Guild Wars 2

The letters are actually singed with ____E
So it seems to me that his/her name ends with an E, and the first mail is saying that he/she can’t go to to lion’s arch cause ‘Circumstances prevent it’. So Ellen seems out of sight.

There is nobody in Destiny’s edge except Rytlock Brimston*e* and Caith*e*. but the writting style is not them. Caithe would be much more enthousiastic bout it and rytlock would order you.

So lets look into the mails further:
‘You may not know me, but I know you’ – so anyone you met during the parts of the main story that are the same as for others or in dungeons or in the living story so far are out . This include (thank god) Trahearn*e*.

’ I’ve heard whispers about a threat to the Ship’s Council’ This might indicate a member of the order of whispers.

’ I’d intervene myself, but circumstances prevent it.’ So there are reasons why this person can’t go to lion’s arch.

‘The situation has worsened. One of the Lion’s Arch councillors, Theo Ashford, has succumbed to his wounds. The Lionguard is keeping the new quiet while the festival continues, but they’re overwhelmed trying to maintain security in the city. At this very moment, a killer walks free, and this cannot be allowed.’
So the person gets information pretty soon and has inside information in the council (again pointing into the direction of the order of whispers).

’ you’ll find one of the best investigative minds in Tyria, Marjory Delaqua. She will need your help to find those behind the councillor’s death. Tell her E sent you’
Marjory knows who it is, and more important knows why this person is hiding his/her identity.

My money is actually on Demmi Beetlestone.
She is currently in the chantry of whispers still hiding for her dad. Very likely she still has ties with old friends in Divinity’s reach, wich are most likely nobels like lady kashmeer (wich would explain here presence). She obvious can’t show her face in Lion’s Arch. You might know her or you might know her not cause of the story and she has access to inside info from the council.

She fits the tale perfectly in my opinion. But then again it can be someone else :P

Emperor Kisu.

And yes, his first name is Emperor.

We’re going to Cantha!

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know this is 250 years after the reign of Kisu, and yes, this is a joke..)

I’m making the effort to move this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Uninstanced-Salma-new-walls/first

Here.

Along with an official statement,

Dear ArenaNet,

We, your roleplay community, have been fairly quiet on these forums. It is ot often that we complain about in game mechanics, or that we fuss over people being too strong in PvP. We’re fairly quiet, because well, we’re out experiencing the rich lore and world that you have designed for us— and all players. However, I speak for many, when I say that your RP community is quite upset with how you’ve blocked off U. Salma, and ultimately, a very high level RP spot for players.

Gray.1704:

The role playing community is relatively quiet on the forum here (for the most part) because of one reason: Arena Net did a good job of keeping role players entertained by giving us access to certain locations and allowing us to find ways to create our own stories without getting stressed in the process.

However, when locations start to get closed off after players have been using certain locations for months at a time, it’s extremely upsetting to those participating in such places. A building or a house being shut away is one thing, but an entire district of Divinity’s Reach is a whole different story.

Now I can understand why Arena Net might want to close off an area like that. Reducing the amount of players visiting that location probably saves a bundle on memory usage across the server, but so does removing unnecessary objects, scripted events, etc. from certain locations. I can understand you want your world to feel more alive, Arena Net, but at the very same time if your servers are over cluttered and you need to conserve memory, removing some stuff would be a good choice. For example: You could set it where the NPCs and such only appear in Instanced Salma during personal story quests, but then remove the NPCs running around in Uninstanced Salma District because there’s no reason for them to be there if nobody can see them.

Optimization. I can understand the desire to clean up your world a bit to smooth performance, but don’t do it at the expense of the players’ enjoyment. Remove mobs from a location that gets WAY too much action (such as saving the Ascalon Settlement with those centaurs that never stop spawning up at the Dwayna Courtyard), and that’s just an example. There have always been a lot of places that need more attention and more bug / glitch solving than a location such as Uninstanced Salma.

Which again begs the question of why Arena Net would choose to close the location off.

It’s been said already that role players have been using that location for their own role play for about nine months (give or take) and so it’s a popular location with establishments that players have created (such as a tea house) and it helps them find enjoyment in their evening hours (or whenever time it is when you hooligans decide to role play).

The problem is that not everyone who plays MMO games is a hardcore PvP / WvW / PvE player. Not everyone wants to spend their evening hours farming for tier 6 materials in Orr or Frostgorge for their legendary weapon. Not everyone wants to get all of their characters to max level with the best gear and the best builds and the best dungeon farming solo groups and blah blah blah. There are a LOT of people who play the game to role play, but it seems more and more that the role playing community is being punished while new PvE / PvP / WvW content is released.

So… why close off such a heavily used location? Really we just want an honest answer, not a quick “It was an exploit that we closed off” answer. From what I’ve seen, the role play community within Guild Wars 2 is very understanding and mature (for the most part), so we’ll understand if it was a real issue that was causing trouble on your end, Arena Net. Just please be honest with us.

I would appreciate if a Dev could read, and respond to this — or the other forum.

Thank you kindly,
A Roleplayer.

Hey everyone,

Anyone who plays staff will be forced to admit we’re seriously missing some of the Gandalf-y gameplay/damage that one would expect from a ranged nuker.

By this point, everyone in game is familiar with the power of D/D bunker, or S/D might stacking. (It will take a better man than I to suggest anything to make the focus actually viable.)

So, for staff.

Fire This is our go-to AoE attunement. It should feel like it.

Fireball – Increase projectile speed by 40%. Increase it’s AoE range from 80 (wtf?) to ~200
Lava Font – This should do damage immediately on cast, not wait for it to “ping” it’s target. Make it a field that does damage continuously if you’re in the field, for it’s duration. Increase it’s base radius to 200.
Flame Burst – Fine as is.
Burning Retreat – This should toss you back the full 1200 range. Staff is all about ranged battle, our escape should reflect this.
Meteor Shower – Fine as is. (if they remove the AoE cap)

Water – our support/healing attunement. Again, it should feel like it.

Water Blast – Needs a serious buff to it’s healing and the range of it’s splash. Heals the caster in addition to the target. For all of me, they could make it ground targeted and do 0 damage.
Ice Spike – The animation is far, far too slow. Reduce casting time + animation to .75 second. Should also be a blast finisher, ideal for comboing water fields.
Geyser – Fine as is.
Frozen Ground – Same casting time, same area, same duration, reduce cooldown to 20 seconds. Make it deal persistent damage to anyone in the field.
Healing Rain – Fine as is.

Air This one should be single target damage. High single target damage.

Chain Lightning – Increase damage to match Fireball. Make it single target, and instant cast. Possibly rename to Lightning Bolt.
Lightning Surge – Again, should be near instant cast time. Possibly buff the damage.
Gust – Increase hitbox area, so it can actually connect, and increase knockback to 1200 range.
Windborne Speed – Fine as is.
Static Field – Make it do persistent damage to people inside the field.

Earth A mix of damage that doesn’t hit and CC skills that don’t last. Again, wtf, Anet?

Stoning – Damage and condition are fine, projectile speed needs a buff.
Eruption – Reduce the casting time + animation to 1 second, so that you can actually hit opponents with it. Can still use as a blast finisher, you just have to lay the field first.
Magnetic Aura – Fine as is.
Unsteady Ground – Make the field round, like Frozen Ground and reduce recharge to 20 seconds. Make it count as a Smoke field for combo purposes.
Shockwave – Fine as is.

Remove the 5 person max on AoE. If I can lay a field in an area, with a 200 person zergball, and have it only hit ~15 people max because of the 5 person limit coupled with the 1 second pulse, what was the point? Setting up a combo is the only response that makes sense.

Later, eh?

Stale

Edited because some folks in this thread have cool ideas, and i don’t want to break anyone’s combos. Second edit – made the attunements match in game order. Third edit – alright, alright – Eruption, not earthquake. Most recent to show how we could have considerably more offense, without borking the support or combo fields. Even more edits to bring in more ideas from the other posters, and tone up/down the skills based around the further changes. (think this makes about 40 edits now…) Made a back-up for when this gets locked because of people arguing about what a staff’s “intended” role is. Edited again to change the fields back to 5 second duration, but 20 second recharge, and have Unsteady Ground be a smoke field.

Furthermore, profession design is sketchy at best. In terms of professions that work properly within the design philosophy of trinity-free gameplay, we have the Elementalist, the Necromancer, the Ranger, and possibly the Guardian. Now, this is operating under the assumption that the design philosophy for the game is to adapt one’s playstyle on the fly to cover for your party’s weakspots, so that you play multiple roles in any one build. The Elementalist naturally performs this admirably. Attunement swaps allow him to output significant control, healing, boons, and damage within the same build. Rangers bring some of the best party healing in the game in the form of healing spring, while bringing significant cc through the use of their pet. The problem is that, because of borked pet design, the Ranger’s place in dungeon groups is sketchy at best.

Now why do I say that other professions are not performing within the game’s systems? Simply put, their support options are either too passive or mindless or sub-optimal. Let’s use the Warrior as an example, given that it is the main source of the disease in PvE. More specifically, let’s attempt to perform a popular “non-trinity” warrior with Berserker’s gear, 100b, and shouts. This is a mindless dps build that performs almost entirely passive party support. They press a few shout buttons in a fire and forget support that takes no thought other than basic positioning. They don’t even need to stop dps’ing to do so.

Adaptive and active support options, outside of those held by Elementalists and a few other professions, are simply lacking. Shouts are not interesting, adaptive, or even consciously applied forms of support. Banners, on the other hand, very much can be, as they take into account positioning, micromanagement of banner positions relative to the party, the support skills available to each banner, etc. Unfortunately, Banners do not tend to perform highly, even with recent buffs. It is not necessary, or even optimal, for Warriors to spec support and take Banners in dungeons. It’s entirely possible, and most definitely would be a fun playstyle if the process of picking up items wasn’t such a ridiculously clunky one, but it isn’t an optimal style of play because of poor balance and poor dungeon design.

And then we have combo fields – a feature of play that should work beautifully with the game’s design philosophy, but, unfortunately, tend to be too minor to encourage teamwork. Don’t get me wrong – the Thief spamming Cluster Bomb inside of a water field is doing a LOT for his team’s survivability, but outside of Fire, Water, and Chaos fields, they tend to be lacking as a whole. I often find myself wondering what the point of that poison field is or why I would want to blast finish the smoke field, only for the AoE stealth I applied to be quickly cancelled by everyone involved, resulting in a Revealed debuff for everyone. The problem with Combo Fields is that they are not balanced against each other by any means, on top of most Combo Fields being horribly redundant.

(TL,DR)
I’m probably rambling by this point. What I mean to say is that the lack of a holy trinity has nothing to do with the lack of coordination in dungeons. The problem lies in bad dungeon design, poor balance, and inefficiency of active support options.

It’s not the lack of a trinity that holds the game’s combat or dungeons back. I’ve heard it said far too many times that the trinity promotes organized play while the current system promotes mindless damage specs.

In principal, this is entirely wrong. Games that include the trinity promote bland, formulaic play. This guy is going to hold aggro. That guy is going to heal everyone. Those guys are going to use the same rotation over and over again to bring health bars down. If something new or unexpected happens, it is probably because someone did not do their job properly. In the Guild Wars 2 system, combat is theoretically meant to be adaptive. You change your role or equip skills to fill another role for the party if needed. Theoretically at least.

The problem does not lie in the system, but rather in other factors of the game’s design. There is little adaptation because the current dungeon design doesn’t require nor particularly encourage it. Dungeon mechanics in Guild Wars 2 typically boil down to “this guy has 2 million health and can sometimes one-shot you.” The result is a monotony that players want to end as quickly as possible. Because it is profitable and because it ends the monotony of boss fights faster, the dominant playstyles are damage roles. As a result, instead of a tank, healer, and dps, we now have 4 dps Warriors, all of which are more or less self-sufficient, and a support, such as a Guardian or Mesmer.

Herein lies the problem. Dungeons and open world PvE do not properly challenge players with unique mechanics. They do not mandate or even encourage the playstyles that the no-trinity system was meant to create.

I’ve played this game since BWE2 on Tarnished Coast. I am one of few who help hold the Guild Summits every few weeks for our server-wide guild summit event that even some devs have come out to. I am a roleplay guild GM and an active community member on our server. That said, I have a short list of suggestions for our dev team that may encourage your roleplayers to remain instead of splinter off into other games that we’ve either come from or new ones that are coming out.

List
- Actual town clothes. Similar to the ones the NPCs all over the map wear, not hoodies that aren’t even hoodies. That was a waste of your efforts.

- The ability to sit on furniture without hovering in the air, but actually sit in a chair or on a bench/couch without sitting like you should be at a picnic.

- AFK tags. Something as simple as typing /afk to alter the color of our player tags, changing it back to the standard coloring after typing /afk once more.

- Name changes -added- to the complete makeover package available through the BLTC.

- If you’re not going to provide player/guild housing despite what rumors or the wiki itself has said, at the very least, open more buildings within DR and consider doing -something- with the collapse. PvE/PvPrs idle in your cities, RPrs actually occupy your cities and bring them to life.

I’m sure there are others who have several fantastic ideas, but these are 5 important ones to me, and several others that I’ve had vent to me with regards to the enjoyment factor where they are concerned. In truth, I’m afraid we’ve already lost a good portion of our Tarnished Coast population to older MMOs like WoW, LOTRO, RIFT or Tera. If you don’t offer any reason to stay, those who play on your unofficial RP servers will leave and thus leave Tarnished Coast & Piken Square near empty if not entirely. So please, strongly consider making some additions on behalf of your roleplayers as we want to enjoy the game as well.

Thank you.

Lucky Shot.7650:

Since I can gain my reward once per week will it take 6 weeks just to get one?

Can you not do one of each mission types per week?

Also, why must every new system that gives reward be judged mostly by “it’ll take me X weeks to get the reward I want” .. how about just judging the content for the content itself rather than the rewards given.