Guild Wars 2

Molten Boss Fractal
• After killing the Berserker, the Firestorm can jump outside of the circle and land in an unhittable spot. This wouldn’t be a problem as you can run to the other side of the circle and he will come closer and become hittable. Unfortunately he usually draws aggro on one of the two mostly useless npc and he will simply shoot at the npc from range for several minutes until it finally dies. Again, the useless NPC create an aggravation and unnecessarily extend the duration of the fight. Not game breaking, but just annoying. Solution: since the npc don’t contribute to your success, just make the bosses ignore them.
Solid Ocean Fractal
• Killing the tentacles no longer damages the Jade Maw. I understand completely that they want to make encounter about the crystal mechanic, but killing the tentacles to speed up the encounter rewarded playskill and made the fight more interesting and interactive. This is a change for the worse.
• The camera zoom has been severely limited and makes it much more difficult to see the skull symbol above your head. I don’t understand the motivation for tweaking the camera here as it was working perfectly fine previously and no one had any complaints about it. The best thing you can say about a game’s camera is that you don’t notice it influencing your gameplay; unfortunately the camera here is a tougher opponent than the Jade Maw. This is a problem.

This is long enough and there is more than enough for the devs to address. Hopefully one of them would be nice enough to address some or all of these points. I, my guild, and the pve community would greatly appreciate it.

Snowblind Fractal

• You can no longer respawn at the check points, and are forced to respawn back at the starting area. This rather annoying if one person dies on the trash run to the end boss, since they then have to run all the way from the start again. Just a huge waste of time for no reason.
• The camera has a bizarre zoom out against the Elemental Source from certain angles. While I would love it if we could zoom out to these distances always in all zones of the game, when you can only do it from limited angles in limited places to no real purpose it seems like a bug at worst, poor implementation at best.
Underground Facility
• Extra dredge added. Really? The problem and biggest complaint since day one has been that there are too many dredge. Good parties can skip many of them no matter how many you add, and bad parties get bogged down. This fractal was already the longest and most annoying to get, and the developers said they were going to address individual fractal balance and the solution is to add more dredge? Sad.
• Blink+Portal exploits still work. How about we make a deal: you remove all the unnecessary dredge (including about half the clown car waves) and you close that blink exploit and we call it even?

Urban Battlegrounds

• The NPCs appear to have had their HP significantly reduced and their agro mechanics changed. They tend to get caught on the endlessly respawning mobs outside the city and take forever to get to the gate. When they do get there, they die much faster than they used to against the veteran mobs. It’s bad enough that an entire fractal is based around the worst mechanic in Guild Wars 2 (npc ally AI) but when there are changes that make them even less reliable it is sheer frustration.
• Making the npc not roll over and die from Ashyim’s Agony attack is a nice change but it makes the fight incredibly easy mode, especially with Time Warp and Battle Standard. Perhaps a middle ground where the fight isn’t an AFK laugher would be better.

I personally think that once a gem store skin has been purchased, it should be unlocked for the entire account and can be applied an unlimited number of times, similar to skins unlocked through the hall of monuments or the zenith items.

Recently, I purchased some Toxic items, but I have some problems with the way skins are being handled now:

• I do not know how many alts I will have in the future that I want to use this skin for, so I was forced to really buy a lot of them
• I think 400 gems for a single-use, single-slot item is a bit expensive (spending 30 bucks for 3 sets, just to make sure I have enough of them in the future is madness)
• Each skin item takes up a storage slot, so I was forced to purchase an extra bank tab to store the items for future alts to use
• If I ever want to change anything in my gear (hello ascened armor), then I need to purchase additional transmutation stones just to move the skins around, which I think is unreasonable for gem store skins already paid for

While I’m sure that ArenaNet knows how desperately we want a wardrobe to store our skins in, gem store or not, this takes quite a long time to implement.

A quick fix I’d suggest for gem store items is simple: The item that applies the skins should simply NOT be consumed upon use, so the skins can be applied an infinite number of times similar to the HOM and zenith skins.

Of course I’d love this fix to be retroactive, but ArenaNet could simply do this for all future gem store skins instead.

I’m going to make this short and simple; I’d like to know how the community feels about making Cultural Armors open to all races, as well as discuss its pros and cons. Here’s some on the top of my head.

Pros:
*More customization for all races in general. - I feel the game, despite the introduction of Ascended gear, is still focused more(just a wee bit) on horizontal progression, so I can only see this benefiting the game. Gives more options for mix and matching as well.
*More gold sinks - Gold value has been decreasing more and more since release. Tier 3 armors take huge amounts of gold out of the economy, so more armors being bought from NPC’s=gold value increases, prices of goods in the TP decrease.
*More Goals - For those that really want something to work towards.
*(For Anet)More Transmutation Crystal sales - Self-explanatory(if Anet keeps the current system that is, which doesn’t really bother me that much)
*Requires less work compared to creating completely new armor from scratch. Just a note: I’m completely against recycling stuff in the game(like the recently added/removed Flamexxxx armors) but I don’t really see this as recycling.
*Emperor Title attainable without playing a race you don’t really like - Currently, if you want the title and don’t really like 1 of the current races, you’ll have to invest gold on something you probably won’t use, but at the end of the day, it’s still vanity. (Note: I’ve had the title for about 10 months now, and I don’t mind this at all)

Cons:
*All races lose some uniqueness - Losing the exclusivity within each individual race may not sit well with some people. Some people were forced into playing a certain race just to be able to wear the armor they want; the same people may have chosen a different race if these armors weren’t restricted in the first place.
*Some armors will become even more common - It’s no secret that some sets are more common than others; removing the restriction will make these armors even more common.
*Armors won’t look right/make sense on some races - non-asura in t3 Heavy Asura anyone? Charr in T3 Heavy Human? In all seriousness, it all comes down to Anet’s execution. Besides, we already have CoE armor on non-asura, or CM armor on Charr.

Personally, I really want this to happen. There are so many Cultural Armors that I want to buy but won’t just because they’re tied to races that I don’t play much. I’d love to see T3 Heavy Charr/Norn on my Asura Warrior, or T3 Norn Medium on my Human Ranger, etc. The pros heavily outweigh the cons from my perspective, so I’m all for it. Maybe make the armors much more expensive to the other races.

As for the subject of whether these armors can still be considered “Cultural” if the race restriction is removed: I think they can be. It’s easy to distinguish which race/culture the armors come from just from their theme. That’s good enough, in my opinion.

Thoughts? Against it or for it? Your Pros and Cons? I’m sure I missed a lot of things, so feel free to add.

With all the hate going on, it seems the rage train only want to hate Scarlet, and keep her in the Living Story only, at any cost. What I find annoying is that people keep claiming she does not belong in the Reactor.

Soooo…. Lore time. The game actually does have lore you know.

Back to basics. Scarlet used to have another name. From Wiki the first thing we learn is:

Ceara emerged from the Dream of Dreams with an innate fascination with the interlocking systems of nature, and a determination to forge her own path independent from the Mother Tree.

In my translation she is looking for the answers to “everything”. She wants to understand how things are connected and put together. In a world infused by magic, there is sure something to get to know. Magic is a part of the world, and everyone has access to magic. With Scarlet being so thirsty for knowledge, this is the ultimate mystery to be solved, the ultimate tome of knowledge. (This seems like guessing, but read on)

From an interview with Angel McCoy:

Magic is the lifeblood of Tyria. The entire world is infused with it, and it flows through everything via ley lines that criss-cross the planet.
The natural role of the dragons is to keep this magic balanced. From time to time, in the long history of the world, the dragons have awoken and begun to draw the world’s magic into themselves, reducing the level of magic flowing through the ley lines.

When the dragons have consumed enough and thus reduced the world to a low level of magic, they go back to sleep. From then on, the magic leaks from them, back into the world at a reasonable rate. Eventually, it builds up in the world again, and the dragons awaken again to tip the teeter-totter back in the other direction.

Now why is this relevant? Well. First of all, the dragons are very much active in the game, meaning we have reached a peak in the magic flowing around the world, so a loooot of magic must be flowing through those ley lines. Furthermore, Zhaitan is dead (surprise spoiler!). That must have released a lot of magic. I dare say there have never been more magic flowing across those ley lines.

Ok, so far we got Scarlet wanting to know how things connect, a lot of magic and dragons. What then? Back to Scarlet!:

Ceara’s ideas were understandably unpopular with the colleges of the Arcane Council, but very much in line with the ideology of the Inquest. She spent a brief time with them, but was ejected from Rata Sum after she and Teyo were found meddling with designs in the city’s archives

Scarlet DOES have history with the Inquest. With the lore describing her being in Rata Sum, being with Inquest, and also running around with Hyleks after again being an outcast, I think it’s safe to say she was in Metrica Province where all these can be found. Now for the sake of Inquest:

Members of the Inquest work towards goals that defy asura ethics. Through their view of the Eternal Alchemy, they believe that the world is a machine which can be run.

With Scarlet being much “in line” with the Inquest philosophy, she must be trying to get to the bottom of why/how the magic in the world works, I see no other explanation. We know she spent time with the Inquest, and we know she put her head where it didn’t belong. The question for me is, how could she NOT be in the reactor? The reactor messed with Dragon Energy, which is definitely where I would start looking, if I were to understand the magic of Tyria. When too much magic is leaking into the world, the Dragons come and take it back. If you shouldn’t start with dragons, where else would you search for the origins of Magic? The Reactor was a perfect place to tap into this knowledge. Unfortunately we know how it ended, from Wiki:

It was recently destroyed by an Inquest experiment gone awry

- Something to note for the people claiming that she could not have been there. This reactor meltdown was in fact recent, so there is no reason she could not have been around. We already know she spent time in Metrica Province.

Now one last quote, spoiler warning, as this is from the new Story:

Scarlet Briar: I told the Inquest chaos energy was a misnomer. Mind you, dragon energy is tricky, so I can see how they flubbed it. At least they helped identify the network of magical channels that crisscross the globe. That was a breakthrough. Now we know how NOT to do this kind of research right on an intersection of those channels. Live and learn, right? That’s progress. Hooray for progress!

Okay, “magical channels that crisscross the globe” – Ley lines anyone? Pathways of magic. Surely they are not just random. There is something here that we don’t know.

To sum up my theories:

Scarlet is a knowledge-hungry kitten. She wants to understand Magic, but not in the sense of normal use and understanding. She wants to understand the very roots of it. She has been with the Inquest for some time, stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. She knows about Dragons and ley lines, whatever their purpose is. She has spent time in Rata Sum, Metrica Province, and she has been in the Thuamanova Reactor where she possibly learned for the first time about the “network of magical channels”. Scarlet is looking for the origins of Magic, and she is getting closer. Something is up with the ley lines, and my guess is that Scarlet is looking for their origin, assuming she will find answers there.

Someone is going to ask how the heck this fits into the Living Story and all its alliances. The truth is I don’t know. There are many theories, but I’m not going to cover that, as I don’t have a solid idea.

The purpose of this was to state that while she may or may not be a bad villain, the lore is not broken. It’s actually a good plot, if I am interpreting it right. I hope she finds the source!