Guild Wars 2

From what I understand, items that dropped in previous LS content (like the jetpack) can come from the box, but items that were achievement rewards (like the gas mask) cannot.

I could be mistaken.

Good change.

1200 is a reasonable number, difficult but not impossible for a bunch of random people thrown together in a random overflow.

TTS I think isn’t a good comparison, as you’re able to have a greater number of people with more coordination, even if we have to manipulate the game mechanics in order to actually get our people into the same overflow. Despite the name Guild Wars, it seems the developers don’t want guilds to be able to work together under the current overflow mechanics.

So, now that Bloodtide Coast is now overflows upon overflows of people waiting to get into LA or just AFKing till the next time opens up, how is ANet expecting people to run an event that pretty much requires a full hardcapped zone of bodies coordinating together to beat it, when half of the zone’s hardcap are at the LA gate or refugee camp?

Another thing that isn’t working. Sometimes when LA opens up, a ‘defend’ area will spawn pre-failed and go straight to the ‘reclaim’ event. This was going from a non-overflow Bloodtide to a non-overflow LA. Zoned in, went straight to Fort Mariner, was on ‘reclaim’. Sucks for those trying to get the defense achievements if it’s failed before it even begins.

Managed to get into the non-overflow on Dragonbrand earlier today. The Fort Mariner event had failed before people were in the zone, soon as the first groups were getting in, was already on the ‘reclaim’ event, not the ‘defend’ event. Going to suck getting the achievements if it’s all based on being lucky enough to get an instance without pre-fails.

Sometimes you don’t even get rewards for killing the attackers. Was there yesterday for several events in Postern Ward, landed plenty of hits, plenty of kills with XP messages, but no credit on any events that entire run.

QA for the win.

Yes, they certainly are. As are bankers, black lion merchants, and all the other essential city stuff that they moved to LA for the sole purpose of effectively relocating LA to Vigil Keep for the duration of the event.

Lion’s Arch used to have a group of NPCs in the Trader’s Forum that sold the books for unlocking Adept/Master/Grandmaster traits, as well as reset traits, for each class. They didn’t get moved to Vigil Keep with the rest of the Lion’s Arch functionality NPCs. Is there a fix on the way for this?

Frostfang and Incinerator, for the whole fire and ice thing.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Thank you for pointing that out before I could.

Malyk disproves the whole “the Pale Tree was purified” idea, otherwise he would be a fanatic dragon minion.

Not necessarily. We don’t know for certain if Mordremoth is awake or not. So it could be that Malyk would go fanatic dragon minion as soon as Mordy wakes up and exerts control.

Or it could be that Malyk is already a fanatic dragon minion, and just biding his time for the right moment. In one of the Pact storylines there’s a risen mesmer who takes the form of a pact soldier for several missions. So if a risen can go undercover without moaning “Return to Orr” every five minutes and give itself away, a blighted human (aka sylvari) could certainly keep it under wraps to infiltrate and investigate this rogue blighted (purified blighted human) faction.

Narcemus.1348:

I want to say that I heard dialogue somewhere that the Artesian Waters had enough magic to attract the gods to Tyria, from wherever they resided in the Mists. So, the Artesian Waters definitely had magic to them.

From what I heard (and given there’s a lot of supposedlys and I heards in this conversation, so take with a grain of salt), it was Zhaitan who attracted the gods to Arah. They didn’t know it was an elder dragon, just that it was a powerful source of magic. The Artesian Waters just happened to be a convenient place to draw that magic from.

zwierz.9012:

Artesian Waters – Alright, this might be a good cometitor for LA… Place where gods first stood on Tyria. But does it mean ley lines cross there? Hard to say, plus Zhaitan was residing nearby, quite possible he drained the places magic, and even if not, there is no tales of recurring, cyclical phenomena.

From what I remember from a few dev posts read some long ways ago, there’s nothing explicitly magical about the Artesian Waters. It’s basically just the source of groundwater in Orr. Zhaitan used it to help his corruption more quickly flow throughout the island, and Traherne did the same thing. It’s source of magic came from Zhaitan, not the ley lines, but I suppose it’s always possible there’s a line running near.

Living Story is going to end by all of us finding out that it was all a dream and that Bobby Ewing is still alive after all!

hihey.1075:

Another possibility is to make it that the stealth you get from it would be “unbreakable” for the whole duration.
While this would solve all the issues I listed, this change will make the trait too good, as you could attack your target while stealthed for 3s (4s if traited) withoug worrying about getting revealed.
—>So let’s discard this change too, as it would make this trait ridiculously OP.

One possibility about this suggestion would be to make the ‘unbreakable stealth’ like the stealth from the fountains in Obsidian Sanctum. When it hits, all weapon skills and utilities are locked out for the duration of the stealth. This would have it’s own disadvantages, in that it would in effect be a daze. Not to mention it would prevent you from being able to heal while the stealth is up. Could just lock out the weapon skills and leave heals and utilities available, but certain utilities could run into the issue mentioned about being able to do damage without dropping stealth.

I think on the whole, a better solution would be to replace the stealth with a ‘revealed-less’ stealth. The stealth from Last Refuge still goes off even if you’re revealed, and dropping this specific stealth would not cause revealed. I don’t think this is that unbalancing, since it’s not a controllable way to apply stealth for the sake of a backstab or what have you.

Better than everywhere that 1 annoying scarlet sylvari.

Dry Bones legs, Winged head, Tactical shoulders look decent. Armwraps of Madness I’m only using on mine because I needed to put them soemwhere. Still experimenting with her chestpiece. Boots aren’t visible, so it’s moot. Results in a decent caster look with a bunch of skulls, looks good on necro.

Of course, Arah storymode has the opposite problem.

One part of the dungeon has Zhaitan bombing the airship with undead and AEs, and you have to keep Zojja alive while she charges a laser. Problem is that the undead are so weak and so far between, and there are so many NPCs standing around, that literally no input or interaction is required.

We actually tested this the last time I ran an alt through. Everyone ran to the side of the ship, away from the action when that phase of the fight started. Not only did Zojja survive, she didn’t even get hit once. The NPCs did all the work.

So while I can understand wanting to make plotline essential NPCs able to contribute a bit more, care must be taken to make sure that they don’t swing to the other side of the spectrum.

Back when the cap was 400, you used to be able to level just through crafting, as levelling one skill to 400 was ten levels. Ten levels, eight crafting skills, boom, level 80.

This was changed when they released ascended weapons, they changed the scaling on all skills (even the ones still capped at 400) to 500 for ten levels. Getting to 400 only got you six or seven levels. This pretty much killed “crafting your way to 80”, since even if you do spend the absurd amounts of money to cross the 400-500 gap, you’ll still be a few levels short since cooking and jewelcrafting are still capped at 400.

Only real oolie to remember, is that for Molten Alliance (either the regular fractal or the boss one), neither Flame Legion or Dredge slaying potions are effective, since MA are their own seperate faction.

I’m down for joining, my main is an 80 charr thief, and I have a 50-ish charr necro I’m casually levelling. I’m also another Dragonbrand native, so I could participate in wvwvw stuff as well.

Lower level characters don’t have all their traits and skills unlocked, which puts them at a disadvantage against a fully levelled character. That, and as mentioned, level scaling doesn’t take gear into effect, thus a level 35 character in full masterwork (or rare, if rare even exists at 35 yet) will still have significantly lower stats than a level 80 downscaled character in full exotic.

So while the dungeons certainly can be done with lower level characters, people doing explorables tend to be doing them for farming purposes and want to get them done as quickly as possible, not dragging along someone who’s contributing significantly less.

I found it amusing that when a female charr is ‘naked’, they still have a cloth wrapped around their chest, even if they don’t have breasts. Don’t know if this is because the Charr still have some amount of modesty about that, or if because the devs didn’t want to have ‘barechested females’.
Yet because of the male-unisex armor, certain heavy armor sets do bare their chest (Level 80 named exotic, level 80 crafted rare, Brahm’s armor, et cetera), leaving them more exposed in the chest wearing armor than they are naked.
For what it’s worth, same thing with female Asura and many (if not all) armor sets.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Scarlet would have had access to some sort of time travel or pastwatch or something like that to have had an influence in the fall of Abaddon. ANet is determined to ram that poorly-written Mary Sue down our throats no matter what the players choose.

For what it’s worth, back in GW2 beta Zhaitan’s corpse was both visible on the Arah map, and accessible in one of the dungeon paths. You can google search for the images. For whatever reason, they took them out before the game was released.

So while it looks like originally it was intended that Zhaitan was good and dead. Whether they took him out for dungeon design purposes or story “not quite dead” purposes, is anyone’s guess.

Question.
Would not Centaur runes be a better choice than Air runes?

Smarter people than me can crunch the numbers to see how much DPS is gained or lost by sacrificing 10% crit damage for 165 power.

The swiftness on Centaur runes (10 sec with a 10 sec cooldown) lasts for twice as long as the swiftness from Air runes (5 sec with a 10 sec cooldown), not to mention Centaur runes also cast it on nearby allies, air is you and you alone.

No idea if the bleed duration on the Centaur runes applies to bleeds caused by illusions, but the Air 6 effect you’d be losing doesn’t seem that valueable to me anyways. Hitting one person every 10 seconds at most, that only goes off if you’re hit first? Meh.

Didn’t update for me either. For what it’s worth, the final boss was Mai Lynn or whatever her name was, the aetherblade fight. Is it updating for anyone who finishes on jade maw?

When we did it, they did have voice overs. But all the voice over audio was playing at once, so several characters were talking over each other and you couldn’t understand what was said.

Killing the ooze gets you a control rod to insert into the reactor, which I guess turns off the radiation. Of course, you don’t have to actually do that, as killing the ooze lets you skip ahead to the final boss.

Already a thread regarding the lack of waypoints or checkpoint respawn, so that’s noted.

The story had us kill an ooze and retrieve a control rod, but we didn’t have to put it in and hit that map marker to progress the story, took us right to the final fight.

Also, when Mary Su… er, when Scarlet pops, her speech and Dessa’s play at the same time, so you can’t understand a word that either of them say. Can’t read the text window, since it gets wiped when you have to re-log to get back inside alive again.

Clumsy.6257:

s/d is terrible for dredge fractal, you can only steal 1 mob’s boons per LS and it they get reapplied instantly

Not really, even if they do get reapplied, you still have the buff yourself, can be handy to be sitting there with over 2 minutes of protection and regeneration on you.

That, and you use CnD+Sword1 to daze the gong-players and they stop applying the buffs.

One nerf you left off the list, that I don’t remember when exactly it was changed, was when Lotus Venom was changed to have an internal cooldown as to how often it applies the weakness.

I enjoy having a fight in the game that requires some amount of complexity and organization to win, so kudos to ANet for that.

However, one of the things that was specifically worked into the game on release, was that there weren’t any events with instant-fail mechanics, or mechanics that could cause an event to fail because of the AFKness of a number of individuals or flat out trolling like what was described above.

Kudos to the Devs for revamping Tequatl into what it is, but they fell far, far short on the aforementioned point. Whether it’s people who AFK on the turrets, or people Akitteng in the zone in general and preventing people from getting into an appropriate overflow (or non-overflow) to beat the event, or people who intentionally try to sabotage legitimate attempts for some hidden achievement, the devs certainly rolled things back a bit to some of the more poorly-designed aspects of other MMOs.

Don’t know if going back and re-tuning Teq to remove this flaw is necessary, but for the love of god, don’t re-use the turret mechanic in other fights and screw over 100+ people just because two or three went AFK and are lucky enough to not get AE’d. And while you’re at it, I understand wanting to make events challenging and giving them enough HPs to make the timer something to actually worry about, but you need to keep in mind the fact that the zones do have population caps, both the soft cap (people get sent to an overflow but can still join their party in it) and the hard cap (party members can’t join). When events are tuned so that they can’t be beaten below the soft cap and sometimes can’t because of the hard cap, something is seriously wrong.

Shiren.9532:

Zhaitan killed Tybalt Leftpaw. Checkmate.

Only because I didn’t kill him first.

“I’m not your ****ing buddy, guy!”

My reaction to him offering to make his last stand was pretty much an over-the-shoulder “Better you than me!”

Coulter.2315:

Is Tequatl an individual though or one of many and ‘Tequatl’ is just the Hylek word for what one of them is. But the trailer made out that it was a singular entity which had become stronger.

I still prefer the idea/timeline that:

We defeat Tequatl -> We kill Zaitan -> Tequatl returns as a more powerful creature. Thats where the intrigue and mystery lies.

Pretty sure I remember a ANet staff post elsewhere in the forums stating that this is the case. Tequatl is not the dragon’s name, it’s basically a word that means sunless, which the hylek call big enemies like that since they worship the sun. Basically, he’s ‘Sunless the Sunless’.

Looks like they only used the stat sets that existed before. Note that there were no carrion ascended items before the patch, and carrion still isn’t selectable for MF rings and amulets.

The opal shard/crystal/orb and all the variations thereof should have had their stats changed to the Assassin’s set (Precision major, Power and Crit damage minor) after the patch. Armor and weapons of this stat set were changed, but the gems left off the Power stat, leaving them with only precision and crit damage.

Dolan.3071:

There are so many things you could do to fix Zhatain. Like, instead of hurp durping around he actually destroys the gunship you’re on and swallows everybody. Using gypsi magic to survive you wake up inside and then proceed to wade through more trash and some miscellaneous unimportant events until you reach…

Wait for it…

‘The Heart of Zhaitan’ Dun dun duuuuuun!
Epic final boss battle ensues in which you kill Zhaitan from the inside.
Don’t lie to me it would be epic and you know it

I was thinking something more like, after the megalaser hits him, there’s currently a cutscene where five smaller lasers latch on and rip smaller chunks of him off before he flies to the tower. How bout, the players have to charge up those five lasers kinda like the door switch in the dredge fractal, those lasers pull Zhaitan in up against the airship and we get a chance to hack and slakitten some of those mini-heads before he pulls back and it cuts to the aforementioned cutscene. The deck of the airship is certainly big enough for some sort of world boss fight.

Or after the golden shower, instead of falling off the tower dead, he jumps off, grabs onto the airship and pulls it down to the ground. Everyone survives, but the airship is wrecked and Zhaitan’s broken and grounded, but still alive, and the players have to either charge in to kill him directly, or distract him long enough for another megalaser to power up and blast him in the face.

All sorts of things that can be done to make the event more exciting and engaging, and above all, give the players a chance to actually attack him with weapons, spells, and skills like other world bosses.

I’m not saying the personal story would have to be redone. Just the Arah story mode dungeon, and just the part of the final fight after you jump onto the big airship and actually start the fight with Zhaitan face to face.
The rest of the personal storyline up to that point I’m fine with, it’s just the final fight that needs some serious love. And as mentioned, making noticable changes to dungeon events does have precedent.

So Anet has been talking about how they’ve made changes to the Tequatl event to make it more interesting, challenging, and fun.

So why am I mentioning this in the dungeon area?

Because I did Arah Story mode last night for the first time in several months, and was once more disappointed over how boring the final few events are. Especially since it was changed from the last time, as before during the Golden Shower phase these dragon heads would spawn you had to kill, and now not even that. Just ten minutes of 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2.

While I can appreciate ANet sending people in to revamp events to make them more interesting, why oh why Arah Storymode not first on the list? The entire storyline of the game is building up to this one climactic battle, and it’s completely ruined by its soul crushing laziness and boredom.

Please tell me that this event is somewhere on the list of events to revamp and make fun.

On events that involve lava being dumped on an area (seen this happen both on the Dredge Fractal at the end boss, as well as the boss of Sorrow’s Embrace story mode), the first time the lava is dumped it shows up properly. For all subsequent ‘dumps’, the lava does now show up and gives no visible indication of its effect. Players still take damage if they’re in the area, but there is no way of seeing where and when the lava is coming down. This seems to last until you leave the zone. Both times I saw this happen in both the abovementioned examples, every person in my group was seeing the same thing.

Given that Dredgehaunt Cliffs happened twice in a row this morning, yes, there needs to be some sort of pattern to the zones being invaded. Not necessarily a fixed, set order, but some sort of coding that makes sure that a zone will happen at least once every X number of hours, or that this other zone won’t happen more than Y times in however long.

So the first time I did the playhouse, I died once or twice learning the final fight before getting it done.

I’ve since gone in twice and beaten it without dying, without going down and having to rally, nothing. And it’s still not giving me the achievement.

Can you only get this achievement on the first time or something? If so, the achievement description -really- needs to be updated to say such.