sounds like it can be done either way as long as everyone knows what to do. We had zero problems with this fight and just did the ooze mechanic as intended. Killed Sparki first, and had no issues with continuing to absorb oil slicks with the ooze while we killed Slick. In fact I think it may have ended up that everyone was just burning Slick down at the end and the ooze just sort of hung around the group and sucked up oil as it got laid down. No big deal.

PureNinja.5264:

Sorry I was gone for a second. So the best way I would see is to try kill all the aetherblades in the front. The achievement is just to make sure to finish them off after he is dead. If you could clear out all but on the back corners and leave one veteran alive. I think you could pull the boss without aggroing him because of how short there leash range is. Just make sure to put a target on the one you want kept alive in the probably top back corner and kill all the other crew. Then fight the boss on the opposite side so that the aetherblade won’t pull. You think that’d work?

We did something like this and got the achievement without any fuss. It took a few pulls of trash and trash plus boss to lead him over to the corner with the ridged pipe (to the left as you come in the door and start jumping down pipes). Now, the area is kind of confined, but if you dodge well, it seems to work out okay, and keep an eye on bringing up the downed. Ranged was preferred to melee.

After he was dead, we went and cleaned up the rest of the trash and bingo-bango, achievement.

Clockwork was tough, lots of getting thrown around until we found the right timing for getting out of the way and bringing the hologram over. He seems to move too slow to just run to the hologram and thus we had better luck getting the hologram to him. Gear regions could definitely use some red circle perimeters on them. Slightly more obvious tells on some of the bosses might have been nice, but then everything was kind of laggy (opening day for content more than likely) so I might have just been failing at the occasional dodge.

Otherwise, really fun dungeon I thought. Not hideously difficult, about 10-15s in repair costs as I recall (and some of that was because I forgot to switch kit on the electricity room and that was kind of unforgiving).

Well, I did it for more of the base ideals of the college and the personality traits I would imagine going into the professions my asura have.
Guardian (Defender Tekks) is of the College of Statics. He believes in building strong, solid creations that help the welfare of the Asura.

Elementalist (Tryxxi) is of the College of Dynamics. She’s more interested in pulling raw power out of the Eternal Alchemy through the exercise and training of elemental tuning.

Engineer (Laika) is of the College of Synergetics. He’s most interested in taking the things worked out by the other colleges and blending it with Synergetics own understanding of the EA to create interesting technology and discover knowledge. (Though he also has quite a lot of fun just running around burning things with a flamethrower — possibly not the BEST student of Synergetics to ever come around.)

Posting to keep this bumped. I would like to see more positive analysis of the dungeon and fights over the QQ posts.

Well OP is welcome to his opinion, but to me it seems clear that the mechanics are not nearly as aggravating as described, and I know for a fact that F/U doesn’t require particular builds as we just ran it the other night with pot-luck of professions and I don’t recall anything particularly annoying or tedious about it.

A dungeon has to have some sort of fight mechanics to make it worth participating in. Perhaps OP can suggests to the forum what type of mechanics he/she finds “not frustrating” and “not tedious” while being “difficult”. Please… provide examples.

My idea was to emergency teleport everyone in the disaster zone OUT of the region (at least whatever radius scales the Tequatl fight), and then provide jump pads for people to get back to the fight just prior to the dragon landing to get back into position. Then AFK people aren’t contributing to the scaling, the people who are in the fight are there because they’re actively participating.

I’ve found it a little weird that the only way to get clean fights is for folks to deliberately SEEK OUT overflow servers. The serious fight rarely seems to happen on the main server — it’s always somewhere else, because the participation is difficult to control otherwise.

Kit damage is affected by weapon stats, yes, BUT OP is talking about the base damage range of the weapon (the Rifle does min dam-max dam, Pistol does min dam-max dam). There was a point where they normalized it based on Pistol damage so that the “obvious choice” wasn’t always to run Rifle because it was higher.

However the Ascended weapons add a major new wrinkle into this and yes there needs to be some adjustments made. Kits are now based on exotic pistol damage and that will be at some (possibly slight) disadvantage against ascended weaponry.

I’ll just put this here and say it simply in the hopes that the thread gets read by the folks who might have some design control.

I want to fight your dragon. I don’t want to fight your server mechanics.

The overflow shard system works great in a lot of ways. If you want to go to a zone to get a little something or the other done for living story, gathering, what-have-you, it’s always available.

For large boss fights it does not work. Last night was the single most frustrating experience in my time on GW2 and the only night I really left with a bad taste in my mouth. SoR was working on their attempt, coordinating over VoIP in GREAT detail. It took me a half hour just to join a party in the zone via party ferry. That’s not really how I wanted to spend my time right clicking a party member, and selecting join, watching the zone full box pop up, and then doing it again. Then during the fight I had a brief disconnection at the 3:00 minute left mark, seems to have been Time-Warner’s fault (graphics low, RaidCall also cut out briefly). I got back quickly but… I was in an overflow shard again.

I don’t know what you are going to have to do to alter this, but it needs to be changed. Perhaps there’s a way to lock people to shards during an event, a place reserved. Maybe there’s a way at the very least to tag participation so that achievements and loot might happen even if that disconnect happens. Maybe there’s another solution. God help you if the attempt had been successful, because then not only would I have been cut off from participating in the event at the critical moments, but also the achievement and the loot and the overall pleasure in being part of a successful ensemble effort.

In other MMOs I raided extensively. I LOVE large group ensemble challenges. The Tequatl fight is really great. I’d love to play it. Please make it so I can return to the fight.

I would really appreciate getting credit for such a long and popular fight somewhere in the early stages of the fight rather than at the end. I got disconnected at about the 3 minute mark and due to the popularity of the fight I could not get back in until it was over. I didn’t get any credit for the fight.

This plus the huge aggravation of trying to play with my people in the correct shard just really made tonight… I just don’t have words. Very exciting fight. I loved the way we were coordinating. I just wanted to play with my guild and the others. But it took 30 minutes of spamming join group in sparkfly fen and then the disconnect really ruined the evening.

I call concern troll here. If OP has max settings, exotic gear, then he’s simply doing something wrong. I’ve run the loop recently quite a lot (earning for legendary runestones) and

1) with a party, have hit it once at the last second, got the drop
2) even without a party, usually LEADING the group because everyone is keeping up permaswiftness
3) loading faster than most everyone which OP must be doing if his machine is as good as he says
4) being a rational adult about things and realizing that one bag is as good as another, so if one misses a champ (vendor, poor timing, missed jump, etc), you skip the next one and wait for the group.

That being said, if the mobs had slightly more health, that would actually not slow things down because due to the delay ANet put into the champion spawn, it’d actually make it so things could be killed with ZERO delay. As it stands, there’s usually some slack along the line, often at fish or kodan or norn. I find that useful as a point to consolidate bag space personally.

Another thing, if mobs had more health, it’d require more hits (as a percentage) to register for the loot table I think.

Anyhow, this whole “problem” seems fishy to me.

Hard to take leaked patch notes too seriously but the last set for class stuff was pretty bang on the money, so with that in mind…

Not too wild about it frankly. As a primarily PvE player, this seems like quite a huge smack instead of a “shave” like they were going with for sPvP and I have a sneaking suspicion that there are going to be loads of knock on consequences. Suppose I’m glad I’ve got the guardian kitted up nicely and most of the way to his legendary as I might end up playing that one more.

We have a protest song?

Kuzzi.2198:

Seeing as most people here are unable to comprehend what I am asking for, or even why a completionist would feel compelled to complete all dailies, I will stop responding to this thread.

I hope Anet is already aware of the issue and will eventually fix it.

I think most everyone comprehends. There is not an issue with the game, and nothing to fix. Having a variety of dailies to do serves a broad swath of the player base. It lets them get a daily achievement while pursuing their own interests by and large. Thus saying you can take a selection of 5 categories out of a provided 10 gives variety and flexibility.

Feeling like one much chase EVERY DAILY ACHIEVEMENT EVERY DAY is not ArenaNet’s concern. That’s a concern for the player themselves and hopefully their therapist. If that’s a goal the player has chosen to pursue, it’s up to them to either put in the time to achieve said goal, or (IMHO quite rationally) choose to pursue a different goal.

The only thing I can think of for ArenaNet to do would be to remove rewarding achievement points for dailies completed above and beyond the ones awarding the daily reward. Given the rewards associated with acquiring achievement points, the occasional “extra” point here and there tends to add up and aids everyone in that goal, I find it extremely unlikely that they would remove that little perk.

As others have said, the issue is with the term “completionist” and that hideously abused phrase “play the way you want”. Only the most trollish or the most foolish would believe that phrase indicates there are absolutely zero limits on what one would want.

TL;DR — Grow up. Seek therapy.

I use both the dodge button and double tap personally. I rarely if ever accidentally dodge, and I prefer not to chord if I can avoid it. Sometimes I use the single button dodge if I want a single press backwards dodge.

Well I appreciate the plaudits for my suggestion, but I would note this is not something we get to vote on. While I believe my suggestion has minimal impact, I know what code that’s been in constant development can look like. What seems like a simple fix ofttimes has unfortunate linkages to other systems and subsystems and can break things worse. It just seemed like what could possibly be the least intrusive method.

While I can imagine the nightmare of twisted things that would result in trying to roll it back, I can completely understand why it’s impossible to reverse this. However, I feel a little tweaked that the time spent on getting the monthly meta done was essentially lost.

I have a hopefully modest proposal in the hopes they’re reading this and paying attention. Why not just reduce the number of achievement categories for September to 2. Two monthlies were removed, and because of the way the events were running over a holiday weekend, it’s these two achievement categories that are most likely complete for a lot of people.

If the threshold for September was reduced to 2, people will not have lost time involved, people who got theirs done are not impacted. It can be flicked to 4 again for October.

Seems to me that would be a pretty easy thing to do, and addresses most of the mature complaints that I’ve read. (That is to say, I’m discounting a lot of the "WAH – Someone else got EXTRA this month. Really the only thing I consider a real problem is the time spent towards completion of the monthly meta.)

Your luck progress is in a small bar underneath your aggregate Magic Find percentage on the achievement panel.

It starts out as 100 points per level but then increases to 10xcurrent level to progress to the next level.

You get essences with fair regularity from salvaging, though as noted the bar increases. However just from saving up a couple days worth of box drops from events (and I wasn’t farming them religiously) I got up to 40%.

Hope that helps.

Well this is just all pure speculation based on interpreting bugs and results. While engineer has a lot of unique capabilities compared to other professions, and it does seem like at times there are things missed, hopefully when they get fixed, they get fixed correctly so as to be as generally broad as possible. I’m not particularly worried about ascended weapons myself. If I’d been doing the fix, I would have it read and calculate based on whatever weapon was being used, or whatever internal composite is used (in the case of up/downscaling in instances or zones). Let the code that creates that composite from the weapon be common across all professions and then each profession’s tool can be tweaked. Or something like that.

But we don’t know what the code base looks like. We don’t know how hurried they were (or not). We don’t know anything about their manpower, schedule, sick days, design process, etc.

Thus, it’s kind of pointless worrywarting in my view. There are things that would be great to fix. Hopefully they fix them in smart ways that lend themselves to future tweaks and growth without undue maintenance. Sometimes crap code is written too. It’s all very much an interative process.

That would kind of suck frankly. Here’s hoping they have a better solution.

We don’t know yet, though many of us have the same question as you asked.

I’ve been using 20/25/0/20/5 as a shout and 2H-centric build and finding it working pretty well, using GW and then secondary being pretty situational, Sc/Fc or Sw/Fc for ranged/melee, staff for mobility and tagging. Really wish there was a 3rd weapon swap honestly.

Atlas.9704:

Orion Star.3651:

Your all forgetting one detail that was said by the asura, she saw the eternal alchemy so maybe she was driven mad by seeing it!

Some get inspired, some go mad, others run.

Props from Gallifrey ;-).

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Remillard.8691:

(Also should be noted that Season 1 of Babylon 5 was considered pretty dry at times at best. Took a year or so for the story to get its sea legs. And this is in an industry that specifically went back 50 years for televised media, and back hundreds of years if you include theater media.)

We also have as examples?

- Seasons 1 & 2 of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” which were nowhere near as good as what followed. Also that last season was almost flat as well.
- Season 3 of Lost had major issues with pacing and plot revelations as well, which is what a lot of the complaints about story in Living Story remind me of.
- Season 1 of Firefly was uneven, but the acting made up for it. The later seasons were much much better. Wait . . .
- The X-Files as a show had so many dangling threads and plot points at one point it was much easier to just sever them and start somewhat fresh in the later seasons.
- Wheel of Time. That is all.

I’d tend to discount ST:TNG as a desired example because largely it was entirely episodic without a serious driving plot line. There were some recurring character types but did not have much beyond the story of the week, or possibly a two parter. There were consequences from some stories (Picard’s encounter with the Borg) but it didn’t really drive plot, and was more of a minor complication at the best of times (ignoring the movies).

I would generally place GW2’s Living Story at about this level. Episodic content, desireably but not always linked with prior story elements.

I think they would LIKE to be in a place like Babylon 5 or ST:DS9 which did have some very strong overarching plot lines. But again, B5 had a single point design person who knew well in advance pretty much the entire story. And DS9 took several years to mature into its plot arc — before that point it was a stationary TNG style show.

Agreed, Lost was a plot mess. It tried. There were elements that were quite good, other stuff that was just haphazard, and basically wallowed around, and just sort of expired on the table with no clear vision.

X-Files I really don’t remember with any clarity. I remember it being primarily episodic with some recurring themes/characters.

And again, I don’t know that any book bears enough resemblance to the reality of a mamorpaguh to be a viable comparison. A book is a linear experience, highly controlled, single creative source, with relatively easy editorial control.

Egon Vidar.9125:

In the end, I think you missed my point, and many other people’s.

Don’t conflate not agreeing with your point with missing the point.

I suspect it will be just an agree to disagree sort of thing here. I think it’s an acceptable development, an acceptable character presented in an acceptable manner. If they had the foresight 2-3 years ago to know they would want or need this development at this time, committed the resources to implanting all the cute little clues needed — that would be phenomenal.

However, if this is what you need to avoid calling these story developments as contrived, then I think you are going to be sorely disappointed pretty much forever. You said you understood my points about the medium. If that’s truly so, then you have to realize there’s no way to plan for every eventuality. There’s no way, with a development team of hundreds of people, coders and artists and all those people who help make this a reality, that you are going to know everything you need in advance — especially not with a medium that is this young. One of my favored shows in recent past was Babylon 5, a show that was hailed as having an extremely strong and vibrant story arc, with all those things you listed as being desireable (basically boiling down to cleverl foreshadowing) still had more or less a SINGLE author. JMS personally wrote approximately 80-90% of the scripts himself. It wasn’t a team effort. And this effort is quite a bit more difficult due to the non-linear nature of a player character’s path through the world, development time constraints, playtime/consumption constraints, and so forth.

(Also should be noted that Season 1 of Babylon 5 was considered pretty dry at times at best. Took a year or so for the story to get its sea legs. And this is in an industry that specifically went back 50 years for televised media, and back hundreds of years if you include theater media.)

All of that being said, ANet’s story folks did try to put in some foreshadowing that the person exists. (Don’t recall the exact examples, but they’re up on the page here someplace.) The attempt to build up characters is there given that they cannot possibly have had the assets in place to begin with without having had this planned in advance of when they actually need it. They are making this up as they go along and they’re doing something no MMO has attempted to do thus far at the pace they’re doing it at.

Does that raise them above criticism? Of course not. You are as entitled to your opinion on them as I am. Is there room for improvement? Sure, there’s always room to get better. The improvement over Southsun is noticeable and appreciated. However, I think it should provide some context for the criticism though. Episodic content in a medium that requires assets to be prepared well in advance in a non-linear medium in a monthly real-time development environment?

Well maybe I’m willing to cut them a little more slack I guess.

And for the record, I do think her dialog is just fine for a crazy person. Quite willing to entertain specific examples though and listen to why that isn’t the talk of a crazy person.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

“What do you take me for? I would not have given you any of this information if you had a chance of stopping it. I started the destruction of Rata Sum thirty-five minutes ago.”

Hey, that’s where I keep my stuff!

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Remillard.8691:

Nike.2631:

These invasion are part of the permanent content.

And how precisely did you come to that conclusion, based on all the Living Story Permanent Content™ that’s been released to date? ;-)

It’s been said the invasions are staying, but will be less frequent once this chapter is done.

Ahh, well that was an unfortunate and silly thing to promise. Though if that’s precisely what they said, it might be worthwhile to parse that in the way one might analyze the promises of a genie… or a dragon ;-). Perhaps they become less frequent once this chapter is done. Perhaps they are gone completely after the next chapter. I dunno. I’d hate to see them become 100% permanent, unless there’s an exceedingly good reason for that to be the case.

Nike.2631:

These invasion are part of the permanent content.

And how precisely did you come to that conclusion, based on all the Living Story Permanent Content™ that’s been released to date? ;-)

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Or the fact the zerg exists to handle her invasions

To be fair, the zerg are from a universe several stories over, and she might not have heard of them ;-).

TheKillerAngel.3596:

I have heard of bomb threats, but if you want to maximize casualties, I don’t think one would state their intentions so blatantly.

Thus, the character’s current primary goal is not to maximize casualties.

Boosted by a Molten Alliance jetpack I think. There wasn’t the rather significant boom from the rest of the explosives piled there that I would have anticipated had she ignited them for the escape.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

However . . .

What should be done is some way of finding things out without getting it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Other people, clues, journals . . . sure, they might not be entirely accurate (“She graduated from all three colleges! No way was that a clerical error or a database hack.”) . . .

Agreed, and from the coy comments from Dev Stein above, I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll see something along those lines. We’ll just see how well they execute :-).

TheKillerAngel.3596:

She loudly announces the fact that she has bombs in Divinity’s Reach during her attack. A smart terrorist wouldn’t say that.

You’ve never heard of a call-in bomb threat? Announcing you have the capability for destruction is a time-honored terror tactic. Regardless of to what degree the actual bombs (if any) succeed is usually secondary to the main goal that you made someone do what you want them to do. Namely, react to you.

Quite obviously if she wanted to destroy Divinity’s Reach, she’s quite capable. The entire watchknight militia could have been activated without a peep, coupled with hidden bombs, and underground destruction from Molten Alliance. The entire city could have been reduced to a charnel house in a day. It wasn’t, thus that isn’t her immediate goal. What that goal is remains to be seen, and as noted, we’ll see how ANet executes on the rest of the story.

I was pleased to see the downed mechanism from PvP come into play in PvE content. A nice already-present way to add a little more depth to the fight (do I take the time to down it, or do I start hacking on the next guy?). I wanted to see some PvP finishers in play though rather than just the banner staking.

Egon Vidar.9125:

Remillard.8691:

I’ve never really gotten the impression that this was ever intended to be, nor would it make a great platform for, something with the nuance, subtlety, and plot twists of an HBO drama series.

Asking for decent writing that isn’t contrived is not the same as asking for writing of the caliber typically seen in mature adult dramas aired on that particular network, such as, say, Oz. That’s very, very different and I don’t believe a single person in this thread is asking for that.

It’s fiction, it’s all “contrived”. Frankly, that’s one of those phrases that gets thrown around and it’s entirely subjective based on their notion of how “real people” work. I don’t give it a lot of credence as a meaningful critique. “Decent dialog” as defined by what precisely? How many brilliant psychopaths have you sampled for realistic conversational gambits? I also happen to hate the term “wooden” for actors playing characters. Sometimes it’s appropriate, other times it’s the character itself who has reason to be affectless.

Anyhow, that’s the impression I get from most of the criticism here. You do not have a linear narrative with ample opportunity for backstory or internal monologue like a book. Using theater is a closer analog but that is still a linear narrative with a captive audience. Traditional RPG is another analog but completely misses the scale — a GM’s players are often far more under his or her thumb than any of the folks in GW2. Storytelling is a completely different beast in this genre that is still, relatively speaking, extremely young.

So, let’s break this down a bit. We have a deranged, extremely capable and morally bankrupt character in Scarlet Briar. She’s there for fun, mayhem, and presumably some sort of actual deeper motivation for going ballistic on the world. However, why in the world would she tell us that? As far as she’s concerned, initially, our player characters are nobodies (capable and well geared nobodies, but off her radar). An argument could be made about why our player characters who have gone off and done awesome stuff versus undead dudes is a nobody, but we’ll set that aside for a moment as it’s not specific to this particular story and more of an endemic issue with MMORPGs, the personal storyline, etc. Essentially it has to be taken as read that we’re nobodies to her at first.

She plans her game. Attacks. Makes an attempt on the Queen (foiled rather nicely by Anise in what I thought was some very good characterizations and interactions between her, Logan, and Jennah.) Fails that, but goes on to have a merry time with the successes she has. Some rather well geared and skilled guys show up and screw up her lair.

Where in there is any motivation for her to open her gob and spout some expository bullkitten about why she’s doing what she’s doing? There isn’t and kudos to ANet for not doing THAT. Yes, she does a rocket pack getaway but we are definitely on her radar now per that final conversation and I imagine we’ll be getting back to her in due time. What she does do is play verbal games (and I can’t give enough credit to Ms. Strong). Why not? It amuses her to do that. Why is that contrived? What is decent dialog for a chatty nutcase who really don’t think there’s anything to worry about?

I think the basic criticism boils down to “Scarlet just isn’t MY kind of psychopath.” Fine, I guess. The Joker/Harlequin parallel is very deep and there could be an argument about it being overdone. Still, the reason that archetype comes back again and again is that the mind is fascinated with madness, that complete fracture of intelligence and morality. What is the cause? What are the perceptible characteristics of someone so afflicted? Presumably so that at least unconsciously we could recognize it in others and take action, or more darkly, possibly recognize it in ourselves. It’s definitely an attractive sort of villain and provides a great deal of flexibility in storytelling, particularly when you DO have highly capable and extremely well geared heroes running around.

I think they’ve done pretty well this time around. I look forward to the development of the character. If the character does NOT develop, then I think there will be time for far more criticism. As an example, I think Canach was done really terribly. Even with the various stories and accounts throughout Southsun, I never came away with a real understanding of what the point was. And the ultimate event there was terrible and explained nothing at all (and didn’t even have the voice acting.)

In Scarlet we have an antagonist that’s entertaining, colorful, and capable. That’s a pretty decent start.

yski.7642:

I haven’t studied this “Scarlet” yet, but where exactly does the information regarding her college studies come from? You aren’t going to just believe someone claiming to have joined our colleges, are you?

Emissary Vorpp confirmed after the attack that she had been a brilliant student at not one, but all of the Colleges. It’s not simply self-aggrandizement.

On the whole, I think Scarlet Briar is fine. I’ve never really gotten the impression that this was ever intended to be, nor would it make a great platform for, something with the nuance, subtlety, and plot twists of an HBO drama series. I’m interested in how the way Asura Colleges work and it’s curious that she attended not one, but all three and not even being Asura. But maybe we’ve setup some diversity scholarships or something like that :-).

And as others have noted, top notch voice talent there, but you knew that already with Ms. Strong. I did that mini dungeon three times (working out the kinks in the “not dying” achievement) and caught more of the quips she made each time and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Hecuter.6274:

You know what would have made a better villain?

Imagine the queen’s cat ( Shadow ) disappearing during the Jubilee and then turns out Scarlet – who’s a human mesmer – was maquerading as the cat listening in on the queen’s meetings all this time…

You’re angling for a Chauncey von Snuffles III conspiracy here, aren’t you? ;-)

I did the mini-dungeon with two others. I thought it was fun. The voice acting is very amusing. The fights were more than tank and spank, less than headbashing against desk. Good balance.

Difficult? No. But that’s alright. I really don’t think these are supposed to be difficult dungeons. You want your difficulty, go pick up a billion gambits and do your one-on-one with the gauntlet folks, and you’re welcome to it. This was a story development with getting to know the antagonist’s personality.

Really the only quibble I’ve got with it was that the “don’t die” achievement was actually “don’t ever even become downed, nor any of your teammates become downed”. The achievement text could have been more explanatory about this — or else the achievement is bugged and downing counts as death for it.

This is MILES better than the Canach fight so I’m pleased. I think ANet is developing a repetoire of different dungeon/instance fights for different purposes. Canach/Scarlet ones were supposed to be primarily story based (Canach’s case terrible, Scarlet’s case decent). Dungeons like Molten Facility/Aetherblade Retreat are a bit more involved and a mix of story, plus flavorful ensemble work. Then for you not-satisfied-until-you-die-4-million-times types, there’s the gauntlet stuff. Everyone has something they prefer (for me, the former two are fine — taking a pass on gauntlet). It’s entirely okay for an event to not be all things to all people.

TheKillerAngel.3596:

Avatara.1042:

/rollseyes

The internet killed that term.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainSue

Really, Scarlet so far “pretty much shows up as an author’s wish fulfillment to just be evil.”

Not necessarily. Using the same TV Tropes description: Probably the rarest type of Sue, as Villains are always given great powers and abilities to make their inevitable downfall more sweet. A true Villain Sue will probably never have one, however, and even if he does it may be via Only The Author Can Save Them Now rather than any non-kitten Pull method.

Presumably we WILL bring her to some sort of justice. If we do that but she escapes to wage war another day (a la Joker over and over and over again) then she could very well be in the VillainSue category.

Not over and over again like the Zenith weapons. You’ll get a package that when used will expand to six different skin items. Each of these may be applied to a piece of gear once, and then they are consumed. To get the skin onto another piece of gear, it will take one of the transmutation crystals (assuming level 80 kit).

Yep. I thought immediately of this thread. The colleges are open to more than asura. It could be that they only take the most promising of other races since we don’t hear mention of it frequently, but at least in one particular case they have.

I’m looking forward to a lot more backstory on Scarlet Briar.

Alleluia.1320:

When it gets to the “lessons to teach/Divinity’s Reach” part it throws off the rythm for me. The rest seems good, though. A fumble on the writer’s part or intentional hint at Scarlet being a calculating, but still crazy woman? Not sure.

I’m guessing fumble. It’s been a long time since high school english and I’m not a poetry expert by any means, but because of the situation, it really ought to be a sing song chant, so the stress and rhythm ought to be consistent. After rereading it and thinking about it a bit, I guess it’s a little better than I thought. There are still things that bug me though.

Tick tock goes the clock
It’s al-most time for time to stop

Aside from clock and stop not being full rhymes, the rhythm seems right. The first line doesn’t have the same number of stresses but I can forgive that on count of it being the first line, and “Tick tock” being … er whatever that word is that means it sounds like the object or effect it’s describing. Anyhow, very singsong. You can imagine a little girl voice chanting along. I think counting syllables is probably beyond analysis here and I was never very good at sorting that out anyway. But stress rhythms are natural to hear.

Some-thing you all must un-der-stand
Your world is built on fog and sand

Putting the stress on the second syllable on “Something” feels unnatural, but it’s workable as long as you keep the sing-song in mind. It might have been better to write it as “Some thing” rather than “Something” which very definitely has the emphasis on “Some”.

You’re out of time, your jig is done
It’s time for Scarlet to have her fun

And here I am imagining their writer cursing the design team for giving the antagonist a two syllable name, because “Scarlet” completely screws up the line. The best you can do is try to slur Scarlet into a single syllable, but it’s not a name that does that very easily.

She has some hard lessons to teach
To the people of Divinity’s Reach

And here, you’re right. It’s completely broken at this point. I’m not even going to mark stress patterns because there’s no way to read this the way the prior lines have been read. I can’t even come up with a good alternate. You either go past tense with taught which doesn’t rhyme with reach, or you abandon the ‘*each’ rhyme and go with something else thematic. And referring to Scarlet again is going to be problematic every time it occurs because it’s Scar-let and never Scar-let.

So mark the date in perm-’nent ink
The hour is late-r than you think

“Permanent” and “later” are awkward as hell but you can kind of fudge past it with some slurring.

On the twent-ieth day she’ll start her games
And warm her hands over Kry-ta’s flames!

And again “twentieth” is awkward and “over” is awkward. “On” might have been better on the latter. I’m not sure there’s a good solution for 20th.

So overall, I’m forced to agree it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but there are still a lot of rough patches.

I concur with the 6k notes. I had a mix of berserker and knight’s and several weeks ago switched out the final remaining pieces (about when the Magitech stuff hit, because I skinned my berserk stuff all Magitech.) Even with Altruism runes, I frequently see 6k+. Haven’t seen 7k but depending on where I am (dungeon scale) and supporting buffs, at level 80 6k is quite doable.

Not exactly lore related, but does the scan and meter of the poem bug anyone else? The first couplet seems correct. After that, it’s just a jumble of syllables that happen to rhyme on the end.

I’m not asking for much here. I would happily throw myself off the cliff over and over again to get that final dive for the achievement if I didn’t have to run in from the freaking Broadhollow waypoint every. single. time. I die. I would happily climb the structure every time, perfecting each jump if I didn’t have to run in from the freaking Broadhollow waypoint every. single.time I die.

It’s done on many other jumping puzzles. It doesn’t detract from the difficulty of the jumps. The penalty for failing a jump is still doing the entire puzzle over again. It feels like insult to injury when the penalty includes a substantial run back into the puzzle discovery area.

If I had my druthers, I’d put it down on the rock area just above the water puddle.

Thanks for considering my suggestion.

There’s a daily that will give you credit. Just check that one out. If you need another one, look tonight at reset.

As an Asura guardian of the College of Statics, and an adherent to the fundamentals of the Eternal Alchemy, it’s not faith, but an understanding as solid as bedrock that one must stand with one’s compatriots, to be the bulwark against which the turmoil of the world crashes against, and is repelled.

Kirschwasser.3972:

Noobulon VIII.

Been there. Decent cheese danishes but nothing to write home about.

Well I can’t stay away from feedback posts usually. Gotta add my two copper’s worth.

Overall I can see where OP is coming from though generally I think it was a bit over-dramatized. I have been on development projects where you start out with a goal, and the route to the goal gradually deviates for very good reasons. So this “Manifesto” or whatever that gets spoken of — yes, grand goals. Then reality hits. As an engineer, I’ve long practice in walking this lines between requirements, desirements (yes it’s sort of a word that gets bandied about in documents), and optional goals.

I think ANet has a solid foundation in which to create something really interestingly fun and I think it’s actually moving in that direction and they’re learning in the process. The developer’s comment here was particularly telling. To paraphrase: “We added [stuff]… didn’t get feedback.” So, lessons learned. It’s very hard to add random stuff to such a diverse and complex world and have your players know that it was special. I’ve got 3 80’s and many more on the way and I don’t level by crafting (under the notion that if I can’t stand to play them to 80, why am I bothering to have a level 80 of that profession in the first place?) I KNOW I haven’t seen everything. Hell I’ve got 3 Asura and I think I ran across the Captain Planet golem joke for the first time in a year! Thus ANet found out they need to put up some indicators if they are doing more than tweaking.

Flame and Frost was a solid undertaking. They learned about pacing and storytelling here. Too fast (Southsun #1) and people don’t have time to complete it. Too slow (F&F Phase 1 — Sign repair) and it gets dull and pointless.

Southsun #2 — Interesting pacing development, but they learned they really need work on character development, and storytelling methods

Aetherblade / Mai Trin / Detective Chick : Pacing has settled down. The standard seems to be to keep things available for overlapping 1 month periods, thus the 2 week cycle. I think this is a really good pace. Makes things EASILY achievable on a time scale, but keeps story progressing. Better storytelling.

Queen’s Jubilee — Overall I find this update a bit meh, but I’m solidly in the camp of take it or leave it without feeling the OCD need to do everything. I did the story and the little pie stuff. I completed it all in under 4 hours. No great time involved. The story is a little meh, but hoping for a little more action soon. Zero interest in banging my head against weird bosses where I have to pay to enter, so fine. I’ll go do something else.

And that’s really the key. People are forcing themselves to do things for reasons they can’t even seem to adequately explain.

And now the next development sprint meeting is upon me so I will just leave this here.