Guild Wars 2

Pandemoniac.4739:

Yes, I have an unhealthy obsession with empirical data. Sexy is measured in petabytes and your sample size does matter in the circles I run in

My Asuran warrior’s name is Empirical Data, and I am disturbed by the statement. Yes, I’m a little flattered and slightly curious, but mainly disturbed.

Kioshi.6597:

The sequence I’m working with now is :
aeifjghfbofkl srfegtspgeaefp wfogpfsqdsvrf qigbfuphfjivcu uceghlhfuerocn gtcfxfovegsf yvudigpptahqoa jyeoceghlemfa pefafhnguhfeig

Try doing away with the last 2 lines of text. The symbols in the two line phrase are the same as the symbols in the first two lines of the seven line phrase, but backwards. Because of this I would suggest entering data from the seven line phrase backwards.

Rabe.2456:

Edit: Right after i posted it, something struck my eye: If you put AC over BD you get an obvious mirror pattern. But if you put CA over BD you can see that C+B = mirrored(A+D), which seems non-trivial to me. You can see it in the picture: lines 8&9.

That’s predictable unfortunately. B = A backwards and C = D backwards. Therefore superimposing B and C is superimposing A backwards and D backwards.

DarcShriek.5829:

Ventari didn’t plant the magic beans, Ronan did. It never occured to Ronan that the tree would bear fruit to intelligent beings, he planted it to honor his dead family. Ventari came around later. You should play gw1 sometime.

Or I should stop believing everything I read on the wikis. According to GW2 wiki they both planted it and the GW1 entry on Ventari implies that Ronan gave him the seed. It was only once I hit The Movement of the World’s page that I actually saw that Ronan had planted the seed.

Guild fractals would be a cool way to allow content like this to be repeated without breaking lore. You could by it like you buy a regular guild mission and everyone enters through a portal in Lion’s Arch. It becomes an instanced event and you are allowed through the portal if you are representing the guild that has purchased it. The only problem is that it’s only really available to large guilds with 75 willing to show up for that event at a bare minimum

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Sidenote: I’ve seen it now on multiple threads, and I’m not really sure if people are trolling or just dense, but Rox is female. It isn’t a “bromance”.

Only in a technical sense. The thing is that a lot of what I see in Rox-Braham relationship is typically associated with a “bromance”. There is the desire to be with each other doing dangerous stuff, knowing that each will have the others back.

If it were to guys acting like Rox and Braham would you have trouble calling it a bromance? That is the point people are trying to get across.

Delvoire.8930:

Mordremoth can’t have control over the Sylvari like that. If he were to awaken, all the Sylvari would then be his minions, right?

Perhaps one of the Gods planted the seed for the Sylvari. Thus creating them. The dream by the Pale Tree is connected to the God’s protection. With that gone, then an Elder Dragon did invade Scarlet’s mind. Or perhaps a Champion of a Dragon.

But if something has control of her, and she’s fighting that, would they not know she’s planning this attack on them? It does seem like she’s actually going after the voice in her head and Tyria is just the collateral damage.

We know who planted the Pale Tree. It was Ventari. He got the seeds from a cave, and nurtured the tree and placed a tablet at its base. What we don’t know is how he knew the seeds would create living beings and how the seeds got into the cave in the first place. I personally think that the sylvari were intended to be servants of Mordremoth, but were corrupted by Ventari (in a good way). The seed was not planted before the Gods’ exile.

Edit: turns out that Ronan planted the Pale Tree.

It’s not the first time they’ve had something for free, there was Polla a while ago. My guess is it’s there way of rewarding people for checking out the gem store.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Use all the bold and caps you want to express your opinion.

ANet kittened up Scarlet and has been trying to recover ever since. While you may defend the company, others of us will continue to point out what a colossal mistake the writers made.

I am not sure what you mean here by “has been trying to recover ever since”. It is pretty obvious that the idea for the Scarlet story arc has been around for a while. For a start most of the dialogue was recorded months ago and the latest set of exposition is not a retro-fit, but rather an elaboration on the “What Scarlet Saw” story and what has happened since. What the writers have been trying to do is give us a series of seemingly random attacks and then show us how they were all working to the one end goal.

You may not like Scarlet as a personality. That is fair enough.
You may have no curiosity as to what deeper force is driving Scarlet’s actions. Well I certainly disagree here, but that again is fair enough.
You may be angry that there were no rocket dolyaks or a quaggan-centaur as hinted in Scarlet’s Lair. You have every right to be.

However, saying that the direction the story has taken is some sort of attempt to validate Scarlet is simply unsupportable. Anyway, it will all be over in March and ANet have been saying so for some time.

Well, Marjory and Kasmeer are the romance, but I’d say that Braham and Rox are more the Bromance.

Meryn.6875:

Taku.6352:

I wish I had a group that does CM daily. ;_;

Or just solo when you can’t find one? ~25 minutes is doable

Video of me soloing p3

That was pretty cool I think. I may be delirious. I got pretty dizzy watching you fight Sure Shot Seamus.

SandraSolace gave a good response, but I will add that when I up levelled my alts I did my crafting in five hits. At level 18 I crafted armour and weapons to level 75 and got myself a full set of level 20 greens (the crafting took me up the last 2 levels), then I crafted to 150 for my level 35 greens, 225 for level 50, 300 for level 65 and last I crafted to 400 for my level 80 yellows. Ascended has changed the game a little and now that I have all crafting skills I haven’t bothered to use crafting for my latest alt, but I hope that helps.

Elen Kiel and Evon Gnashblade both saw Lion’s Arch in peril, and a chance meeting confirmed that they both foresaw the coming danger. Having planned to try and use their positions to lobby the Captain’s Council suddenly a position on the council was available. Knowing that if one of them were to stand a challenger would certainly arise they decided to both stand hoping that by fielding two strong candidates other contenders would be scared off. It worked and Ellen Kiel won her place on the council, although in reality her influence proved less than they had hoped. They continue to work in concert behind the scenes, and when they do so they choose to go by the natural pseudonym of E.

And if that’s not true, then I suppose Half Life 3 isn’t confirmed.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Regarding Scarlet, we’ll find out more about her as the Living Story progresses. I personally think her madness is related to an Elder Dragon, but my bet is on Primordus frankly. That’s because of the drill, and the pictures of eyes in her lair.

We’ve seen a fair bit of evidence either way as to which dragon might be next, but nothing definitive. To be honest despite having pushed the Mordremoth theory earlier I am now leaning towards it being Primordius after the last update.

It’s pretty clear that she’s found what she’s looking for under LA, and it’s almost certain that it’s a dragon. Obviously if the Pale Tree is growing on top of Mordremoth (I don’t think it is, but I have a hunch that Mordremoth does have some sort of relationship with it) then it can’t be Mordremoth under LA.

So, Scarlet intends intends to wake the sleeping dragon under Lion’s Arch, and then bring her armies there to either:

1) Defend it in its waking state, as the dragon’s voice has been coercing her to do.
2) Bring it down (with the help of the powerful weapons she has been testing on us for the last year) as the voice of the malicious God has been coercing her to do.

I was so happy when they got rid of the exploit where you jumped over the mountain to the last boss, but I was sad when they got rid of the barrel damage. Stacking them up in the shed and bringing them out at the right time felt like using tactics. I may have been kidding myself, but I was still sad to see it go.

As for rewards, I think all the non-Arah dungeons should reward 1 gold, except for the hardest path which should be 1.5.

Weirdly I’ve been running into a lot of novice groups through lfg recently. There was this guardian who was really impressed when I told him about how useful Wall of a Reflection was doing path 3 and ran forward in the hall full of rocket launchers and placed one right in front of a launcher…

Actually the writing team has usually been good about stuff like that, and I’m pretty sure they’d regard it as an oversight.

jweez.7214:

Make matters worse Ebon Gnashblade has been saying that she would attack LA for awhile now.

Now that would be a nice twist, Ellen working to get Ebon on the council.

I try and run Twilight Arbour regularly, and get a fair bit of linen from that. Not a huge amount I admit, but as you only need 40 scraps of linen to 300 scraps of silk it’s more than enough to keep pace. For wool I occasionally do some of the events where you need to kill lots of Centaurs in Gendarran Fields. I would do a profit analysis of killing Flame Legion in Iron Marches for linen versus joining the Frostgorge train, but farming bores me silly.

I remember my first encounter in a dungeon. It was Caudecus Manor story mode. The rest of the group were taking their time, and I saw a group of 4 thieves none of whom were veterans. I decided to do what I would do in open world content and took them on by myself. Even though I was a tanky guardian with a shield I died really fast. That’s when it occurred to me that dungeons were hard. They are designed so that five moderately well geared characters with a reasonable understanding of tactics will have to work together to get through.

Now I run an attack oriented (mostly zerker) guardian and never bring in a shield and any combat in which I’m downed I consider to be disappointing. There is a shift in expectations on entering a dungeon, but it all becomes easier with experience. Also, dungeons can be run with non-optimised groups in under 15 minutes and provide over one gold as a reward. That to me makes them worth the time.

Blade Syphon.4325:

Spoilers to Follow

Wasn’t Kiel supposed to be stepping up security in LA after the Dragon Bash incident, not saying “Naw, Scarlet obviously won’t attack the same place twice. Criminals never return to the scene of the crime!”. Of course there’s also the possibility of another painfully obvious plot twist where Kiel has been working for Scarlet all this time.

Kiel actually wants to step up defences it’s just the rest of the council who didn’t want to.

$75 but I’ll be spending more.

GW2 has been the main game I’ve played over the last year and a bit. I’ve XCom, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and a handful of other games in that time and generally enjoyed them, but not played more than twenty hours on them. In terms of value for money Guild Wars 2 wins hands down for me, in spite of the fact that I’ve spent as much on gems as I have on the original purchase.

My one regret is that I bought boxes of fun with my first purchase so that I could craft The Moot shortly before they became available in Achievement chests.

So, does anyone have suggestions of words to search for? Words with no repeating letters such as “Scarlet” are no use, words with only one repeating letter like “Primordus” are slightly better, and words with many repeating letters like “Mordremoth” are really good.

Nike.2631:

Guys… The 2 lines that are out of place in the two streams are a left/right reflection of the first 2 lines of the 7 line repeating blocks.

It’s surprising the number of people who missed this even though it’s been mentioned twice. My view is that it is a clue to tell us that the main message is written backwards.

tmakinen.1048:

I don’t quite understand all the disdain against a guardian with a staff. Personally, I find it an ideal second weapon (set) against the second warden (which I usually go against since I’ve figured that’s where my contribution can have the largest effect). Since the warden will flip between invulnerable and vulnerable states in any case, it’s a perfectly good strategy to whip up a staff when the warden goes invulnerable, and stack might and swiftness, with a side heal, on the team while kiting the warden into its mines.

This is a reasonable strategy, although trying to get might stacks on everyone is tricky and the heal is rarely going to make a difference for this encounter. The problem is with people on boss 3 who only stick with staff. I’m not saying that staves don’t have their uses, it’s just that dealing damage to a single opponent is not one of them.

Marionette has it’s frustrations, but overall it is probably my favourite piece of content on guild wars. There have been bad moments (like the time where on the last chain one platform failed and so the event failed and a couple of people felt the need to go the full on “I hate you n00bs!!” hissy fit over chat) and there have been great moments (lane 2 fails the first time, everyone on chat remains positive and by the time it gets back around to them lane 2 manages to finish it off) and frustrating time (this overflow has only thirty people, oh well stack lane one and we’ll get something), but I still make sure that I get to this event every day. Kudos to the team who designed this.

Luke.4562:

The point is there aren’t anymore team games where skilled players carry the game.
In this Event noob players will 100% carry down the team and experienced players too.

They should allow more experienced players to carry the game for those who can’t.

I’ve been on platforms that have won despite having terrible players who simply couldn’t grasp the mechanics. I have seen platforms that have been carried by one player. I’m not good enough to carry a platform, but it can be done. The times my platform has failed have largely been caused by a large number of players getting downed at one time. Platform 2 almost always has someone going straight back on it, but it’s still doable provided the rest of the group are alert.

My best estimate is that a platform of 5 will be very close to failure with two bad players and three players who understand the mechanics reasonably well. If I’m on a platform with two bads I just hope that there is someone there who is better than me.

I spent five minutes staring at the code trying to find the word “mordremoth”, which should be identifiable as it has 3 letters that repeat themselves. I found something that could be “mordremath” (2nd line of that two line phrase) but that was the best I could do.

It is probably cost effective to throw three green items into the forge with a stone in the hope of getting a rare, but that means putting a value of a little over a silver on each stone. Here is the maths.

Say five attempts to get dour greens converted to a yellow.
Average sale value of a green = 1.7s (don’t put in light armour, salvage for silk)
Average sale value of a yellow = 25s
Every five attempts uses fifteen greens and five stones, but produces four greens and a yellow, meaning the loss of 11 greens and five stones for a yellow.
With my pricing assumptions, this means a profit of 1.26s per stone.

Forging rares is a losing proposition given the current low price of exotics. Forging exotics is only worth it if you believe in precursors, or you are forging soulbound exotics bought from a dungeon vendor or WvW (and even here it only works OK for the level 70 WvW items that only cost badges, and CoF tokens that don’t have a decent salvage option).

It is far better value to craft Mystic Salvage Kits but that will hardly make a dent in your surplus. Yeah, I still have a lot forge stones too.

Frotee.2634:

Cormac.3871:

There are a lot of casuals. I remember saying that we needed good dps from warden 3 onwards, and I got people asking me what dps was. The platform I ended up on had a staff camping guardian who evidently thought he had high dps.

DPS is an acronym I frankly had to look up/figure out, too (though some time ago) – just because you are used to throwing around abbreviations to any and everything, don’t assume everyone who just wants to play the game will understand them, too Additionally, not everyone on your server – particularly when you land in overflow – may be a native speaker. Also, just because someone doesn’t know the term DPS, doesn’t mean they can’t grasp the concept when it is explained to them.

People asking what something means are good people! They are actually interested in learning and use the map chat to communicate and to soak up information! What really kills these event are people afking, disabeling map chat and not speaking up when they don’t know what to do.

Lastly, please stop throwing around the term ‘casual’ as a means to convey ‘uninformed and unskilled’. I identify myself very much as a casual player, but I am a decently skilled player carrying my own weight in fights and regularly help organizing the big world events I take part in.

When you want to say ‘players who have no idea how to play their profession efficiently’, just say ‘unskilled players’.

I agree with most of what you say, but you have missed my point I think. I am not saying that a casual player will be bad in terms of skill level and willingness to learn. I am saying that it will take longer to explain things because they will be less familiar with common gaming jargon (dps is a concept in a lot of games like this, and is used by gamers speaking in English whether or not it is their first language). What I am also saying is that casuals will be less likely to be aware of the relative damage of their weapons choices.

I am not condemning casuals for this, it’s just that it becomes a problem on warden 3 which can become a race to do enough damage before time runs out. For a casual who hasn’t looked into his build but just done what he feels comfortable with in world exploration there isn’t a lot to indicate that by just hitting 1 on your guardian staff you will be handicapping your team.

Would support King Joffrey style crown if /slap emote is added.

Wanze.8410:

Cormac.3871:

Wanze.8410:

Cormac.3871:

My advice is don’t sell any crafting materials. You will need to get to 400 in two crafting areas and this can mostly be done with materials you collect yourself doing world exploration. Once you have levelled those crafting areas then sell by all means.

No point in keeping mats, if he doesnt want to craft.

He will need crafting at 400 in two areas in order to make the gifts.

You dont need 2 crafts at 400 to be eligible to buy a legendary off the trading post.

OK, I see what happened. Your post appeared as I was typing mine so I didn’t read it. The OP still said he wanted ascended gear as well though, so crafting is still required.

UMAD bro? Oh, hang on, that’s not quite right.

Wanze.8410:

Cormac.3871:

My advice is don’t sell any crafting materials. You will need to get to 400 in two crafting areas and this can mostly be done with materials you collect yourself doing world exploration. Once you have levelled those crafting areas then sell by all means.

No point in keeping mats, if he doesnt want to craft.

He will need crafting at 400 in two areas in order to make the gifts.

My advice is don’t sell any crafting materials. You will need to get to 400 in two crafting areas and this can mostly be done with materials you collect yourself doing world exploration. Once you have levelled those crafting areas then sell by all means.

Tentonhammers advice is pretty much what I do. The things that will hold you back are the t6 mats, the lodestones or silver doubloons and the precursor. Also, it’s worth running whichever dungeon you need early. You will only need to do eight runs of it in explorable mode, but if you end up liking it then that’s not a terrible way to get a hit of gold each day.

I also saved up my laurels to buy t6 mats from the laurel merchant towards the end of my building process, so do your dailies. Salvage your blues and greens for magic find too, which will mean more t6 materials drop in high level areas.

Fror.2163:

kitten , except for me, I have not seen a non-staff guardian in a dungeon in a week!

I thought the community was going better then all of a sudden since one month, it’s really bringing that bad staff up. This is kitten annoying! >_<

You should see the number of staff guardians trying to take down warden 3 in the marionette event. I use staff way more often than I should, and even I’m embarrassed by that. It wouldn’t be so bad except my server is big on instructing its players to range warden 3.

Actually I was half hoping that the marionette event would give some people here an appreciation for the quality of the average dungeon PuG.

I thought for a while that this could be a variant of pigpen where the first 9 letters are the same because the backwards L character, which is A in pigpen, appears on its own a couple of times. However there is no square symbol, which is E in pigpen, is nowhere to be seen. Further complicating matters is how letters join up. Given the characters used elsewhere, that shape that looks like a broad T could be one of three combinations that I can think of.

Also, the code doesn’t say Lorem Ipsum, which I was half expecting it to.

Also, craft in the day before WvW reset, this means you get the WvW bonuses working for you. For armorsmith you might consider making orichalcum boxes around 425. It is in no way cost effective, but if you think you might want them anyway you may as well get the experience for it.

Your real problem is going to be silk. Seriously you need to salvage every piece of light armour you find because you will need 300 silk scraps per bolt of damask, and you need 25 bolts of damask for a full suit.

Another trick if you run dungeons is to buy dungeon armour with soldiers or magi’s stats and then salvage them with your best salvage kit. I buy light armour so that I can get silk or gossamer which is a lot harder to farm than ore. You also have the chance of salvaging insignias as long as they can’ the crafted normally (this won’t work if you only run CoF, as all the stats for the armour there can already be crafted).

And expect it to be a long slog if you don’t want to spend a lot of money.

I like the Underflow idea, but making doing away with world specific maps would create havoc for guilds that like to do PvE together.

There are a lot of casuals. I remember saying that we needed good dps from warden 3 onwards, and I got people asking me what dps was. The platform I ended up on had a staff camping guardian who evidently thought he had high dps.

Erukk.1408:

The Pale Tree was NOT a dragon champion. For one, she was planted as a seed, so she had no life prior to that. Second, there is no natural way to break the mental control the Elder Dragons have over their minions. So no amount of happy thoughts and singing Kumbaya will ever convert them. They are fanatical in their devotion to them, and their thought process is strictly “with us (minion of the same dragon) or against us (everything else)”.

The only way Glint was able too escape was because the Forgotten forcefully captured her, and they used an obscure ritual to break the connection. She empathy afterwards came from her telepathy. She as able to look into the hearts and minds of the mortal races, and she decided that she would do all she could to protect them.

I agree with this argument, particularly the first sentence, however I think that the pale tree was intended to be a champion, but Ventari raised it in such a way as to subvert that. I think that he too used an obscure ritual and that instead of the dragon we see in the dream sequence being the tree’s personification we get the mother. For some reason Ventari’s spell isn’t perfect and so the nightmare court arises.

The tree and the sylvari are a dichotomy. On the one hand we have Ventari’s dream of the races of Tyria united to fight the dragon, on the other we have the nightmare of service to Mordremoth. Then we have Scarlet’s third way which is ? (Followed by profit).

This doesn’t mean that Scarlet’s eyes are on Mordremoth (or that it is his eye on her). The red theme points strongly to Primordus. She might even mean to kill all six elder dragons, I don’t know. All I know is that there are good odds that Rox will say “I’ll believe that when dolyaks can fly!” in the next update.

Whoever appears in the cut scene is the instance creator. But everything else I pretty much agree with. I personally don’t think we’ll see a change on it though. They have understood that it’s a problem for over a year now and have only done a minor tweak on it, so it’s in their too-hard basket.

Volstag.6371:

Random theories here.
What if the X’s mark secret lairs? I really want to got to each location and see if we are missing something else. The Sewers of Lions Arch, has anyone been down there recently?

The X’s mark the locations of the order headquarters and something in LA near the Southsun Asura gate. I did consider that there might be lairs at each of these locations, and spent some time swimming around in Lions Arch. I got very excited when my head passed through a rock, but I didn’t manage to find anything in the end.

Thanks for posting. I am often online off-peak and it’s good to know that tactic works.

Yeah, the buy orders are off now. They got what they wanted.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/49481

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Freeing a Dragon Champion from it’s link to an Elder Dragon requires considerable magic, and a rare ritual that only the Forgotten know of. Which is something that never happened to the Pale Tree or its seed, as far as we know.

Plus Sylvari can’t be corrupted, while we know that dragon minions CAN be corrupted by other dragons. So they aren’t dragon minions. It’s as simple as that.

I didn’t say that the sylvari were minions, I said that they were intended to be such. Just as I didn’t say that the mother tree was the champion, just that she was intended to be. I may well be wrong about the pale tree being the champion, or indeed all of what I said, but I find neither of these objections particularly compelling.

The idea that the pale tree is the result of a seed intended for dragon minions makes sense, and I agree that it is probably Mordremoth. The Nightmare Court / Mother dichotomy is a nature / nurture thing. The Mother sees her role as fighting the dark influence by controlling the pale tree’s children, whereas the Nightmare court are either wittingly or not preparing to serve a new master, the dragon.

Scarlet’s plan is to somehow remove the dragon’s influence, possibly by killing it. I also have a feeling that the Mother is intended to be a Champion, and is linked to the dragon, and that what Scarlet intends to do to the dragon won’t be good for the Mother. If successful the Sylvari would lose both the malignant influence of the dragon and the gentle guidance of the mother. Scarlet intends to fill that void.

That is what I think Scarlet plans, I am not sure how things will pan out, but I am pretty sure that we will have another dragon awake by the end.

As for Taimi, I think that there is a fair chance that she is Omadd’s daughter.

As to which of the new characters will die, my money is on Braham, with Rox being busy with her warband at the time and unable to save him. For paralleling the Destiny’s Edge storyline this would put Rytlock in Queen Jennah’s role.

Shpongle.6025:

GuzziHero.2467:

She looks like a victorian streetwalker so Im not surprised.

That’s why she should be punished with a victorian era punishment.

Send her to Australia!

Chris RJ.1843:

Just be firm with PUGS.

My LFGs usually scare away vermin. Be very up front with it and include things like, “READ: PX/Y/Z Speed Clear only DPS, Do X,Y,Z – Get Kick”

Sometimes you get a random join. Ask them if they read. I have never once had anyone reply. They stay silent. Then comes the kick.

For someone like you described, I can’t even imagine how fast that kick would be.

Try to keep the important stuff up the front, because the lfg listing only shows the first part. If you need full zerk, say that before speed run.

Other than that, yeah, I agree. People should read. I am more than happy to run with a group that is still learning (unless they just don’t listen), but if I join a group with a set of conditions stipulated I stick to them, and I expect others to as well. The most annoying example of this was joining a group that said TA forward, and everyone but me and the original poster (who opened) picked up. Instance creator left, everyone loses.

J Eberle.9312:

The other problem with the empower is the duration is awful. In a proper group, your warriors/eles put down fire field and blast + fgj up 25 stacks before each fight and it lasts longer as well. So, you do bad dps and you actually screw ppl over with bad might stacks.

Some will argue ‘well most of my teams don’t do that!’

Cool story, so do you put your staff on before the fight, stack the might and then swap it completely off for another actually useful weapon? Do you put a purging flames down before a fight and blast it with focus and hammer? Do you use Virtue of Justice? 9 times out of ten – nope.

From my experience in pugging, only about 1 in 3 guardians spam Virtue of Justice. But from the same experience only about 1 in 30 parties will have close to full might without guardian staves, and half the time they would curse your hammer for laying down all those bloody light fields.

The possible dyes are listed on the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flame_Dye_Kit

The rule of thumb with this is the same with any other RNG element of the game, don’t do it only once unless you like gambling.