Guild Wars 2

All Living Story releases from the start of Season 2 onwards are permanent. You can unlock them either by logging in during the 2 week release window or by paying 200 gems after that.

Once they’re unlocked they’re accessible by every character. Including new characters created after you unlock the episode at any time (although you have to get to level 80 to play it).

It may also be worth knowing that what you’re paying for is actually only a few specific things. You can access all of the following even if all the story releases are locked:

• New maps
• Open world events on those maps
• Open world achievements
• Items obtainable in the open world like the carapace armor
• You can play the story by forming a party with someone who has it unlocked

Paying will get you:

• The ability to start the story instances yourself
• Story related achievements
• Certain reward items, like the Mawdrey backpack and Mardrey II which consumes bloodstone dust

So you could try a few of the story instances, or even play through the entire story, by joining a friend or a guild member who has them unlocked and then decide based on that whether you want to buy them.

I have a whole folder for screenshots of other peoples characters and most of them are ones where I like their armor, or the look of their whole character.

Some time after I started collecting these it occurred to me that I should really tell people I like their character design – if I’m honest partially because I thought it’d make it less creepy when I have to obviously follow them to get a decent shot, but also because I thought they might like to know.

Like other people I’ve had only positive responses. It seems weird at first to whisper a stranger to tell them you like their outfit, but chances are they’ve put a lot of time and effort into it, so it’s not as random as it might seem.

Adding a dedicated system for it just seems like an unnecessary complication. And might actually have the negative effect of making some people feel pressured to choose an outfit they think other people will like, instead of what they want their characters to look like.

Just remember that this game is not WoW, it’s not even a clone with different names for the same things. Although they’re the same genre they are very different games in a lot of ways.

Don’t assume you know how something works or what to do because it seems similar to something in WoW and you’ll have a much easier time learning the game.

I think you’ve encountered some of this already with the answers you’ve been given but it’s true of everything in the game. The people I see struggling the most are the ones who are determined to treat this game just like the last one they played no matter what.

Also the Wiki is a great resource, it has a lot of useful info. But you can also ask either here or in game any time you’re stuck or confused and other players will help.

Nhalx.9735:

First there’s a huge complaint about holiday specific weapons that were RNG on the Chest drops back when it was haloween. They changed that, now you cna buy them.

Then there’s the fact you coulnt obtain anything based on miniature pets which you can now get from doing these events.

So, to directly answer your own individual question; Why would you want everything?
Does it not seem logical that you actually already get something fro doing part of the holiday experience?

Why do you need everything and leave them completely blank with specialty items you can obtain for paying something if you are so obsessed or want to support future developments?

The problem is they didn’t fix the issue with an RNG for halloween weapons, they just transfered it to a different type of item and therefore a different group of players. It’s exactly the same system.

Although the entire thing wouldn’t be an issue if it was possible to buy the minis in the trading post.

Apparently early on they did try removing levels all together, but the alpha testers didn’t like it. I’m not quite sure why, but I think partially it was probably just habit from other games.

Personally I agree that the actual level numbers are largely meaningless but I still think levelling up makes a difference. A level 20 character down-levelled to 9 will be stronger than a character who is genuinely level 9.

You have many more skills available and from level 15 onwards you can get bonuses from your traits as well (your stats are scaled down, but you still get the perks, which is why I said level 15 instead of 11). You’re also much more likely to have a full set of gear with stats which fit your build and all the upgrade slots filled.

I find it’s very noticeable when I go back to things I found difficult the first time I did them (at the appropriate level). I often find I can get through it much faster with less trouble. Sometimes I even feel like I don’t even need to try.

I much prefer it to either being locked out of lower level areas once you out level them, or having high level characters running around demolishing everything and making it impossible for anyone trying to level to actually hit anything.

I do enjoy the story. No it’s not great literature, or even the best storyline I’ve seen in an RPG. But I like multiple books and movies, not just the single best one I’ve ever read/watched, and similarly I can enjoy multiple games story lines even if I know others are better.

I like exploring the lore and both history and current events – which is mainly done by speaking to NPCs both inside story instances and outside of them. I like playing through the story multiple times on different characters to see the different versions. (Which mainly applies to the personal story which can be almost completely different based on your race and the choices you make, but the HoT and living stories have minor differences too.)

I also find a lot of the dialogue amusing, so even if I’m not that interested in the overarching plot at the time I can enjoy the way it’s presented.

I think the big problem with the Guild Wars 2 storyline is actually that it’s quite complicated. You need to pick up on and remember a lot of details in order to get the full experience (like characters who are introduced in one instance, won’t be seen for a while and then appear again periodically – the game assumes you know who they are from meeting them before but players may not remember). And that generally means either playing it multiple times so it sticks in your memory or playing it all in a short space of time which is not how it’s designed.

Which I think might be part of the OPs problem. The enemies that are attacking you usually do have something to do with the story and who and what they are and why they’re attacking you is explained. But if you see it as “kill some adds, something happens, kill some adds…” you’re not going to pick up on that. You need to follow the details.

Likewise Aurene is not a pet and they have not created an area specifically for you to play with her – it’s an instanced version of Tarir – the same place many earlier story chapters and open-world events take place, a city specifically created to house the baby dragon.

The purpose of having her in the story is not to give you a tamagochi to play with, that’s just one tiny part (which is why there’s not much to it), she’s going to be a reoccurring character who will literally grow as the story progresses and presumably will play a much bigger and more significant role once she’s not a newly hatched baby.

I’m not quite sure how you could have missed all of that but if you did I can understand how everything else would seem like a mess because you must be missing a lot of the details and reoccurring characters.

(I’m also a bit confused about these multiple dragon fights you mention in HoT and the living story. We’ve only fought 2 dragons so far – Zhaitan and Mordremoth. Any others bosses you’re thinking of are not dragons.)

Same again with intractables. If you assume that everything worth investigating is labelled and anything without a label can be ignored then you’re going to miss a lot, like objects which are deliberately hidden because they’re part of an easter egg or achievement, jumping puzzles (not story related I know), NPCs to speak to… And then yes, the maps will seem quite empty. (And this is assuming you are aware that the maps are designed to be played outside of story instances too. Many of the things which appear non-functional inside an instance are used outside of it, so again if you only do the story and then never go back there ever again you’re going to miss a lot.)

I agree completely. I have no idea why the original town clothes became a tonic instead of an outfit. I know it’s not possible to keep them as separate pieces to mix-and-match but considering there was a complete set it should be easy to combine them into an outfit like they did with the pirate and chef costumes. (And we know from the wedding outfit they can have ones which change based on your race and sex so that’s not a problem either.)

Like you I thought it would be a perfect ‘starter outfit’ and may actually lead to more gem store sales. At the moment you can completely ignore the outfit tab unless you’ve already bought one, or you got the free one for having an account before Play-for-Free was introduced. But if new players (and everyone else) got a free outfit to start with, like we used to with town clothes, and were told about it when they first unlock outfits, it would give them a reason to go into the tab and experiment with the functionality and then they’d be more likely to buy others.

But also I just miss my town clothes. I used to use them regularly (I even had a keybind set to switch between them) and ever since the wardrobe update the tonics have been sat in my private guild bank, because they’re not worth using and not even worth selling.

Olaf Olafson and his daughter were certainly willing to try. It’s almost a shame their chosen partners were less keen.

I wonder if people would also be offended if they knew about every time an artist designs an enemy which isn’t used or a programmer figures out a cool trick with the physics engine and then can’t think of a practical use for it.

To answer some questions:

The game has patched.

The foil wrappers are not for sale in the gem store any more.

The Skritt is still there but he’s not accepting any more foil wrappers.

I don’t know if wrappers still drop from ToT bags but they’re useless if they do.

I don’t know but I assume the skins will be exactly the same as the ones from the 1st Halloween, meaning tradeable.

The skritt already said they will be given out by mail so there’s no risk of missing your prize if you weren’t online at the time it’s decided.

The prices probably will drop shortly before/after the prizes are given out, but they’ll go back up again afterwards so if you’re one of the winners and looking to sell you might actually be better off waiting. (For example look at what happened to precursor prices when the Karka event ended and a lot entered the market, the prices dropped then climbed higher than they were before.)

By guardian skins do you mean the shoulder and helmet skins that are only available during character creation for guardians?

If so then you don’t need to use the trick of putting them onto white armor any more. All you need to do is create a character using the skin you want and it’ll be unlocked in the wardrobe, then any heavy armor wearing character can use them. The same is true of all the other profession specific starter skins.

(And also every other skin in the game. Even legendaries. If you’ve got a legendary then you can apply the skin to any other weapon of the same type on any character on your account.)

Finally no it’s not possible to delete skins from the wardrobe, once they’re in they’re there forever. And I actually like a lot of the low level skins.

I have never heard anyone say GW2 is not a PVE game. Maybe I’ve just missed the topics where it’s come up but I’m on the forum every day so either it’s an isolated incident or I’ve somehow missed a lot of topics.

Either way it’s rediculous. There is a huge amount of PVE content in this game. I’ve been playing almost daily since launch and haven’t even touched PVP or WvW.

And GW1 was the same. I played it for 5 years, several thousand hours in total, and barely ever did PVP. I’d do occasional matches in JQ or FA but 99% of my time was PVE content and I never finished it all.

NapTooN.6283:

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

A friend deleted her character with the legendary staff on it by mistake, didn’t get the character nor the weapon back. And we did send many emails and explanations about a genuine mistake (another of her characters looked very similar in name and appearance).

What do we learn from this?

• Always check the Inventory of the Character you want to delete before you delete it
• Don’t name one Character xXxKillerxXx and the other xXxKilIerxXx (one of them has a capital i as an “L”)and make them look the same and have the same Profession.

Agreed.

I make, and delete, a lot of characters and the only thing I’ve ever lost is some karma back before it was account bound.

My method is to strip everything out of the equipment tab, even stuff you don’t want to keep, because it’s easier to look at an empty tab and confirm it’s empty than to look at one with stuff equipped and work out what you do and don’t want. Condense their inventory down to the starter backpack (by banking, selling or salvaging items) and remove all extra bags.

Then go through the stuff in the inventory, carefully read the name and deposit, salvage, sell or delete each item individually until there’s nothing left. Then double check I’ve done everything above.

I do a similar thing when actually deleting them. I click the character I want to delete, double check it’s the right one (it’s pretty clear, since they’re the naked one), type the name in, double check the name and then delete them.

Although I have to admit I’d never made a temp character with a name that was virtually identical to one I wanted to keep.

Have you tried creating your own adverts on the LFG tool?

I like doing dungeons the same way you do, actually doing the full thing instead of skipping most of it and then stacking in a corner spamming skills for the rest. If I don’t see a group that appeals to me I make my own advert and they always fill up quickly, a few minutes at most.

I think everyone should be able to get the skins and other cosmetic items they want. It doesn’t have to be cheap or easy, but it should be possible.

Especially when it’s something like this. It doesn’t work as proof that you were playing at a particular time when it’s sold on the gem store. If they’re willing to someone could buy the game today, convert a bunch of gems to gold and get that shield. As far as anyone else in the game knows the only thing it’s proof of is that you once had a lot of gold.

All of which means it makes much more sense to treat it as simply a skin and buy or use it based entirely on whether you like it or not instead of worrying about how many other people have the same one or what you imagine they might think if they notice you have it.

I don’t have time to respond to everything in your post now (I’m at work right now) but LA was empty because all of the city functions like bank access, merchants etc. have been moved to the Vigil Keep as part of the Living Story.

If you go through any of the portals (in cities or the Heart of the Mists) that normally lead to LA you’ll come out there and find all the people you’d normally see in LA. (Although there’s also a lot more people in the racial cities now.)

Also if you were buying trait books every time you wanted to change your traits then you were wasting a lot of money – the trainer would reset them for a few silver, far less than the cost of a book. In that sense the new update should be better for you because now it’s free to change them whenever and wherever you want (as long as you’re out of combat).

I’m not aware of a boycott but many people have made the (entirely sensible) decision not to buy it until they think it’s worth it: either when more information comes out on the stuff they want, or when the price drops after launch. Some of those people might never buy it.

But waiting to make a purchase decision is not the same as a boycott, which implies you do want it but have some issue with the business and are refusing to buy it as a protest.

I’ve never been able to decide how I feel about transmutation charges.

On the one hand the basic system does sound undesirable – you obtain skins to use, but then have to pay extra (either gold or real money) to be able to use them. That would definitely put me off changing skins and therefore obtaining skins.

On the other hand I’ve been playing this game for 4.5 years, I’ve got 9 permanent characters and had literally dozens of temporary ones (who do sometimes get reskinned equipment) and I’ve never bought transmutation charges, or transmutation stones. I’ve always had more than enough simply from the ones we get free, even with my main character totally changing her look every few months. I don’t play PvP and only play WvW occasionally so I think most of those came from login rewards and map completion (mainly cities but you can get them from other maps as well) – because I make a lot of alts I do a lot of map completion so I end up with a lot of charges.

I suppose the logical conclusion of those two points is that transmutation charges are ineffective (in my case) as a way of generating income for Anet, but still create the impression of a pay gate, so the game would be better off if they were removed.

But in practice the outcome is that I don’t care. I don’t worry about spending them because I know I always have enough, so they don’t feel like a barrier to me. I almost forget that changing skins costs anything, I just pick the skins I want and apply them.

Do you know that damaged armor (the orange shield symbol) is still fully functional?

You don’t need to repair it unless one or more pieces are broken (jagged red symbol), and that won’t happen until after every piece is damaged. So you can get killed 7 times before it actually has any effect.

If you’re regularly dying 8 times in a row between encountering an armor repair station then you need to reassess your build and how you’re using it, because that shouldn’t be happening.

As for contested waypoints that is exactly their purpose – it means events can’t be completed simply by people rushing in, dying, resurrecting at an adjacent waypoint and rushing in again. You actually need to be able to complete the fight, not just zerg it.

It’s basically fan fiction written by someone at Arenanet, a story about the world of Tyria and the people in it (although I don’t think Vikki and Momo are actually in the game).

I enjoy reading it, especially for the descriptions of different places as seen by someone on their first visit there, it reminds me of the first time I encountered some of the same landmarks, and places I still like to re-visit now (like the aquarium tunnel in Divinity’s Reach).

I especially liked the previous chapter where she briefly visited the Mad King’s Labyrinth. It was an interesting firstly to realise that to someone like Vikki who seems to have little/no combat training ending up somewhere like that would be absolutely terrifying, and then that she found our characters (who were mentioned in the story) nearly as frightening – seeing all these people armed to the teeth rushing eagerly into a maze filled with deadly monsters.

But if you’re not interested you don’t have to read it, you’re not going to miss anything except the story itself.

I think they’re confusing two different things. Development on GW1 would have stopped no matter what Anet’s next game was called. Maybe if they’d decided to make something small and simple like a phone game or a puzzle game they could have done both, but an MMORPG takes a lot of work from a lot of people so they couldn’t keep 2 going at once.

Especially because GW1 relied on selling boxes copies to make a profit, which meant they had to keep producing new campaigns or expansions quickly to keep the company going, and that takes a lot of people so it’s a vicious circle. They’ve never out-right said it but I strongly suspect part of the reason for the decision to make a new game was that they were finding that business model was unworkable in the long-run.

Likewise I think a big part of the reason they decided to call it Guild Wars 2 was so they could keep the world and the lore they’d already created and just adapt it instead of starting from scratch. World building is a huge part of creating any fantasy. Amateur writers are often warned off starting with fantasy for exactly that reason – before you can do anything you’ve got to create a whole world, and then you’ve got to persuade readers to be interested in that as well as your story. It’s a huge amount of extra work compared to using something they’re already familiar with (like your existing franchise).

Secondly GW1 wasn’t built around Guild v. Guild – it was built around PvE and PvP going hand-in-hand. When the game first came out there was no option to make a PvP-only character and the two modes weren’t as separate. There was no PvP in PvE maps, but you had to level in PvE and then you’d unlock arenas as you reached them (the ones now used for random arenas) and compete in them until you out-levelled it, by which point you should have reached the next one by playing through the story.

Eventually you’d complete the Rite of Ascension and gain access to Heroes Ascent (which at the time was accessed through the Tomb of the Primeval Kings, some people still call it Tombs or Tombing for that reason). Then winning that gained you access to the PvE end-game zones: The Fissure of Woe and the Underworld, as well as a chance to get a Celestial Sigil and therefore a guild hall (which was required to hold Guild vs. Guild battles).

They started changing that pretty much from release as they discovered that some people only wanted to play PvP and others only wanted PvE and the ones who did want both wanted more choice over what they did. Which ended up with both the system we had in GW1 where you could create a PvP-only character and access all the PvP modes right from the start, or access all PvE areas without doing PvP and lead to the system we had in GW2 right from day 1 where the two were kept separate.

In lore the actual Guild Wars were ended with The Searing (so the only part of the game that takes place during that period is the tutorial for Prophecies). After that guilds were banned from owning or controlling land on mainland Tyria -which is why all the guild halls are islands – and their battles were restricted to those islands and the Mists. Then Zhaitan rose and the islands were flooded, but the battles in the Mists have continued – in the form of World vs. World and PvP in GW2.

Yes you can. It’s sold through the GW2 website for $50.

I know it’s not at all clear from the way it’s presented but that price is the cost of the expansion, even if nothing else came with it. They’re giving away the base game free to people who don’t already have it, but the expansion costs the same either way.

If I’ve understood the announcement correctly laurels and mystic coins will now come from the log-in reward, and the daily achievements will reward different items.

Which makes me think a lot of the concerns about doing dailies are going to be irrelevant to most people because the rewards are the main (only?) reason to do them and now the two are separate.

You only need to do the dailies if you want the AP (and for AP hunters doing any 3 dailies instead of 10 must be an improvement) or if you want the reward items from that specific daily and don’t have an easier way to get them.

One of the nice things about GW2 is if you don’t like some of the content you don’t have to do it. I’ve barely touched PvP and I know people who have never been in a dungeon.

So if you don’t like whatever the challenging group content is you can ignore it.

I’ve always had trouble telling the difference between completed and uncompleted Hero Points (skill points were easy, but hero points look too similar to me). This is going to make it harder.

Sure you can look for the symbol, but if you’re scanning across the map looking for things you need for map completion it’s even harder to tell if you need that hero point than it used to be.

Bob F It.5701:

I’ve had someone tell me that My Greatest Fear has been reintroduced into the game. Can anyone confirm this?

I think there’s a bit of confusion because there’s 3 different possibilities.

1) Your character had finished the story
Originally the September 9th patch changed the story journal to show the new format. On the 16th this was reverted so characters who had already finished the story had the Greatest Fear arc included in their journals.

2) Your character had started the level 70 arc before the 9th September
You will get to play through the original format, including the Greatest Fear arc. I wasn’t able to confirm this myself but I believe all the other chapters will be in the original order too.

3) Your character had not reached the level 70 arc before 9th September
This applies to both new characters and existing ones below level 70. These characters have to play through the new format, where the Greatest Fear storyline has been removed.

I’m 100% sure that 1 and 3 are correct. I’m not willing to risk taking one of my permanent characters who were below level 70 through the story to check 2 but that’s what’s been reported by other people in this and other threads.

I agree.

A few weeks ago I noticed my left hand, the one I use the mouse with, was very sore. It didn’t exactly take a genius to realise it’s because of using a computer (I’m on one all day at work too) but what was a bit of a surprise was that by far the biggest contributor was how much time I spent holding the right mouse button down.

Luckily I was able to set one of my mouse buttons to toggle right click on and off and it’s amazing the difference it’s made. I’m not using a computer less, I’m not playing GW2 less, but my hand only starts to hurt towards the end of exceptionally long play sessions.

The really surprisingly thing is I’m also not using that button as much as I thought I would. It’s very inconvenient not having the cursor because it stops me doing a lot of things, so I only really use it when I’m running long distances or doing something like a jump puzzle, but I still wouldn’t go without it.

I propose a very simple solution to both sides of the problem: Everyone who thinks they have too much gold and nothing to spend it on should send their spare gold to someone in this thread who said they don’t have enough.

Then everyone is happy.

(Disclaimer: This is not a serious suggestion, unless you want to send it to me of course.)

They added a Looking For Group tool to the game, I don’t remember when exactly but it was a while ago.

Open your contacts menu (now called Contacts and Looking For Group) and click the magnifying glass icon.

OP – that’s my thinking. Every so often I find myself wanting to play the original Guild Wars, so I open it and play it.

I usually end up with mixed feelings – remembering why I love it and some things that I wish were in GW2 (mainly fairly minor things like being able to keep your bank open anywhere in town and being able to put skills on my bar in any order I want) but I also end up frustrated by a lot of things that are in GW2 and I wish were in the first game as well. Usually the end result is that I remember why my plan to play both equally rapidly turned into playing GW2 far, far more.

The biggest problem with that quote is that it’s usually repeated out of context. Here’s the full sentence:
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

Anet never said there would be no grind in the game. They said grind would only be for cosmetic items. Legendaries, gem store skins, and dungeon armor all come under that category.

Yes legendaries and dungeon gear do have stats as well, but in both cases there are quicker and easier ways to obtain the same stats, so the grind is only for the skin.

Compare this to many other MMOs and RPGs where you will need to spend hundreds of hours just to level up, and your only option for getting the best gear is to run a specific dungeon over and over again hoping for it to drop (and then fight your friends for the “right” to keep it).

Obviously ascended gear is an exception to this, but it was added in response to 2 months of people who rushed through levelling and got their exotics as soon as they hit 80 complaining that they needed something else to work towards and Anet must add a gear treadmill for the game to survive. (Seriously, go and read topics in this forum from October 2012, there were a lot saying exactly that.)

Personally I think they’ve done a very good job of compromising by giving the content leeches something to work towards that doesn’t affect the rest of us. You don’t need ascended gear, even with a full set the difference in stats isn’t enough to make an impact, especially since the entire game was balanced around exotics being the top tier.

If removing it completely isn’t an option maybe it could come up briefly when you first enter beastmode then disappear? Or fade in and out?

Alternatively it could be made more subtle. Remove some of the green haze so it’s mainly just the leaf and vine effects maybe?

He was posting on the forum yesterday.

He may be busy in real life, or in-game. But he’s definitely still around.

Is it me or do the human ones look a lot like what Axl Rose and Stephanie Seymour wore in the November Rain video? The jacket isn’t exactly the same but with the right dyes I could see it looking very similar.

Now I want to make a character who looks like Axl and give him that outfit. (And use loads of shout skills.)

FrostyBou.5491:

crystalpink.2487:

Omg, high-low dresses. Yay!!!
Anet knows some of the current trendy styles xD

I did not know this term before. I was looking at them and thought they did not look like any wedding dresses I’ve ever seen anyone wear before. Now that I google it, i see there are actually wedding dresses that are similar in style. They do not seem to have the same formalness(?) that most wedding dresses have, but I have learned something today.

Not all wedding dresses, or weddings, are formal. Mine certainly wasn’t, I got married in a (blue) bridesmaids/prom dress in a garden and my top priority for the dress was making sure I could walk, dance, sit and eat loads of cake comfortably. I was outdone by my friend though, who got married in what I can only describe as a mass of colour then had a nerf gun fight in a field. Best wedding I’ve ever been to.

One of the things I like most about these outfits is that they’re tailored to each race and culture. I can’t imagine the charr (or the norn) wearing a “typical” wedding outfit, but these look like fancier versions of what the NPCs wear, which is perfect.

Well quite a few people are expecting us to go to the Crystal Desert in the next expansion, so maybe we’ll find enough of the original Ascension sites still in tact to be able to do it there.

Although GW1 never really made it clear what Ascension actually involves, in spite of showing us 2 different versions of the process. The Crystal Desert rituals were created by the Kournans, who never actually succeeded so it could well be that a lot of what they involved isn’t necessary at all and the Canthan version is completely different.

Also, the effects of Ascension given on the GW1 wiki are allowing you to:

• Enter The Mists
• Learn new skills (2nd professions)
• Unlock hidden reserves of power with the right help
• See the spirits of the dead, and other spirits from the Mists when they’d normally be hidden.

In practical terms it allowed us to enter the elite missions (Underworld, Fissue of Woe, Tomb of the Primeval Kings etc.), choose and change secondary professions, and preceeded the missions where we could get our armour infused to reduce the damage done by mursaat’s spectral agony and where we’d see large numbers of mursaat or (in Factions) Shiro. (You didn’t actually need to ascend to see the mursaat, if you went to those maps early they’d still be there and you could still get your equipment infused by going to Mineral Springs.)

However Nightfall characters could do all of those things without completing either ascension mission. And then there’s Lord Odran, one of the first humans to enter the Mists who did it using “a spell of his own devising and the sacrifice of many souls”.

So it looks like there are many different ways to achieve the same result.

I agree that if we need to be Ascended it shouldn’t just be ignored, but I don’t think it needs to involve something as elaborate and complicated as the Prophecies Ascension rituals.

This sounds like a really good change.

At the moment I’m often reluctant to use Revive Orbs because it’s so slow and there’s a very high probability of being killed again before the sickness wears off. I’ll basically only use it if I know there’s no enemies, environmental effects or anything else dangerous anywhere around and I’m 99% sure no other players are around either and there are big advantages to reviving where I am instead of using a waypoint.

Which basically means I only ever use them when I’ve fallen part-way off a jumping puzzle at a quiet time of day. (And on rare occasions when I’ve broken out of a map but died in the process…only so I can submit a full bug report of course. )

This change sounds like it will completely remove the first consideration and drastically reduce the second, meaning my revive orbs will be much more useful to me. I look forward to trying it out. Hopefully not too soon…although I heard Josh made a jumping puzzle for the new map, so I’ll probably be using them on day 1!

I don’t like it. I’d much prefer to keep nameplate clutter to a minimum because otherwise it just looks like a mess and it’s difficult to pick out the relevant bits.

Maybe they could give us the circles some NPCs have around their picture, that wouldn’t be too obtrusive. (This could tie into Vayne’s idea of making it a reward for hours played, scale up from the basic circle to the jagged purple legendary one.)

But something like a red dragon around the whole nameplate just sounds distracting and messy to me.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

It’s more likely to be a repeat of this year—with another choice of backpack—for the next four years. Hopefully, there’ll be additional rewards.

But I do like your idea.

Considering the backpack was just one of many things we got this year, and we’ve never had just a single item I think it’s safe to assume there will be other things next year too.

This frustrates me too. Every time I do a meta-event like Silverwastes or one of the HoT maps and then try to empty my bags I hit this. And it seems to get more strict after the first time it’s triggered – if you wait a few seconds you can sell another item or two, then you’ll have to wait about 10 seconds, then sell 1 item, then wait about 30 seconds….until it becomes impractical to keep trying and I have to go and do other things until I can finish selling stuff.

I do try to empty my bags in between stages of the event, but depending on what you’re doing there may not be time to get through it all so it still ends up building up.

I realise there’s a good reason for it to exist, to stop (or at least slow down) bots, but it definitely seems too sensitive to me if normal players can hit it on a regular basis.

It’s probably not a problem for everyone, especially if you don’t normally pick the ‘sell instantly’ option, but when I’ve got a bag full of greens and blues and the difference between the buy orders and sell orders is about 1s I’d rather just sell them quickly, and that’s when this becomes a problem.

It’s certainly not game-breaking, but it would be nice if it could be toned down a bit so real players are less likely to trigger it.

I for one welcome our new dragon overlords.

2 years ago condition builds were useless (and I say this as someone who played them anyway). IF you were the only person in that fight using conditions you might be able to contribute meaningful damage but anyone else using conditions actually reduced your damage because everyone was sharing the same stack limit.

And since it’s pretty much impossible to avoid using conditions (even on a pure power build some skills will still trigger conditions) you were better off just using power, unless you were playing solo in PvE and willing to accept that if anyone else showed up they may reduce your damage.

Now condition builds basically work the same way as power builds – you do your damage, everyone else around you does theirs and if you’re attacking the same target it all adds up.

Yes it does mean that in PvP you need to use condition removal, but in many cases you can get that from traits so it happens automatically and you don’t even need to do anything.

I like the idea of special, unique pets we can find somewhere in the world but I agree there could be balance issues. Both with more powerful pets and with disabling pet swapping.

What if they were re-skins, like the Hall of Monuments pets? For example maybe we could find a full size version of the spirit tiger mini, or a mistfire wolf or something like that (they don’t all have to be shiny and transparent, that’s just the examples that came to mind).

They could be hidden in hard to reach parts of the world, like the existing pets but more so. Maybe at the end of a jumping puzzle or dungeon, or a spot you can only reach by gliding a long way. That would also be a nice throw-back to some of the Guild Wars 1 pets, like the phoenix which you could only get by finishing Factions.

DoctorDing.5890:

I think the reward is the weapon and the warm feeling you get as you soak up the admiration of your fellow players. Actually, the last bit is a lie. If all the other players are like me you’ll see them staying further away from you than that used to, just to avoid the annoying audio and visual effects.

I suppose I could support a title for crafting one though. How about “I crafted this even though it was cheaper to buy one”?

“I used to be rich you know”.

I feel like being a casual player actually gave me an advantage in HoT, particularly regarding navigating the maps.

I wasn’t going in with a checklist of goals I had to complete as efficiently as possible so I could move on to my next set of goals. I was just going to have a wander around and see what happened. I might have an end-point in mind, whether that’s reached a particular vista or POI or the next story step or whatever, but it didn’t bother me if I didn’t get there.

In the process I got to know my way around, not by looking at the map and knowing which ‘level’ each thing was on (I struggle to read maps of all kinds, GW2s is better than many but I’m still inclined to ignore it) but by remembering how I got there.

Draconis Mons is a prime example. When people in my guild were “complaining”/bragging that they’d already finished the story in the first few hours and only had achievements to do but that was going to be really difficult because of the impossible map I’d barely started the story but was able to tell them the map was a spiral and if you just kept going up and left you’d get there because I’d gone in ignoring the mini map and the markers and just wandered around to see what I could find.

This is so frustrating, the first new content for months and it’s only available for one weekend when I can’t log in. I may be able to play a little bit on Thursday night but after that it’s absolutely out of the question.

Even so I just hope it goes better than the Karka weekend. Forcing everyone into the same map for an event proved to be a very bad idea, and I can’t see how it’s going to be different now so I hope they’ve taken that into account.

Edit: I really hope the ‘concessions’ don’t include an account bound mini. If there’s one that’s tradable and I can get it later that’s fine, but if 3 years of going out of my way to make sure I get every single one is ruined because I have to work for 1 weekend that’s going to be incredibly annoying.

They don’t know how good they’ve got it. Look at this, just look at this! (The screenshots.) You know what this is?

This is Wayfarer Foothills. Where we had to walk up hill for miles, in the snow, every day, to level up.

And when you finished? You could move on to Snowden Drifts. Guess what you found there? I’ll tell ya: more snow! By the time we got to Lornar’s Pass we were thanking Bear herself that we got to walk downhill in the snow.

And now new players, they get to go straight to the nice warm jungle! Oh, but there’s pocket raptors? We would have killed for pocket raptors! We had to fight Oak Hearts the size of a house, which would crush you with one hand!

They don’t even have to walk, just glide around picking up airship cargo as they go…

Ok, serious now: If anyone’s unclear this is a joke topic. But I did find it genuinely amusing after all the comments about having to walk uphill in the snow to level up that Wayfarer has been my favourite 1-15 zone since launch, so that’s where I’ve levelled most of my characters and I never realised until now I was doing it by literally making my way uphill in the snow.

I think Warrior is probably the easiest to learn to play and actually get good at. Ranger is very easy if you only do open-world PvE but to actually be good at the game in general there’s a very steep learning curve.

However I would strongly recommend you let your friend choose a profession they enjoy instead of pushing them towards the easiest. I think warrior is easy but I also think they make combat very dull and as a result I’ve never been able to get one to level 80 because I get bored playing them. If someone had pushed me into playing a warrior when I started I might have concluded the game was boring and moved on to something else quickly. (In fact the worst piece of advice I was ever given for RPGs was to always play a human fighter class first and only consider something else after finishing the game on that. Fortunately I was starting Baldur’s Gate at the time, where you have to control your whole party anyway so I got to play as everything.)

I had to literally bite my tongue when my husband started and decided to play a Mesmer and an ele. He’s not the best RPG player and I knew he’d struggle with whatever he picked and that was just making it harder. But he really enjoyed it and hated both a warrior and a guardian when he tried them, so pushing him to pick the easy option would have been a big mistake.

The ideal system, at least since megaservers were introduced, would be for players to not even need to choose a server until they enter WvW.

(Even better if, when they do come to choose they’re presented with the relevant information, or at least a link to the leaderboards, so they can make an informed choice. Right now it’s a matter of either taking advice from friends or guessing based on the names and stated populations of the server.)

Edit: Unless you’re in Europe and prefer to speak Spanish, in which case you have a grand total of 1 choice.

mtpelion.4562:

2g is probably not enough to incentivize a large portion of people to focus on doing the new dailies unless they are currently saving up for something (although there will probably be a large number of “I hate you for making me do X, go back to the old dailies now” threads for a while).

Plus most people aren’t going to be doing them every single day.

This means that while the total potential new gold generation is pretty large, the actual generation rate will probably not be too high.

This is my thinking,

My first reaction was “Wow, 2 gold a day!”, my second reaction was “Eh, I don’t really have time today, I’ll start of them tomorrow…if it fits in with what I’m doing”.

There’s a theory that hoses were native to Orr and went extinct in the Cataclysm. I think that’s mostly based on the Necrid Horseman, one of the Orrian undead in GW1.

Although the ‘horses’ they’re riding appear to have 4 horns so unless that’s part of the corruption they may not be anything like horses on earth.

Other than that the only horse we’ve seen encountered in the franchise is Gum Drops, Mad King Thorn’s invisible pony (and of course we don’t know what he looks like).

For what it’s worth here’s my thoughts:

Zhaitan

Zhaitan was an undead mess of dragon parts. Seriously, look at it, bones and random bits of flesh all over the place, and extra faces coming out it’s mouth.

I only assume it was alive at some point because I don’t think you can be undead without being alive first. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kind of dragon-Frankenstein’s Monster made up of bits of multiple dragons. And now on top of that it’s not even alive. My guess is it was sexless and created the Sunless in the same way as it’s other minions.

Mordremoth

Mordremoth appeared to be mostly plant, and plant reproduction is even more complicated than animals. Take my bromeliads for example which are currently simultaneously reproducing asexually by producing ‘offsets’ (offshoots that will eventually be independent plants) and sexually by producing flowers. Or trying to reproduce sexually anyway, I don’t think anything here can pollinate them. Which is another way plants are different – many of them rely on entirely separate species to facilitate sexual reproduction. And that’s just the visual aspects, on a genetic level it’s even more complicated because they can have many more chromosomes than our two and multiple distinct life stages.

In other words even with all the recent developments in coming up with new terms for every conceivable variant of human gender I’m not sure we have a word for Mordremoth. It may well have been capable of multiple forms of reproduction. For all we know it may have already had dozens of children but they’re at a different stage in the life cycle where we don’t recognise them as future plant-dragons.

Kralkatorrik & Primordius

They look the most like traditional western dragons, and therefore the most likely to be capable of sexual reproduction (and therefore either male or female), but they both also look like rocks which are not capable of reproducing at all.

Primordius creates it’s minions out of lava and Kralkatorrik corrupts them (including Glint) so that tells us nothing about how they reproduce, or if they can.

Jormag & the Deep Sea Dragon

We don’t even know what these too look like (although I hope the DSD looks like Cthulhu) and given how different the others are I wouldn’t want to guess. Without that it’s hard to even guess how they might reproduce.

A different theory

You know the more I think about the dragon’s anatomy, life cycle etc. the more I find myself wondering if they’ve corrupted themselves and are now no more dragon than the icebrood, branded, risen etc. are human or norn or charr or asura.

We know Glint has always been a dragon but has not always been crystal. We know the dragons are believed to be the oldest things in Tyria.

What if way back in the distant past there was a whole race of dragons, mortal dragons who lived and died and developed a society just like our races do today. Maybe some of them experimented with magic, just like our races did. Except maybe they tried to enchant themselves and ended up changing themselves in the process. They became something other than just dragons, changed by the spells they applied to their bodies and dependant on absorbing more magic to keep those spells going and keep themselves alive.

And then it became more than just keeping themselves alive, they got addicted to absorbing the magic (which we know from Bloodstone Fen can happen to other beings) and kept taking more and more, killing or subjugating other dragons in the process, until there was no magic left and they had to go into hibernation to keep themselves alive.

And then they’ve been doing that ever since.