Guild Wars 2

Raven Elodie.4195:

I know this is going to sound really stupid, but I just can’t figure out how to get the achievements. How do I do it? Yes all the achievements are unlocked in my story journal. I went to the beginning of Gates of Maguuma where the first instance was and there’s nothing there. I read everything I could find on the net about it and it said to look for purple circles on the map. I don’t see any. I’ve stood around and waited at the spots where the instance green stars used to be and nothing happens. I am so frustrated, I’ve been spending hours asking people what’s up in game, but no one ever answers me. So I’m trying here, maybe someone can give me a detailed answer as to what is happening here.

Did you re-start the episode from your story journal?

Genesis.8572:

I wish that these characters brought back could actually remember our characters. If we have human nobles, then Lord Faren’s quest text should be different for us.

Definitely agreeing, but that’s already happening. Kasmeer’s text changes if you’re a human noble, several texts in the ending of S1 were sensible to being a charr (“It’s a charr thing”) or being the member of Durmand Priory. And it’s, at least in my humble opinion, a great way to go, because it helps to add a personal flare that culls down the feeling you’re just another random adventurer numbered one hundred and eighty billion.

Which brings me to another question to ANet/fellow players. I spent a few minutes in Blood legion quarters today and noticed two things. First was Laria Sharpeye accepting a few coming in centurions and legionnaires, informing them (in full voice!) Rytlock’s absent and having a conversation in his stead, which is a great little touch I applaud hard enough to wake the neighbors. But when I tried talking to her, I noticed she noticed my character and her sharing a profession. I’ve been to Blood tribune quarters for dozens of times, I talked to her on several occassions and my character’s always been a ranger, but I never noticed that conversation option. Is that also newly added or am I just blind, deaf and dumb?

sorudo.9054:

Changer the Elder.2948:

sorudo.9054:

Changer the Elder.2948:

sorudo.9054:

i don’t think a charr can lift a curse only a true ascalonian can lift, it’s like having an average joe killing apocalypse, it’s just not possible.

Well, technically speaking (which literal-minded curses have a distinctive taste in), charr are the “true ascalonians”. They are the original settlers of Ascalon, humans merely kicked them out for a short time before getting all spazzy and burning themselves down to free up the space again, so…

true, one issue remains tho, i don’t think king adelbern would make a curse only for a charr, his worst enemy, to be able to lift the curse.
it has to be a human ascalonian or the whole idea of this curse makes no sense whatsoever.

Problem is, that presumes two things: One, that Adelbern specifically custom-tailored the curse and that he himself was of sound enough mind to say in that time and place “I hereby curse my own people as well as the invading army to perish and rise again to haunt this country for all eternity, killing anything that moves in the form of a vengeful spirit, until a rightful true Ascalonian human, preferably of kingly heritage, comes with the sword of my son, stabs it in the ground and says this precise magical formula…”

That didn’t happen, because a) it’s an obtusely stupid thing to phrase and b) Adelbern’s sanity was slipping like a buttered kittenroach on a waterslide, so what he basically did was raise a distinctively magical sword and yell “ALLYASUCKERSBUUUUUURN!” and the curse was pretty much the side effect of using a magical item to do “a thing”. It’s like firing a roman candle – you fire it for the pretty lights and stuff, but if you handle it like Adelbern handled this whole thing, you might possibly set your cat on fire. The fact that it’s not covered in the instruction manual under the “intented use” clause doesn’t automatically mean it cannot happen as a side effect.

The part where “curse will be lifted if a true king of Ascalon brings back the magical shiny burny blade” was presumably added later anyway, by some sort of a wise seer (or very profound local drunk).

there is one problem tho, charr don’t have kings, humans do.
if that holds true then it doesn’t matter which charr has the blade, only a human can lift the curse and if that happens to be a king then they need to search for the only descended of ruric…..if any exist at all. (he died before reaching kryta )

Again, I defer to the quirkyness of magical curses they so often display in fiction. “rightful king of Ascalon” = person (not necessarily human) with the greatest right (not necessarily inherited) to be considered the ruler of said patch of land. Curses have the lovably (infuriating) quirky nature that lets them be both extremely literal and vaguely metaphorical at the very same time .

So “charr don’t have kings” is on very wobbly legs dealing with non-lawyery speaking magical terms, because “king” and “true Ascalonian” can be ever as fluid as it can get literal. Exempli gratia: lions don’t wear a crown and silk garbs and still we call them “king of beasts”. First kings also didn’t become kings because magical glowy finger pointed at them and gave them blue blood transfusion, but because they were strongest and most fit for that duty.

Again, I can’t see into the writers heads, I don’t know if that’s what will happen, and I’m not adamantly saying “Yes, it’s gonna work and yes, even a charr (or specifically Rytlock, as the trailer seems to imply) can do it”, I’m merely stating that if that is to happen, the curse does indeed have a workaround to avoid digging a plot hole the size of Mount Maelstrom.

Anyways, I feel like I’m responsible for slightly derailing this topic, so I’m going to skulk off to my work. Thank you for listening

sorudo.9054:

Changer the Elder.2948:

sorudo.9054:

i don’t think a charr can lift a curse only a true ascalonian can lift, it’s like having an average joe killing apocalypse, it’s just not possible.

Well, technically speaking (which literal-minded curses have a distinctive taste in), charr are the “true ascalonians”. They are the original settlers of Ascalon, humans merely kicked them out for a short time before getting all spazzy and burning themselves down to free up the space again, so…

true, one issue remains tho, i don’t think king adelbern would make a curse only for a charr, his worst enemy, to be able to lift the curse.
it has to be a human ascalonian or the whole idea of this curse makes no sense whatsoever.

Problem is, that presumes two things: One, that Adelbern specifically custom-tailored the curse and that he himself was of sound enough mind to say in that time and place “I hereby curse my own people as well as the invading army to perish and rise again to haunt this country for all eternity, killing anything that moves in the form of a vengeful spirit, until a rightful true Ascalonian human, preferably of kingly heritage, comes with the sword of my son, stabs it in the ground and says this precise magical formula…”

That didn’t happen, because a) it’s an obtusely stupid thing to phrase and b) Adelbern’s sanity was slipping like a buttered kittenroach on a waterslide, so what he basically did was raise a distinctively magical sword and yell “ALLYASUCKERSBUUUUUURN!” and the curse was pretty much the side effect of using a magical item to do “a thing”. It’s like firing a roman candle – you fire it for the pretty lights and stuff, but if you handle it like Adelbern handled this whole thing, you might possibly set your cat on fire. The fact that it’s not covered in the instruction manual under the “intented use” clause doesn’t automatically mean it cannot happen as a side effect.

The part where “curse will be lifted if a true king of Ascalon brings back the magical shiny burny blade” was presumably added later anyway, by some sort of a wise seer (or very profound local drunk).

sorudo.9054:

i don’t think a charr can lift a curse only a true ascalonian can lift, it’s like having an average joe killing apocalypse, it’s just not possible.

Well, technically speaking (which literal-minded curses have a distinctive taste in), charr are the “true ascalonians”. They are the original settlers of Ascalon, humans merely kicked them out for a short time before getting all spazzy and burning themselves down to free up the space again, so…

But we’ll see. Anet brought many surprises thus far and we’re only in for a third episode now. Whichever speculation turns out to be correct regarding the “Ascalon, I free you from your curse” part, it’s on its best way to be very, very cool from the story AND gameplay standpoint.

Wishful thinking speaking here, but do you think it’s possible the feature pack will include in some form replayable LS season 1 or at least parts of it?

OmaiGodman.2098:

Characters from Destiny’s edge should appear throughout the living story more often. Right now it’s as if they’re just sitting on their lazy bottoms instead of actually doing something.

“We beat Zhaitan, we’re done. Leave the other dragons to someone else.”

Well, Destiny’s Edge didn’t do that much against Zhaitan, to be honest. Sure, its members are each of the races respective authority figure your player character defers to, but they only actively stick around for the first few missions. As a whole, they only came around last minute after they spent the entire span of player’s story arguing with each other and holding to their grudges and “sitting on their lazy bottoms”, to help with the last dungeon (not saying it was bad, storywise, just that there are other characters that did way more – order leaders, Pact recruits, etc. Some of them spent quite a lot of the final push on Zhaitan constantly in the fray and limelight).

That being said, I’m definitely glad they’re back to actually doing something, so kudos to Anet for that.

Also, some Tengu or Kodan characters in LS would be cool. I know there are Tengu in the Vigil, at least, so it could be excused storywise.

I have a question to ANet (and by extension, to you, fellow Tyrians). With placing the living story firmly after the personal one, return of some faces of the PS fame either already happened or is about to happen. We see Destiny’s Edge, Trahearne has been mentioned several times.

But will some of the “lesser” NPC supports come back? I’m not naive enough to hope for more input of our Krewes, Warbands or other respective backgrounds, but some of the Pact members would be definitely nice!

Even last year’s updates brought us a reminder of Tybalt and Forgal (via the nightmare tower). Is there a chance this year’s update will bring us guys like Gear Warband (I still owe Mangonel a drink. Or two.) or the awesome Backdraft/Edgecrusher duo? Or Elli? They all helped bring down the last dragon, it would make sense to have a hand/paw in taking down the next as well.

And for you, fellow players, who would you like to see?

Speaking of great character dialogue in the past two updates – dear ANet, would it be possible to perhaps extract all the quips Taimi and Braham exchange in Edge of the Mists and say, put them on Soundcloud or something, like you did with some other dialogue bits? This player would be very, very happy if you did. Those are what I don’t want to lose once a new update is live.

Spawn is either broken or forcibly taken down – it has been at least about 9 hours since Tequatl’s last spawn and he hasn’t appeared on Devona’s Rest since.

Anet, seriously. You’ve wasted a lot of time to lot of your players, who ended up standing in Sparkfly, staring at their screen and waiting for nothing to happen. Generally, people (especially those of us bound by work and real-life duties) hate when their time gets wasted. Please, do not kitten your players off next time. Get a good guy who’ll stalk the forums and actually TALK to people, your PR and community relation skills are leaving a lot to be desired.

Coming from a patient person who’s usually defending you against other players’ rambling, I suppose that is saying something.

Yes, no patch, but daily missing and Teq’s about an hour late and nowhere to be seen.

I rarely do so, but Anet, that’s one stupid idea. Tough as he was to beat up untill now, I want to see the 100+ people mandatorily required to beat this event to show up all geared up and organized in a moment’s notice randomly throughout the day.

I find it rather strange, but Teq seems to have respawned to his original timer from the 1h30 window he used to be during boss week. It’s kind of confusing, since new patch hasn’t been released yet.

Could anyone confirm or/and post an accurate timer window, please?

Tequatl fish heads spontaneously disappear without Teq actually dying or spawning, and spawn back when he is STILL on the map, making last two minutes of the fight almost impossible for close-up groups, since people keep blowing themselves up.

I know I’m gonna get stoned for this.

You know, all those who are whining about guesters… do you have any idea how many people does each server hold? Sweet secret is – way, way more than a single map ever can. Even if you disable guesting, people with real-life obligations that cannot go to camp at main for hours before won’t. get. in. That is an issue, but not an issue directly caused by guesting, only worsened by it (liken it to this – when your house is on fire, putting out the stove won’t help you).

Let me tell you a story. Story I promise is true. There was a raid I was part of on a highly populated server that was able to defeat Tequatl. That raid (and several other successful ones) was being co-led by a person from a completely different, low-population server. That guest was able to instruct people on what to do, help them understand what needs to be done. In the end, the guest you all loathe so bad helped the other 100+ server natives to their trophies, shinies, loot and fancy name tags.

And when the whole raid decided to pick up their things and move to overflow, because there were too many AFKers from the said home server, overflowed natives from the server finally got in from overflows and guess what – lost. Just getting on your home isn’t a guarranteed victory – it’s piggybacking a ride on someone who can beat him. Get a teamspeak, get a raidcall, get any other voicechat conference. Get people to come to it. And teach them what to do. No matter what server you are, that works. Even on overflow.

tl;dr:
Moral of my story – you do not defeat Tequatl just because you get on your own main server. You defeat him because you know what to do and help the people around you do the same. If you disable guesting, you’re just gonna find a new reason that stands between you and a shiny trophy. Instead of those “kittening guesters” (who, by the way, are people like you, me, any of us, and do not deserve to be call that way just for the reason alone), you’ll have those “kittening campers” who have defeated Teq and now are just wasting YOUR space.

Take a deep breath, eat a cookie, be a good host and be kind to your fellow man. If you greet people with “kitten off MY server”, they are not about to politely move out of the way.

@Have No Faith In Me (Is it bad that I do, for your informed answer?): Thank you. Good to know, I will warn people from it on raids. Not rezzing AFKs.

Still, the timer is ridiculously long on the Tequatl event – when Sanctum of Rall downed him, he caught us with our pants down, spawning after 45 minutes instead of 1h30 he usually takes. Lot of people were AFK, standing on a safe spot, not getting killed for those 45 minutes. That’s way too long, especially on high-server demand events.

We had success with guardians countering the Fear by… was it “Stand your gound!” shout, or the other one? It really worked miracles on the main attacking cluster, didn’t get Feared once.

Yeah, if I knew I was going to sleep, I would have logged out, trust me, I’m not that much of an idiot. My computer doesn’t handle running this high powered app well, either. Human body, at least mine, doesn’t exactly have a screen or monitor that would precisely tell you “sleep imminent and unavoidable in 10 minutes, close all apps and prepare to assume a horizontal position.”

And sorry, but being still in-game after FOUR kitten HOURS is either a bug, or a really bad idea. Or both. Because if you leave for that long, you have no right to clogg the map for someone else. Hell, even an hour is too long. 30 minutes are max in my opinion. When the game counts participating in map chat as inactivity and threatens to boot you when you just write in guild chat and not moving, then this shouldn’t happen at all.

Well, solution is actually really simple – do what the guesters do, come early, run through with your folks, learn the ropes, try to get the beast down. Eventually, you are bound to come out of overflow. I ended up being teleported from Overflow even with no party present on main each time with no problem.

What seriously needs fixing is AFK timer, that would help the Overflowed people as well. When there’s a high-demand event like that, AFK should never be longer than 15 minutes. Yet there are people standing there for 40, caught with their pants down when the raid starts. Plus there appears to be a bug, anyway, because being able to be AFK for four hours without disconnect is just not healthy, not normal and plain weird.

Dear Anet,

Earlier today, during a Tequatl raid, I went through all night, trying to help Sanctum of Rall down the beast. When time reached 8-9 AM locally (some five hours earlier from now), I accidentally fell asleep. Yet, even though I wasn’t active for about four straight hours, I didn’t get disconnected! Thankfully, it was way past America’s bedtime, so I wasn’t clogging that much space on a extremely high server demand, but still, I find it highly problematic these days, due to guesting and map-space requirements.

I know I ruined somebody’s day somewhere by making them stuck on overflow, while I was sleeping and my character clogged up the map, standing uselessly, getting killed a lot and wasting precious manpower on good folks trying to get me up again (for which, I apologize to my gaming mates).

There was no pet or child present on my table to keep me “false active”, my mouse or keyboard weren’t touched for that time, yet I miraculously didn’t get disconnected after four hours of standing around, not moving, not writing, not doing anything. That needs fixed ASAP.

It feels so great to down that sucker! Thanks to everyone present!

Seriously, the loot NEEDS to be better though. Bunch of greens and blues + one Rare coat? That’s a joke, easier things drop way better stuff.

Julie Yann.5379:

The timer should determine the level of success until the 30 min mark and then you fail. Beat him under 15 mins you get a lot of shinies. Beat him under 20 and 25 and you get less and less loot until you inevitably fail at 30min. This would give a chance to those stuck on overflow and those on low pop servers to actually get past the first stage of the fight. Personally I would prefer the encounter to be harder and not have a timer but that’s just me.

I’m slightly worried this would cause people to quit after 15 minutes, if they see they’re not going to get their ascended loot/big shinies bag anyway, thus often by proxy failing the event for others way ahead of its actual ending.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I’m also willing to try, but i’m hitting a barrier of ‘ok, I dodge every single of his wave, i survived him poison traps, i ressed over 15 people on my own, i protected the turrents, i dps’ed the dragon for a while, ‘oh crap timer is out 90% left’, ok we did someting seriously wrong. But I do not know that answer.

You are like my friend, if a new game comes out he figure all the hard content out in litterally 5 secs. He doesn’t have to try even. He can somehow always predict what the developpers thought, and see true what was supposed to be very hard content, with easyness. But i don’t call him a good player. He’s just lucky to have this gift. Now you are telling people without this gift to suck it up and don’t ask advice? Kk, leaves tequatl

Nobody is telling you not to ask for advice. You do alright on Teq, congrats to you. But it’s not a solo event. No matter how hard YOU personally try to get everything perfect, it rises or fails with other players being able to do the same. And the more people learn to do what you do, the better the result. Just do what most people with experience do and… well… crude as it sounds, yell at others to get their acts straight.

As long as people will run around like beheaded poultry, don’t listen to map chat/people telling them what to do to do it right, the event can’t be won. It’s a group effort.

As said before, I do support way better loot though, considering the effort you need to put into it.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

If nobody tells me how the kitten to dps him 10x faster then now, then yes i will abandon him. Still no replies from the elitists in this thread. And just for the sake of mods reading this they are elitists because they want hardcore content, it doesn’t mean anything else.

If telling people “suck it up and learn to play the game to actually work for your rewards for once” is elitist, then I’m an elitist and I’m kitten proud of it. However, by telling people to man up, I do not imply I have the recipe to beat the dragon (that’s simple Aristoteles logic. A equals/means/implies B, not half the alphabet). Yes, I do not have any more luck than you killing him, but the difference between us is – I’m willing to TRY.

People were nagging that every boss can be beaten by a bunch of zerging noobs poking him with sticks. Now they’re crying that they want to be able to poke the boss with sticks. Heaven forbid you actually need to use your skills, dodge and THINK.

If the promised “bigger, badder, meaner, leaner” Tequatl were just the same event but timed and with mode HP, we’d all be here, crying it’s “boooooooriiiiing”. And we’d be right. Anet actually followed their promise of a tough fight. Boo hoo, I guess?

Agreed. Do not nerf. Killing new Teq is supposed to be an achievement, a test of skill and cooperation. If people run around like headless chickens and try to zerg it and then cry for nerf, it’s not Anet that’s doing something wrong.

Oh the woe, oh the horror, the game actually requires you to play now, not just mindlessly zerg-farm with spamming 1 and standing on a safe spot. (New Jormag fight can be hilarious at that regards)

I agree on better rewards part though. Tough content needs motivation.

Considering how much fun to follow Ellen was during the Southsun event… I’d say she’s right where she belongs. At least she provides entertainment now =D

Even though I wonder where will she get the money for the Fractal funding when she’ll have to buy new boots all the time.

I’ve been trying to get my friend to enter a personal story instance with be, but no matter what character of mine we try, he never gets the invite. I can enter just fine, but alone. We tried both lowlevel and high level quest, several characters, behaves the same for about two days now.

Is there some new setting that prevents him from receiving invitations, or is it a server lag, or something else entirely?

Fractals of the Mists provide answer only for part of the problem – dungeons (like the Aether hiding spot back in Sky Pirates of Tyria – at least I think it was during that LW). But no matter their gameplay qualities, dungeons are interchangeable. Go there, kill mobs, avoid traps, get a grand chest and a pat on the back. Don’t get me wrong, that in and of itself can be great and awesome. But if you miss it, there’s gonna be another following the same recipe.

Same goes for the achievements – they hand in nice rewards, but if you miss them, nothing terrible happens. If you don’t have the time in two weeks to gather 200 bear butts and bring them to an NPC, there will be some other quest in the future to give you the very same 10 Achievement points you’d get otherwise.

The actual problem with Living World being temporary is the story – especially since the story is evolving, continues from previous instances. And that’s the part that gets missed the most, at least by myself. I came back to the game after about four hours of being unable to play it, only to find a world changed (which is awesome) without virtually no chance of catching up to it (which is terrible). My first encounter with GW after that time was like: Ooo, nice, looks like the great collapse is a go. Wait, who’s Aetherblades. Who’s Molten Alliance? Why are they trying to kill me?! Who’s this charr? Why does she behave like she has a backstory? I’m supposed to vote? Who’s Ellen Kiel? Why should I root for her? Why is there a void seat on the council all of a sudden?

The game itself does drop vague idea of what happened beforehand, usually counting to a very nice “Yeah, since event XY, we live like that”, not counting on players that have lived under the proverbial rock and have no kitten idea.

Thus far, the only way to catch up to the world is hours of reading the wikipedia. Which is not how I imagine playing a game. That’s something I doubt any fractal dungeons will fix.

Speaking of books. Have you pondered the idea of turning the short stories published on the blog into an actual book (short story collection, most probably)? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a) trouble reading longer text from computer screen, b) has no luck finding all of the stories, since many of the links are broken and there doesn’t seem to be a coherent archive and c) simply prefers to have a printed volume.