Guild Wars 2

Going to replace the “Would do again” with some detail after the adventure title.

Verdant Brink:
Tendril Torchers: Daily for xp
Fun: 4
Difficulty: 5

Bugs in the Branches: Ignoring
Fun: 3
Difficulty: 8

Flying Circus: Daily for xp
Fun: 6
Difficulty: 3

Shooting Gallery: Ignoring
Fun: 2
Difficulty: 9

Salvage Pit: Daily for xp
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 2

Auric Basin:
The Floor Is Lava?: Ignoring
Fun: 4
Difficulty: 9

On Wings of Gold: Ignoring
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 7

Sanctum Scramble: Ignoring
Fun: 3
Difficulty: 8

Fallen Masks: Ignoring
Fun: 2
Difficulty: 10

A Fungus Among Us: Ignoring
Fun: 3
Difficulty: 8

Tangled Depths:
The Ley-Line Run: Ignoring
Fun: 1
Difficulty: 9

Drone Race: Skipped

Beetle Feast: Daily for xp
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 3

Haywire Punch-o-Matic Battle: Skipped

Scrap Rifle Field Test: Ignoring
Fun: 5
Difficulty: 7

I like how people now optimize their builds for Dragon’s Stand not for actually beating the meta event…but for running past mobs afterwards and making sure other players are eaten so that they can open more pods.

Mortifer.2946:

Everyone is always rushing to bosses at 20:00, like dogs who see food…. it is so horrible, you can see how people just turn off their brains…then i have to solo protect camp and watch other empty camps getting lost, and nobody just leave those freaking wyverns to protect them…And the best is when some another no-brainer yells in map chat that some champion spawned somewhere and those who protect camps run off to that champ…because one champion loot bag is more important than successful meta.

Once the bosses spawn you no longer have to protect camps in Verdant Brink. However, if your map looks like it is lagging behind the tier curve, you can still earn points towards Tier 4 by running supply to the camps and doings the ground events. The bosses though are the main priority once they spawn though as they add the most impact to tier rating. I had a map today lose several camps and even after all 5 bosses were killed we were only halfway through tier 3 but we all regrouped and barely managed to grind out enough supply to hit tier 4 in time.

I don’t like the system that is in place but you have to use the LFG if you want to get into a good map. If you just let the game place you then you will almost never be in a quality map.

There’s one big thing I don’t understand about Mordremoth. Elder Dragon’s consume magic. Rata Sum is right next to him. You can literally see Rata Sum from Dragon’s Stand. I could have sworn I saw an Asura wave at me from afar. Instead of hopping over and wiping out one of the most powerful magical races that stands against you, you ignore them and instead send most of your forces north through Tangled Depths, Auric Basin, Verdant, the Maguuma Wastes, and just on the fringes of Brisban. You make a giant wide arc AWAY from Rata Sum.

Auric Basin obviously had a worthy target to go after…but what is there to gain from the rest of that wasteland? Rata Sum is right there! I know the answer is…plot. It would be too much to write Rata Sum being in trouble and have that cross over with new players doing Zhaitan stuff…but still.

I rarely crashed for 3 years. Then HoT arrived and the crashes came every hour. But ever since I started using the 64-bit client, all is well again. If you have a 64-bit system I would definitely recommend using it.

Coming soon…you must fail Octovine in order to get Legendary Armor! Come on south…start pushing those bombs sideways!

Verdant Brink would be difficult to scale simply because of the amount of objectives that need to be covered, especially during the Night.

I find the Octovine scales quite well. I’ve seen 5 players take West down to 5%. A little better execution and it would have been completed.

Not sure if the scaling would matter for Tangled Depths since it fails the vast vast majority of the time regardless of population.

I haven’t done Dragon’s Stand on a low pop map but even at off hours I always find a full map ready to do that one. I hear it does scale down though.

The entrance to Dragon’s Stand is in the southwest corner of Tangled Depths. It is located underground due west of the main Ley Line hub area.

It’s a good thing I killed the evil Glint back in GW1 when I needed the bonus completed on Dragon’s Lair. I then replaced her with a similar looking dragon posing as Glint. All is well!

I feel taxi-ing is one of the major flaws though. The fact that players can’t just log in and play is a significant problem. They first log in, find they are in an empty map, and then have to play the LFG game. They have to abandon their friends so that they can party hop to find an instance they like and then there’s no guarantee their friends will be able to make it into the new instance. Also, at least half of the taxi LFG posts are bogus. They promise an organized map and you end up in another empty map/disorganized/tagless map. Players should already be placed into quality/filled maps to begin with.

I think the 2 hour cycle exists so that players can form their own routines such as: Run Verdant Brink Night bosses, hop over to Tangled Depths where the Chak Gerent is about to start (if anyone ever ran that), then jump over to Auric Basin in time for the Octovine, and then they have the choice to either start the loop again or hop over to organize the start of Dragon’s Stand. Everything is set up so that the player knows in advance where they want to be and can time their routines around that.

I haven’t experienced it yet but I had wondered if these map closures were related to the Low Pop Map Closing “Feature”. It would seem HoT has a lot of problems with map populations that I hope they fix.

1. Maps need to re-check their population before actually closing.
2. New maps should only be created when ALL existing maps are almost full. Why do players HAVE to use the lfg to find a decent map…because they always log into an empty map. If players could log into decent maps they wouldn’t have to make maps even emptier by map hopping to find a full one.

If you reconnect quickly enough (I don’t know the exact time frame) then the game will always try to place you back into the map you were previously in. You will maintain all progress you had when you lost connection. The wrinkle though is if that map is full, it will boot you to an empty map and your progress will be lost. Even if you are in a party you will get the boot to an empty map if the map is full. A party can help sometimes, but most of the time it all comes down to whether the map is full or not.

I like the idea just for the sake of having more options. I’d like it if the game treated the HoT zones and SW/Dry Top as part of the Heart of the Maguuma in terms of masteries and also for dailies if they ever update them.

Those stair icons are funny. Some point up and go down. Some point down and kinda slope one way and then go another. It’s as if they are there just to make you more confused. Come here to go down…ha ha made you come here!

I know this is minor but for some reason it really bugs me. Whenever I pop into WvW or an activity my Elite Specialization weapon gets unequipped (since I don’t have the build for it in WvW or PvP). Often times I an burdened with loot and I have to sift through piles of junk to find my previously equipped weapon so that I don’t accidently get rid of it. Stop unequipping my weapon! If I don’t have the right setup, just deactivate the skills and let me do my thing before leaving WvW/Activity. I hate having to re-equip my weapon over and over and over. And simply changing my WvW/PvP builds to match my PvE one is not an option since I might not want to use the Elite for those game modes.

The Activity unequip is the worst. Crab Toss is not real PvP!

Most maps are empty but it is fairly easy to LFG into a map that can do the Meta events for Verdant, Auric, and Dragon’s Stand. Tangled Depths often will have players running events but when it comes time for the finale the map can go from nearly full to a ghost town in seconds. Virtually nobody even thinks about considering making an attempt at talking about convincing other players to maybe sorta stick around for the meta.

I want to say no. When a map is wiped by Mordremoth, people wind up dead at the start. When a map is successful, people wind up alive at the start. Last night when I was successful, I wound up at the start with a mix of living and dead players.

I have nothing but good things to say about the 64 bit client so far. Since HoT I would crash every hour or so and I haven’t had a single crash so far with the new client. If this keeps up I might actually go and try Dragon’s Stand again.

Mastery points are account bound and can only be earned once. Hero Points are character bound and must be earned by each character.

I love how there are people out there who say the solution is to just have all settings on low and it’s okay to have that as a solution. Have a great computer that can run all games on high settings including this one at 60+ FPS…but no, just turn all settings to 8-bit Nintendo graphics and problem solved! High end computers that significantly exceed the requirements for the game are somehow at fault?

Anet adds all kinds of great graphics and settings to make you go oooh and aaah. And yet people say just turn everything to low so that the game looks like a Nintendo game.
The solution isn’t for quality computers to run the game at garbage settings. The solution is for the crashes to be fixed so that the game can be ran as advertised.

I’m still seeing people running HPs all the time. I rarely have to wait at a HP for long before a few others show up. All of them can be done with a standard group of 5 and some of the champs are even pretty easy with just 2. The way I think of it is…these hero points are worth 10 points! They should be 10 times more difficult than their Central Tyria counterparts. So having champs at many of them is appropriate. Too many aspects of the game (and games in general nowadays) are getting dumbed down and made easy for the instant gratification generation.

Eventually interest will wane and it will be hard to find randoms to help out with HPs. But that’s what guilds and friends are for. Form a group and hit all of them on a map for everyone. Also…yeah…it’s an MMO. If everything is soloable then that makes it a single player game.

Until the crashes are fixed I would avoid Dragon’s Stand altogether unless you’re just farming xp and don’t mind losing progress. And for the other map’s meta events, always close the game and restart it before starting those events. This’ll increase the odds of making it through the event before crashing.

Since HoT came out I crash after about an hour of play on the new maps. I now restart my game before doing any major event to save myself a lot of grief later on.

I received a Bladed Chest piece after my map pushed Night to tier 4. Not sure if there’s another method.

I get that every now and then if I try to rapidly sell stuff. I either slow it down or wait out the message.

You’ll want to have all Exotic level gear (or higher), especially for the HoT maps where mobs can really pack a punch. Make sure the gear slots are also filled too as that adds a lot of power. Make sure your gear/runes/sigils go well with the character build you are using. Other than that, practice.

You can buy gear off the Trading Post for gold. There are Karma merchants around high-level zones that sell quality gear for a level 80. The new HoT maps give out piles of gear like candy. If you’re just starting out some of that gear will be pretty good. You can also craft gear by learning a crafting profession. But for a level 80 you’d need to level up crafting to 400 to craft decent gear.

The leftover Mordrem will probably form their own religion. Mordremoth will riiiiiiise again!

I’m confused a bit about the Pact. In Verdant they are isolated, scared, and barely hanging onto survival in small makeshift camps. In Auric, they are mostly priory running around going ooooh and aaaaah at all the golden shinies. I’ve been trying to avoid Tangled Depths since I don’t like the map layout but it seems like suddenly they are trying to organize some kind of offensive. Not sure where they mustered the means but okay.

Then in Dragon’s Stand they are marching an army of soldiers and copters to go kill Mordremoth. A tattered and broken down Pact just picks up some scraps off the ground and says…let’s kill Mordremoth anyways! A bajillion Mordrem stand between our half-dead soldiers and our goal. We got this!

Post your tales of glorious success despite a game crash that threatened to doom your adventure! Give hope to those that feel none remains!

Tonight I was running Octovine on a whim. In the back of my mind I knew that my game had been running awhile (I usually crash after about an hour). The map turned out to be well organized and everything was going smoothly on all four sides. At roughly the 6 minute mark….blam…CRASH! I was not in a party. There was no way I’d make it back into the good map. I was doomed!

But wait…I relogged and there I was…in my original map! We successfully killed the octovines and I got my shiny rewards for a job well done.

I know it’s not the same but you can see the Crystal Desert, Charr Homeleands, and the Ring of Fire islands in the original Guild Wars.

In GW2 the shape of the fire islands will have changed. I can’t think of any reason we’d go there at this time unless we needed to access the Door of Komalie again. The Crystal Desert will definitely be a focal point if and when we ever go after the crystal dragon (not going to try to spell his name!). Major change there is the Elon River now running through the southern part of it. Finally the Charr Homelands…not sure what would take us there as the dragon that used to be there isn’t there anymore.

When HoT came out I ended up with about 30 Central Tyria mastery points right away and I rarely run Fractals, I hate jumping puzzles, and I don’t grind AP. The points are already there.

There have been a bunch of posts on this topic in the bug report forum. It seems to be related to players who complete a map and already have 100% world completion on their character. Hopefully anet is looking into it.

Unfortunately…join the club. Tons of people with high end computers who never used to crash are now crashing all the time since HoT was released. I don’t think Anet is really saying much about it. Hopefully that means they are busy working on it. Hoping.

It must not be working at all. I can close the crashed game, relaunch it, log in, select my character and load into the map in about 10-15 seconds. If the previous map I was in is full, I’m always dumped in an empty map.

The game probably always tries to put you back into the map you left. The problem is that if is it an organized map, the map is going to be full. Therefore it can’t put you into a full map so it dumps you elsewhere. The fatal flaw is the fact that the game does not reserve your spot for any length of time after you’re forced out of a map. That spot goes to the next person trying to squeeze into the map.

Solution: Get little computer shaped voodoo dolls and poke with needles until you get someone else to crash so that you can rejoin the map you were in.

Coming soon*…

Your forum post has run out of memory…CRASH.

Crashes seem pretty random. Large boss fight with 100 people on the screen…seems ot be going good. Take a screentshot…CRASH. Random use of any skill…CRASH. Step away from your keyboard…CRASH. Max all settings and fly around Tarir…laggy but it works okay-ish. Type a message to someone…CRASH.

Every patch seems to make the crashing worse somehow. I didn’t crash too much with the initial release of HoT. Since then crashes are more and more frequent. Not sure their fixes are going in the right direction.

I doubt they’ll ever add in a slot reserved system. They’ll just ignore the problem and hope that months from now some of the crash issues are worked out and less people are running the long meta events.

Until the crashing issues have been worked out it’s definitely a waste of time to run Dragon’s Stand. I’ve crashed more since HoT came out than all the years of GW1 and vanilla GW2 combined.

Every time I see “Fixed a Client Crash Bug” in the update notes I prepare to start crashing even more. Before HoT I would crash maybe once every few months. Since HoT it is every 30-60 minutes. I love HoT, but with the constant crashing it is absolutely impossible to enjoy any content that takes time and effort. Even if I’m lucky and manage to finish the content, I’m stressed out that I might crash at any moment.

Many aspects of HoT crashes lots and lots of people. But by far the most frustrating crash is when you crash near the end of Dragon’s Stand meta. Spending 2 hard hours trying to kill an epic boss should be rewarding, but no. CRASH. Every group I’m in has people crashing multiple times, often at the worst times. And most of the time the map is “full” so even if you spam Join over and over hoping you can rejoin your party, many times you can’t, especially at the end boss.

So people have 3 options:
1. Never run Dragon’s Stand again out of disgust.
2. Rerun Dragon’s Stand over and over and over and over in the hopes they can manage to finish it.
3. Join an organized map and afk until it looks like it is soon to be successful. Then run over and smack the boss a few times. If you crash, who cares. You weren’t doing anything anyways.

Option 3, although dishonest, is the only viable option for many people who don’t want to pull their hair out trying to get a completion on what is otherwise a fantastic boss chain.

Solutions:
1. Fix the crashes! Obviously, but maybe very hard.
2. People with tons of map progress should be guaranteed to rejoin the map they were in regardless if it is “full”. If there technically is no room for them, kick out an afk’er (someone with no map progress). This is probably the best option since it’s impossible to fix all crash situations.

The best part is when you do the Dragon’s Stand meta and crash over and over and anet won’t even let you rejoin the map you spent 2 hours in because it’s full. If some bozo snuck in for a quick reward without doing anything, kick them out and let me back in! You can track progress. 200%! Let me in.

I agree. They need to recalculate the threshold of players needed to open another map instance. I find myself in empty maps constantly. And it’s not that there’s no commanders. I can run around for 5-10 minutes without seeing anybody. Until a map is almost completely full, there shouldn’t be any more instances of that map.

hardy.7469:

Find it hard to believe no one noticed?

Dragon’s Stand is RIGHT on the cost RIGHT beside Rata Sum. There’s no way no one didn’t see that realistically, even just standing on the docks. lol

An Elder Dragon’s favorite pastime is to nom nom on magic. Tarir is overflowing with yummy magic so lots of Mordrem are threatening that region. Rata Sum is right next to Mordemoth and…nothing?

Conclusion: Asura taste bad.

I never understood why people are so upset with this. Spawn siege isn’t going to prevent the capture of the northern towers/Garrison unless the attacking army is too small to be able to take them in the first place. And if you do take an opponent’s Garrison and spawn towers on their own borderlands, you’ve already won. If they then have to use spawn siege to try to take back their towers/Garrison, that means they don’t have the numbers to go down there and actually take it anyways.

I was looking at those stats recently myself. It is an amazing feat even if you’re of the hating crowd. It’s not easy to be at the top of any rankings for so long in any game. Congrats to Jade Quarry!

Successful groups are always going to be villainized for their success. Tier 1 has always been hated. Top sports teams are always being hated on. People hate on rich people and assume they stole the money somehow. Some people are just jealous. Some people hear anecdotes and just repeat them with no knowledge of what they speak of.

I’ve been on Jade Quarry since launch and although I’ve never been super active in WvW, I’ve always found it to be a great home server whether it be PvE (before mega-servers) or WvW. There’s a lot of good people and a lot of people that I’ve seen around since day 1. Not everyone is a bandwagoner. The vast majority of Jade Quarry players are just like any server. They log into WvW and just compete and try to have fun.

I think a lot of people get discouraged from checking the map. Call out swords and the response is usually:
1. Nobody is on the map so it doesn’t matter.
2. Ignored
3. A couple people show up and are run over by a blob of 75.
4. “____ is paper. Who cares. We’ll just karma train it back later.”
5. Tag asks “Who’s attacking?” and continues to roam aimlessly. After response tag asks “Which guild is it?” and continues to roam aimlessly. After response tag asks “How many?” and continues to roam aimlessly. After response tag asks “Wall %? Did you disable?”. You don’t respond because you are laying dead in the lord room watching it being capped. Instead of playing 50 questions that tag could have just gone there right away since nothing else was going on on the map. Hard to type when you are being overrun.