Guild Wars 2

Considering flying mounts would require re-doing all of Tyria, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Anet has neither the team size nor income required to overhaul the entire world (even WoW had over a year of content drought before flying was available outside of Northrend). Leaving aside whether I personally want flying mounts or not, I’d much prefer new content over no content.

A couple things could be done, though, if Anet wants to have flying mounts in Tyria.

One is have a zone specifically for flying mounts. Think the Junundu from Guild Wars 1. You go through a quest and earn their trust, then you can use them as mounts to navigate a zone specifically designed for them. If you have it so these are sentient creatures instead of summonable mounts, you don’t run into the “why can’t I summon it here?” issue. Plus no having to redo old content. We already have zones that have their unique mechanic, so having one where you can fly isn’t out of the question.

The second option, which I’d prefer, is instead of having a flying mount, have a swimming mount. Flying and swimming is essentially the same thing, but the nature of swimming acts as a natural barrier because it’s restricted to water. Water combat and adventure also has been neglected and in need of an overhaul in GW2 for a while now. We have the largos and deep sea dragon that have only been mentioned and had a brief cameo, too.

Underwater mounts can also be much more diverse and creative than flying mounts — you can have something super big or super small, have something you sit on or simply hold onto. It’s pretty much all the perks of flying mounts with none of the drawbacks, that part of the game is still underdeveloped and will require development at some point anyway, and it’s hard to put tons of waypoints under water so having something to aid in movement just makes sense.

STIHL.2489:

Thank you very much for your candor, and in the spirit of sharing such open honesty, I can sincerely say, I feel the same way about people such as yourself.

Now the real question is not why a filthy casual such as myself is playing this originally super casual friendly game, I mean lest get real, if this is the most casual game out there, there really is no lower tier games to move to, and viola, a bunch of filthy casuals come to play it. That’s pretty much self explanatory of why I came to GW2 originally.

Which brings us to the real question, if there are already many games out there, like TERA, and Skyforge, etc, that are a higher skill bracket and more a challenge, why are you here?

See the casual player is no out of place playing a casual game, however the player crying for more challenge that came to a casual friendly game is.

This the elephant in the room, when these discussions happen is, Why did you not play those many, many, other games that offer you the challenge you claim you seek, and instead come here to mussy up my filthy super casual game?

Care to field that one?

See, this is the most casual game out there, as such, it is my ONLY option, if I want to play a Casual MMO, but , you.. Oh you’re so much better then me, and thus have all these many other options open to you, games that offer you multitudes of raids, challenging end game content, an all the things you claim you seek.

Yet.. your’re here.. not there. You’re playing what you consider just a step above candy crush saga, when there is a legion of other harder more challenging MMOs out there waiting for you.

Why is that?

See., if we are going to be candid with each other, I belonged here from the start.. You never did.

Not the person you replied to but your question stood out to me.

Why do I play GW2 as a casual who likes some challenge? Because I’ve played many, many other MMO’s and they always end up being a gear slog and a job I’m not getting paid to do (or am paying for the “privilege” to do). Sure they might have some content I like, but that doesn’t change the fact that I had to keep playing and running new content repeatedly ASAP because gear stats were constantly being inflated.

I also was never super into the lore of most other games, and those I did like got retconned to heck and back.

I’ve done the whole hardcore/tryhard thing — I’ve even done competitive gaming in an FPS — and I didn’t actually enjoy a lot of it, and that’s just not me anymore. GW2 is casual with some harder content. Some of it is overtuned (Looking at you, LW2 story), but that’s been getting better and if you were to marathon LW2->HoT->LW3 it would be extremely obvious how they realized the difficulty was too much and have been toning it way down lately, and it’s looking like PoF continues that trend. Same goes with the map design with the exception of Draconis Mons.

Other games also don’t have WvWvW, which is essentially massive casual PvP. WvW can be as hardcore or as casual as you want, which is a good description of GW2 in general. You can do raids and T4 fractals and min-max everything, or you can just stroll around exploring and crafting. The best part? No matter how hardcore or casual people are, everyone has access to essentially the same gear. You can take a break for a few years like I did, come back, and not have to spend days or weeks grinding out gear just so you can play basic PvE without getting one-shot.

It sucks that you don’t really like GW2, but that can just mean it’s not the game for you. Sometimes what sounds good on paper just doesn’t match up with what you like, for whatever reason. The good news with GW2 is you can take a break for however long you need, wait for PoF to come out to see how that goes, check out other MMO’s, etc., and if you decide to come back you’ll be no further behind than you were when you left and be a heck of a lot less stressed.

But for people like me, there’s no alternative, either. Sure we may like some challenging content, but it’s not fun when you’re forced to do it to remain casual. And when lore is taken into account instead of just gameplay… Well, it’s hard to leave a game when you’ve been heavily invested in the lore for 12 years and the gameplay itself is everything you want with just a few hiccups and warts here and there.

phokus.8934:

But professions don’t have different character models maybe other than the off ability. I just don’t see the necessity to keep it as it is today.

It’s not the character models but the armour models. For example, all heavy armour was made with consideration and testing with all other heavy armour that could interact with it so as to reduce/remove clipping issues and maintain a certain look. The same is true for light and medium armour

But if you were to start mixing and matching heavy and light armour, clipping would become a huge issue and it just wouldn’t look good without a lot of work by a dedicated team to go through all the past armour models and quit possibly re-skinning some. You would end up with weird bare patches where armour was supposed to overlap, or two pieces that constantly clip into and out of each other, or two pieces that are in the exact same spot and flicker as each one fights to be rendered. And more.

Then there’s also the different races and different body shapes of said races to consider. So a team would have to go through each piece of armour 10 times — 5 for race, twice per race for gender — and then also go through the body types for even more work. Charr especially would need a lot of time to avoid clipping issues between armour pieces and with the character model itself.

That’s just a whole lot of work for very minor gain when they could focus on other content. Arenanet is not a large company and cannot keep the stable of artists that would be needed to do such a thing in anything resembling a decent timeframe. It would have been one thing if the game started with armour types working with each other and being interchangeable, but we’re 5 years in and some things you can’t (or shouldn’t bother to) change.

War paint? Probably not due to what zargnath said, but war spray? I’d like that.

Granted that’s pretty much semantics and no one would be able to tell how the paint was put on, but you can use custom dyes for fur in an airbrush to give unique colours and patterns to fur without the gunk buildup traditional paints tend to cause.

Though I don’t think warpaint should be restricted to character customization — GW1 had a number of armour sets which had tattoo components to them so to me it makes more sense to have tattoos/warpaint to be an armour or town clothes so everyone can have access to it.

Burn my fur… we don’t need boobs on every. single. non-human. race. Seriously, the trope of sticking breasts on everything is extremely old, worn out, and completely unneeded — especially when the race in question not only is very physically different from humans, the idea of what’s attractive is very different as well.

As a woman, I find the lack of breasts on asura and charr extremely refreshing. It doesn’t make sense for either to have breasts that are visible so adding breasts for the sake of having breasts would just make asura a mockery of their former selves. It’s also about time people got over the idea that everything that’s female — be they mammels, reptiles, aliens, robots, and pretty much anything else — needs to have breasts for them to be considered truly female and/or sexy. If people want eye candy, they have three races to choose from — there’s no point in destroying the aesthetic of an entire race just to give those people one more option while taking away one of two options for those who like the lack of almost uniquely human characteristics on non-human races.

I would say neither the charr nor humans are evil. They’ve both done questionable things and both sides have their own views on what happened so each side thinks they’re in the right; but truth is war is messy and it just gets messier the longer it goes on.

If anyone in the war between the two races is evil, I would say it was King Adelbern. Instead of fleeing before the charr forces attacked, saving hundreds — if not thousands — of human lives, he summoned the Foefire simply because he hated charr so much and was too stubborn and proud to retreat to fight another day. As a result, every charr except for one warband was completely obliterated, and every human in the city had their soul kitten to wander the earth thinking they were alive, filled with the King’s hatred of charr, and unable to pass into the Mists.

Both sides have done their fair share of questionable things, but I’d say Adelbern wins the prize for being the most evil individual in the war.

Oreoz and MisterGumby covered the basics of charr name systems pretty well. Charr also favour harsher letters and names over ones that flow smoothly, so that’s something to keep in mind as well. There are also times when a charr takes up a title instead of using the standard given name warbandprefix/personal name convention. It’s less common and sometimes it’s actually a degrading name forced onto the charr (such as one charr in Orr who is somethingsomething the Survivor, who (I think) ran away from the assault that killed his entire warband) but it is an option.

Oh, and keep in mind that the warband prefixes Iron, Blood, and Ash (and Flame) mean that you are part of that legion’s main warband so it doesn’t make sense for a charr named Ashblade, for example, to be in the Blood Legion — if the surname starts with Ash you’re in the Ash legion. Just something to keep in mind if you want to name your charr Iron-something

1. This would be a nice feature. Perhaps not all weapons (or parts of weapons) should be allowed to be dyed since some of them have so much detail like Darknass said, but it would allow a new degree of customization. Granted it may or may not be possible (at least without overhauling all the skins we have now) since if they didn’t build or add the dye channels — or the framework — to the weapons those would need to be added first. If it would take too much time and resources away from other aspects of the game, I could live without such a feature.

2. I would love this. Whenever I change my dyes, I always take a screenshot so if I want to use an old dye combo I don’t have to rely on memory. Having presets would make things a lot easier.

3. While I don’t think dungeon gear should be allowed to be sold back at any time, perhaps a time window after purchasing a piece where you can would work. I know World of Warcraft had such a system when I played it, and if you purchased a piece of token gear you had 1.5 (2?) hours where you could refund it if you wanted. If the timer ran out, you were stuck with it. Such a system would definitely help in cases where people accidentally bought the wrong piece of gear.

4. That was Triple Triad, right? (sorry, it’s been a while since I replayed FF8). I’d actually like a collectible card game in GW2 if it were done well and Arenanet had the resources to maintain it. If not I could live without it but I am a sucker for card games.

5. Even just being able to zoom 50%-75% of that distance would be good. I really enjoyed the camera glitch that let you keep that zoom distance after leaving because I could see so much more of the world and appreciate it’s size and beauty.

I agree — doing Troll’s End on my max-height charr once for the achievement was more than enough for me and I haven’t done it since. Which is a shame since I would find the puzzle fun if not for the camera issues that plague larger models. But due to the camera issues, it took me nearly an hour to finish because I could not see where I was going for the part where you walk along wooden beams and jump from platform to platform and parts of the environment (one stalactite in particular) would go invisible. And the jittery camera didn’t help at all and actually made me start feeling sick.

I know the camera has issues and bugs of its own — which probably doesn’t help matters — but it would be nice if enclosed jumping puzzles such as Troll’s End were more friendly to larger players. They’re doable, but, at least for me, they lose much of their fun and challenge because of how the camera acts on larger characters. I don’t know if it’s possible, but even setting specific camera behaviours within certain puzzles so that the camera stays further back instead of zooming into a psuedo-first person view would lessen many of the problems I would think.

Not quite sure why you’re getting so worked up. The charr design isn’t one that appeals to everyone, but everyone is allowed to have their own opinion and while you may not like the hunched charr, there are many who do — myself included.

And while GW2 is fantasy and thus not constrained by our world’s rules, any fantasy world needs its own rules if the creator wants to breath life into it. If one starts tossing out and changing rules, it takes away a lot, including depth. One of the reasons why fantasy (and sci-fi) tend to get a bad rep and are looked down on is because so many people cannot stick with the rules they created which just cheapens their book/comic/movie/game/ et cetra. Whether you like it or not, Arenanet has created their own rules and thus far is not willing to break them.

The charr are hunched because it’s a natural posture for them. It facilitates movement on either two or four legs, it lets them be as top-heavy as they are, it gives them better balance and more power, and lets them more easily defend themselves, among other things. They are capable of standing or walking upright, but it’s an unnatural and uncomfortable position for them.

The only charr that make a habit of standing upright are Flame Legion members (typically shaman). While nothing has ever been said why this is, it’s not hard to imagine them doing so because they want to look down on all the “lesser” charr and separate themselves from the rest (humans of the same mindset do the same, though it’s less noticeable compared to charr). The magic they wield may also alter their form and posture a bit, which is supported by Flame Legion shaman retaining the shoulder spikes all charr had in GW1 while the playable charr have since lost them.

And at least in the case of femcharr, they have no reason to ever imitate the posture of the very charr who enslaved and oppressed them for so long and continues to do so with what femcharr they have and would do to any femcharr they can get their paws on (if that femcharr doesn’t slit her own throat rather than go into that life).

There are biological and lore reasons why the charr stand as they do. You might not like it but it does make sense and follows the rules Arenanet established, along with rules which are shared between the real world and Tyria.

I don’t think a whole lot has been revealed about how and where the Flame Legion keep their (unfortunate) femcharr in the current time, but before Kalla lead the rebellion to win femcharr back their rights and freedom, the Flame Legion essentially enslaved all their femcharr and kept them far, far away from the front lines and they were only allowed to be in the Flame Legion’s home territory.

This is just speculation on my part, but this is what I think is a good possibility with the femcharr and Flame Legion in the present.

First, I would expect that most femcharr would have joined Ash, Iron, or Blood in Kalla’s rebellion — that or just flee in the initial confusion. Pretty much only those who were unable to escape (be they too young, too old, injured, or restrained) would be the ones who were stuck with the Flame Legion. So by default, Flame would have a far greater number of males to females and I suspect that the only femcharr within the Flame Legion were either born there or were captured by Flame as I can’t see any femcharr willingly going to Flame. Males yes since they might stand to gain something, but females would lose everything by defecting.

Anyway, like Flame did in the past, I suspect that femcharr are kept back at their main camp as slaves and, if one is lucky, a cook. That would be as free as they could be since after Kalla’s rebellion, Flame is likely even more restrictive and less forgiving than they were. Femcharr would mostly be used as slave labour and for the males’ enjoyment and that would be it — they wouldn’t be allowed out of sight or given any opportunity to train or obtain a weapon. And for those that would strike out, they would likely either be flogged, tortured, or killed outright.

The lack of substantial numbers of femcharr in the Flame Legion would also explain why Flame has to recruit a lot of their members — unlike the other three legions, they can’t reproduce at a rate which keeps their numbers level or even grow.

While I think there is a reasonable chance that some femcharr in the Flame Legion are biding their time until they can strike back, or at least plant seeds of dissent among their younger members, Flame has probably done a lot to brainwash them and give the femcharr Stockholm Syndrome. Any charr born into the Flame Legion who happens to be female is likely indoctrinated from the moment they are born and throughout their lives to be the perfect, meek slave that Flame thinks all femcharr should be. Flame underestimated femcharr once and it cost them greatly, I don’t see them willingly letting history repeat itself by not changing what allowed Kalla’s rebellion to happen in the first place.

That’s what I think may have happened/ be going on.

In any case, I also hope that Arenanet eventually touches on life within the Flame Legion. Perhaps when the Blood or Ash homelands and main cities are added. I think Blood’s home territory is actually constantly being attacked by Flame Legion and is closest to Flame’s base so if we get Blood’s base my guess is we’ll get a good dose of Flame lore to go with it.

Like Grizor.6543 said, charr eyes do show up in the dark a bit more than the non-sylvari races, but they don’t actually glow. Sylvari eyes glow because of bioluminescence whereas cat eyes don’t glow at all — they reflect strong light back out of them.

See, the back of a cat’s eye is extremely reflective. You don’t notice this during the day since the pupil is a slit, but at night the pupil is almost as big as the iris because it needs to take in as much light as possible. Because of the mirror-like surface in the back of a cat’s eye, even minute amounts of lights are amplified, letting them see in extremely low light where we couldn’t see a thing.

The glow of cat eyes (among other species) is simply that mirrored surface reflecting a strong source of light back out. The red eye phenomenon in human photography is actually the same principle, we just lack the mirrored surface to actually reflect the light back in the intensity it entered with and so it comes out red from all the blood vessels in our eye. Without a direct light source, such glowing eyes don’t happen.

I also don’t think charr have the degree of night vision felines have. Their eyesight during the day is quite sharp but in low light and night it’s either the same as a human’s or only slightly better if the two novels were any indication. As such, their eyes may not even be capable of “glowing” to the degree a cat’s does.

As for more horn variety, I agree. It’s an iconic part of the charr’s appearance so it’s a bit of a shame that there’s not a wide amount of variety for them. Hopefully in time more will be added.

I decided to look on the GW2 Database and found a hat that shares the same icon (no pictures, sadly): http://www.gw2db.com/items/50338-commandos-helm

After a tiny bit of googling (it’s late and I’m too tired to do more than that :P ), it’s a Mystic Forge item (though I could be wrong) and your best bet is to buy it off the TP if there’s one up there. But maybe someone else will have more information than I do who can help you out.

Good luck finding it

Yeah, splitting up the WvW and PvE part of the achievement into their own achievements would be nice. I’m lucky that last week my server pretty much dominated all the borderlands so I could get most of those done within two or three hours, but for people who are on a server that doesn’t have a number of dedicated WvW guilds, it could take a very long time to get those done.

I’m still at 99% world completion, though, because I have to wait until my server is team blue to finish Eternal Battlegrounds. Borderlands can be hard, but EB is just brutal. Pretty much since the new match started, my server and the other two have been deadlocked with who owns what in EB and it’s impossible to get many of the points without owning them (and even for the ones you can get without owning a tower or keep, you have to hope you don’t get jumped). It pretty much means either server-hopping (which isn’t really an option when your home server is full and you wouldn’t be able to come back) or waiting and hoping your server will be a different colour during the next match.

I can understand what Arenanet was going for with WvW being part of the achievement, but I think it’s too punishing for players. PvE players get stuck doing something they might not want to do and have to hope they can get everything, and WvW players have to deal with a bunch of people ignoring everything except finishing the map. Plus on servers where there can be an hour or longer queue to get into any WvW map, it sucks for everyone to wait and I think it would make a difference if people who queued only to finish the map didn’t have to any more.

You know, I could have sworn I saw a karma vendor who sold that model after completing the heart, though it may have been the Knight’s model instead. And in any case I have no clue which vendor it was :<

It’s a bit strange that the model pops up on NPC’s fairly frequently yet isn’t in the Locker and I couldn’t find anything on some GW2 item databases. It makes me wonder if the model is even available to players, even though it should be.

The link you posted actually proves charr are in no way any more capable of surviving falls than the other races

Domestic cats can survive because they’re small (the smaller something is the more likely it is able to survive a fall), light, are capable of spreading themselves out to decrease their speed so it’s survivable (cats ball up at the start of a fall to hit max terminal velocity ASAP before spreading out to increase drag and slow down — which is why a short fall such as ~1-5 stories is more likely to be fatal as the cat can’t slow down), and their bodies are designed to absorb shock.

Charr are too big, too rigid, too heavy, and don’t have the physical attributes that would let them slow down. Charr were designed for fighting and running and thus never developed a way to reduce injury when falling — domestic cats come from a long line of felines which needed to be agile and climb heights and so it was natural for them to evolve so falling wasn’t always fatal.

3. On top of all this, you have a society with no family bonds, cubs are put in communal homes where they are prepared to be soldiers, nothing more. (Slamming into that education thing again, oops)
There are some blood-family bonds with the parents and cubs keeping tabs on each other, but charr don`t believe that blood is what determines who you are or who your greatest allies are. A warband is a family. They aren’t tied by blood but by experience and friendship. A warband is a group where everyone grew up together and where everyone has to rely on everyone else to come out of things alive. That creates bonds just as powerful — if not more so — as saying blood alone. If a warband member is lost, you can bet that it`s like losing a brother or sister (and in fact, ’bandmates do tend to call each other brother and sister).

The charr may look like warmongering barbarians on the surface, but they`re actually quite the practical and altruistic (minus the Flame Legion, of course) society. Their societal structure also allows them to advance faster than the other races even though the charr don’t use any magic at all. Asura have a heck of a time working together and make things up as they go along, humans rely on gods and magic to do too many things and they’re preoccupied with not being pushed entirely out of tyria, norn are too individualistic and nomadic to do what the charr have done, and sylvari are too new to really have a chance to do anything. If anything, the dredge are more likely to advance technology (pure technology, not magic or a mix of the two) than the non-charr playable races are.

If you want to know more about the charr, I recommend reading:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ecology_of_the_Charr
http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/2002041.Guild-Wars-2/features/136930.20110427.Introducing-Guild-Wars-2s-Charr/
http://www.arena.net/blog/scott-mcgough-on-writing-the-charr
http://www.arena.net/blog/the-legions-of-the-charr
And even going through the charr areas and listening to random NPC’s talk and listen to/read dialogue

(splitting this into two posts since apparently it’s too long >_>;; )

You have some grasp of the charr, but they’re a rather nuanced race and you need to dig a bit deeper to see them past the surface.

1. The Charr fought among themselves until someone was strong enough to unite them.

The charr, while the four legions are separate entities and don’t always get along, have not always fought. In fact, the four High Legions were united under the Khan-Ur before the humans arrived on the Tyrian continent. They remained united until the humans assassinated the Khan-Ur and threw charr into chaos. With no leader that all the legions agreed upon, they started fighting each other to be able to claim the title of Khan-Ur for themselves.

In this civil war, humans took the opportunity they had set up via the assassination and took over charr lands. The loss of the Khan-Ur also was directly responsible for the Flame Legion (formerly the Gold Legion) and shaman caste to start worshipping the Titans and enslaving and oppressing femcharr and charr not of the Flame Legion.

So when the charr took back Ascalon, they not only took back their homeland, they were in a way getting justice (or revenge) over what the humans had done to them.

I’ll also point out that humans had the chance to flee Ascalon — many did, in fact — but the human king Adelburn was the one who made Ascalon the bloody battlefield it turned into. He was also the one that unleashed the foefire, sentencing the Ascalonians who stayed to eternally hate and fight the charr instead of passing into the Mists. The charr may be militaristic, but even they were shocked and disgusted by the foefire.

2. They know nothing but war. That is stated very plainly, in more than one place. Charr are soldiers, nothing else.

Charr are a militaristic society, and no doubt are one of the — if not the — smartest races when it comes to war, but they don’t know war and nothing else.

They’re actually extremely great and innovative farmers. Since charr eat only meat and it takes a lot to keep the legions fed (especially the Black Citadel), they have to be. I believe it was charr who invented agriculture in Tyria, and as I recall, the sprinklers you see in Queensdale and other human lands to water crops are charr technology that the charr gave to humans, since humans were still using irrigation or something far less efficient.

Charr are also amazing engineers and good at solving practical problems. Granted quite a bit of what they create has a militaristic reason, but they then apply the knowledge to other things.

Every charr in the Legions may be trained as and considered a soldier, but that doesn’t mean that every charr is on the front lines. Being a farmer or engineer or merchant is a “career” path a charr can take if that’s what they’re good at. Serving the Legions doesn’t just mean serving in combat.

There also seems to be a growing trend with charr being more philosophical and scholarly. It’s not common and may even be looked down upon by some, but with such groups as the Priory and a cease fire with other races, it’s now an option for charr.

And fahrars do more than just teach to kill — charr cubs actually get a pretty good education. They may not have to do poetry or handwriting like humans, but they do get taught history, how to read and write, math, some learn how to raise and train devourers, and practical things like that. They aren’t taught to be mindless soldiers who only do what they`re told.

Like Emrad.9260 said, them not touching the ground keeps them sharp. All big cats except for the cheetah retract their claws for this very purpose (cheetahs can’t because they need the claws for traction and being non-retractable gives them more support and stability, and they don’t use their claws to grip to the degree other big cats do), though since charr don’t appear to be able to retract claws (or at least not by much) it makes sense that their claws wouldn’t quite touch the ground when walking so as to preserve the sharpness of the claws.

Of course when running — particularly on all fours — the claws do come into contact with the ground and give the charr more traction.

Colton.9460:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions

“Will there be mounts?
Other than map travel and asura gates, there will be no other methods of long distance travel such as mounts, ships, etc in Guild Wars 2 upon initial release.”

Other than this where do they make it abundantly clear? This is asked with sincerity since this was the only thing a search brought up. I am fine with the game not having mounts, but I really dont see the argument against aesthetic mounts; which, come on would be hella cool.

I can’t find it, but there was an interview or a question asked at a con a year or two ago where a higher-up dev was asked specifically about mounts being in GW2, and the answer the dev gave was basically there won’t be mounts unless they can be done right and are more than just pretty and cool speed buffs.

Things can change but the wiki FAQ pretty supports that that’s how they still feel with mounts. It’s a pretty firm no, but they’re leaving things open enough that if they can create mounts that fit what they want for the game, they can go ahead without people calling them liars or make it so anything and everything they’ve said no to being brought into question and possibly being added to the game.

I know the allure of mounts having collected them in other MMO’s (sooo much time on them in WoW…), but I’d rather them be done right or not at all than have them brought in at the cost of other things :3

Kailthir.6384:

Horses died out a long long time ago. No centar would let another “ride” them. They are a race of people not beasts. Doylaks are slower than walking. I would like to see the Asura that tries to “mount” a Charr, and tell them where to go.(seen this in another thread)

There are no mounts. No domesticated animal that can be used as a mount. It’s lore breaking. Just deal with it

There’s actually reason to believe horses aren’t extinct, they’re just extremely rare or are no longer in Tyria yet still reside in other places on the planet. This is because in the Edge of Destiny novel, there’s one point where an Asuran portal is flickering randomly between different places on the planet (this was a modified gate that didn’t need to connect to another gate to work) and one of the places it opened to was a meadow (?) with a herd of horses grazing. Unless the portal could go through time and/or space, there’s good reason to believe horses exist somewhere.

Of course even if we did suddenly find enough horses to give everyone and anyone who wanted one, they don’t come trained — it takes years to train a horse to the point it’s reliable. More if they’re born and bred wild, and it takes generations to domesticate. So lorewise, even though horses are around, unless some race has an underground horse-breeding and training organization, horses wouldn’t be more than toys for the rich, elite, and eccentric for a good long while. Long enough that barring significant time leaps in the game, whether horses are extinct or not doesn’t change the fact they are not viable mounts.

Plus I don’t see any race other than human or sylvari riding a horse. Norn are too big and heavy to ride, I have my doubts charr would be able to comfortably ride at all given their body structure (plus they’re giant, predatory felines which don’t mix well with prey animals such as horses), and asura either prefer golems or sentient beings they can order around — horses would test their patience too much and I’d fully expect an entire obituary section set up dedicated to all the asura who got themselves kill by horses.

Colton.9460:

So they couldnt have spectral animals to ride, have mechanical mounts, make moas a little bigger, or idk maybe make a new creature? I dont see how any of those are lorebreaking. If they cant add new creatures to the game without breaking lore, how will an expansion ever be released?

And realism( I know you said lore, but in the same vein) is not really this games strong suit, I mean my char runs on all fours at the same speed a norn jogs in place. Mounts would be fun, interesting, and downright awesome; plus if they just gave swiftness, wouldn’t harm the game in any way. So why not?

It’s not just creating a creature that works as a mount, it’s making one that fits in the game and doesn’t break anything. Though any mounts at all means taking a not small amount of resources (people, time, and money) away from other content which, imo, is more important than what amounts to a very costly cosmetic speed buff. To make a mount you need concept art, 3D modelling, texturing, animation for the mount and brand new animation for character models, the mounts would need to be designed and tested to work with everything in the range of character customization (height and physique mostly), armour clipping issue would need to be addressed — possibly meaning changing armour bones and animations. Then there’s testing mounts to make sure they don’t break the world with such things as people being able to get to where they shouldn’t and things breaking due to the mounts.

It’s easy to say “adding mounts would be easy” but the reality isn’t, especially in a game which was designed from the ground up to not have mounts.

The game does not need mounts. Arenanet has come up with a good balance for travel — waypoints allow for instant travel to anywhere you want to go without having to spend 20+ minutes running there, yet they’re spaced out enough that when you venture away from them, what you do and who you see matters.

Give tonics a speed boost for all I care (the lack of ability to fight and jump is actually a fair trade for a permanent speed boost while in that form, and it would make tonics a bit more useful), but mounts aren’t needed in this game. Unless Arenanet can do them right to make them fit GW2 and the GW2 universe, the resources should not be spent on them over higher priority content such as dungeons, armour, DE’s, and expansions which add to the story and don’t break lore.

I kept meaning to try transmuting an accessory but would always forget, so I’m sad to hear that it won’t work. It may not be cosmetic in that other players will be able to see it, but it’s still meaningful customization for those who would enjoy being able to customize everything about what their character wears. It seems like it would be easy enough to do, so hopefully it will be added at some point.

The main reason I’d like it is because found the Pet Rock trinket (“This used to be a pet for a skritt. A lonely, lonely skritt.”) hilarious and cute and bought it even though I just hit 80 solely to transmute it. Other people wouldn’t see it unless I linked it, but it would have made me smile and I couldn’t help but picture my big, little-nonsense femcharr warrior going into battle with her trusty Pet Rock at her side.

Though I also like your point about the Hero’s Band — it’s something that is out-leveled really fast yet can hold a level of sentimentality that other rings don’t have. It would be nice to keep the ring with you if you wanted to, instead of keeping it in the bank or deleting it outright.

luchifer.6401:

How does inspect will be abused if stats dont really matter in Guild Wars 2? Or i am missing something here? because as far as I know all end gear have the same stats.

Gear of the same level and rarity mostly have the same sum of stats to go around, but how they’re spread out can and does differ. And even though stats aren’t the end all and be all like they are in other MMO’s, an inspect function that shows stats will still be used to alienate other players because they’re gear isn’t the highest possible, the stat allocation isn’t min/max ideal, and just generally be used to prevent “undergeared” players from running dungeons.

It’s bad enough that some people are requiring certain classes/builds to run dungeons (along with linking X number of tokens), giving such players the ability to further act as elitists will very likely turn ugly. People will be turned down for dungeons — both story and explorable modes — just because they have a piece or two of green or blue gear, something isn’t max level, or they have a piece of gear with +magic find, among other things.

Besides, skill tends to be the deciding factor, not gear (within reason, of course). Gear isn’t indicative of skill so good players who don’t have perfect gear may very well be kicked out of dungeons, be blamed for someone else not carrying their weight, and have a hard time just finding a dungeon group in general.

An inspect button that doesn’t show stats is fine, but once you create a tool that lets players take an intrusive look at others and discriminate at will with the knowledge that gives them, it will be abused.

Why would I care, exactly?

I lose no experience, loot, or anything if a player comes up and helps me at the last second, and if I killed a mob to 99% it’s pretty clear that I would have beaten it with or without help. And hey, good for them — they might get something good for being helpful. It’s win/win, which is one of the reason’s I love the game.

And RNG is just RNG. Sometimes you kill a champion and nothing drops, other times you kill a low-health add from a DE and get a level 80 rare. Best not to question the wisdom of the RNG gods

Femcharr warrior who makes her own weapons and armour. So, less popular gender combined with the least popular race, yet the most popular profession combined with one discipline that’s tied for second last and another that’s extremely popular.

Dinky did alright for me, but he’s more support than the other ones. I picked Reeva on another character and she seems to be alright for the moment, but I’m only level 10 so there’s a lot of room for that to change.

But NPC’s as a whole seem to be rather underpowered much of the time. I just loved the personal story missions where 10+ NPC’s and I got swarmed by undead, I AoE daze the undead on cooldown (so 2 second daze every 10 or 12 seconds) — as well as hit them with weakness and cast boons on the NPC’s — and a minute later three undead are down along with all the NPC’s ?_?

At least ‘bandmates — less than ideal as they may get — are better than Generic NPC #1-10. I’d rather listen to Dinky’s banter and see the other ones I recruited who went and vanished than have a bunch of identical NPC’s that shout the same few lines over and over again.

I definitely agree with this. I’m sitting at ~80% completion and it’s at the point where I’ve forgotten some of the zones that I’ve completed. Being able to tell at a glance on the map what’s done and what’s not would be such a small feature that would save quite a bit of time and a decent amount of silver.

Like it’s been said, hammer is great for multiple mobs. It’s AoE and control can just decimate multiple mobs at the same time while not making you a glass cannon. And if you have someone with you, almost everything should drop like flies.

Even single mobs, unless they are unstoppable or have permanent stability (or certain champions), aren’t much of a problem depending on your utility skills and traits. The hammer may not do the sheer amount of damage as other weapons do (though I recall it actually has the highest damage-per-second of all warrior weapons), but it offers enough control and conditions that what it lacks in damage it makes up in giving you (and people around you) better survivability.

My only complaint is that there’s not really many traits which are for hammers specifically. In fact, I think there’s just one and it’s in the defense tree, meaning that hammer-centric builds pretty much have to put 20 points in defense since the damage increase and reduced cooldown is nothing to sneeze at. It would probably get more love if there were a few more hammer-specific traits spread out in different trees.

I’ll be in all three, but my main charr and heart lies with Blood. I’m fond of Iron and maybe it will win me back, but Blood has really impressed me. The other legions look down on Blood, seeing them as a bunch of meatheads and leathernecks, but instead of letting that get to them, Blood members typically have a “yes I’m a soldier, and I don’t need toys or to sneak around to be a good one, either” attitude.

I can see why they didn’t do this (suddenly a personal story question would affect your combat and become part of min/maxing and be impossible to change) but I’m still a bit sad they didn’t do this. I’m pretty much done my personal story now and I miss kicking tail with Dinky by my side and having him make me choke on tea with his comments

I’m actually surprised that there isn’t a tab for the rare materials. They may not be as common or prevalent as standard crafting materials, but they still can take up a good chunk of bank space if you have just a small variety of them. Bank space is already at a premium — especially if you’re holding onto gear to transmute — and since bank space is account-based and thus needs to be shared with all characters, a tab for rare materials would be a small mercy.

tiennen.6890:

GOSU.9574:

Mounts never had a place in Guild Wars. The content comes in smaller packages and the game has waypoints, a vastly superior form of travel.

Now if you want mount heads on sticks to “giddy up” around town in your town clothes, go for it.

that is because they weren’t needed. There were mounted mobs in GW1, so this argument is invalid.

I think that mounts have a place in GW2, and should be implemented.

Mounts aren’t needed now, either. And two non-human mobs that rode mounts doesn’t invalidate anything since mobs inherently can have/do things that play characters can’t.

Plus there’s no lore that supports mounts. The closest is asura riding golems. Now, there are hints that humans used to ride horses centuries ago, but horses themselves appear to be quite rare — possibly nearly extinct. Other than that, there are no cases (at least as far as I’m aware) where riding a mount was commonplace. The races of Tyria seem to be perfectly content to walk around on foot or riding on dolyak carts (which aren’t any faster than walking on foot, though it makes moving stuff a lot easier).

The game just isn’t set up for mounts, and shoehorning such a feature in would be a lot of time and effort for little-to-no gain and potentially cause more problems than it “solves”. Arenanet is on record saying that if they add mounts to the game, it needs to be done right and in such a way that it adds to the game. This could mean that at some point we’ll get an area where we can use mounts where they’re part of the gameplay (such as the junundu in GW1) but cosmetic speedboost of the complexity of mounts aren’t needed, imo, in the game as it stands. The waypoint system works well enough, granted it could use some tweaks, and adding mounts just for the sake of mounts would be a waste of resources.

Hey, you try swimming around in water with zombie humans, zombie fish, zombie drakes, and water which has pretty much been steeped in dead things and parts of dead things all while wearing a fur coat and see how well you smell afterward :P

After hanging around and saving them a couple times, skritt have grown on me and I’d definitely like to play them. For the most part they seem like decent individuals but wound up not having anyone but themselves when they had to flee the destroyers. And with other races treating them like vermin, it’s no wonder they’re so hostile to outsiders. I’d also like to see more of examples of how their intelligence waxes and wanes depending on how many other skritt are around.

Quaggan are another race I’d like to play. I just love how they talk and how they’re just a roly-poly ball of blubber… who may just snap and turn into a ball of rage and hurt if you push it too far.

I’d also like to play an Elonian centaur. I prefer their design over the tyrian centaurs and I doubt tyrian centaurs will ever stop going to war with humans, and so I hope over the past 250 years maybe some elonian centaurs are willing to ally with non-centaurs. They’d be a pain to do jumping puzzles with, though :P

I can’t see mounts working in GW2 outside of instances such as the junundu in Nightfall, even though those weren’t technically mounts.

First, deciding what each race should ride (or just giving a blanket type of mount to everyone) would ride would be a pain. Asura have the obvious golems and sylvari would probably have some plant creature, but humans? Charr? Norn? Arenanet isn’t just going to shoehorn a mount in if it doesn’t makes sense, and lore does not support mounts being used except in the case of asura and golems. The next closest is probably necrid horsemen in GW1, and there’s no telling how long ago those horses died, but it was very likely a long, long time ago since horses no longer seem to live on the continent of tyria.

Then there’s also the problem that mounts would set a precedent so all future playable races would need to have mounts, too. There’s so many different races which can potentially be playable, it seems like poor design to never be able to make them playable because they couldn’t have a mount.

Plus designing and animating a mount, and creating animations for player character,s and making sure mounts work for all variations of player characters, and dealing with major clipping issues is a lot of work which could be better spent on other content.

Mounts work in some games and I love them in those games, but GW2 is not a type of games for mounts. Other MMO’s typically design the game with mounts in mind, so all the basic structures and world are conducive to mounts. GW2 has been designed from the ground up not to have mounts, so that means that any mount system would need to be designed from scratch and then added to the current game code. Factor in that the world has been designed for people to run around on foot and it’s asking for a lot of time, effort, and trouble for very little — if any — payoff.

Perhaps one day we’ll get a “mount” in the sense of a transformation, but I highly doubt we’ll get speed-boosting mounts that we ride outside of specific content.

Yeah, it’s a bug and/or lag. It’s annoying but there’s no helping it until it’s fixed (and if it’s due to lag it may never be fixed completely), so your best bet is to try to compensate for potentially going through your target. It’s why I no longer use Bull’s Charge around drops after a couple times I went through a mob and continued to fly to my death >_>

After playing a hammer warrior in the beta, one of the first things I did was get a hammer for my warrior. It doesn’t have the raw DPS some of the other weapons have, but I don’t find it overly lacking, especially if you have enough precision and +crit modifiers. And really, I wouldn’t give up all the control a hammer has for more damage even if I could. Sure it may take me longer to kill something solo, but I bet I’ll take a lot less damage since I can lockdown mobs so well.

Group situations are ideal, though. Both when I’m in a group and if/when I decide to pull multiple mobs.

The only thing that bothers me is that hammers are next to useless against mobs which have stability, are unstoppable, or otherwise immune to the control hammers have. Still, I guess that’s why there’s weapon switching :P

And I wouldn’t give up the ability to jump in with the AoE daze burst to save someone who aggro’d too much with the Captain Hammer song running through my head for anything

I rolled charr because I pretty much love everything about them.

I’ve always been a cat person so the caught my eye back in GW1, but as more lore was revealed — particularly in EotN — I found myself getting more and more hooked. And once Ecology of the Charr was posted on the GW1 wiki, that was it — charr became my favourite fantasy race.

Here’s a race that was oppressed and enslaved by some of their own (and arguably regressed during that time) and overcame that and the civil war that’s been raging since, that has been at war on multiple fronts with other races, and is still alive and kicking. Not only that, they live in a world where magic and gods exist yet they eschew using magic and worshipping anything after the titans and have become the most purely technologically advanced race in Tyria. All in less than 250 years and with constant wars.

I also love how pragmatic charr are. Age and gender doesn’t matter as long as you’re capable of doing something. And if you were to dare to insinuate a femcharr is any less than a male charr, odds are you’re going to end up in a lot of pain, if you live long enough to see the sun rise.

A casual glance at charr may make it seem like they’re a brutal, warmongering race who don’t care about anything other than victory, but underneath that there’s some core values which run deep and strong. Blood only determines your genes — the people you fight beside, see live and die, and the friendships you forge are what makes up your family. War is bloody and violent yet it still has rules — if you cross the line from honourable to spineless your life is forfeit to the point where your own people may very well turn their backs on you. The good of the many is more important than any one individual, and loyalty is something not to be betrayed or exploited, to name some.

Charr also live life well and seem to have a wicked sense of humour, so when they aren’t on duty (and sometimes if they are) they seem like blokes who would be great to hang out and have a drink with. Or shoot the breeze with, end up getting into a hairy situation, then laughing about it when it’s over.

Definitely my kind of race.