Guild Wars 2

sylvari order questline (locating caladbolg with cai):
cai: disguised “we’ve wanted to be bandits ever since we were small pink fleshlings”
bandit: “you mean children right?”
cai: “yeah that”

sylvari order questline (retrieving caladbolg with cai):
you:sounding very drunk “the oozes! THE OOOOOOOZEEEES!!!”
priory questline (finding the sword):
sieran: “ok, I’ll make a portal for you, don’t worry, it probably won’t explode”

priory questline (geting grenth statue flakes)
sieran: “you know, for a place dedicated to the human god of death, filled with horrors from the underworld, this place is pretty nice”

priory questline (making the shadow shard):
sieran: “if this works we’ll have a perfect containment method”
sieran: “if not we’ll be lost in shadow forever, ok, let’s begin” starts
you: “wait, what?”

priory questline (making the shadow shard, about 2.5 seconds after the previous):
gixx: “WHAT ON TYRIA ARE YOU DOING!?!”
sieran: “don’t worry gixx, all the theories made sense”
gixx: “SENSE!?! YOU CAN’T APPLY SENSE TO TECHNOLOGY!”
gixx: “you, novice, protect me while I make this make less sense!”

whispers questline (meeting tybalt):
you: “hi, are you my contact with the order of whispers?”
tybalt: “GAH NOT OUT LOUD! what part of ‘secret society’ do you not understand?”

whispers questline (locating demmi):
tybalt: “Demmi’s been kidnapped by pirates! cool! … I mean interesting”

whispers questline (the drinking contest):
announcer: “it’s everyone’s favorite cheap date: one drink dan!”
dan: “…I hate you guys…”

whispers questline (same quest):
final opponent: 25% hp “what is your liver MADE of?!?”
opponed: defeated “oh drinking master TEACH ME YOUR WAYS!”

whispers questline (same again):
demmi: “so do you have a plan?”
you: obviously drunk “yes, it starts with ‘leg it’ and generally goes downhill from there”

whispers questline (using tybalt as bait):
tybalt: in his regular voice but demmi’s body: look at me, I’m a human girl, and I have a pair of lovely… apples"

whispers questline (same quest):
tybalt demmi’s body, doing a terrible fake girl voice: “oh my how handsome you are, I am all aswoon!”

after claw island (priory):
gixx: “I have an enchanted idol of balthazar: human god of war, murder, etcetera, etcetera”

after claw island (priory):
gixx: “ok, nobody move, or bad thigngs will happen”
magister: “sir I don’t feel too…” explodes
gixx: “what did I just say?!?”

after claw island (priory):
gixx: “well done, you channeled the human god of mass murder without turning into a divine blood-crazed psychopath”
you: “what?”
gixx: “oh, right, I forgot to mention that”

that’s all I have for now, after claw island things get a lot more serious

I like to use masquerade armour, the “outer” robe is dyed jalepeno, with gold as a secondary colour (the “internal” pants are dyed ebony and the shirt is dyed matte)

I’m also using my harlequin’s smile dyed matte and using the T3 asura weapons

until 80 I used heritige armour dyed the same way (green as primary, gold as secondary, black pants, white shirt)

male sylvari BTW :P

I personally think the skill is backwards, it should be a dash to the target, leaving a clone at your position, like a reverse phase retreat, that way, even if you’re at 601 range, you’re at least getting SOMETHING from the skill, rather than “lolol ur 2 far awai, no skill 4 u, but u can has this cooldown if u want lolol”

damny.9342:

scyld.1743:

The reason why mesmers are so weak early on is quite simple, actually. It’s so simple I don’t know why people don’t (usually) come right out and say it:

Mesmers are the most trait dependant profession in the game.

I think it’s not fair to reduce it to traits. Yes, traits make a huge difference. But the things low level Mesmers are good at also aren’t that useful for leveling. You can be very survivable early on, you can get very powerful utility skills early on, but all in all, leveling is easier if you can just sneeze at the mobs and they die like a Warrior (for example) can.

I have to Q this FT, though:

If you aren’t willing to learn how to use [illusions], then you shouldn’t consider touching the mesmer.

That’s like saying “I’m an Elementalist but I really want to play as a fire mage” or “I’m a Ranger but I hate animals” or “I’m a Thief but I hate being invisible all the time”…

“I’m an engineer but I hate versatility”
“I’m a warrior, but I hate being overpowered as heck in PvE” (what, you mean that isn’t their class mechanic?)
“I’m a necromancer but I hate death shrou… ok that’s a bad example, EVERYONE hates DS (partially because of the fact that it’s a kittenty downed state masquerading as a core class mechanic, partially because even condition necros are balanced around it):P

ok, being serious now
I have a friend that I convinced to play mesmer, and let me tell you, he SUCKED at it, he despised clones, he didn’t dodge, he never shattered.

then I introduced him to the second tier of traits, and showed him deceptive evasion, and he LOVES it.
he went from never dodging to dodging all the time, he shatters and makes clones, today he told me he soloed 5 harathi centaurs and 3 rock dogs at once without getting downed. I almost wept with joy. :P

if you want to give mesmers one last go, take deceptive evasion and 20 in illusions, and learn to love the ability to use dodging as a weapon, if that doesn’t get you to love the purple butterflies and the sound of glass breaking, there is no hope for you, mesmers are just not your thing

Kal Spiro.9745:

You have an out of combat weapon swap already. Just like every class in the game that wants more weapons than they can hold. It’s called keeping extra weapons in your inventory and activating them while not in combat.

See, everyone is still on equal footing.

so all eles and engineers have 2 less bag slots than everyone else because of their class?

yep, equal footing

ok, being less sarcastic now, I’d like to point out that eles and engineers have no real way of switching range in combat, on my mesmer I just switch to GS if I need to go long range, a DD ele is screwed, the argument that they get attunements instead falls flat in that they can all be described as “melee with x” as in, melee with burning, melee with mobility, melee with healing and melee with bleeding.

a staff or sceptre COULD act as a short range weapon, but that’s not really the point, the point I’m making is that if an ele is caught in a fight with daggers, and the fight isn’t melee friendly (hi kol) they’re really out of luck

one of the other arguments I hear is that it would make eles a nightmare to fight against in pvp. the people making these arguments have likely never played an ele before, since the ele’s playstyle is described now as “grand piano with your keyboard”, even the best pvper’s brain would melt having to rotate between 40 skills at once, especially when a single mistake is often fatal.

IMO eles SHOULD get weapon swap, and even in combat, if the weapon swap also put their attunements on CD as well

as for engineers, I really can’t think of a good reason why not to give them a weapon swap, the weapons focus on different areas, so it’s not like the damage boost would be significant

Blueshield.6291:

The reactions to this are amusing on Tarnished Coast, when a roleplayer encounters you watching some poor kitten get murdered.

I remember saying when the prelude started that luring a worm to kill a refugee over and over again is probably the most twisted “act of kindness” I’ve ever seen :P

SilverWF.4789:

Lol? So, let give 25% speed boost to the every class!

most classes have a way of getting faster movement speed the ONLY one that has no access to swiftness through a trait or utility is the mesmer

necros have a 25% boost already, eles have so many boosts it’s not even funny, thieves have a 25% boost signet, rangers get a 25% boost signet

engineers have a 10 pt trait that allows 100% uptime on swiftness
warriors have banners giving a 66% uptime and a warhorn skill

guardians and mesmers only sources of swiftness are the guardian’s staff skill and the mesmer’s focus skill. guardians also have a 20 second swiftness skill on a 60 second cooldown (combined with the staff skill, that’s 83% swiftness uptime), mesmers get a 12.5% chance to get swiftness, and an 87.5% chance to get something else (50% RELIABLE swiftness uptime and only with the focus)

if you go to that pirate cave in lion’s arch, you can buy a portal stone to the hall of monuments for free from a charr, if you use it, you get taken to a private instance of the HoM, and when you use the stone again or use the asura gate there you’re taken back to the exact point you used the stone first.

I use it all the time if I’m going to be AFK for a while and I’m far away from anything that could be considered safe

then disable it in combat or in PvP, merge it with another signet (eg, signet of inspiration, gives 25 % faster movement speed out of combat, in combat gives random boons every 10 seconds (the main reason people wanted the boons to work out of combat was for the chance at getting swiftness)), ANYTHING to make getting from point A to point B less AWFUL

I just feel so SLOW compared to other classes, we’re the only class that has no permanent swiftness, or even non permanent swiftness, the ONLY two sources we have is the focus 4 skill and an occasional random swiftness from signet of inspiration

every other class has a reliable way of getting swiftness or faster run speed (eles have permanent swiftness in ANY weapon setup, have a 25% run speed signet, AND have a trait that makes them run faster in air or whenever they have a dagger, specifically: swiftness on staff 4, dagger 3, glyph of renewal, from traits, 25% from 10 points in air, swiftness on any aura (available in ALL setups) from 10 in air, swiftness on attunement to air from 10 in arcane, 15% from wielding a dagger from 20 in arcane AND they get a 25% speed signet)

please ANet, let us have either a utility that gives swiftness, or a 25% speed signet

Arkham Creed.7358:

Arena Net just has a thing for killing off all the interesting and likable characters and leaving us with one-note supporting cast that no body likes. First Killeen, then Snaff, and now Tybalt. My advice; don’t get too attached to the next “buddy” character.

wouldn’t the “buddy” character be trahearne?
it goes:
race dependant > story dependant > order person + mentor > order mentor > trahearne + order dependant > trahearne > trahearne + fear compaion > trahearne > plan based > trahearne

(in my case: caithe > carys, tegwen, trahearne > cai, caithe, trahearne > sieran > trahearne, carys, tegwen > trahearne > trahearne > all by my lonesome > trahearne, carys, tegwen > carys, tegwen > trahearne (so for me it will either be carys or tegwen, which is unlikely since they are just minor recurring characters, or trahearne, to which I say YES!))

actually, playing as a sylvari, trahearne isn’t as bad as when I played my charr

in fact, the path that I took makes the quartet of the player, trahearne, carys, and tegwen feel like a group of friends off to save the world, where you are the party member that leaves for personal growth (think final fantasy IV, nearly all of the characters leave the party at some point only to return later as a total kitten) and appears for the finale, where the other three go and help the war effort.

the end result is that most of the characters are introduced or mentioned before their roles expand significantly, trahearne’s importance is justified since sylvari learn more of his story, and most importantly I don’t feel bitter about giving him the KITTENING SWORD (seriously, I feel SORRY for him that he’s lumped with that piece of rubbish)

plus, you get the vibe that he’s asking for your advice because he trusts you, and not because it’s a game that needs you to poke the plot with a stick if it slows

Dinny.5310:

While I realize dervishes as they were known in GW1 won’t come back, it would still be interesting to take the ideas/mechanics of the class and repurpose them. A light armor class wielding scythes and having a lot of close-range/melee attacks, with lots of healing abilities/damage mitigation abilities, perhaps? I’m not sure.

elementalists and warriors with scythes?

that way all races could use it, as it wouldn’t be related to the gods, the enchantment and avatar fighting styles could be replaced with elementalists, and the regular scythe moves could be used by warriors.

and while we’re at it we could give necros a scythe, and make them into ritualists :P

to be fair, the only thing that was “holy” about the dervishes was the avatars and the lore behind them, the fighting style just requires skill, strength and discipline, and the avatars could possibly be replaced with elements.
hell, we could give an elementalists a scythe and make a pretty good derish substitute…
here’s an idea for lore for non-god based dervishes:

ever since the gods left tyria, the dervishes have been slowly dying out.
thankfully however, a group of elemenalists have decided to keep the fighting style alive by substituting the power of the gods with their own elemental abilities.
with the rise of the elder dragons, the other races of tyria have attempted to learn this fighting style with some success.

whilst they’re at it, they could also add a scythe to necros and bring back ritualists :P

Adine.2184:

Why make a separate WvW monthly? Just add WvW achievements to the PvP stuff since WvW is PvP anyway .

not exactly, PvP is more about teamwork and personal skill, wheras WvW is more about strategy and co-ordination.

some glory seeking moron who attacks a keep alone before the rest of the zerg is there just gave away the zergs plan, wheras in PvP, going alone could capture or keep a node.

the thing is, the WvW kills in the general/PvE monthly just reeks of attempting to get more people into WvW, the PvE’ers don’t want to be there for any longer that it takes to get their kills, and the WvW ers don’t want them there because having people who don’t want to play along and are only in it for themselves is useless to the team and is actually counterproductive.

adding a monthly for WvW and removing it from the PvE monthly means that WvWers will be better rewarded, PvE’ers won’t be forced into doing something they don’t want to do and is completely irrelevant from the rest of their playstyle, and the PvE’s that DO want to get into WvW get a “carrot” in that doing the monthly will aid their team and they get rewarded for it (as opposed to the “stick” of having some berk with 100 gold calling you a noob)

it also has the added bonus of having a better tutorial. which is better for teaching people? a small popup saying “kill the dolyak to deprive enemies of supplies for building stuff” or a pair of achievements to “kill/escort x dolyaks” and “use x supplies to build seige weapons/repair walls”
one is just an instruction, the other is an instruction that gives you rewards, and has a logical link between the two “ok, I escorted the dolyak, now I have supplies, so I can build this trebuchet that people are talking about, woo achievements!”

Blueshield.6291:

I like this idea, and I can think of only one major counter-argument to it.

There are a few servers out there for which WvW is effectively not an option – the tier that Henge of Denravi is in, for example, has been a complete lockout by one of the servers for over a week, and possibly as long as two weeks. While, yes, server swapping is an option, it shouldn’t really be a necessity for the sake of completing a monthly.

Currently the only WvW participation required for monthlies is a simple kill count. This is achievable regardless of anyone’s server’s status in WvW (or lack thereof). It is even achievable for individuals not working in a seriously organized fashion. Capturing major objectives such as the castle would cut against this.

On the one hand, this is still actually a good thing, because with no WvW in the “normal” monthly, even casual PvE players stand a chance of completion. On the other hand, it could make the proposed WvW monthly effectively unattainable in a (very limited) number of brackets.

I thought of that when I was thinking of examples, that’s why each one is possible both playing as attacker or defender (eg, escort/destroy caravans)

as for making it impossible on some servers, that could possibly be a good thing (not the impossible part, but what it will do for those servers), it will get people who want to complete the daily to rethink strategies and try harder, and the incentive added could also bring more people into WvW to do more than just join a zerg, kill 50 enemies, then leave.

who knows, it may get entire guilds into WvW and they find they enjoy it enough to keep playing :P

edit: just as a clarification, I don’t mean that one of them should be “capture and defend stonemist castle x times” I mean, “capture or defend any supply camp, a tower, a keep, or the castle, x times”

I think it would be a good idea, since it will give a monthly achievement to the third major part of the game, and remove the WvW requirement from the otherwise fully PvE monthly
there are so many possible challenges for us to do, in WvW, and it could almost act as a tutorial for new WvW players by giving them direction that will assist the server, rather than just zerging up and farming kills, examples could include:

capture or defend camps/towers/keeps/stonemist castle x times
x world invader kills
escort/destroy x supply caravans
use x supplies to build siege weapons or repair structures

these would not only make new players aware of the things to do in WvW, it would also give WvW players a reward for helping their server, and will allow people with no interest in WvW to complete their monthly

the reward for this could be something like a bunch of badges and upgraded siege blueprints

good idea?, bad idea?, thoughts?

Galrond.5972:

is mabye a bit overpowered.

Running away is now overpowered. Lol’ed hard.

nerf logan :P

I don’t see why people are saying that it’s a 100% escape, necros can pull you back, you can be affected by conditions like chill cripple and immob

hell, everytime I tried it, I instantly got locked in place until it ran out and my squishy kitten got zerged to death

don’t forget, it’s eles only stomp denial, only works three times because of death penalty, has a pretty hefty CD (10/15 seconds I believe), and the ele is still vulnerable to fall damage, and conditions

seems like somebody is just upset that downed eles aren’t a free kill anymore :P

asura personal story spoilers below

they were made by your character if you choose an asura and your first invention is the infinity ball

you end up using it to see your (possible) future, but accidentally open a portal instead, your future self and your friend step out and explain that they are what happens if you kill zojja for holding you back, you become a ruthless dictator and conquer the world with your steam creatures. so they came back to make sure you kill zojja and conquer the world.

ANet: “this guy has a point… we need to nerf daggers”

being serious, I completely agree, especially with the kitten dragon’s tooth, you either need to open with it, knockdown, stun or learn to tank as THE squishiest class in the game, since even a crippled enemy can walk out of it fast enough to avoid the hit

hell, even switching the cast methods would work, making DT a ground target and making phoenix a regular target (maybe even a tracking projectile?) spell would make the skills much better

my sylavari is called Pentacus Flareblade… because he was my fifth character, and is a dagger wielding elementalist… go imagination :P

when they release name changes, I may change it to something more celtic and remove the second name, since I hadn’t realized sylvari don’t have second names, so mine’s been a title instead of a name.

I also have a mesmer called pentacus nightshade, with nightshade acting as a stage name :P

it’s also as a homage to my GW1 character “Pentus Blazescythe” who was my fifth character and was an ele/dervish… actually, come to think of it, that would be an awesome name for a charr if they ever bring back dervishes

I personally think sylvari can be anything and it still make sense from an RP perspective, don’t forget, their curiosity and naivety means they’ll try anything at least once :P

engineers can be sylvari who dreamed about the black citadel and are interested in how the charr make machines

necros are interested in death, since no sylvari has yet died of natural causes

elementalists want to learn more about nature and do so through the elements

rangers are the same as elementalists, but learn through studying nature itself

guardians and warriors are learning about new styles of fighting (there is even a warrior in brisban that says as much, he wanders the world and learns from it)

mesmers I can only imagine saw another race’s mesmers and thought it was cool, so they want to learn how it’s done

thieves I have no real justification for either, unless you compare thieves to how a child will steal something they’re interested in because it’s JUST SO INTERESTING THEY NEED IT NOW.

Contender.5428:

Trahearne is a necro…. and so is my main Sylvari. But, I got to like the Sylvari most of all the races, so leveled three in the three different factions:
Necro – Priory
Guardian – Vigil
Engineer – Whispers

Ranger or thief might have been a better choice for the Whispers/Sylvari, but the engineer is so much fun I don’t care.

engineer fits whispers pretty well, they have Whispers Creators after all who make all the spy gadgets :P

Ryuujin.8236:

Almost certain it was synergetics. Again I’m not sure exactly where I read it, pretty sure it was in game some place during the synergetics story arc (Zojja responds slightly differently to you if you’re in the same college – “We synergetics alumni need to stick together!”)

His line of work fits synergetics as well; people think of him as a golemancer but all colleges utilise golems; dynamics merely specialises in that sort’ve gadgetry. Snaff’s speciality was mind-hardware interfacing, and that is very much synergetic’s bag

isn’t synergetics more physicsy stuff and the things that are more likely to leave behind some sort of spacetime problem, than a puddle of slime or a nice crater if when it blows up

I remember an asura in rata sum saying “you dynamics types are all the same: if you can’t strap it to a golem, you blow it up”

also, the dynamics storyline specifically mentions that snaff was a golemancer and the point of their entry to the snaff prize was showing off a perfect mind-hardware interface to keep in the spirit of the competition (synergetics made a teleporter that could choose a destination on the fly without needing a reciever)

I’m pretty sure that since he was zojja’s mentor, he would be synergetics, although the fact that he was always on the cutting edge of things and the fact that he was a golemancer makes me want to think he was dynamics…

to be fair, any can go anywhere. using eles as an example, there is the obvious use as a soldier, but there is also their use as a living toolkit, they can arc weld, quench, sandblast, and heat, their magnetic abilities can be used as a temporary glue substitute for metal, and their ability to create things out of stone instantly means that they’d never need tools “why do I need a hammer? I have all of these rocks”

that’s not to say they wouldn’t fit in ash legion as well, both as assassins, saboteurs, and infiltrators, creating a vacuum in a room to kill someone by suffocation, boil all of their fluids away silently, make a guy fall down some stairs with a carefully places patch of ice, cause an engine to overheat, use rapid heating and cooling to induce thermal shock in metals, rust gears and machinery by getting water in the places that you just don’t want water to get , weaken the structural integrity of their buildings and machines, make two gears stick together at the worst time with magnetism, mask your footsteps by making a layer of vacuum near the feet, freeze the water beneath your feet for over water infiltrations, turn a wall into sand, make the ground into mud. so many possibilities :P

necros can raise armies of undead on the front lines, slowly but surely kill off camps of enemies with poison and plague, and who better to research weapons designed to kill ghosts than the one who regularly deals with them?

mesmers have the obvious benefit of being illusion wielders so ash is a perfect match, but considering how tricky it must be to remember how to manipulate enemies like they do, and still warp spacetime via portals means that they must be very intelligent as well, perfectly suited for an R&D position in iron, and let’s not forget their melee skills, they are after all the only scholar that actually uses their melee weapons as WEAPONS, necro and ele just use them as a focus for spells.

engineer has the obvious position in iron, but they can act as sappers and have the traditional “spy gadgets”, and they are competent on the battlefield as well as combat mechanics, somebody will need to repair all of those things blood legion uses.

rangers can act as assassins, and as beastmasters on the front line, and their use of spirits puts them in the same position as necros in fighting the foefire ghosts.

the rest are pretty much pigeonholed into one role, but they can still be useful elsewhere

thieves are obviously ash, but are able to hold their own on a battlefield, and their knowledge of poisons can help both ash and iron legions in chemical weaponry like the engineers elixir gun

warriors will most likely be on the front lines, but there’s nothing to say that they can’t act as the ones who build the war machines fr iron, that must require a lot of physical strength, and their rifle skills are based off both muskets and sniper rifles, so they can act as assassins for ash, and possibly as a diversion to let the sneakier members of the warband into a target location

finally, guardians have the obvious role as a soldier, but also will fit into iron with the anti-spirit knowledge like necros and rangers, for ash, they face same problem as warriors, except without the ability to use sniper rifles, they are literally the only one I can’t think of any use for in ash except as a diversion :P

so yeah, any class can fit in any legion in some way, don’t forget, charr choose their legion and warband as cubs, so who knows what they’ll grow into, a cub in blood legion who wants to be a soldier could have a natural affinity for illusions after all, and I doubt that the people you grew up with will be overly pleased with the guy who is like a brother to them being kicked out because “he wasn’t stabby enough” :P

Demented Sheep.1642:

D) Many players from GW1 made their GW2 character to be a descendant of their GW1 character.

mine IS my GW1 character :P
it involves the asura gate in the HoM, the portal stone that links to it from anywhere, the FotM (the ascalon invasion one to be specific) a charr disguise, and time travel shenanigans making the universe think the charr disguise is the real thing and makes the disguise permanent (think “The Fly” style teleportation mishap).

and this is why you should always take care when messing with untested spacetime warping technology, you could end up a different species, half the way across the continent, 250 years in the future :P

I didn’t even get to use signet of capture on her corpse to get her fire portal or flight skills :<

Levetty.1279:

Considering the amount of people who use the excuse ‘Charrs were just taking back their homeland so the searing wasn’t evil’ I hope that we can join a Dragon’s side and help them just take back their homelands.

good idea, let’s give them ascalon, the immortal army with a hatred of all life that isn’t a foefire ghost will LOVE that ;P

(seriously, why do the humans still want ascalon? it’s not been theirs for 250 years, anyone who has a legitemate claim is LONG dead, and is filled with branded and unkillable ghosts and the humans are also fighting pirates, bandits, destroyers, centaur (who are annoyed that the humans used magic to forcefully take their lands… sound familiar?), risen remnants, and would have to deal with the charr renegades. it would be like britain being pissy that america isn’t british owned if america was also the middle of an alien invasion and zombie apocalypse… whilst in a war with nearly every other country on earth… and then kicking out the group of people who have been studying how to kill the aliens and zombies)

what’s wrong with the BC?
one flat ramp area with class trainers leading to the core, guild stuff on the bottom floor, racial stuff on the middle, story stuff on the top, elevator on the right of the bottom floor to the bane, eleveator to the left to the gladium canton, ruins of rin access via gladium canton, smelter and food merchants near gladium elevator, crafting, banks and BLTC to the right of the citadel

not that hard

for rata sum it’s racial stuff, trainers, and portals on top, crafting, guilds, BLTC and banks on middle, food on the bottom

hoelbrak and DR, not got any opinions on since I never go there, but the wheel structure of DR makes it a bit of a pain to get anywhere easily

the grove is a bit of a mess, but it’s trainers on top, everything else in the middle, racial stuff is a bit scattered

ZeftheWicked.3076:

I agree on the quest problem. At lvl 13-14 i couldn’t find a quest for my charr at ashford plains. I know i’m missing one heart (maybe that’s the one), but it is bit tricky for a charr to advance to 15. Also the next map in line is near start of ashford plains while your 14-15 leveling takes place at end of it…right next to high level map where you get smeared;) Well no one said war is easy;)

Now i should go and scout more around for those quests and maybe npc that warns you about the next map being a “suprise”, if not it should be suggested to put one there;)

hint: look for the telescopes :P

there are also non-citadel charr, charr in places like LA seem to have had their long standing racial biases defused, and it’s only really the player character’s generation that still has a problem with humans, the cubs and child dialog in LA shows that the only reason the charr and human dislike each other is the war, to the point that the kids and cubs will go trick or treating, play “ghosts vs charr” together, re-enact logan’s heroic acts from edge of destiny, and even plan on forming a warband together, to quote “why do you think our parents don’t like each other?” “I don’t know, all I care about is that we’re best friends”

my ele/mesmer decided to work with the asura to refine the gate network and work on developing spacetime magic as a side project, however due to a bizzare accident whilst making an experimental gate in the eye of the north that could be linked to from anywhere via a portal stone, he ended up teleported to the gates of ascalon city in the middle of a charr invasion, and displaced slightly out of time.
for some reason, 4 other wierdos including a strange green guy and an asura demanded he disguise himself as a charr and fight alongside them. after the fight, he found himself floating on an island in the mists, stuck as a charr due to the effects of moving through time in a form other than his own, and due to the effects of time travel, cut off from his mesmer skills.
he, and the rest of the group left through the nearby asura gate to find himself in a place vaguely reminiscent of lions arch, and decided to return home to ascalon.

he thought to himself as he started the trek across the shiverpeaks with his new companions “how appropriate, my life as a hero started as a human from ascalon defending it from the charr, and now I return as a charr, after being one of those very invaders”
explaining what happened to his new friends, he was met with disbelief until the asura mentioned that there was a record of his disappearence… two hundred and fifty years earlier…
the group decided to teach him everything they knew about charr life and culture, what had happened during his disappearence, and helped him create a false past.
he arrived in the black citadel a few weeks later, enlisted in the charr military and was placed in a warband.
He was no longer pentacus ignus the ascalonian elementalist mesmer, but calcifus flareblade, ex-gladium from lion’s arch, an elementalist of the iron legion
he immediately decided to intergrate himself by using his knowledge of spatial distortions gained from working on gates and as a mesmer to build a gun designed to kill ghosts as a way of freeing friends from the torment of the foefire.

then one day he was called to the village of smokestead to fight a ghost incursion…

TL:DR
so yeah, my character “died” during an asura gate accident whilst setting up the asura gate in the HoM, also explaining why he has the portal stone in the future and why he has heritige gear.
in actual fact, he got TPed to the FotM’s ascalon seige fractal, and displaced in time so that when returning to the fractal observation platform, he ended up stuck as a charr and lost his ability to use mesmer skills due to mysterious time travel stuff (he “appeared” in the future as a charr ele, and so therefore, the universe thinks he’s a charr ele).
he changed his name, forged a past, joined the iron legion, and started developing the ghostbore technology using his experience with spacetime magic from working with portals and from being a mesmer.

he probably killed a few friends in the seige, but doesn’t mind, most of them died during the searing and events of GW1, and the foefire killed the rest, the ones he did kill would have died to the foefire anyway and sees what he did as saving them from an eternity of torment. the ghostbore musket is his way of trying to free the rest of his friends from their blue immolatey fate.

(as for the father questline, as part of his fake past, he paid a guy to pretend he was his dad, and he’s an ex mesmer, he’s pretty kitten convincing when he wants to be, he still knows the mind games, he just can’t use magic to do them)

I think that it may be easier to make undead out of “fresh resources”, after all, necros can use the reanimator trait to make a minion from a dead enemy without a thought, (whether they like it or not :P), but it takes time to raise other minions from assorted bits and pieces in the ground and scattered about.
makes sense really, a fresh corpse has mostly working parts, especially if they died of causes other than “massive stab/crushing wounds”, it’s like getting a jigsaw puzzle in a box versus a random mishmash of pieces from lots of jigsaw puzzles, some of which are broken(decayed) or damaged.

it’s possible that zhaitan has the same limitation.

there was another theory a while back that zhaitan rips the original souls out of the mists to give his minions autonomy (wheras, like trahearne says about necro minions “mine have never been alive, so they can’t be controlled by zhaitan’s power”), and that was the purpose of the ritual, in which case, the soul is still IN the body when it dies, and so the ritual is unnessecary

Mik Hell.8206:

“Unintended feature”= exploit

You know how many great things were discovered by accident?

Like penicillin, champagne, post-its, cellophane, velcro, the whole American continent, dynamite (explosives are costantly used for building construction), teflon and countless of other great things which greatly help us today.

I am not saying Evasive Arcana is to be compared with so many great inventions, what I want to point out is some of the unintended features could actualy be good as in fun in a game.

in games development, it’s called “Emergent behavior”, tvtropes calls it a goodbad bug or an ascended glitch.

generally, if a bug is around that isn’t gamebreaking, but actually ADDS to the game, and is used often enough or is fun enough, it’s not only kept, but made official

look at the “basket on head” of skyrim, or reverse pickpocketing, that started out as a bug that people used to kill kids in fallout by planting live explosives in pockets, now it’s a full part of skyrim and fallout, with lore and skills based around it.

or hell, even the farlands in minecraft, notch said he liked the idea of a far off land where reality begins to break down. unfortuantely, with 1.8 he accidentally fixed it, what did he do? he made The End as a tribute to it, yes, it was a bug so loved that the developer actually spent an entire patch to add a reference to it, and write it into minecraft’s “lore”

what ANet has done here is the WORST possible thing to do, the standard thing for a dev to do would be to look at it, figure out why people like it, and then fix the bugged part whilst silmuntaneously adding in a feature similar to the old bug. in this case, it SHOULD have been to reduce the damage and cooldown of the old trait, but remove the non spell finishers, or even to remove the spells, damage and cooldown, and just give elementalists a trait that gave a blast on dodge.

oh, and one more example of emergent behavior:

the mechanic of space invaders where the invaders speed up where there were less of them? that was actually a hardware issue, when there were less invaders to draw, it took less time to draw the frame, giving the impression of the invaders speeding up and getting desperate. when they realized, they loved it so much they kept it, and started the trend of enemies “turning red” when near death. it’s funny to think that one bug has defined videogame enemies for generations.

I remember that enemy, it’s complete bullkitten, thank grenth that it’s one of the only enemies in the game with that buff, and it’s at a low enough level that even our DD is enough to get gold

why would a largos be immune to conditions anyway? do they just not bleed? are they also immune to poison? are their legs unbreakable and are they sufficiently smart to overcome confusion?

there is NO REASON why ANY enemy should be immune to ALL conditions, some of them, sure, I could see a largos being immune to burning and poison, but unless they have no blood, they SHOULD be able to bleed, earth elementals can, so why not an underwater butterfly man?

yeah, I just crashed in HotM and now I can’t log in on that character

since this has been marketed as one of the “one time only world changing events”, the thing I’d like to know is how are they gonna fix this? (the “this” being the huge portal in the middle of LA)
will we just log in on the 31st and everything is as if it never happened?
will the days afterwards have cleanup crews tidying up the city and rebuilding the statues?
will the statue be gone for a while whilst it is slowly rebuilt real time like how it was slowly degrading over time?

the fact that they were so good at doing the destruction of the statue over time means that it will just be a little jarring if it’s just “poof, event over, relog now please, oh hey the statue containing a portal to the mad realm is fixed hooray”

it happened to me when my latency was so bad that when the cutscene endedand I lost my determined buff, the goo was already up half the tower

hooray!
it’s not just me

I hope these are fixed by the end of the event, I want to be able to turn in the pages on my “intended to replace my main, alt”
(why must the books and pages be soulbound? :<)

Name: Pentacus Nightshade, Lv 22 mesmer
Server: Desolation
Location: Lion’s Arch

Problem: I was on my alt gathering the 6 pages for act 2, after completing the one in the ruins of holy demetra, I teleported back to the gate hub waypoint in lion’s arch.
However, I never made it to LA because the loading screen carries on forever. It is currently stuck with the vistas/POIs/WP’s info and the loading screen art, however, I can hear sounds and BGM playing.

closing the game and logging out/in again doesn’t help, it just gets stuck in the same way. I have tried to log in on multiple computers, to no avail, indicating the issue must be server side. and this only happens on this one particular character, my main and other alts are able to load into lions arch perfectly fine from all three computers.

I hope this can be resolved soon, since I’d just spent an hour and a half gathering the act 2 pages (getting to sparkfly was a PAIN), and would like to complete the book on this alt before the event ends.
Thanks

I’m rather enjoying my orrian scepter
it drips with corruption and has a nice rust/blood-splosion effect when you swing it

@aelial
let’s not overexxagerate
mesmers have the same problem as we-oh wait ¬_¬

no, I don’t want a legendary staff tailored to necros, I want a staff tailored to anything that isn’t a mesmer or brony

I have a necro, engineer, ele, and mesmer, all at or near level cap.
the only one I could seriously imagine using bifrost on is the mesmer.
would it have been too hard to make four staves? one based on light, one on shadows, one on the elements, and bifrost? they made three greatswords after all.

as for why I’m trying: because I want a goal, an ultimate end point that will be proof to myself that I’ve done EVERYTHING there is to do in game, it’s like beating emerald and ruby WEAPON in final fantasy 7, or dullahan in golden sun, it’s there to fight not for the reward, but for the sheer experience of fighting it.

and if you’re going to continue calling me narrow minded, I’ll sum up with this:
I’m asking for a staff that anyone who doesn’t like rainbows can use, you want us to shut up and enjoy our rainbows.
who is the one being narrow minded?

let’s think about how many bleeds that is worth if we assune that the necro is the luckiest man on earth:
5 enemies, use the S2 skill, it crits.
every enemy now has 5 stacks of bleed on them
use epideic (by this point the barbed precision bleed has fallen off)
target has four bleeds on it, surrounding emnemies have EIGHT. in total, that is 36 bleeds (with 5 that ran their duration, so a total of 41)

what if it didn’t crit?
that is an enemy with three bleeds surrounded by four with six, so 27 total

41 total bleeds vs 27 total bleeds spread over 5 enemies.
from only using the S2 attack and epidemic
(of course, that’s only showing the maximum and minimum bleeds, since barbed precision and SSoE’s aren’t a 100% proc, the actual total bleed amount can be anywhere between those two numbers)

@jaha
“precision is virtually useless for necromancers”

I use barbed precision and superior sigils of earth (60% chance on crit to add kitten bleed), so on crits, my auto attacks can do up three bleeds with the sceptre, and my S2 attack can add up to 5 bleeds

erasculio, please stop saying our views on what a necromancer should look like is narrow minded, if anything, YOU are the one being narrow minded for not accepting that not everyone wants the rainbow sparkle staff.

as for wanting a legendary staff, it’s NOT just about the skin, it’s about feeling rewarded in a suitable wat for all of the effort we put into making it. at the moment, the reward is rainbows.
I’m not saying “make a black emo staff” just something less girly would be good, hell even a white staff that emitted holy light would be good (in asian cultures, the colour of death is WHITE, so no, not all things related to death are black)

@Agemnon
“Oh, and predator fits engineer perfectly.”
you would think so… but engineers use rifles as shotguns, they would be firing a SNIPER RIFLE from the hip >_<

it was working on blacktide last night, can’t check at the moment if it is still working

it’s just so annoying that the boss with the most bullkitten mechanics is also the most buged and difficult to get to (what flavor of instakill youldyou like today sir? PBAoE stomp, targeted splash AoE fireball, charge to target THEN PBAoE, 5 iinstakill aoes that have no way of avoiding or removal and spawn at random?)

it seems like there is a divide in the leendaries, on one side is weapons a warrior can use, andthe other side is stuff you’d find in a toybox

there is NOTHING in the legendary list that would fit a necro, thief, or engineer

warriors get frostfang and the three greatswords
guardians get flmeseeker propecies
mesmers get bifrost, quip, and the minstrel
rangers get howler
elementalists get incinerator and meteorlogicus (and bifrost to a far lesser extent)

where are the darker weapons?
where are the non rainbow shooting bows?
where are the guns that won’t make me embarrased to use (or at least, let me use it PROPERLY, sniper rifle != shooting from the hip)

(sorry about the double posts but anet’s forum software is a pile of kittens and won’t let me edit)
oh, and inicdentally I don’t think the liquification weapon is working properly, it’s causing the test subjects to dissolve and disperse into solution, but it’s not killing them, what’s left in the vats is…disturbing.
I’ll just boil off the excess liquid and try again, we need results we can USE.
(the view was nearly ruined however by the undead scratching at the glass)

another thing that irritates me:
how the hell do wine makers make money? it seems like everyday “it’s a bad day to buy wine” (“but it’s a great day to derinkit”)