Guild Wars 2

Yolanda Hardass.8045:

Thank you for the clarification, I actually see where I went wrong here. The only switching is the actual maps, and not to the lobby subgroup, you just drag yourself there.

Exactly. The lobby group is only there to act as a temporary holding group so that people can swap groups without them getting all muddied up. You want everybody in group four to actually be in map four or else it gets extremely confusing when someone tries to taxi in to that map.

Cynova.7406:

Why only raids? If we can get legendary weps in a variety of regular pve content why not the legendary armor? Not everyone likes raids and a top tier of equipment shouldn’t be exclusive only to those who want to raid.

Will there be other options and ways to acquire legendary armor is this the only way?

Because raids are so popular that Anet need to use every possible method to try and corral people into them. Do you want legendary armour? Better do raids! Do you want spirit shards from experience in Heart of Thorns maps? Better do raids! It just strikes me as a little pathetic. If the content was as popular and desired as they make out, why do they need to lure players in with every single reward, both large and small, that they can find?

Kalavier.1097:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Technically, Edwin, Lazarus said that the Krytan throne is inconsequential.

Which could mean his goal is to literally obliterate all of Kryta.

My theory is he’s after the dragons.

He said they are after more virtuous pursuits, he’s been on the edge of nothing for a long time.

Maybe he’s decided this time around instead of fleeing, he’s going to fight? My prediction is Lazzy and his white mantle go after the dragons.

I tend to agree that Lazarus wants to take down the dragons. Although, I doubt it’s for any actually virtuous purpose. I think he just wants their magic. We know he’s capable of absorbing large amounts of magical energy and coming out unscathed, I think he wants to be standing right next to an Elder Dragon when one dies.

I like that a workaround for this problem exists. I don’t like that a workaround is needed.

This is a basic game mechanic and it shouldn’t be locked behind raids. Especially since raiders constitute such a small group of players. The raid masteries should either be unlockable without a boss kill or not count towards the experience bar progression while they’re locked. At no point should players be forced to raid to unlock a basic game mechanic like gaining experience.

Vacheron.9870:

I told myself: I need to get my gold back from this scrawny Skritt.

This is the exact point that you messed up. Don’t ever chase your losses.

When it comes to gambling your ideal mindset should be set yourself a certain amount of money that you’re going to lose. Just pretend the money is already the establishment’s when you walk through the door. If you’re not comfortable with the thought of losing that money then straight up don’t gamble. This way if you end up getting lucky then that’s great. But if you end up losing then you’ve set yourself a threshold to minimise your losses to a figure you’re comfortable with and won’t feel compelled to chase your losses.

How does the Tyrian calender work?

According to Justiciar Bauer’s notes the Pact fleet overflew their encampment and were brought down by Mordremoth on 30 and 31 Zephyr respectively. He also notes that Mordremoth was killed on 74 Zephyr. Presuming that he wrote that entry the exact day that Mordremoth died then we finally have a concrete figure for how long the Maguuma campaign lasted: 43 days.

But that’s just straight subtraction of dates and depending on how the Tyrian calender is organised, that might not give an accurate figure. So how is the calender structured?

There are no accessories and only one ring in this LS episode because they want to bring them in as rewards in later episodes.

Ranael.6423:

No I think you are reading too much between the lines. The comment on reddit was more meant as :
“We have a difficulty scale in the game but the steps are not equally distributed. We find there is a huge gap between Fractals and raid. We would like to use our Fractal “scalability” to offer players, who find Fractals too easy and want challenging content but don’t want to get into raids, a suitable spot in term of challenge. This is our view on the expandability of FOTM: finding the right challenge for every players".

It is actually how they want to not force people to do raid to feel challenged.

Anet_Ben

There is a problem in Guild Wars in that there is no real stepping stone to raids. A lot of mechanics in Swampland and Chaos Isles are more raid-like now because we want top tier fractal players to be exposed to more difficult encounters.

The statement isn’t “there’s no scalability of difficulty between fractals and raids,” nor is it, “we want to offer difficult encounters to people who don’t want to raid.” The statement is, “… there is no real stepping stone to raids.” The implication is that the end of the path is raids and Fractals are just a stop on the road to that destination rather than being its own standalone content.

Ranael.6423:

Tapioca.9062:

This feels like the exact raid or die mentality so many people were worried would creep into the game with the introduction of raids. Similarly, I saw a dev post on Reddit stating that high level Fractals were being redesigned to act as a stepping stone towards raids in terms of difficulty. Does everything in the game have to revolve around raids in some way now? Is this what the game’s about?

out of topic but why is it bad that they are creating a ramp in difficulty from Fractal lvl 1 open world to raid?
On top of that it is not remotely true, I found some T4 Fractals harder than raid, for different reasons than I can find raid difficult but still.

The increase in difficulty itself isn’t the issue. It’s the stated rationale behind it, namely for the Fractals to serve as a stepping stone towards raids. Rather than treating Fractals as their own thing it’s been treated as a way to facilitate raids. This effectively makes the Fractal content design sub-ordinate to raids. Which is a disconcerting precedent for those of us that do not want to raid especially coupled with the raiding masteries requirement for the experience bar spirit shards. Because after Fractals, what’s the next game mode or basic game mechanic to serve as a way to try and shoo people into raids?

This feels like the exact raid or die mentality so many people were worried would creep into the game with the introduction of raids. Similarly, I saw a dev post on Reddit stating that high level Fractals were being redesigned to act as a stepping stone towards raids in terms of difficulty. Does everything in the game have to revolve around raids in some way now? Is this what the game’s about?

What makes it even more confusing is that Guild Wars 1 had this. You could lose your connection and have a grace period to log back in and reconnect to your instance.

If the legendary journey merchants aren’t displaying faces for you, you should probably report that as a bug. I don’t think that is an intended state.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of White Mantle activity going down in the Deldrimor Front. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve occupied the area in force. It was also one of the areas where we found Seers which would be of interest to the Mantle if the Mursaat are rising again. The last thing they’d want is another batch of plucky heroes getting infused against Spectral Agony.

Beyond that, it would be the east path to tie everything into the on-going theme of Glint’s Legacy since this region was where the Brotherhood of the Dragon were located. It would make sense for her to have tucked something of importance away around here.

Scarlet coming back from the dead really would be the perfect cherry cap on the Mary Sue sundae that was her entire existence.

Are we honestly surprised that the profession that can turn people into Moas have some capacity to physically alter people?

I just ran one of characters down there and got the Thistle Reed waypoint without any issues.

I’m not sure what the issue is here, mauried, but it’s apparently not a consistent, global bug.

HiddenNick.7206:

Can we have other metal nodes than Mithril in 80 areas?

It’s as inconvenient as it’s just plain silly that Mithril is the most common metal in the entire game… It drops from all the Heavy trash you find. And all the areas that are filled with players have only Mithril nodes. It’s becoming a weed in this sense…

The current state of metal nodes also encourages farming as it’s only way to acquire large amounts of other metal types.

Fix it! Thanks!

Done! You can now find orichalcum nodes in level 80 areas.

You’re welcome.

Pretty sure you have to be in combat for it to activate.

BobbyStein.2315:

Erukk.1408:

BobbyStein.2315:

That stated, if it’s not in the game it’s not canon! Feel free to RP, though.

I feel a great disturbance in the lore, as if numerous out of game lore articles and interviews cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has just happened.

Nah. That’s just me putting an asterisk on my “behind the scenes” comment. I don’t believe we’ve ever explored what happened to Koss after Nightfall. If we ever decide to do something, I want people to understand that the final outcome might be different from what I said here. Just setting expectations is all.

Personally, I’d love see some exploration in that direction. Even if it only takes the form of books in the Priory stuffed with exposition. I was gutted when the Elona portion of Guild Wars: Beyond ended up never happening. It would just be nice to finally find out what became of all our old friends.

What would you even buy them with? Airship cargo is the primary way to get the area resource. If you bought the crowbars with area resource then you’d just need a few initial crowbars and then you’d be set because your returns would enable you to continually buy more. That’s just poor design.

The current system works fine. Possibly better than the other map systems given how difficult it is to actually run out of crowbars.

The Dreamer has become my next legendary project mostly because of how annoying it is. And if I put it on my Ranger I can shoot like a wide spread of rainbow unicorns at people. What’s not to love?

I miss those two NPCs near the crafting stations that wouldn’t stop talking about the LA sewage system.

Is Steve really a bad guy? The only races we’ve heard of him bothering directly are Largos, Krait and Karka. And let’s be honest, who here hasn’t killed dozens of Largos, Krait and Karka? As far as my minimal research shows, we have no accounts of Quaggans being attacked by DSD minions. Rather the Quaggan diaspora was due to the Krait being forced out of their lands and the Quaggan having to flee for the Krait.

So let’s not prejudge a dragon before it’s shown its true colours. I, for one, welcome our new draconic friend and his sclerite minions. There can be peace in our time.

If they’re lowering the caps for paired worlds how does that help anybody? If you’re pairing a world that has the numbers to reliably fill a WvW map on their own and then pairing them with a world that doesn’t then you’ve raised the total number of players with access to the map but are subsequently lowering how many people can be in the map?

This just seems like the sort of plan that will lead to longer queues and bickering solely by its design.

Dav.9152:

Werdx.2059:

So,point of this is?…

Point is to make a funny joke about the ease of leveling now days (lvl80 boosts, long-lasting XP buffs, etc).

I still love running around all the old starter zones.

I enjoy running around in the starter zones but I don’t enjoy leveling in due the butchery that the NPE did to low level characters. Having to level up to use different attacks or unlock basic profession mechanics is just tedious and awful on every level. So when I make a new character I’ll use boosters and then go play in the starter zones just because I want to have my profession mechanics and skills available.

I don’t have the exact file size here but it was a surprisingly fast download for me. About 6,000 files but it was downloaded in a few minutes. Remember, this isn’t a content patch, it’s a balance patch. So there aren’t a lot of new, huge files that need to be downloaded.

Dragon’s Stand

- Increased the timer after victory from 15 to 25 minutes.
- Noxious pods now have a glow that is visible through terrain.
- The Whispers Keepers now also sell boxes for each of the Leystone armor pieces in exchange for Ley-Line Crystals, Piles of Auric Dust, Airship Parts, and Crystalline Ore.
- Noxious pods now spawn near the forward camps and advance camps when they are captured by allied forces. Additional pods will become available for each additional group of allies that the players obtain.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Everything else is wonderful too, but this just knocked out a lot of painful grinding.

These changes to make everything give more experience sounds great. Unfortunately, it does absolutely nothing for me considering that I already have my Core Tyria and Heart of Thorns masteries completed.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Lol Necrotic. I love people like you. Cause playing a game and trying to enjoy yourself is all about research right? Lets do some work so we can play a game.

Yet that’s exactly what the OP is proposing. The only difference is that he’s trying to shift the work onto other people. As if everybody around him has an onus to specifically go out of their way to use long forms for abbreviations on the off chance that he might not know what they are. Making every single other person do work for you instead of you doing work yourself seems like a heck of a lot more work overall.

I get the impression that LS3 was meant to follow directly on the heels of the HoT story but given the long delays in release it means the HoT ending feels flat and anti-climactic since there’s no follow up to immediately jump into.

Nadha.6097:

You used lol, didn’t you OP?
so, how is that different?
If y o u know what it means, its OK to use it?
;)

I agree. While myself, and others, know that lol stands for Laughing Octopus LOL, it’s only fair that it be annotated at least once in every thread it appears in for better acclimation of new users.

With Scarlet’s purported insanity Anet had a prime opportunity to create a nuanced and unpredictable character with some great depth and characterisation as you see how she struggles with her mental state.

Instead of that, however, we were given the Ooky-Kooky WunderSylvari who is just the bestest ever at everything and despite apparently being functionally insane, it doesn’t impair her performance or productivity at all. I mean, when it comes to forging alliances between six highly xenophobic and malignant groups, I probably wouldn’t choose someone whose mental state is explosively turbulent to negotiate and forge those alliances. But that’s just me, right? Scarlet apparently had no problems on this front because Scarlet is gonna Scarlet. Nor apparently were there any issues creating technology the likes of which Tyria has never seen. Because why wouldn’t Scarlet be the world’s best inventor, best negotiator and best strategic military planner (she raised how many armies, invaded how many places and successfully achieved her ultimate strategic goal) in all of Tyria. And all that while being insane.

What a burden insanity proved to be for Scarlet, just imagine how many productive hours she spent mailing whacky bombs to adventurers and how much she could have achieved if she’d not had that compulsion.

Sarcasm aside, Scarlet was a god awful character. In tabletop gaming circles she’s what one would call a Fishmalk. In Vampire: The Masquerade, players can choose to play a Malkavian vampire and one of traits of Malkavians are that they are mentally ill. Instead of approaching the subject with some kind of dignity or seriousness and creating a strong character with realistic mental issues, many players instead opted to play their character as the kind of kooky character who would be liable to smack someone with a fish and dash off hooting. Hence, a Fishmalk. Which is exactly what Scarlet’s personality was. This alone would be bad enough without the addition of the Scarlet Is The Best At Everything Ever elements. Scarlet as an entire concept is the kind of character that you shouldn’t even see created by an author of low grade fanfiction let alone a professional writing team.

I ran into the same problem. The Exotic level packs are all Soulbound on Acquire so you have to be careful who you open the achievement rewards chest with. The Ascended level packs are Accountbound on Acquire which makes me wonder why they even structured it this way. I appreciate that Exotic tend to be soulbound, but it seems so unnecessary for three items. Especially if a person is likely to unlock them on already established characters who are likely to have a better tier of gear already, which is the exact problem I found myself in. What’s the point of an item that’s functionally useless because you can’t give it to a character who can benefit from it?

I’m not even asking for the items to not be soulbound, they just need to be soulbound on use instead of acquire. That way a character who needs the item could actually use it and would bring it into line with the rest of the exotic HoT rewards.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return of the GW1 Aureate Longbow skin. There is an Aureate Longbow skin in GW2 but it’s ugly as sin and nothing like the GW1 version.

That’s certainly something alright. Maybe it’s for the best that the new legendary sets were indefinitely suspended. What a note to go out on.

For serious though, I think Garm will turn up again as an important part of LS3. Namely, because I don’t think Eir is going to stay dead. The Maguuma Druids are referred to as spirits who shed their bodies to become one with nature. Eir, as a Norn Ranger, has a strong affinity to both nature and spirits. So I think she’s coming back as a Druid. I also don’t think it’s incidental that the GW2 Druid elite spec is oriented around healing given this line of thinking.

So Garm will realise Eir has returned and track her down and Braham will go searching for Garm and end up being reunited with Eir.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the Dreamer, but let’s be honest here, people worked long and hard for that Legendary. So while I understand where people are coming from, if I had to side on whether to change it or not I’d probably vote nay.

Not enough mastery points in a wide enough area of content. Being forced to do Adventures for mastery points means that you directly couple in the flaws of the Adventure system into the mastery system. You look at the Adventures system and you see the problems like overtuned content, bugs, over-reliance on RNG and timed content with mechanics where lag will destroy your score. Instead of this just being a problem with optional content it becomes a problem with your core progression mechanic when you tie to masteries. I got enough points to max out my masteries and then never touched Adventures again.

XP becomes worthless after you max masteries. Which is completely bonkers for a progression system. Players should continue to gain experience after completing masteries and receive something for filling an experience bar. I don’t care at all what the player receives but it should be something. One of the best suggestions I’ve seen was Mystic Coins since there’s so few ways to get them in game. But again, I don’t care what the reward is, just that there should be one.

Many of the masteries aren’t actually good. They generally act as gates in two senses: The first that they gate off content that you may or may not care about. For instance, nobody really cares about being able to fight the ally champions beyond the collection items they give. “Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever. The other kind of content they gate off is in regards to where you can go in the environment. Unlocking Itzel Poison Lore and having new areas to go to was actually kind of neat. I wouldn’t like to see this concept over-applied but the way it was done in this instance, I actually enjoyed. The second way that they act as gates is in regards to other masteries. There are a lot of interesting masteries locked behind masteries that nobody cares about. If players were given the option to choose which order to unlock masteries then you know that there are a bunch that would just never get unlocked at all. So from the perspective of a progression system this isn’t great. Your progress should be meaningful, you should be excited, like, “Yeah! This new thing I’ve unlocked is awesome” instead of “Okay, so I’ve unlocked this thing nobody cares about and now I’m one step closer to the awesome thing I actually want. Yay.”

The primary take away is that as a progression system it’s heavily flawed. Trying to force players to do things they don’t enjoy is a great way to create disgruntled players who burn out and quit your game. Having a progression system that makes one of your currencies irrelevant is a great way to make players avoid content related to that. If I have to sit down and ask myself, “Do I really want to go play in the open world and do events that grant me no experience and pathetic loot when I could be doing more rewarding content like SPvP or Fractals” then you’ve created a system that devalues your own existing content. But considering what Anet did to dungeons, maybe that was their intended goal here. The final thing to focus on is that with meaningful progression the keyword is meaningful. It shouldn’t feel like a chore or busywork or unrewarding. Every milestone achieved should actually feel meaningful instead of feeling like filler that takes you closer to something actually worth having.

Dawdler.8521:

Berelious.3290:

NCSoft is the publisher and parent company of ArenaNet. That being said, they have pretty much allowed ANet free reign over the development of their games, even going so far as to buy back their shares from Nexon in order to avoid outside influence.

Afaik NCSoft let go of the publisher role for GW2. Its fully in Anets hands now. Still parent company though.

This. Anet have moved to self-publishing after Heart of Thorns which makes me suspect that NCSoft leaned on Anet to push HoT out the door before it was finished. So while Anet is still an owned subsidiary of NCSoft it means that Anet have more say in how, and when, they release their products.

Brokensunday.4098:

Garm is looking for magdaer, we are going to have a sword wielding dog. No for real he is somewere in the jungle prob gonna see him in s3

I can see it happening. I picture Garm retrieving Magdaer but the blade has been corrupted by Adelbern’s madness and drives Garm wild. He changes his name to Sif and becomes a raid boss.

ArchonWing.9480:

The only problem is the map system that requires you to LFG, because people constantly taxi until maps get full while everyone unfortunate enough to arrive off the “proper” time can locked out into empty maps that close themselves anyways. Also, resetting your participation to 0% is frustrating.

In terms of difficulty, maybe a few mobs could use retuning, but they’re honestly sort of okay.

The exception to all this is the obsession with gating exploration and adventures (and thus progression) behind metas; DS is guilty of the former while VB is very guilty of the later. But that’s not a matter of difficulty, it’s just annoying.

Exactly this. The major problems that HoT maps have are due to everything being set on hard timers. It means you have one or two meta maps full to the brim with players and then a bunch of mostly empty shards where there aren’t enough players to push the meta before the timers run out so the players don’t bother and go elsewhere.

The two big fixes that HoT maps could see would be to move away from hard timers in favour a system more like the Silverwastes event progression system and to introduce a districting system like Guild Wars 1 had that lets players choose and fill maps without needing to taxi via LFG. If you give players choices they’ll pick the most optimal choice for themselves which means you don’t need an automated system trying to shuffle players around in the hopes they’ll end up where they want. Just let them choose to be where they want.

Mechanically speaking, my main thought is that if a Guild vs Guild mode ever actually drops then the crystal will be treated as a victory condition. Instead of having a Guild Lord to defeat the enemy team would have to destroy or capture and hold the crystal.

From a lore perspective though, we don’t really know much about it. All we’re told is that it’s a place of power and the Mordrem are leeching magic from it to empower Mordremoth. Once we’ve taken it to deny it to Mordremoth then we don’t really do anything with it. It might just be another dangling plot hook that doesn’t have a set outcome yet but exists so that when Anet want to expand upon guild halls in another expansion or just in the fullness of time then they have a way to tie that into existing elements.

I understand how you feel. I took a level 33 Guardian into the HoT maps a few weeks ago to get some hero points unlocked. Everything would kill me in one hit and I couldn’t kill anything or even do enough damage to tag mobs for events. I did get 140 Hero Points spread out across three maps, but I did eventually reach a point where I couldn’t feasibly progress any further and had to head into other areas instead. So maybe the difficulty could be tuned down a little.

Why would anybody pre-order at this point? Beyond that, why would you buy the next expansion on release instead of waiting five months to find out how much of the promised content will actually be delivered and how much will be indefinitely suspended?

I just want to see a return of the district system in addition to district information so you can see how full a particular map is. You don’t need to create a complication automated system of player/map routing. Just give the players informed choices and they’ll route themselves to where they want to be.

That looks like the brawling arena from the Eastwatch trials.

All signs point to the expansion being rushed out the door early. A telling point is that Anet are no longer published by NCsoft. They’re still an owned subsidiary, but the responsibilities and general tasks of publishing the game now fall under Anet’s control.

Click them and then right click their picture and select report.

That being said though, it’s quite possible this wasn’t a hack. The increased move speed from the Signet of Air is on the lower end of movement speed buffs. It’s only a 25% increase whereas Swiftness is a 33% increase. It’s not uncommon for Guardian Commanders to wield a staff and just spam Swiftness on themselves.

I’m not sure Kessex Hills could withstand any more non-static events. That poor little area is like a magnet for permanent devastation. I’m sure that even if the devs set out to create new permanent changes in other maps they’d somehow end up blowing up Kessex Hills just a little bit more.

Most of the armours aren’t really built for a system like this though. You’d either end up with amazing clipping like wearing aviators over a fully enclosed helm or Anet would have manually go through and tag every headslot item as either eyewear or helm and then additionally whether they’re compatible or not. It’s a ton of work for very little pay off.