Guild Wars 2

Ashantara.8731:

• And now, on top of all that, they also turn the Six, the Pantheon of Tyrian Gods, into magic-hungry jokes. For real? You could have done it the classy way, have them return to Tyria in the wake of upcoming events instead of this embarrassing interlude featuring the once proud God of War.

I’m interested in what caused this, personally! If it turned out to be ‘for the lols!’, then yeah, that sucks (and, really, anet?). But if we get a ton of story (maybe not explicitly in instances, but in books/side collections ect.) about what caused the changes over 250 years (and what lead to them really disappearing from Tyria) that would be so cool!

If you’re a glassy character, then maybe rethink your build/gear? There’s no such thing as a ‘glassy class’, only ‘glassy setups’. If you’re struggling to survive a fight, then swap out some gear to help, and change some traits

To draw a direct parallel, this is exactly like the early days of HoT where untrained elementalists wandered into the jungle with their happy-go-lucky zerk staff setup and were roflstomped (even if they were good players!). Glassy setups only work well in semi challenging content if:

a) The content is super duper easy and/or short enough to avoid mechanics (i.e. most open world enemies as a daredevil – seriously, the damage output of daredevil without any external buffing is immense!).
b) You know the content well and/or are simply a really good/experienced player and react well to any new threat and situation

This isn’t about ‘gitting gud’, it’s just about tweaking your build to adapt

Ider.1276:

All this grand reveal is just horrible, mostly because it makes no sence.
Why would Balthazar disguise as a mursaat? He could just pop in as a human god, and every human would react as Kasmeer initially did, kneeling in awe, and following his orders with little to no questions and great zeal.
What did he accomplish by imposting Lazarus? Human minority (part of white mantle, thats minority of a minority!) and suspition of every persone with half a brain. That exact suspition that lead us to breaking his disguise and stopping him from draining dry completely both elder dragons (which was his original plan, as we see now).
What the kitten, Anet? A week ago i wrote that after this reveal I will be either applauding or facepalming hard. Well, guess what, there is a red palm print on my face right now.

Unless something else is hunting him. I doubt he’d be scared of humans. He also explicitly states that he doesn’t care about Tyria, so he’s only here for the free magic buffet courtesy of blowing up some dragons and a bloodstone. Note that he didn’t actively ‘reveal’ himself, he was forced out – and he made a beeline to Taimi’s device once he knew it could destroy two dragons.

Plus, he’s obviously extremely weak right now, since Majory isn’t splattered all over rata novus.

In short, I doubt he was masquerading as Lazarus for the benefit of hiding from us.

Yeah, she seemed on point for her character:

- I’m annoyed with you for letting Majory run off without telling me
- Has a mild domestic
- Freaks out and has a hiccup fit because she saw a god
- Bails because she feels like she’s going to go up against Lyssa

For the record (since some people are also complaining about this), I think my characters reaction of ‘yeah, whatever balthy, foight me irl’ is actually pretty justified even if my character is human. My character has fought 2 elder dragons and all kinds of kitten over the past 5 years. A human god, a weakened one at that, that actively attacked them, is not one to really shake them after what they’ve been through.

Kas, on the other hand, is pretty new to the whole thing so her reaction is more in keeping with a standard god loving human.

Also, we don’t need Kas, we have M.O.X. and Scruffy 2.0. The golem dream team :P

Here’s my view on it – this is the beginning of a new story arc that’s going to be explored in the expansion. It’s going to open up a bunch of questions that simply wont be answered just yet. I’m interested to see how it all unravels, especially since it sounds like there’s a schism between the human gods.

Balth may have been talking about dragons, but my first impression is that Balthazar is being shunned and shut down by the other dieties (or at least all but Lyssa) – the gods simply didn’t seem to care all that much about Tyria, and the only reason Balth would be interested now would be because he has been stripped of power, and the death of elder dragons has given him a free buffet. Also, he may be disguised in order to hide himself from other powers (much more powerful than us) in order to regain strength. He had no intention to reveal himself before absorbing that huge amount of dragon magic, after all, and he was in such a weakened state that he couldn’t even kill Majory :P If Balth was at peak strength, she’d be gibbed all over the maguuma.

That would be a super interesting story to explore, and far more interesting to me than ‘dragon killing checklist’. I’m actually not too fussed about ol’ Primordus/Jormag being temporarily shut down, since the prospect of having to kill 4 more dragons in a row just feels a bit dull? The humans gods have always be interesting, so a story about infighting ect. would be really interesting!

I really liked it too But I also really like tangled depths. There’s much more of an element of exploration when the map isn’t just ‘go to all these items on a map without any real thought’. Those kinds of maps are still fine, but I’ve always liked the initial exploration steps of the more involved HoT maps.

Also, there’s been around 30+ ‘super duper braindead simple’ to explore maps already and 4 ‘complex’ maps (maaaaybe 5 if you thought bloodstone fen was difficult too). That’s not a huge percentage!

Variety is good (but also means some things wont suit everyone – that’s fine), and I hope arenanet continues to provide variety in their maps in the future!

I think this is just a learning curve thing. I’ve completed this fight 3 times (once for myself, and twice for two friends), and whilst I’ve yet to die once (zerk tempest), both of friends did manage to die at the updraft parts and neither are bad players. It is somewhat easy to get struck out the sky, and if you’ve not got the best handle on your classes defensive skills/healing, it’s easy to die.

If you’re struggling, just try to practice how to recover from damage, and make sure you build accordingly (getting knocked down and murdered? stun breaks. Condi doing you in? condi cleanse. Taking far too long to dps? fix your gear/traits for more dps).

Seeing yourself improve is one of the more fun experiences! I’m sure you’ll get there.

Yeah, it’s annoying. Gorsey is still plenty do-able even with the bug though. So it’s not the end of the world, just a bit annoying. Especially if you don’t have the support to keep the arena ticks from destroying your squishier squad members, and lack the dps to phase gorsey before he spawns small ghosts >.<

I personally love the raids, timer included! Note that the timer is not a ‘game over’, it’s simply an enrage. Yes, the boss hits like a truck, but a group with stronger support can still hold out for a little while longer.

After around 2 hours doing our first real guild attempt today and getting the boss down to 15% HP, we’re all pretty stoked by the challenge. It’s not about constantly getting big rewards for content, it’s about the content being rewarding in its own right! I would rather spend 2 hours without earning a single copper in raids than 2 hours in silverwastes chest farming. Plus, when we do, as a guild, nail the mechanics (I fully expect we’ll beat the first boss next time we group up and since we’ve been consistently improving I wouldn’t imagine it would be a one off) down, we can then reap the rewards of our hard work by consistently beating the content.

If failing dozens of times perfecting a composition, learning together, and working with each other to get your team in sync with each other doesn’t appeal to you, then raids are not, and should not, be for you. Wait until they fix fractals and have your ad hoc ‘guaranteed success’ fun there Yes, it’s annoying if you don’t have a guild that you can raid with, but this is an MMO! There SHOULD be content specifically for guilds or organised friend groups. If everything is puggable, it makes it far less fun for those, such as my guild, who enjoy challenging content. It’s not like we’re even ‘ermagerd super 1337 players’ either! We’re just a team of decent to good players who banded together to make a raid group.

This isn’t really a problem for a guild, since the main thing is knowing what people can play what roles so you can build effective comps (we just have a google docs spreadsheet \o/). It gets harder for larger guilds is all. I don’t see the value in necessarily ‘gear checking’ everyone though. If you don’t trust someone enough to believe that they’re running, say, celestial if they say they are, then you probably don’t someone as flaky in your raid group anyway! Unless you’re super paranoid, then that’s probably not a good mentality to have towards your guildees either.

Jayllyfish.3489:

Senario.2038:

SeriousSituation.3462:

Tempest ele is great at support. I’m currently running in full clerics gear and I am traited to not only heal a ton, but I can give my party infinite protection and share auras. It’s pretty sweet. Great for full DPS pugs where no one knows how to dodge.

At that point wouldn’t you just be better off running druid with full clerics? The only real benefit to that is protection not to mention you do no damage. Protection is great and all but if they don’t dodge they will still die even with protection. Protection just gives them slightly more leway on what they can get away with. Ideally people shouldn’t be getting hit if they are so squish they need protection from a buddy.

I mean this with all due respect, and I am only asking out of pure ignorance of this game’s community but is it common for folks to just say, “Well for this situation wouldn’t it be better if you had a different max level character with the HP to fully unlock it’s elite spec?”

I mean, it sounds like a druid might do certain things better, but obviously this guy like to be able to support and heal when the situation calls for it on his Ele.

Druid also Isn’t particularly great (this isn’t BWE3 any more, Druid got nerfed. Hard.). It can do some small, very specific heals to a couple of allies in a spammy way, then some larger (but still relatively small) heals for a little bit after a relatively long cooldown. It has some very basic utility, but basically no boons.

It’s a healing bot, but without any huge clutch heals like ‘Wash the pain away’. Whereas Tempest, aside from that insanely powerful (8k on celestial with radiance runes) low recharge heal, also has the ability to spam out tons of decent AoE heals via auras along with permanent vigor/swiftness/regen/fury plus the benefits the auras provide. If you’re using your skills properly, perma protection is also easily done. Additionally the warhorn water skills are both potent sources of healing too. Finally, whilst doing all this, it can still deal fairly good damage (air overload by itself is an easy 8k DPS for 8 seconds without might that ends in an aura heal, and that can be recharged via fresh air – never mind all of the overlapping fields and attacks that go on alongside it), whereas druid just … can’t.

Not to say druid wont be useful. The spammy, precise nature of the heals means it can specifically target individuals from range, but you certainly wont want more than one of them in a raid party with how little they bring to the team aside from some healing.

I think a lot of Tempest salt also comes from the fact it’s not a ‘DPS’ spec too, even though Elementalist already has the best DPS specin base ele. Tempest does provide some extremely powerful support whilst not giving up much damage though (especially d/wh setup) to a level that Ele simply could not achieve beforehand. It helps to make high level fractals even more faceroll-able.

All in all, Tempest feels pretty powerful to me, as someone who has created a build from scratch that utilises the spec well, instead of trying to staple Tempest on top of base ele. Tempest, even in a more support role via d/wh, can still deal significant amounts of damage whilst providing large heals/perma fury/vigor/swift/regen/prot. You can also get some decent might stacking going on although I tend not to prioritise might over protection seeing as there’s usually someone else providing might, but if there isn’t a might stacker I just shift my rotation to stack it myself. Tempest just feels, at least on d/wh, that it can do everything (except ranged fighting, but that’s what your staff is for) and the only thing in the way is learning how to do it. The tradeoff is that you don’t pull off the extremely high flat damage DPS of base ele, instead only doing ‘good’ AoE DPS.

All in all, It should make it extremely useful in raids, considering druid barely does anything other than heal and some mild condi damage, meaning more than one druid is a massive hindrance to the team’s DPS.

I’m not going to go too much into Dragon stand as a map for anyone who still hasn’t completed it (aside from it being a really fun map!). However, I’ve one request from Arenanet: Can we have the map timer start AFTER the meta start requirements have been met? If it means reducing the timer to account for this, that would be fine.

The issue at the moment is that starting up a new map is tricky because a lot of the time players load into an empty map without much time left! If the timer started after the initial ‘get 5 people to each point’ events were completed it would allow for new maps to be properly set up with commanders/taxis ect. at any point, rather than sitting around at the top right of the map on LFG or waiting for the timer to roll over because there isn’t enough time to complete the meta.

I run tempest as air/water/tempest, even in a pure support role, along with aura sharing and elemental bastion (plus runes of radiance). Utilising fresh air and air skill recharge reduction, you have easy access to two static auras for healing, along with pumping out fury, swiftness, vigor, and regen every time you throw out an aura (which is a lot). In addition, you also deal respectable damage via high uptime of lightning storm (especially if you’re in a set such as celestial/zerker mix). Also, never underestimate static aura. Unless the enemy has a break bar (which static aura will help shred anyway), the constant stuns prevents a lot of the more damaging multi-hit attacks meaning you simply don’t have to heal as often.

The warhorn skill is fairly meh, since you lose out on so many aura heals.

I use it pretty much all the time now with dagger. Heat sync is easily the worst skill (if they add a fire aura to it, I’d love it), but otherwise I find the other skills genuinely useful! Lightning orb is suprisingly good damage when paying attention to how many of those little numbers pop up, the fire field is a little sluggish but also long lasting without persisting flames, which is great for might stacking. The water skills are both solid heals, sand squall is simply awesome, and even the dust storm isn’t bad (yes, it’s slow, but it’s a quick fire and forget skill which deals decent damage and blinds over a large areas when it’s wound up). The air pull is also pretty decent.

However, I think the build needs to really play into auras and really learning how the make your dagger and warhorn interact well. As it stands I tend to be able to stack high level of might (18-20 for around 6-7s or so with a decent tail of around 8 might, now that I’m running radiance runes instead of strength – before I could easily run with very high might persistantly), keep fury/swiftness/vigor/regeneration on at all times, and generally just keep on the enemy the entire time with air overloads and lightning orb spam whilst they struggle against high static, magnetic, and frost aura uptime. The fire is actually my support damage line I use for might stacking and a bit of ‘downtime’ damage when I’m recharging some air skills!

Also, in sPvP, there is nothing more evil than a team of players with static aura. You can have the most amazing stability in the world, but one AoE will mess you up!

I’ve been finding that, whilst not amazing in 1v1, a Tempest really shines in group fights. If you can keep static aura on (which you can do for roughly ~75% of a 18s+ fight [and 100% of a short fight] with the right setup) your team, you’ve essentially won already whilst the enemy team get stunlocked into the ground. Combine that with frost aura (of which there’s a few sources available) and magnetic aura (again, a couple of easy sources, even if you don’t run the shout) and suddenly your team is insanely hard to deal with. Pushes into lord rooms on either side are much easier to handle when there’s auras everywhere!

I’m running cele tempest at the moment (water/air/tempest) with runes of radiance on d/wh and I feel like i’m the tankiest person around! Not only does that setup give you easy access to air overload and static auras, perma fury, vigor, and decent might stacks (leading to decent AoE dps, although obviously not on the same level as zerk staff by any stretch), it also constantly pulses insane heals! I very rarely even need to use WtPA, and when I do it’s a massive 8k heal with light aura to boot! The condition removal is also insane, but you can also swap to bountiful auras if you want to sacrifice the condi removal for group healing.

There’s also flexibility to change skills based on what’s needed. I find using the earth shout effectively nullifies any ranged enemies, since the magnetic aura uptime (easily 20s of constant reflect when using the shout, wh earth 4 and the earth overload) destroys them, whilst bringing in blinks ect. help against the rolling dinos.

The physical version of the game, aside from speeding up your day one install (assuming no form of preload), would be fairly useless, surely? If you want the box (which is fair enough I guess!) then maybe just prioritise that? It’s really not worth spending the insaneballs money you’re proposing, since you may as well just buy a physical copy and the gems seperately!

Since you can generally do any of the PvE content in very high damage gear at the moment, celestial is a bit unnecessary. However, for WvW (the reason I got my ascended celestial for ele) and possibly raids (Tempest has a balance of condi damage, flat damage, and healing, so celestial works pretty well there), celestial works very nicely as a more defensive/support set for Ele (possibly engy too?) that doesn’t entirely give up the damage potential of the class.

I’m generally seeing 30-50fps in verdant brink @ 2560×1440 on a gtx970/5GHz i5-2500K (for reference, there’s nothing worthwhile me upgrading to on either front that wouldn’t cost stupid money for a tiny gain – if there was I would have done!). It’s not exactly what I’d call great performance by any stretch. It’s playable, sure, but something needs to be done eventually, especially if they want to improve detail further.

Also, the game has always ran relatively badly on any system. It’s likely due to the sheer amount of stuff to be rendered. In such a case DX12 would likely help out a lot, but it would involve an engine rewrite – you can’t just slap DX12 on top of an engine and expect miracles! I personally would think it’d be a worthwhile change. It’s always been manageable, but it’s never been ‘good’.

Been messing around with some builds and you can get some impressive healing and defensive boons going. The self heal alone is a ~6-7k heal on all nearby allies (yes, it says something like 3.8k, but that’s actually only the first pulse, of three pulses – combine this with something like runes of the monk and it’s a very potent heal), and you can get insane protection uptime. Whilst this is absolutely useless in current GW2, this may possibly be a good thing for raids! It all depends on that content.

I like the shouts, but I feel they need some buffs. The earth and air shouts have slightly too long a cooldown (air wouldn’t be too bad if it gave an aura, but since it doesn’t I feel it could either do with a slight cd reduction or given an aura). The water shout needs a bit more ‘oomph’ to it than a 3s chill too. In PvE it just doesn’t feel like it adds up to much (and I’m thinking towards raids too, how often will a 3s chill help when something like frozen ground can provide so much more?).

The warhorn feels better, especially with the new blast finisher on earth 4 (in combination with the moving water field, that’s a lot of healing potential!). However, earth 5’s ‘wind up’ time is still far too long and usually proves useless as a result. Lightning orb still needs a major buff to damage. It’s a skill 5 that does much, much less damage than lava font! Increase the cooldown from 20s if needs be, but that skill needs to feel damaging if it’s to live up to its GW1 roots!

Overloads:

- Water is getting decent, the condition removal and final heal are both better, but could still do with being a bit higher. After all, these overloads are very high risk (not least the inability to dodge!).

- Air: This feels pretty decent to me now, it’s like a mini GoS on a shorter recharge. It also has the least risk, since you’re already getting decent use out of it before you finish chanelling anyway.

- Earth: The protection pulsing is great, but I feel like the blast finisher could do with being as the beginning of the channel.

- Fire: Considering that this is the ‘big damage dealer’ of the tempest (in theory), I feel like this could be dealing 50% more damage before it started feeling worth it.

Rebound: It’s bad. We all know it’s bad. If it didn’t get negated by auto attacks it’d still be bad. The idea itself doesn’t even work with the tempest theme! If you’re going to go with some kind of ‘recharge’ deal, why not just make it recharge all of your other shouts? It’s still not making huge sense, but at least would be powerful, since it could allow for some heavy spike heals via WtPA without worrying about the balance of other ele utilities receiving that recharge.

Note that all of the above are considering playing some kind of ‘support/healer’ in a raid scenario. If that’s not a role that’s needed in raids, then this elite spec is a write off for PvE entirely. I can see good utility for this spec in WvW due to the moving water fields and heavy heal spikes. For PvP? Nope. I just can’t see tempest ever working as well as base ele, never mind any of the other interesting elite specs.

You can drive yourself insane constantly comparing the price of games across different markets. However, in the end, the UK and Europe usually don’t fare too badly for the most part. When taxes are added to the US prices, they tend to end up about the same as the UK/EU prices anyway (which include their respective taxes). It’s Australia that gets screwed over.

It’s always been the case in every game which has an expansion placed ‘on top’ that it’s ‘better value’ to buy a whole new account. It was also the same in GW1 too, since you’d ‘only’ get a couple of new character slots for adding a campaign to the account versus four (I think? It’s been a while) for setting up a new one. Plus you get all the extra bank space too.

So, if you don’t really care about the convenience of having your current account being able to go into HoT (maybe you don’t have much in the way of expensive account bound equipment? I personally want my main account to be HoT-able since I have a couple of legendaries, high MF, and other bonuses) it would actually be a good plan to buy HoT and keep your current account as a ‘mule account’. It would also mean you can get any ‘one per account’ rewards more than once too in stories, which is nice.

There’s not much of a problem for going either way really.

I gained a couple of % on my ele personally, but I run celestial mostly, so my precision also went up at the same time. If you are somehow at the same precision stat than before then I guess it makes sense that you have less, but wouldn’t your precision stat be marginally higher if your gear was precision based in some regard?

Moira Shalaar.5620:

I haven’t had beta access so I have not tried gliding yet, but I was under the impression that there was an endurance limitation, run out of endurance and you end up falling . . . hopefully like a snowflake

Yarp, but it does start recharging the moment it gets put away, so you can still pull it out just before you hit the ground to avoid a messy death from what I’ve seen (unless you can’t pull it out twice? I’m not sure).

There’s a site called gw2spidy.com. That’ll have all the answers you’ll ever need on the subject

I don’t actually care about lots of fancy new graphics tech (although, of course, I wouldn’t say no) but I’d personally like to see them rewrite the engine to accommodate DX12 and finally make proper, efficient, use of CPU resources. I’d love to see a perma 60fps GW2. Aside from that, the game still looks fine to me at 2560×1440. Maybe higher texture quality, but aside from that it’s still a nice looking game due to the aesthetic.

Crimson Clouds.4853:

Might stacking ele (s/d) used to be pretty complex, lots of attunement swapping and understanding of blasts and cooldowns. In some instances (out of combat) you can also extend the complexity to swapping weapons in order to get the maximum amount of might.

However, I’m not sure if the build is nerfed at all with the recent patch, I haven’t check it out yet. Perhaps somebody else can confirm its status.

The S/D stacking build is just as effective as ever, if not more so, since you can now trait into a full water line too to provide large AoE heal spikes too Or just go into air for even more damage via rapid attunement swaps to get extra lightning bolts, or bolt to the heart.

It’s not too complex to get a 25 might rotation though. As long as you have something which buffs might duration (such as runes of strength) you can very easily maintain 25 might/fury without too much hassle if you throw arcane wave and brilliance into the mix.

If you really can’t deal around 2000 damage without conditions at all to take an ele out of the diamond skin range, then you probably do still have some way to go with your build if you want to make it ‘all purpose’. What you’ve done is made the build very much a ‘one trick pony’, so whilst you’re surely effective against some builds, there will also always be hard counters to that in 1v1 situations. No one build will be great against everything all of the time. It’s like how that ele has given up resistance against critical hits (Stone Heart) in order to have higher condi resistance, so now they’re much weaker against zerker builds as a tradeoff for being stronger against you.

Therefore Diamond skin is as overpowered as rock is to scissors.

I bought 5 of them about 3 years ago, when gems were next to nothing But yeah, it’s not actually too difficult to earn the gold for a character slot, especially if you do a few silverwastes runs. All the ecto and t6 quickly adds up!

There tends to be more leeway in Story dungeons as they’re not ‘important’, but explorable modes are generally done repeatedly for the tokens and bonus rewards. As a result, people want the run to at least go fairly smoothly. Not everyone particularly wants a full on ‘2 pro 4 u zerk meta 10k+ AP or kicks’ group, but generally having only 80s means that at least everyone will, in theory, not be too bad.

I’ve personally never kicked a sub-80 from an explorable run (assuming they were at least above the recommended level), but I also tend to not care so much about efficiency!

Test.8734:

Chobiko.9182:

So, an Expansion (optional, purchasable) is coming. There will be ppl playing it, there might be people who don’t.

And ArenaNet wants people to feel pressured to buy it. Ergo, expect the new skills and the new profession to be available only to those who buy the expansion, and to be useable everywhere in the game (all dungeons, WvW, PvP, etc).

So either you buy the expansion, or you won’t be able to join PUGs, you will lose in PvP, and you won’t won in WvW unless you have a considerably larger zerg than the other team.

Assuming the other skills are vastly better. Which I doubt. You’ll still be able to play the game just fine, you just wont be as flexible. It’s not like you’d struggle with any of the current PvE content, because that’ll be the same. WvW has always been a zerg fest and is much more about who can blast water fields as a team the best rather than any individual skill that they could feasibly add that would still have a 5 person AoE limit :P

You usually rejoin the map you got d/c’d from, unless that map is full. Which in the SW, towards the end of a cycle, it usually is. Blame all of the lazy people only ever joining 80%+ maps :P Surprisingly, this situation would not be helped whatsoever if you had a map selector, since the map would still be full.

As for the map selection, it wouldn’t work well considering how the harvest nodes work. They could, however, make the nodes essentially ‘static’ over a 24 hour period and keep tabs on what node the character has harvested from to prevent farming. It’s just a lot of potential coding to fix an issue which really doesn’t affect many people all that often. Yes, it sucks that you sometimes can’t rejoin the SW map you got d/c’d from because the map is full, but the system works pretty well otherwise.

In the end, they’ve got better things to be doing that spending tons of resources to implement some kind of ‘map picker’ that still wouldn’t help you if the map is full.

If it isn’t an expansion, I’ll piledrive a Quaggan.

I just find staff in the open world really dull to use! It can definitely be useful to have a couple of them in the boss fights for the might stacks though (yes, yes, they can overwrite longer duration ones, but as a whole, the group benefits HUGELY from empowers), but for random fighting it’s not great.

I personally use greatsword/sword/focus and go for all out blinding and vulnerability stacking via the VoJ recharge-on-death trait. Much better support overall due to sheer amount of burning, vuln, and blind applied. Plus you hit like a truck.

Tumult.2578:

Cool! What rewards?
and what do you get with the achievement points?

Usually things like small experience boosts, reward track exp, WvW experience, along with some random other stuff. Nothing huge, but probably worth more than the 5s, 50 luck, and a mystic coin was.

As for what you get with cheevos, you get rewards every 500. Some are small, some are huge (the 5k cheevo thresholds give you quite a large amount of stuff).

For the cheevos!

Seriously, achievements being used to encourage people to try random things in a game is the only legitimate reason for cheevos to exist that actually helps gameplay. The achievements lead a lot of people to do all the jumping puzzles, or explore more of the map, or try out PvP. They’re simply applying this valid use of achievements to dailies, rather than making them a simple chore. The dailies never made me do anything other than I would usually do, so why make them achievements? They may as well just give me a reward for logging in…

You do get a tiny reward too based on the type of achievement completed, so there’s that. However, the old ‘daily’ rewards have now pretty much been moved over (and improved) to the login rewards. If you did your dailies for the rewards, you’re better off now. If you did it for the cheevos, you can finish them MUCH more quickly than before too.

The dailies are now for cheevos, logging in is for the ‘big’ rewards.

Magnuzone.8395:

I want me a 2h wielding light armored class. Melee damage dealer with with magic abilities. Maybe strong buffs, powerful HoT and protection spells for both self and allies.
Something different like that.

Yeah we really need something like new classes or such. I rarely log in nowadays. Still a great game though, but it feels like Ive done it all and cant really be bothered to do any more living stories.

They don’t need a new class for that, just give the Ele a Scythe, it’s already pretty much ready to go in terms of being a Dervish (aside from the avatar forms, of course).

Conski Deshan.2057:

I still disagree and feel the gem conversion to be very invasive, it allows a new player to potentially catch up to my account in a fraction of the time it took me using money which I’m not ok with, it devalues my efforts. It also allows a bad player to have access to more skins than they’d earn.

If someone wants to pay around the £350 it takes to get a Bifrost in order for them to ‘match’ me. Let them. I honestly couldn’t care one way or the other what others skins players are running with. Except for me to go ‘ooooh, that’s nice’ and potentially look into acquiring it.

Honestly, that may be because I don’t really care if my efforts in games are seen as valuable to other players (outside of something like actually commanding or PvP – skins? not really). Those kinds of concerns, the motivation to make sure my efforts aren’t for naught, are the kind that I maintain in my career. In a game? I get shiny weapons because they’re shiny. I don’t really care how other players acquired their shinies, and I’ll never need to know how they acquired them anyway.

If it irks you to think that some people got an expensive weapon unjustly: I got dusk from a random undead Orrian mob. At least those guys paying real money worked for their weapons. I certainly didn’t ‘work’ for Dusk! Or earn it. In any fashion. Same for my Dawn drop. I got it after 40 rare greatswords that I made because I had some spare t5 mats! I have not ‘earned’ those weapons, those hugely expensive weapons, in any way you would be able to justify as ‘work’.

My Bifrost and (soon to acquire) Sunrise will have taken vastly less time than they should have due to dumb luck. How is that less annoying than people exchanging gems? XD

Essentially, what I’m saying is this: There are people out there who have had a far easier time getting really expensive weapons that even the (probably tiny, tiny fraction) people who ‘buy’ skins with money :P

Y’know, I had never considered the use of this item as a way to skip jumping puzzles. That may be because, if people did that, it wouldn’t affect me in the slightest, nor would I care. I had fun doing the jumping puzzles. If people want to skip them to get to a mediocre chest (which will never really outstrip the cost of the teleport item), that’s their free time to use as they please.

I thought it was quite a cool item to potentially have if a friend needs help in an event or something. I guess everything convenient or new is the end of the world though in an MMO to some players.

If you run it from a USB3 HDD, you can already create your own ‘portable’ GW2 without much in the way of downsides versus a standard internal HDD. Of course, whatever you plug it into needs to be able to run it. Plus, lets face it, if you’re on a computer often enough, you’d just install GW2 on that anyway.

Every game is grind. Every. Single. One.

It’s always about refining and repeating your actions.

If you’re noticing it, then maybe it’s because you’re playing simply to get some kind of status symbol, or reward, rather than for the enjoyment you get from the game. At that point you have two options:

1) Stop playing the game just for the reward.
2) Stop playing the game.

There are not many advantages to games beyond fun. No-one will really care if you get a full set of legendaries at a job interview in a few years, nor will your grandchildren be captivated by the story of you running around the Labyrinth for the 50th time in a day. So if you’re not having fun anymore, go and do something that IS fun. Maybe that’s another aspect of GW2 (I personally stopped playing GW2 for a couple of months, then I ended up getting into organized WvW guild raids), maybe it’s another game, maybe it’s even another hobby. Just stop with the ‘game too grindy’ stuff – the game has been made so that nearly all of the content is very easily accessible – the only ‘grind’ is for the shinies which simply aren’t needed. The game is fine- there’s huge amounts of content for the asking price, and it’s being expanded regularly piece by piece – but everything has a finite entertainment value. If a game has become ‘grind’, you’ve simply exhausted the entertainment value of the game in question.

I guess a vague equivalent from another medium would be like asking someone to watch a random subset of 6 Futurama episodes every day for a year in order to gain a badge saying ‘I <3 Futurama’. Eventually, no matter how much they originally love the series, they would get bored. It’s inevitable. But for some reason people seem to think games, especially MMOs, should provide infinite entertainment value o.O They can’t!

Yeah, I really doubt many people have multiple mining tools at all. I really like this idea too!

The problem I foresee:

PvE mobs in GW2 are, for the most part (I like the Silverwastes mobs!), just not that interesting – adding extra health/more damage wouldn’t fix that. This mode would require them to completely redo how mobs work, maybe introduce mob ‘parties’ like GW1. If they did that, sure, but it’d also be a lot of work, work I’d rather they put into something like a Doman of Anguish difficultly dungeon/raid!

GW1 vanquishing worked because the groups of mobs were interesting and varied to fight. This would just be dredging through a map hitting mobs. It doesn’t sound fun to me, i’d rather be able to simply reset my ‘map completion’ on a character if I wanted to do something like this.

Honestly, without a developer stating when it happens, it’s impossible to really know. My guess that the loot table lookup would happen upon opening it, because that’s where I’d put it. It doesn’t make much sense to calculate the loot table of an item that may not even be opened, and when it does you’d need to save the information of the looted items anyway – which you shouldn’t really do before their true creation because they don’t exist yet and would be a waste of storage space to do so (sure, it’s only going to be a couple of records, but it all adds up).

I do like the idea of mobs/bags being assigned loot as they spawn though. Just because I like the idea of a Skritt running around with a Dusk saying ‘Shiny Shiny Shiny!’.

Have you tried resizing the UI to small/est? It’s what I do on my laptop (1600×900) and it looks similar to my desktop (normal UI size at 2560×1440). In both cases the information isn’t close to being in the way.

Elementalists are really good with greatswords, but their weapon swap cooldown for them is abysmal.

I’d personally like the ability to set the camera height independently of character height. An issue at the moment is that the max height norn/charr characters can see a little better over walls ect. in WvW, which gives them a direct advantage with landing superior AC barrages over the top of obstacles! So either the Superior ACs finally need their ‘no line of sight required’ bug fixed (if it is a bug of course – I’d rather it not be changed since I do actually quite like this behaviour), or that camera issue could do with being sorted!

Of course, it’s a nitpick :P

I prefer it being the absolute closest enemy too, since 99/100 that’s exactly what I wanted. If I need a specific target to be selected, then that’s what a mouse is for (clicking a specific target is much faster than any form of tab system usually in my instance, but I’m also pretty ossum at FPS games haha)!

I’ve been playing on Silverwastes lately, so I’ve been getting ALL the loot Exotics are rare drops though. It took me about 4 months to get my first exotic drop! My second was Dusk, so it evened out somewhat.