Guild Wars 2

I feel really bad for anyone that didn’t farm the capacitor before HoT.

LorVan.1029:

An announcment about this would have been nice, as I have spent one hour looking for group and doing three 51-75 fractals just for a bunch of lulz (which were nice anyway).
On a side note, anyone knows where (and if) ascended armor and weapon boxes are supposed to drop now in this revamped fractal system?

The encrypted boxes as far as I know, though the drop rate’s something like a tenth of what it was. KING opened over 200 and didn’t see any.

The Wyld Hunt thing seems like a really stupid misunderstanding considering it wasn’t mentioned at all until that one line late in the story. So much ultimately pointless drama could have been avoided if her or the Pale Tree had just said something.

AWACS.6537:

Story was much better in gameplay, but felt very rushed.
In fact, it only had TWO more chapters more than the final arc of the original story.

I’m hoping a living story season will conclude the story properly, as well as give some new insight and additional content.

Considering the raid is dealing with bandits of all things, I can’t see the sylvari/Mordrem themes being explored in LS3 when it probably needs to start building toward X2, whatever that may be.

They have to either build the 64-bit client or stop making maps and events as big as they are in HoT. They’ve demonstrated that they can’t have both.

Don’t know if it’s been touched on, but it feels like they really wasted Mordremoth as a character. Even playing through it with a sylvari you don’t hear much from him(when it’s supposed to be almost constant), and what you do hear is just so bland. They really couldn’t come up with any better dialogue for a millenia old formless horror than “Bwahaha, you can’t defeat me >:p”? With the sylvari specifically they could’ve played into the fathership angle, or added hallucinations, something to make being mind-linked with it genuinely unsettling. I know from the fight with Zojja’s clones that they’re capable of that kind of writing(they desperately beg for you to burn them), but they just didn’t do it.

At least it was better than Zhaitan I guess.

Ranlares.2513:

Nemesis.6938:

Marauder and crusadet u can buy from normal crafting merchant

Im interested in wanderer and trailblazer

Do you know what stats are on marauder? At work or I would look

+Power, +precision, vitality, ferocity.

Sobin.5947:

Anyone wish there was some way to tell your function gyro was out there reviving? I honestly can never see it, sometimes i think its reviving but its not. Wish we had a buff or maybe another toolbelt skill slot thing that showed us.

Also, it seems the gyro has problems reviving/downing if the teammate/enemy gets pushed. The gyro goes full special mode and doesn’t know what to do.

It’s an issue just because it’s almost impossible to see if you have the gyro by your shoulder in the middle of combat. Cooldown bar and icon over the toolbelt, maybe? Gyro’s out reviving, the gyro’s icon turns blue and it has the downed ally minimap symbol over it. If it’s out stomping, the icon turns red and has the downed enemy minimap symbol.

I’m convinced they just give things to Rytlock when they don’t want to spend time discussing them. Sohothin? Don’t ask, doesn’t matter. Revenant? Don’t ask, doesn’t matter. Herald? Don’t ask, doesn’t matter.

Erukk.1408:

I really have a feeling that they saved most of the interesting lore for Raids and the future LS, and HoT’s PS was basically just there to get rid of Mordremoth, introduce new areas and groups, and set up the ground work for everything else. Because other than Mordremoth’s mind getting killed at the end, all I really saw was a bunch of loose plot threads for future stuff.

As for the future, I’m wondering if the bandits/WM might go after Glint’s egg. They seemed to have some sort of presence in the future from what little we got from the beta raid, and the egg would be an excellent target now that it contains a large portion of Mordremoth’s power.

…Maybe Lazarus or random WM mook would want it to try and ascent into god/higher being status?

~crosses fingers~

I’d agree if not for the fact that ANet’s been setting up plot threads and then never developing them since Eye of the North.

Holesale.2640:

Not shocked Adaptive Armor was toned down, it was dominating the other Grandmasters in terms of usefulness.

It still does but that’s now because gyros are still unreliable and mostly useless and the extra 10% damage and stab from Perfectly balanced is a drop in the bucket when you consider how much more sustain AA gives.

If one GM is massively outshining the others, shouldn’t they be looked at first?

Phineas Poe.3018:

I understand why both of these traits were nerfed. I don’t have a problem with either of them.

PvP tears and ANet’s unwillingness to split skills.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Garm wasn’t there throughout all of Season 2. Eir isn’t always with Garm, you know.

Eir didn’t have a weapon. How could she go down fighting, when the moment she stands up she’s killed? Her standing up IS her going down fighting. You don’t have to throw a punch before being shot in order to die defiant.

And it’s dying defiant that norn do, not die fighting.

Your continuous posts complaining about that throughout dozens of threads is getting past the point of annoying and into the realm of “viewed as trolling.”

Except norn can shapeshift, something none of the important norn(Knut, Eir, Braham) do ingame. She couldn’t channel Wolf and grapple with the vinetooth for a bit before being overwhelmed?

And if I try those and no one bites?

The scrapper icon reminds me of a rubber toy hammer. Couldn’t we get a hammer icon more like perfectly weighted’s? Or the sawblade with a cog-shaped hole in the middle(or vice-versa)?

Please? :<

I just want function gyro’s targeting to be improved. It’s already bad in PvE, and it can be incredibly annoying to target an ally through mobs and particles to send it out. We can manually res without targeting, so why do we need it for the gyro?

Braham comments on him briefly. He says something like “Garm… spirits, I don’t even know if he was with her in the crash.”

For all we know he’s in Hoelbrak waiting for her to come home.

No one can use any pets, melee ones especially. Gyros, illusions/phantasms/clones, necro minions, ranger pets, anything. If it’s just players, they can easily back out when they get the debuff and she won’t be able to heal much.

PWNcakesAndROFLs.8263:

Daralii.8940:

ANort.1425:

At least it’s not as bad as Blast Gyro. Tooltip says 3k damage, actually does 2.4k and crits for 3.6k despite having 220% crit damage. And that’s when it does hit, usually it misses since the tracking dart pulls the enemy to you and the gyro often misses or dies before exploding. And putting knockback on something designed to be used with a melee weapon, pure kitten genius(knockdown would have made way more sense).

My favorite part of blast gyro is when you tag a mob, the gyro moves to it and starts to cast the explosion, the mob moves slightly, and the gyro cancels the attack and moves to the mob, repeat until the gyro just times out.

To be honest, most of the gyros are sort of an embarrassment at how badly they function. I’m really disappointed in the lack of proper implementation and lack-luster functionality of them. I hope for the future’s sake that the development team takes community feedback more into account. Maybe a CDI like the rangers got?

At least druid got butchered after BWE3, so we can be together in our frustration again. Thanks Irenio.

I saw one outside Wizard’s Fief yesterday. I’d have to check to see if she’s still there or if she moved.

ANort.1425:

At least it’s not as bad as Blast Gyro. Tooltip says 3k damage, actually does 2.4k and crits for 3.6k despite having 220% crit damage. And that’s when it does hit, usually it misses since the tracking dart pulls the enemy to you and the gyro often misses or dies before exploding. And putting knockback on something designed to be used with a melee weapon, pure kitten genius(knockdown would have made way more sense).

My favorite part of blast gyro is when you tag a mob, the gyro moves to it and starts to cast the explosion, the mob moves slightly, and the gyro cancels the attack and moves to the mob, repeat until the gyro just times out.

I feel like they need to update the audio to better reflect the new visual. Something like a wet fart seems appropriate.

The effect was overdone, but this was a massive overreaction, especially considering it’s part of an elite. It’s also very inconsistent; why change orbital strike to this degree, but leave overload air more or less the same? Why not address EVERYTHING herald does? Why not give us a particle density slider so we can turn it down for #ESPORTS or raids?

smekras.8203:

The sylvari will become soundless to protect themselves from …losing their connection to the Dream and the shielding it gives from Mordremoth? As far as we know, even the Nightmare keeps mordry away.

The Nightmare is merely a corruption of the Dream. If the Tree dies and the Dream goes away, the Nightmare would as well.

The Soundless should be very vulnerable to Mordremoth as they don’t have the mental shielding provided by the Dream.

The Pale Tree’s capable of protecting sylvari in most of Tyria through the Dream. It’s when they get farther from her and closer to Mordremoth that problems arise.

HenleyLegoMan.4987:

When the dust settles in 2 weeks? Have you not realised yet? That’s when all of you moaning about us complaining begin to ask anet why hot maps are empty and demand it sorted lol

The maps are already empty.

Vayne.8563:

Cosbuster.4379:

Let me tell you a story…

I was frantically searching for hero points in the first map in order to unlock the elite spec on my necro. After wiping at several of them, I finally found an unguarded one by gliding down toward the bottom of the map.

I was so happy when I discovered it, the feeling of exploring and being rewarded for it was almost overwhelming. Then I found out I couldn’t click on it and the npc kept saying I wasn’t worthy. Locked behind some mastery I assume. Instantly turned the game off.

When all you had to do was ask in map chat and people would have joined on you and done the point. You need to l2p this game.

People are so spread across so many map instances that finding enough people to do some of the hero challenges can take 30-60 minutes easily, and that’s ignoring the possibility of them missing the jumps needed to reach some.

That nuhoc point they were talking about is just silly. You can go to the place of power with just basic gliding, but you can’t commune with it unless you have a mastery that doesn’t unlock until the third map. There’s not even some sort of terrain like the poison cloud ones.

Dimensional.7692:

I can’t use my elite specialization skills, items, or traits. I’ve spent Hero Points on them, and I got an shield for my mesmer, but it keeps saying “weapon type unusable by your profession”.
The Chronomancer specialization should be seen there, but only the 5 standard ones are.

Elite specs can only be placed in the bottom slot.

Echoing people that haven’t been able to talk to Scout Acan during In Their Footsteps. Someone whispered me saying that changing maps can fix it, but I haven’t had any luck.

My guess is that each base legend will be a “school” of training. First purchase is the stance, and after that it’s the utilities.

Guhracie.3419:

There was an interview where someone was asked “Are you reducing dungeon rewards in order to deincentivize that content?” And the answer was a refreshingly honest, “Yes.”

It was during John Smith’s Q&A on it.

Christonya.3856:

Daralii.8940:

Midnight pacific time, as was previously announced by ANet.

We’ll probably have to download a patch, but we don’t know when or how big it’ll be.

I missed that announcement, and I hope not. It’s always awesome when every thing is done pre launch and they just use their tech to activate the expansions content, it allows for players to be firmly planted at their started point and immediately get into things.

I guarantee we’ll have to download some things. As far as I’m aware, no part of the 3 HoT maps after Verdant Brink are in the .dat apart from a few chak models.

Midnight pacific time, as was previously announced by ANet.

We’ll probably have to download a patch, but we don’t know when or how big it’ll be.

I can’t see it being 250 when, from what we’ve seen, you don’t get hero points in the HoT maps(or at least Verdant Brink), and they intend to add another 2+ elite specs for every class. They’d have to add another 500 between now and then.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASncoCFpitbBWXB0ehFLjiOtn76G85muNSMZCgvD-ThRBABRcBAua/R5He6AA4BAQp6PmpEMAwBwv/GAO/8zP/8z73f/93f/tUA6JsC-e

Doubt it’s particularly good, but I’m so tired of grenades at this point that I want to try something different.

Thagyr.4136:

It looks neat, and produces a unique effect on the arm, but I am more wondering what it sounds like and what it would do to our skill visuals. Despite what Quip looks like it does its job of being unmistakable despite it’s size as a pistol as people can both hear and see the effects of it easily.

Also wondering what H.O.P.E stands for.

Something something something Emitter?

“overcoming challenges in the jungle to unlock your elite specialization”

Reneged on it just being hero points?

Silberfisch.3046:

I’ve been absent from the froum for quite some time now, but the economy blog post got me to look what was going on here.

Maybe I overlooked it in the other comments, but I think dungeons actually still offer an interesting “currency”. Even if they nerf the gold into the abyss, a dungeon tour is one of the fastest ways to get experience in the game.
So if you want to unlock Old Tyria Masteries, I think a dungeon tour is still pretty useful in that regard. Especially if the experience cost for mastery unlocks they used in the 3rd beta weekend are any indicator for the cost on higher tier masteries.

So unless Anet decides this makes getting XP for Old Tyria Masteries too easy and changes this, maybe this is at least a bit of an incentive to do dungeons. Granted once your masteries are unlocked, the dungeons become most likely pretty obsolete for you in terms of rewards. Still it is something to keep in mind, I think.

I can’t see them letting dungeons give a lot of core mastery XP when the point of the change is, from the horse’s mouth, to deincentivize dungeons.

Behellagh.1468:

phys.7689:

Simplicity.7208:

I’m amazed at the number of people who just don’t understand economics. Let me see if I can explain it. Dungeons are a gold faucet. They are the single largest gold faucet in the game. By running one AC path 1, you generate not just 1.86g for yourself, but for all your party members as well. That simple 10 minute run just generated 9.3g and put it into the economy.

On the opposite side of the scale, you have things like the silverwastes chest farm which does not generate gold, it simply generates items which have their value taken from current market value. Selling or salvaging items acquired through this farm removes gold from the economy through TP fees and salvage fees. Furthermore, when gold is easier to get, the silverwastes chest farm items are worth more gold and when gold is more difficult to get, the silverwastes farm items are worth less gold. Their value does not change, only the gold it takes to acquire them.

By reducing the available gold faucets, ANet hopes to increase the value of gold and curb inflation. You may not appreciate it, but dungeons are a giant contributor to why things are so expensive gold wise. The dungeon runners are putting much more gold into the system than sinks are able to remove.

sorry man, i asked that question, the main purpose of the nerf is not to reduce gold faucets, but primarily to disincentivize dungeons. They dont want dungeons to be competing with other content, and they dont want to encourage people to do them daily.

They plan to move liquid gains to other things, but you wouldnt have to actually remove dungeons if that was your goal. You see, if 3 things reward similar gold, for the same time requirement, people will do whichever thing they prefer. They also could have given dungeons non liquid rewards and focused on mats, or other things that sell well on the TP.

but that would defeat the purpose, the purpose of taking away the gold was to make doing dungeons not be the thing those type of players do.

True, they decided well before the expansion announcement that fractals was the way for challenging group content that is below Raids. That all future development will be done as a mix of fractals, raids and living world. Two of those three will require HoT and the remaining one, fractals, will require HoT for the later fractals that will likely use mechanics from HoT like gliding and shroom bouncing.

So they want players to pay more attention to fractals and less for dungeons and the one sure way to dissuade doing dungeons ad nauseam is to remove the majority of the gold being dropped. This makes dungeons only purpose is to get specific dungeon rewards and tokens for legendary weapons.

Not even needed for that. The associated PvP tract already gives more tokens(and armor/weapon boxes for the collection), and Smith stated they’re not buffing token rewards from dungeons. They are, for all intents and purposes, obsolete.

Eight Samurai.6840:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Taku.6352:

Rasimir.6239:

Well, I guess there goes my chance of ever getting my dungeoneer collections done …

You can always pvp. :^)

Still waiting for the fractal reward track where you get fractal skins thrown after you :^)

Haha… it still baffles me as to why pvpers have to be catered to with a silver platter by giving them dungeon rewards, and for some strange reason, tomes of knowledge when you can pvp at any level.

Because PvP was dead for a long time, and the only way they could get people to go back to it was by massively overincentivizing it.

Chokolata.1870:

I really do not understand their logic for removing dungeon rewards. It is a very well developed and popular part of the game. There is absolutely no need to pigeonhole people into Raids or Fractals. They do not even have to touch dungeons and just have it as casual instanced content.

A big part of it is probably to sell HoT. Raids require it outright and I can easily see fractal mastery impacting performance to a huge degree.

All the racial Heart of Maguuma masteries let you challenge an NPC for a daily chest. Who’s to say they’re not doing something like that with fractals? The entire thing smells like an underhanded business decision, not something for the health of the game.

Substance E.4852:

Daralii.8940:

My hope is that they’ll use the lull of water content in HoT to work on improving it, even if it’s just a balance pass and making more skills usable. Bubbles is obviously in the ocean, and Jormag’s in the middle of an inland sea. They can’t just ignore it unless they abandon the ED plot or end the game after Mordremoth, Kralkatorrik, and Primordus.

At the rate they are going we’ll be lucky to ever get that far in the first place.

At their current rate, we’ll get to either of the water-centric EDs by 2022/2023. Perfectly reasonable, right?

;_;

My hope is that they’ll use the lull of water content in HoT to work on improving it, even if it’s just a balance pass and making more skills usable. Bubbles is obviously in the ocean, and Jormag’s in the middle of an inland sea. They can’t just ignore it unless they abandon the ED plot or end the game after Mordremoth, Kralkatorrik, and Primordus.

Celtic Lady.3729:

If TP flippers don’t play any other parts of the game, why would they need the gold?

Some people like to amass wealth for its own sake. Just look at the real world.

EcoRI.9273:

new legendaries look like poop. I guess i will just burn my money on more perma contracts for my alts.

I like that the legendary axe reuses a texture from LA… which was also reused for druid.

phys.7689:

Iris Ng.9845:

phys.7689:

Iris Ng.9845:

Sigfodr.9576:

Iris Ng.9845:

Speaking of SW, the value of each champ bag deteriorates greatly due to the popularity of the farm. When it was firstly introduced, you can make easily 200 g in 3-4 hours by abusing it. As soon as the chest map is organized and more people make trains, the gold income drastically drops to the point of only 10 silver per champ bag. It’s a sign that the economy balances the value and influx of gold by this farm and it’s not as unhealthy as we made it to be. (Actually, I’m quite grateful to the chest farmers for bring down the atrocious price of T6 mats that reigns high at 45-70 silvers a piece for months). With the new map rewards, I speculate this farm is gonna die down as it no longer maintains a high reward/hour ratio. Maybe the Orr farm will come back more strongly than ever with Charged Lodestone and Giant Eyes are in the loot table now. Who knows…

This is not how econemy works sry.
Money (of any kind), and in gw2 that is gold only have a value due to what you can get for said gold.

So, by lovering the gold from dungeons and making more people do SW or other farms that mainly provide materials, then that simply mean that the value of gold will go up compered to what we can buy for said gold (deflation). This is the opposit of what we have mainly been seeing (inflation). Now I am going to assume that Anet have some numbers to support this change and that they simply want to reduse the inflation that we have seen so far, but.. the track record of anet is sadly not giving me a lot of hope.

This is exactly what J.S. mentions in his blog post.

The major concern that we’re sure to face is the specific intent of dungeons as a gold-generating activity. To that effect, let’s talk about map rewards.

Map rewards are specific, tangible rewards you receive from playing on a map. They allow players to balance overpriced items as well as seek specific materials for their personal goals without constant uncertainty. Map rewards are pretty great but are a constant enemy of scarcity. Map-reward materials can no longer be overpriced for any extended period of time because players now have the power to push the supply when needed. This shifts the power from the supplier of a rare good to the buyer, because the buyer now has the option to refrain from buying and still achieve goals, which is what we wanted.

which ignores the concept of people who like earning gold in dungeons actually not wanting to run map based activities because they find them less entertaining?

Which ignores the fact that people who loves to hoard Gold and spend on nothing is but a fraction of the economy and several more actually farms dungeon gold for their x numbers of legendary weapons and high-end stuffs?

dungeons are not the most effecient means of earning gold
it goes
tp playing>open world cheese farms>dungeons

they really just want to kill the gold faucet of dungeons, and no one at arenanet cares about dungeons anymore, so no ones going to stop em.

you are basically saying dungeons shouldnt even be viable as means for getting anything except dungeon armor and gifts for legendaries.

Isn’t PvP better for both of those already?

Celtic Lady.3729:

I don’t really get why the developers for this game have more or less failed at making dungeons, if what people are saying is true and that they are minimizing dungeons because they’re so imbalanced.

Isn’t dungeon making and dungeons in general a staple of MMO play? Shouldn’t they be able to make good ones and balance them?

The dungeon team was disbanded after the AC remake. For whatever reason, they have an active disinterest in dungeons being a thing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if they had actually carried through with new fractals being periodically added every few months because they were easy to churn out instead of adding a grand total of 4(three of which are recycled from dungeons that were timed content) since the feature was implemented.

ANet’s track record with instanced PvE content in GW2 is absolutely horrendous, which is a big part of why I’m so skeptical of raids past Spirit Vale.

Miltek.2104:

With recent changes to Dragon Hunter’s F1, Thief dodges and Ele’s Rebound, I regained faith in rework of function gyro.

10 days to launch, Anet HQ must be in fire right now ^^

I’m not getting my hopes up. Considering the levels of polish in BWE3 and the fact the only response to scrapper feedback was “Thanks, we’ll think about it” (just look at the druid response), it’s been made very clear where scrapper is on their priority list. Hell, I’d be surprised if hammer 1 gets particles before release.

Merava Laq.7319:

I miss it T_T
Just imagine the barrage effect with the juggernaut Oo

Right now Juggernaut only affects hammer 1, probably because it doesn’t have any particles. It’d be great if it turned them into mercury grenades or did literally anything else, but based on their track record I’m not exactly getting my hopes up.

They generally seem to be phasing out underwater content, not that it would make much sense to have a big underwater area in a region that’s been getting sucked dry. Just look at Silverwood/wastes.

Flamefang.9230:

I don’t intend to get caught up in the moral debate regarding the Mursaat’s intentions because I haven’t studied the lore to the same degree as I expect most of you have. Although I do have my own opinions on the matter, and I’m sure they’ll color what I have to say below, the purpose of this post is not to become involved in that debate.

That said, these exalted seem to be more or less the most uninteresting option available for a “new race”, and I don’t fully understand why Anet decided to go forward with them. The most interesting parts of the original Prophecies story line were those where shades of gray existed, or where factions proved to have more depth than was initially clear. The Mursaat and White Mantle with their attempts to stop the Titans being the foremost example, but also consider that Vizier Khilbron originally stood out as a good (if shady) guy, and the Ascalonian-Charr war went from being a bloodthirsty invasion to a religiously and ancestrally motivated reconquista. Meanwhile the least interesting faction was probably the Stone Summit, who were evil because they were xenophobic, and they were xenophobic for no clear reason. Why would a mostly isolated race breed fanatical grassroots xenophobia leading to brutal civil war? No idea.

So now we’re presented with the Exalted who seem one-dimensional in the extreme, and I can only hope that Arenanet decides to do something more compelling with them, but my expectations aren’t too high. There’re a lot of opportunities to take the races, and minor races, in interesting directions.

Lets be honest, one dimensional morality defines at least the bulk if not the entirety of GW2’s character writing. Kind of frustrating when shades of grey could make it so much more interesting.