Guild Wars 2

Pocket raptors forever!

WTB Summon Pocket Raptors skill to eat my enemies <3

Don’t know why people would use an Assassin crest for stats when an Opal Orb does the same job.

What’s more, if the crest was going to be used in trinkets then it’s worse than the orb. Orbs can be upgraded to an Exquisite version for even more stat points (but note: you can’t slot exquisite opals into armour).

Seera.5916:

I’d say lower than 50%. You shouldn’t be using skills to top off a player with high health. That player can use their own heal. The player below 50% could use your heal to help them get back to max/near max. Or you might end up with a player going below 50% two seconds later and now the skill for healing is on cool down.

I also agree with it being an opt in feature.

Oh! That’s an idea you could take even further if it was an opt-in option – you could have a slider under the tick box for a heath threshold. Maybe even call it “Health Threshold”.

Let’s say you only want to see players under 50% – set the slider to 50%, et voila! A good range for that slider would be let’s say “Under 100%” to “Under 25%”? Seems a decent ball park.

Zedek.8932:

If you know League of Legends, there is a healer/support called Soraka. There will be a little circle/compass thingy around her (mind: It’s an isometric game with a fixed camera angle) an arrow/several arrows on it to indicate nearby players with low health. That works pretty well.

That is also fascinating… I don’t play LoL but yeah, green arrows for the 5 – 10 nearest wounded allies might work really well. I mean in zergs you’d have to cap it but I’m sure all that stuff could be done client-side so as not to stress the servers.

A current nightmare for healers continues to be the total lack of any indication that an ally is wounded until they go down. This needs to change.

I’m certain that it’s a concious design choice not to have healers look at the UI practically ever, i.e. party or squad UI, but rather to have players looking at the battle in front of them.

Looking at the battle in front for what’s going on works up to a point. Various boons and effects (auras etc.) have visuals, which is great, enemies often have tells and such, which is also great, but allies have no indicator of health short of mousing over them. That part is horrible.

There might have been a design decision at some time not to clutter the battle with little health bars over players’ heads, but it would be amazing to at least have the option to have mini health bars pop up over players’ heads when they fall below 100% health and thus could do with a top-up.

There have been some great additions to the action combat of Guild Wars 2, especially the awesome Action Camera, but could we please have this option added as well?

Thanks for reading.

Hey guys,

Does it bother you that your aristocratic human acts a bit shifty? Does your nightblossom sylvari not slide through the shadows? How about that male norn who follows Wolf but moves like they follow Bear? It’s time to pitch: base animation packs.

Character Creation

So, one of the things that’s bothered me about character creation since beta 4 years ago now, was that although I could pick various physiques for my characters I couldn’t choose how they moved.

You’d normally want that big bulky character to be all stompy and that lithe character to be all slinky, especially if you wanted them to act in character. Take the male norn as a good example. The animations for your idle, walk and run are perfect for a follower of Bear, but if you want a follower of Wolf or Snow Leopard then you need your big bulky guy to move more like water, flowing through the wilderness like a predator.

Animation Styles

I like to use a Street Fighter analogy. In that game you have your Zangief, which is basically your default male norn (Bear). Then you have 3 other massive male characters who move completely differently: Bison who is like Raven, Sagat who is like Wolf and Vega who is like Snow Leopard. These are all massive guys who embody very different characteristics based on the way they move.

That’s the norn with their spirit themes. What about the other races?

You have humans, with the styles of aristocrat, commoner and thug.

Sylvari embody a particular mood depending on their time of birth. You have dawn, noon, dusk and night. These could be animated in the mode of cheerful, bold, philosophical and secretive respectively.

Then we have the asura and their college affiliation defining their animation. The statics are stoic, dynamics hyperactive and the synergetics dreamy.

Charr are defined by their legion. Blood legion could be animated to be more gung-ho, Ash as slinky and Iron as workman-like.

A Realistic Scope

I’d like to bring some of that extra “character” to Guild Wars 2, because we watch our characters animate for hundreds or even thousands of hours. We’re looking at each race getting new variants of some of the base animations: idle, walk and run.

That’s 3 animations, multiplied by races and styles. The combat animations wouldn’t get touched. Perhaps you can make an argument for some of the dodges on a case-by-case basis, and perhaps there’s an argument to use the same animation for a particular race and style where there isn’t enough difference to express.

What Do You Think?

So, are you happy with how your character moves or would you be up for seeing this? Possibly this is expansion content or it could be a “when it’s ready” addition. Support this if you like it.

And there was me thinking the Bloodstone Maw looked just like the Northern Crater in Final Fantasy 7 and all the creatures had Mako poisoning.

Lazarus the Dire is Sephiroth, Xera can be Hojo/Jenova and Caudacus can be President Shinra.

At least the moa deaths are amusing. Should release a cloud of feathers on impact (like the queen bee).

Hi guys,

I should have put this up here on Thursday or Friday, but anyway, I’ve written a companion guide and opinion piece on the latest Living World Season 3 zone, Bloodstone Fen for your amusement and insight.

http://pocketmyriad.xyz/a-guide-to-bloodstone-fen-guild-wars-2-living-world-season-3

Have a look if you like and tell me what you think. Thanks!

anninke.7469:

Best in-game day/night timer is a Sylvari toon – yay for bioluminescence!

Yes this! Make a sylvari with all AC weapons and never be in doubt again :P

Bazompora.2635:

Humans IRL were once all African and in the Guild Wars lore, all non-Elonians (Africans) were once Canthans(Asians) . If norn should be restricted to Nordic and Pacific ethnicity, then should you likewise not demand that humans be restricted to African and Asian ethnicity?

It’s wrong to assume our ancient ancestors looked like modern Africans. That would be like saying modern Africans hadn’t evolved in all that time but everyone else had.

Tyrian humans arrived in Orr from another world, brought here by the gods. So humans in Tyria are actually an alien race, unlike the norn who are native Tyrians.

Norn also don’t need to follow human ethnic rules. Skin colour among norn can vary in the same way as hair colour and is not a regional marker, like it is with humans, since “black” and “white” norn are both from the shiverpeaks and there is no distinction between them.

Bazompora.2635:

And by what measure are norn not just the biggest variant of humans? I don’t know if others noticed, but for some reason you can make African heads with norn, unlike with humans.

Like I mentioned earlier, humans and norn are from two different worlds. Norn are Tyrians, whose kin include the Jotun and the true giants like Lupicus. Humans were brought by the gods through the mists from their old world and then left behind.

The similarities in appearance appear to be a coincidence, and follow different rules.

vonbladewing.5973:

I have allot of hairstyle images on hard drive but i can’t add more then one per post

You can. Do an attachment, hit preview, then add another attachment and repeat as necessary. Just don’t go too overboard

I agree with you

I was looking over my infusions just yesterday, I have a mix of defensive and offensive types and of course now it would be possible just to run a full set of either. A trade option would be perfect.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Maybe now they can explain who this Duchess Chrysanthea is. She just suddenly appeared at Dragon’s Stand, and we have no clue who she is, in terms of character. I don’t recall her being anywhere else ingame.

Right! Duchess Chrysanthea’s there out of nowhere. I like her, but I wish there’d been some story setting why Faolain had come to Maguuma with her Nightmare Court, what went wrong with her being captured by Mordremoth, how this new duchess came to be here and what her agenda was (perhaps she betrayed Faolain in a power grab?).

It was interesting that the Nightmare Court didn’t side with Mordremoth in the end. They became a true rebel faction like the Soundless.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

If they do put it in, it will be a gemstore item and accessible to anyone with the right number of gems. And you’ll have to buy each color separately.

The following attachment conveys my response better than I could.

~EW

Oh my 8 months and still not released? The actual Assault Knights were flying around with these packs on – take our money!!

edit: found a pic of the flying assault knight on Exterminatus -

papry.8096:

Plus as you can’t equip the armor, you will not be able to transmut it.
So take the character that can wear it then transmute the armor to an unracial one, before using it.

And if you want to transmute from a racial to another racial, go via one of the free transmutes like a hall of monuments skin or an AP skin. There’s also cheap 1-shot WvW skins you can buy for a few badges in the borderlands, no transmute charge required.

misterman.1530:

Much easier (and cheaper) – though, the mats for the insignia are crazy (you will need 18 Maguuma lillies, and they aren’t cheap). Plus Hardened Leather – also not cheap. If you are making inscriptions (for Heavy Armor) is cheaper since orichalcum can be farmed via nodes. The leather can’t be, ’natch.

Huh. I was wondering why hardended leather was nuts. Incidentally you can promote leather squares in the mystic forge, which… miiiiight…. be worth it now?

Those maguuma lillies are crazy rare though, basically a case of harvesting “jungle plants” nodes and praying. There’s 2 nodes in the middle of Tarir, so I always do those just on the off-chance of some easy cash.

I made some auric weapons with HoT stats via the discovery panel, but I think they’re limited to Marauder and Crusader, which are inscription/insignia recipes you can buy off your regular craft master now.

It would probably make sense for viper’s auric weapons to be discoverable too… I’m not sure why they’re not.

Oh. I thought this was for the full set of antique skins minus the tequatl ones… now that would be worth a title.

I’m currently on Nevermore IV. Nevermore II was the really nuts step. Just take your time and don’t fret, step by step you’ll manage it.

I’ve been working on Nevermore and The Golden Child at the same time and these new legendaries take an astonishing amount of ecto to make. Without the Tarir farm putting ecto into the economy I’d dread to imagine what things would be like.

As an example, the 250 crystalline ingots takes a stack of ecto to make. It’s also worth salvaging ecto into crystalline dust to mystic forge t6 mats for the gifts, which is hundreds more ecto. Then there’s the mystic clovers to forge, which would be around another 250 ecto… although this time round I’m looking hard at the WvW tracks because mystic coins have become so expensive.

Anyway, the thing with farming ecto is that it’s not introducing liquid gold into the economy. Any player-to-player trades suffer the 15% TP tax that drains gold out of the overall economy, which is probably necessary.

HoT was amazing for me in the long term but it does take a while to adapt to the content.

Only now am I getting close to finishing off The Golden Child for 100 Tarir victories and I still have a few more hurdles for Nevermore IV, all done very casually.

I was at something outrageous like 12,000 hours when my first precursor dropped, but a lot of that time is afk so… still 3 years or so before I saw one come out of a grand chest in Tarir.

The Auric Basin companion guide is up, linked in the top post.

Enjoy and feel free to comment / share etc!

Ice magic works best underwater in this game unfortunately. If you play the underwater content and get used to bursting trident #2 and #3 properly, and can trap enemies to get a good surge of #5 (like trap them against the floor or a wall, sink them with #4, trap them with #3 and detonate the ice wall as you fly through etc.), then yeah you can have a lot of fun with ice magic.

There’s even some tricks you can do with combo fields to generate might or stealth (elementalists can stealth with a smoke field from earth and a leap finisher from water underwater).

Fire magic is pretty meh underwater. Water magic does it all, damage cc and healing. It just takes a bit of skill to land #2 ice orb bursts to get the double-hit from the orb hit and then detonation just after the pass-through for maximum damage. I completed the Trident Master (5,000 kills) achievement messing around with all the trident spells and water was by far my favourite in the end… so yeah, maybe get used to playing underwater?

There’s a few L80 underwater areas out there, I’m not really that familiar with Honor of the Waves but I have a bit of fun in Malchor’s Leap doing the Jinx Isle chain. Just an idea, since there’s a fair bit of “forgotten” content out there..

On land though… ice is meh. It’s all about fire and air really.

DR might have restocked on clockwork knights by now.

I wish Eir had died in-character instead of like a suburban housewife though. I was really disappointed by the choreography of that scene, not so much that she died but the poor manner of it.

She’s fully capable of shapeshifting into a werewolf to fight (which she does in the norn personal story), is a master of wilderness survival, is a norn, and has fought creatures vastly more terrifying than a veteran vinetooth. Then she gets 1-shot without putting up a fight?

It would have been better if we’d found her half-dead from the crash, and then she passed away right there without any combat. I remember she complained about “no food or water for days”… except that again, she’s a wilderness expert? What? And she’s a norn, probably capable of going for weeks in inhospitable conditions, so again… what? And she’s a legendary hero… I mean surviving the basics shouldn’t even be an issue for Eir. Not to mention she goes for a run right after being released, so she’s not crippled. None of that sequence made sense for who and what Eir Stegalkin is.

The other thing is why on earth is Faolain there? Even after all these months, none of it makes any sense. The Open World story was much much better. After the first personal story mission to free Laranthir, it went rapidly down hill. I did like the personal story in Rata Novus though, that was good.

I also have to say, Braham needs to stop behaving like a sniveling human and think more like a norn. Less small-minded personal vendatta, more world-saving legendary dragon slayer. I really wish my norn would take him aside and give him a pep-talk… he needs to think bigger than his personal problems.

Caudacus has been under house arrest since “Caudacus Manor Story Mode” (dungeon path) as far as I know. Of course he’s a prime candidate for being involved somehow. though unlikely to be White Mantle, rather a 3rd party.

Interesting that the clockwork knights got a mention. I vaguely thought Uzolan had made them, but since he’s dead I’ve been wondering who was behind them and if they’re still working on them for the Queen. Is there a Shining Blade artificer in the background?

One thing that gets me about the bandits is how many of them there seem to be. It’s like they can pull a city out from their behind… crude statement, but following that line of thought through a moment what about a White Mantle city somewhere? If you remember all the ruins in the Silverwastes, there could be a city we don’t know about somewhere in the same style but populated with White Mantle. A bit like the Lost Precipice guild hall, but elsewhere, hidden, with a Mursaat sitting on the throne. Hmm?

I’m wondering if there’ll be an invasion, Scarlet-style, with an army.

Karmapolice.4193:

Am I remembering incorrectly? I am almost positive that when the game first came out, the forums asked for less butt capes and less trench coats. And I am also almost positive there was a dev response along the lines of “okay, but armor takes time to make”
So, three years later, and we are still getting butt capes and trench coats. Ugh. Sometimes, I really wonder about whoever is in charge of approving armor designs.

Thankfully the trenchcoat situation isn’t as bad since the likes of glorious and triumphant came in. Actual leather cuirasses!

The earlier leather cuirasses were gemstore (viper’s, strider’s) but now there’s some decent in-game options. There’s a hero’s version of triumphant but it’s unavailable at the moment, it’s more ornate but actually I think I prefer the plainer top because it goes better with the rest of my outfit.

I’ll attach an outfit using the triumphant brigandine cuirass. You can get this one doing the WvW reward track:

That… is really good! I liked all the subtle scrap metal sounds. I almost wish there were flashbacks of the battle to bring back memories, but I did like it. Nice one.

Nice, welcome back Baddabum!

If you need any help getting back up to speed, I made some companion guides just for players like yourself. Hopfully I cover the first things you want to know about getting to grips with each of the Heart of Thorns zones.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/creations/fansite-HoT-Zone-Companion-Guides

My guides are not exhaustive so maybe they spark a few ideas for your guides? I see all these niche guides popping up for certain things and think they’re really cool. Anyway, I should have the Auric Basin guide done pretty soon, it’s the only one missing at the moment.

I’m looking forward to what you make. It’s nice to have fresh eyes on things so it’ll be interesting… xD

In GW1 there was a concept of “district selection”, and I saw that in TERA: Online as well.

I still don’t understand why ArenaNet removed it from GW2 when it’s such a quality of life issue, choosing a particular map instance. Now, if the instance is full then it just pops a message, but the choice ought to be there.

Hmm, it’s like a berserker’s/knight’s mix. The quad stat PvE gear does give higher total points though so mixing isn’t the same. Commander’s is fairly close. Commander’s / Marauder’s mix… heh, trouble with PvE gear is having to remake it over and over.

ArenaNet could alter the way salvage kits work, so that only the yellow and gold kits remove upgrades (runes and sigils). The copper-fed in particular churns out a lot of junk green runes that I’d rather it didn’t, like others here.

Instead, the “grey”, white, blue and green kits could just give better chances for rarer materials (which actually means the next tier up of material, like linen instead of cotton). They do that a bit already, like the 10% on the copper-fed. You can also get blue karma kits (252 karma) that give 15% for 25 uses at the charr/norn cultural weapon vendors. Too bad there’s no karma merchant that does green kits…

Oh, you reminded me of the beta hunger games. We all got given pirate outfits with aviator sunglasses and that’s just not possible at the moment. I imagine they’ll add the feature when they make hair accessories dyeable. Oh and swimsuits. Those Southsun NPCs are such teases. Swimsuits and shades for the summer… one can but dream…

There’s still a lot to do for most people.

The video makers need talking points and things look a bit dry for them right now? I remember WoodenPotatoes had his house move just recently so there’s that, plus he doesn’t play WvW much and WvW is something I’ve gotten back into a bit since the addition of the reward tracks. I don’t PvP so they were a really new addition for me, plus I love some of the WvW exclusive armour pieces in the WvW track. The server alliances have been interesting too.

Now is probably a good time for people to play some other games before season 3 hits. Some folks are talking about Overwatch, I know I’ve gone back to Path of Exile to play some of the expansions I’ve missed and I have a backlog of other games… but just speaking personally now, I’ll be back in GW2 at some point no doubt. I’m vaguely working through Nevermore II and getting The Golden Child done in Auric Basin… >.>

The recipes for Keeper’s armour are on the Trading Post although I see they’ve all exploded in price since I bought them a few years ago. I have a Keeper’s set on my druid. I see the aqua breather is cheap.

I thought you might be able to get the recipes from the 6 Pact Supply Network Agents that wander around Tyria but apparently they only sell the exotic recipes… Anet should add the ascended recipes too really.

Well all I can suggest is using the Mystic Forge on another stat set.

Yeah, it’s Auric Basin.

A decent multi-map loot squad makes all the difference, just remember good etiquette and move your tile to the correct sub squad each time you swap maps.

If you park a few alts at the way into the treasury and have your keys in an account-wide inventory slot then you have another option should you run out of maps. Just log the next toon in and keep running until you run out of time.

I’m quite happy with how the trait selecting has evolved.

I’d prefer runes and sigils to be just as easy to swap, since they play an important part of a build and it’s not just about swapping traits over. It’s quite unfortunate that legendary weapons have an easy stat swap without an easy sigil swap to go with it and legendary armour will only exacerbate that issue.

Certain sigils still stack, like fire/air of different tiers. I mean you can stack a minor air with a major air and have them both proc and use independent cooldowns, a test you can run for a few silver. Other sigils like accuracy don’t stack, as expected.

I’d like to see more food diversity, by which I mean food that’s at a decent price and quite easy to make. It seems as if most foods since the core game are overly difficult to make, like taking 20 of a rare ingredient for a 30 minute buff.

The other issue I have with foods is that the single condi foods need a buff. The all-condi foods have their place (rare veggie pizza etc), but the single condi foods are worse. It’s like they should buff the duration and effectiveness of that single condi to give the speciality food something over the general food.

My 2c.

Two new Heart of Thorns companion guides added, both linked in my initial post at the top for your convenience.

Next week I’ll get around to Auric Basin. Leaving the best ’til last? ;P

Hope you enjoy them.

I’ve found leather armour to be excellent on sylvari, though it tends to be a gemstore jerkin and leggings combo as the base. I’ve uploaded 3 images (front/back) that I’m going to talk about.

The first one is Krytan jerkin & leggings with Evergreen shoulders (cultural t1), Rogue gloves and Stalker boots (boots skin bought in WvW for 15 badges, called “Warden Shoes Skin”, no transmute charge required). My hidden headgear is the Aviator Sunglasses.

The second and third images feature the Strider’s set, which I bought just for my sylvari specifically for the tunic and leggings. The mesh windows let the glows through (3rd image) on your arms, legs and back. I’m still using the Evergreen shoulders (my favourite by far), this time with Prowler gloves and Magitech boots. My hidden headgear is the Panscopic Monocle.

Furajir.3815:

I don’t understand how to make this and the wiki is confusing?

How much should a set cost to make? and what profession do I need to be?

It would help to know what weight you want to make, but basically:

mesmer, elementalist, necromancer require a tailor

ranger, engineer, thief require a leatherworker and

warrior, revenant and guardian require an armorsmith.

In each case you need 400 skill to craft exotic quality marauder armour. If you don’t have 400 skill yet then you’d have to factor the costs of skilling up and finding a crafting guide…

Once you have 400 skill then the overall cost of marauder gear is not that high because the “special ingredients” are barbed thorns and ebony orbs, which are not that expensive.

The main drawback to normal exotic armour is that it’s soulbound. If you have 450 skill in your crafting profession you can make account bound exotic armour called Ornate Guild Armor that remains account bound like ascended armour (so any of your characters who wear that weight can use it).

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ornate_Guild_armor

Ornate guild armour comes with a stat selector, so you craft it and then double-click it to choose the stats you want. Marauder is one of the options. The light armour is especially nice.

Working on The Golden Child, the loot is a great perk. Having done the Silverwastes a lot as well… it’s a wash, really. Silverwastes is amazing for obby shards like no other place and AB is great for ecto.

Ecto prices are high despite Auric Basin, which suggests the loot fest isn’t a problem at all, unless you want to compare Auric Basin with the loot from other Heart of Thorns maps, but then there’s no reason for every HoT map to have a crazy ecto generator in it if it has something else like flax farms and rich ori nodes instead.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

True. But the 2 opposing sides in WvW might consider that the enemy forgetting to put away minis during stealth is a perk. ^^

What would be more terrifying about a zerg of minipets? That their owners are all stealthed, or that there’s a zerg of minipets? Then again minipets aren’t that scary… like being assaulted by puppies… or buried in kittens…

Hmm, never mind then.

The daily JP is still harder than daily Vista Viewer, even with a mesmer. I mean the difficulty bar is pretty low here…

AoE completed 1,960 times + 124/200, making 392, 124 items.

Enko wins. Most impressive.

The last guide in the series is up, this week covering Auric Basin:

http://pocketmyriad.xyz/a-guide-to-auric-basin-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns

Again it’s mainly aimed at newer and returning players to take a look, so if you know anyone who needs a crash course in Auric Basin consider sending them this way. There might even be a few things veterans have forgotten in there… not to mention lots of pretty pictures!

Hope you enjoy it.

Hello again,

I’ve changed the topic title from the initial “Verdant Brink Companion Guide” to the wider one it is now so that I can put all my companion guides into a single thread.

So, without further ado my latest two guides (since I forgot to link last week’s, oops) are aimed at newcomers to Dragon’s Stand and Tangled Depths. I see people struggle with certain things in each of these zones, so I hope these guides have you covered!

Veteran players might get something out of the Tangled Depths guide since this zone is packed full of secrets. I thought I knew the zone pretty well, but just in writing this latest guide even I learned a few more routes and access points. It’s a jungle out there.

Last week’s companion guide:

http://pocketmyriad.xyz/a-guide-to-dragons-stand-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns

This week’s companion guide:

http://pocketmyriad.xyz/a-guide-to-tangled-depths-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns

As always if you have any feedback or anything, please leave it in this thread or over on my website. I hope you enjoy them and maybe learn something.

Thanks and have fun

Hi guys,

I play both Verdant Brink and Auric Basin a lot, and since the 2016 Sping Update I still feel as if there’s many players who could use a helping hand in the jungle.

To this end I’ve compiled a lot of my knowledge of Verdant Brink and put it in a Companion Guide that you can use along side a traditional technical guide like the wiki (which I’ve linked to in my guide).

My guide: http://pocketmyriad.xyz/a-guide-to-verdant-brink-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns

Please check it out and leave me feedback if you find it useful or whathaveyou. There’s a bunch of other GW2 content on my site as well so please poke around and have fun.

Thanks and good luck

AWF.8941:

I can remember when GW2 was originally coming-out and unique underwater combat was one of ArenaNet’s exciting new selling points. Then the game was released and we realized that it wasn’t what anyone would call finished. Well, it’s about 3 years later now and it’s not much better. What I’m primarily referencing is the limited use of utility skills. There have been some improvements, but nowhere near what there should be.

Right. I was having similar thoughts a few days ago and wrote them up here:

http://pocketmyriad.xyz/bubbles-the-dragon

There’s a genre of action games about flying mechas that basically do underwater action combat in the air. The current underwater combat in Guild Wars 2 isn’t exaggerated enough and that’s what needs to happen to give it the “whoosh” it needs, exaggerated movement and powers.

The mastery system might be a place to start. There’s a lot of untapped story potential too, you have the largos and the deep sea dragon, you have Abaddon the “dead” God of Water and whatever legacy he might have. You have the quaggan and the krait to play the straight good guys / bad guys. Maybe not enough for an expansion but perhaps part of one or a Living Story experiment.

For some unfathomable reason it’s also needed to buy stuff from guild hall merchants. I’d like to buy the mushroom mini but apparently the 20g and 50 guild commendations isn’t pricey enough so there’s an added cost of 100 crystalline ore attached just for giggles. It’s not even a guild related currency! On the other hand, I have a big pile of shimmering crystals mined from our guild nodes that I have no use for: a part of me suspects the currencies were mixed up.

Personally I’ve been getting my ore from dead DS maps, of which there is no shortage. There must be 10 or so noxious pods available at all times if you look around.

What’s funny is the radical difference in difficulty compared to some of the others.

I love On Wings of Gold and you get 3 minutes to get gold. My current record is 1:03, about a third of the time permitted. At masks my record is 20 masks, still 5 short and I hear it’s rng to get a route that’s even gold-viable. Great.

I read a post where someone was stuck on their reaper greatsword because they couldn’t even manage the 15 for silver. I think ArenaNet needs to mover the bar a lot further down on that one, like 8/13/18 for bronze/silver/gold.

At this point I’ve managed gold on Haywire Punch-o-matic and Scrap Rifle Field Test, both of which are pretty extreme. I’m pretty sure most of the mobs don’t even render in Haywire so you just have to pray a big wad of mobs pop in front of the golem’s fists as you mash skill 2 and on one run I eventually got lucky…

Still, most loathing goes to A Fungus Among Us, which I desperately want to love but the bugs… oh the bugs… Mario 64 it is not. I got 1:19 for gold and I’m not going to play it again because that skill 2 has so many ways to fail. Why on earth does it even have a line of sight check that can fail?! Just jump in the indicated direction like Mario would! Argh. Sometimes the initial cap vault just pops you over in place without even moving… why?! /facepalm.

I’ve also been trying gold on The Floor Is Lava? and it has that hilarious bug where if you activate a spore while in a dodge roll it locks the controls up. So you want to do like a dodge-roll-into-spring-jump as if you were playing a platform game but it just breaks and locks you in place on the horizontal plane and your character just drops into the poison and dies. Nice.

This stuff should have been fixed by now. It’s not like it’s not been bug reported. Anyway, this stuff needs mentioning because I really want adventures to be high quality and they’re just inconsistent.