Guild Wars 2

Wrong subforum (needed to go in Guild Wars 2 discussion rather than this one), but for what it’s worth, you have my condolences.

InfamousBrad.5879:

I haven’t tried the D-series golem yet, but yeah, I use the 7-series the same way others have said: when I really need to distract a Group Event boss for a few seconds.

I have to disagree about Pain Inverter. If you’re at all into melee, or even if you just bop in and out of melee (like I do when I’m using the elixir gun) dropping confuse+retaliate into the mix can be a life saver. I could wish that it recharged in 15 seconds, so I could use it every time I ran forward to drop an Acid Bomb, but that’d probably be too good.

Wish list item, for me, one I’ve seen already in the suggestion forum: I wish Asuran rangers could “tame” a smaller, more fragile pair of the 7 series and D series golems. Stick ‘em in one of the Home instances that only spawn after, say, you complete the first story arc, or something. But, then, I also wish that Asuran engineer turrets looked like the Inquest turrets instead of like steampunk kludge, and I wish that Asuran elementalists’ elementals were golems with the same power the existing demons get, instead of demons. Sadly, you fight elder dragon minions with the game skills you have, not with the game skills you wish you had.

Having a golem as an option for a starter pet for an asura ranger is a great idea.

If you want to/have the time to and you’re up for drawing asuras.

EDIT: Oh, and I’m up for giving you some ingame gold if you decide to do it. I think it’s only fair.

Dustfinger.9510:

In some fantasy worlds, harpies need to mate with males of other races to fertilize their eggs. In Xanth, harpies are foul and disgusting so the mating often isn’t “agreed upon”.

That’s interesting, because it seems to be the case here in GW lore as well. I haven’t seen a male harpy anywhere and I’ve seen a few references to how harpies and grawl apparently form romantic bonds quite often.

But yeah, for everyone else’s reference, during that event, the male asura(s, because there’s another one there and they’re brothers) are enamored with how harpies smell and aim to make a perfume out of their pheromones. Like, one of those pheromone perfumes you wear that supposedly attract women. Except it backfires because once they test the prototype, they find that it only effects/attracts harpies. And supposedly the fantasy cliche of harpies being absolutely foul runs true for GW2, because the asura leading the event mourns the fact that the perfume won’t sell because, in his own words, they would have to be “incredibly desperate or lonely”.

LittleZoe.4970:

My sylvari is called Dinnye. It means watermelon :P

Way off topic, but that is (almost) my real name.

I… never knew.

Time to embrace my inner watermelon.

Orissa.1872:

Asura do have bellybuttons, so they’re born like all mammals

Whoa! Their models do have bellybuttons!

Alright, awesome, so it’s confirmed.

I wasn’t paying enough attention to determine whether there’s any example of a sylvari falling for someone of another race, but amongst the dominant races, inter-race romances/crushes definitely exist. They aren’t very common – which makes sense, as you’d naturally be more attracted to your own kind – but they do exist.

The most amusing one was a male asura and a female charr. Albeit it was one-sided. One guess as to which way it was one-sided.

I know this will get washed away in amongst a sea of “We want mounts!”/“Class X is OP/underpowered!”/“Change everything!”, but this is both fundamental and important.

The crux of the issue: Please, please, please stop making “ninja” changes.

I’m aware that in many cases, changes to the game will be documented in the patch notes of the nearest update. I can understand there are some cases where changes are so small they’re not worth alerting everyone to.

But fudging around with loot drop rates, ecto/salvaging rates etc doesn’t go unnoticed by the playerbase. Further, for a more solid example, take note of the recent change to the “Illusionary Membrane” trait for mesmers: it was changed drastically and even the text of the tooltip has changed. Nowhere have I seen this documented. The fact that the tooltip text has changed is proof that it isn’t an oversight or an unintended side effect as some previous bugs have been. I don’t even play a mesmer and this change has sort of mired me.

From the bottom of my heart, I want to continue supporting this game with my wallet and by encouraging others to experience it, but these sorts of undocumented changes are dishonest.

Concrete suggestions:

Suggestion 1: Every time a change/fix is made, document it. No exceptions.

Suggestion 2: Amend the GW2 launch client/updater to have easy access to all patch notes. In most games I’ve played, the launcher was primarily used to communicate all modifications to players. Bit surprised that it isn’t the case here.

I don’t know about the hijacking eggs theory purely because you have female and male asura, both with appropriate “parts”, and that in itself implies how they procreate (although the live birth vs egg laying is down to speculation because we’ve never been given confirmation).

Also, on the cannibalization theory: while I think it’s possible, almost all asura traditionally cremate their dead.

I found the attack golem (the first elite tier golem) pretty useful in PvE situations: sometimes I would call on it to draw the heat off me if I was running low on escape options, and I think it’s damage output is somewhat decent. It’s good against skill point bosses/veteran mobs and the like.

D-series/defensive golem (second tier elite) is somewhat useful, but could be more so if the barrier discharged more often. I would sometimes use this in dungeon runs.

The golem you can operate yourself is almost purely for fun/roleplay, it’s actual usefulness is very low. Skills take too long to execute and don’t make up for it in damage output.

Technobabble’s effect is too short for me to consider it useful, although it could be worth looking into with a properly traited mesmer.

Pain inverter is the same as the above IMO.

Echoing what everyone else has said, radiation field is probably the best racial for asuras. Since you’re working with a guardian specifically, if you don’t like the tomes or the golems, the virtue recharge skill is probably the most useful in PvP for an asura guardian.

Panzerjaeger.7612:

Dinny.5310:

Panzerjaeger.7612:

Bizarre? That boy is HAWT

God kitten it. Panzerjaeger, you are officially my favorite person on this entire forum, everybody else go home.

Yay, I’m loved! I will respond with beautiful fanart!

I shall treasure it forever.

Leo G.4501:

I was wondering if it were possible to get glowie eyes like that pic there Dinny posted. I tried for my last asura I made but couldn’t make them vibrant like some of the NPCs I’ve seen. (Snip)

Yeah, I have no idea how Gorr and Kekt have eyes that are that vibrant… It’s not possible in the character create, I’ve tried doing it before as well. I am wondering if it’s a bug like the male asura ears were bugged at some point and you couldn’t change their thickness.

Panzerjaeger.7612:

Bizarre? That boy is HAWT

God kitten it. Panzerjaeger, you are officially my favorite person on this entire forum, everybody else go home.

I’ve seen these around somewhere, have they been put up on to Tumblr and/or DeviantART? Either way, they’re fantastic.

Thing is, the way they’ve established the sub-races, they will never ever implement them as playable races.

The three races I’d pick, personal preference: Largos (I adore water-dwelling races, and they are basically Norn mermaids in many ways), Skritt (Rats are my favorite animal), Harpies (Cause harpies are rad)

The races that I think are actually viable/probable future races: Tengu, Largos, Kodan.

I have no idea why they don’t get it. When I saw my fiance play on his charr thief, I was all like, “Did you pick some sort of trait to get that effect?”.

But no, asuran thieves don’t get the blur thing. Doesn’t bother me personally though.

I always thought Zrii was really cute. I wish there was more fanart in general of these characters, actually.

catqeer.1954:

If i or my asura male were into females I guess it would be logical to choose Batanga but my asura prefers males… he finds them less annoying

I know this thread is about asuran women, but, if we’re going down that path…

I’d hit it. I am a woman of bizarre taste, apparently.

I’m going into a bit of an analytical discussion here, because I think this topic has come up a few times and I’ve always wanted to weigh in but never have.

If you’ve been spoiled by Bioware-esque writing, I think you can have a bit of trouble getting emotionally invested in GW2’s story. Those games make you spend a lot of time with certain characters and let you see multiple sides of them. GW2 usually keeps a character around for only a single arc (of which there are three: your racial arc, your order arc, and the Orr arc), and in many cases much less. I did feel something of a connection to your mentor in the orders arc and I do think Tybalt and Sieran are examples of well-done characters in amidst a sea of relatively forgettable ones, but still.

The thing is, GW2 has a really big problem that I think they tackled reasonably admirably: having enough characters so that the story feels “big”, whilst simultaneously keeping the cast restricted enough that there are recurring characters you’re supposed to build some sort of rapport with. When you have a ton of characters, developing them (giving them all equal ‘screen time’) is really hard.

If you wanted to know who your cast is (everyone has a different one based on the choices they made), wander around Fort Trinity after completing “Victory or Death” (after the cleansing Orr mission is good too). Those are your “main characters” so to speak. Trahearne, your mentors and the Destiny’s edge member related to your race are supposed to be the characters you get attached to, but I felt like it fell through a bit as well.

Thing is, what’s there is good: it just needed more. More missions in every arc. Double the amount to even approach Bioware-esque, coupled with a stronger writing staff, but it won’t happen because it’s not really the selling point of the game, it’s ancillary to it, and it would take a whole lot of work that I don’t think would be that appreciated. In that way, it’s a bit of the inverse of Guild Wars 1.

I’m reserving my judgement for the big January (Feb?) update, however, because I want to see how that effects the story and if there are any additions. God so help me if they forget everyone they introduced in this story and don’t bring any of them back, though… There were a lot of characters I want to see again, but I fear that we won’t get to see ‘em even though they technically work for the pact. Or worse: tons of them get killed off to make room for new characters, because GW2 writing staff seems to think that kill a character = it’s sad because death is a recipe for good emotive writing. It isn’t. In every instance other than the mentor’s death, it fell pretty flat.

TL;DR: It was meant to be enjoyed as a story. It just needed more content and more polish. Mind you, I though the exp from the missions made it worthwhile as well as the black lion keys early on.

What Urthona said: the shorter your legs (your stride), the more steps you have to take to cover a comparable distance with someone with longer legs.

And yeah, asura run at the same speed as all other races, they just appear to go faster.

Panzerjaeger.7612:

Rezzet.3614:

Batanga followed by Teyo i always felt like dominating that lil brat and putting a leash on her for some reason :L

I like the way you think.

I like both of you, too.

That is a lot of kittens.

Anyway, that’s unfortunate, but oh well! I suggest you keep re-entering toypocalypse until it puts you in an instance that’s on wave 5 or higher. That’s how my fiance completes it.

That is one of the most bizarre and roundabout ways I’ve seen someone express an otherwise simple sentiment. I like it.

Yeah. I noticed that all extremely dark asuras have flekittenone/peach lips and sometimes noses. I’m not entirely sure why it’s that way… why they’re lighter around the face.

My thief is also a primarily black asura, but he wears a mask, so it’s a non-issue for me.

Haven’t had the time to read everything on this thread, but…

I also fondly remember Ultima Online, but I don’t think we can pull off that sort of PvP setting in Guild Wars 2.

I do support the idea of the server under two conditions:

- PvP is effective as of hitting the level cap: like this, everyone roaming the overworld is on the same footing, lower levels can’t be killed and can’t be prevented from levelling.

and

- No inventory looting. Or, if there is inventory looting, soulbound items + items bought with gems shouldn’t be lootable. Loose stuff like mats and drops and gold can be lootable.

I feel ashamed for forgetting Zojja, who is my second choice after Batanga.

Edit: Not sure about Efut being in my favorites, but she is actually cute in her own way. Most asura are.

Cause your player character is supposed to be cast as a good guy. No reason you can’t roleplay as inquest or cast your character as such outside of the game’s story, though. Not every character can be a hero. I view my guardian as a peacemaker and my thief is of pirate heritage, so yeah, I don’t follow the official story/make my own characters heroes either.

I think you might have your conception of the inquest just a little bit… incorrect? Inquest don’t really “kill everything they see”, their primary objective is the collection of data/undergoing of research without any kind of moral or ethical constraint, not explicitly going out of their way to sow the seeds of chaos, so to speak.

As for alignments and stuff, Jeff Grub, the creator of GW2’s overall story, says that the Inquest are actually lawful evil/lawful neutral.

“The Inquest has come up with a way of reducing that loss of signal and what they have done is to effectively create a corporation. They have created a hierarchy, they are much more lawful than the members of their race, but it tends to be lawful-evil, as they are cut off from morality at that point. So they will do things that most Asura will not want. Most Asura would not want to conduct experiments on sentient races, whereas the Inquest don’t have those qualms – they believe the end justifies the means.”

They play politics and have a lot of members in the council and do what they can to manipulate the system rather than disregard rules outright (which is what the chaotic alignment is mainly about).

TL;DR: No reason you can’t roleplay inquest.

Not sure, but I know that Tixx wears human cultural as well. So, it’s technically possible for races to wear each other’s cultural gear…

Panzerjaeger.7612:

Judging by the fact that Asura males have nipples, however, I would say that Asura are mammals.

They do? I’m gonna have to de-shirt my male asura next time to see if that’s the case. If so, the female models don’t have it just for modesty reasons.

Another fun (actually sort of sad) fact: When asuras marry or enter a long-term relationship, they often (not always) set an end date for the relationship. Since this kind of long-staying relationship usually includes progeny and joint ventures (i.e. research over time), it’s safe to say it’s usually between 10 – 20 years.

So, the conclusion? While we know asura genuinely fall in love and have feelings for one another, many are pragmatically-minded about it nonetheless and are realistic about how long their passions will actually last.

Right, Flyfunner has a point.

Anyway, yeah, Agent Batanga for “Miss Rata Sum”.

I’m about 93% sure it’s Patton Oswald. You can hear the similarity, and I found a page a few days ago where someone was talking about it, but it’s since been deleted/removed? I’ll wait for the official confirmation.

As for Mad King Thorn, he’s been properly credited and his voice actor is Fred Tatasciore.

Prince Rogers Nelson.7652:

Donut.6914:

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

Its a Forum based extension of Tarnished Coast’s Role Play environment.

Ah okay thanks for the clarification. I get it now, still not my thing though, I hate lawsuit cases.

As an attorney I must tell you, this is a mistake. Lawsuits are not the problem.

Lawyers are the problem. Hate US. Not the cases.

(No bro, we need love too.)

Tixx confirmed for Patton Oswalt, I did some digging around.

Holy kitten Dogsmack/ElenaDragon, you have some finely-tuned ears to have picked that up.

You’ve got to be kidding me…

Armors: It’s not “human male” armor — all armor sets look the same on all asura, all charr and male humans, sylvari and norn. Then, of course, asura have their three cultural armor sets as all races do, and they’re beautiful.

Weapons: The weapon scaling issue is not easy to solve. You just can’t have asuras walking around with norn-sized greatswords. If you wanted to have a giant weapon for everybody to look at, you should have rolled one of the other races. Alternatively, you can offset the problem somewhat by making your asura as tall as possible.

On top of that, consider the things that asuras have that the other races do not:

- Arguably the strongest/most fun beginning personal story arc.
- Consistently good voice acting. Seriously. It’s virtually unanimously agreed that asuras got all the good voice casting in this game.
- The fact that both Lost Shores and Wintersday primarily featured asura: Lost Shores introduced Dessa (who oversees the entire fractals dungeon), and Tixx is the MC for this year’s Wintersday. And uh, I guess the herald for Halloween was asuran too, if that counts.

I chose the Ventari and the Golem. The Golem makes a cute clicky noise and shuffles around periodically. I haven’t had Ventari out very much so I don’t know if he can do anything, but I wish he could talk.

I would also get a princess if I had the mats for it, but I don’t want it enough to spend gems on it.

I see I’m not the only law student on these forums…

I got a black lion salvage kit a few days ago.

They didn’t nerf it, it’s just everyone’s respective luck.

Zaxares.5419:

Fortunately my female Sylvari necromancer outsources all the hits to her minions, so while I do hear the noise occasionally, I think it cute more than annoying.

I seem to always be in agreement with you.

ObliviousFool.3427:

You are mistaken. The exotic crafting materials can only be received once even after the dungeons reach LA and that was confirmed by DEVs unless they see all this rage and change their mind. So you can only make 2 mini pets. The most hideous of maneuvers is by far taking 4 endless tonics, which BTW you have to sacrifice 4 of your frames allowing you to only make 1 mini pet now and not guaranteeing an account bound toymaker tonic. Unnecessarily wrong thing to do to people at christmas.

You would have a point if we knew how the rest of the event was going to play out. I think it’s at least possible that toypocalypse/other similar events will give out those exotic mats, we’ll have to wait and see.

I do see your point on the toy frames being consumed, though.

A definite “yes” to you getting the mystical cogs for the ones you haven’t played yet.

What I’m uncertain about is whether you’ll get more materials from repeating dungeons, basically, if there’s a “daily reset” so you can make all five toys. But I think it’s more likely you’ll have to get the mats some other way (i.e. toypocalpse).

I’m actually not following the OP’s complaint. You can make all of the toy minis, dude… If you missed a day, when Tixx gets to LA, you can play whichever dungeon(s) you missed. And, if I’m not mistaken, you can do them every day until the 3rd of January (once a day) to get the materials to make all five of the toys.

And like Dungin said, all of those christmas skins bought with ugly currency are very easy to obtain: you can go enjoy yourself in bell choir/snowballs/jumping puzzle/open presents on the overworld and get the currency to buy it yourself, or buy it from the TP for not very much at all.

Weapon skins and the town clothes are purely cosmetic and the playerbase asked for them. Gold prices are the lowest they’ve been for a while, so it’s easier than ever to buy gems if you can’t afford to put in money.

Possibly the only hiccup are those three RNG minis, and even they wouldn’t be problematic if they weren’t account bound. That is literally all that would have to be done to remedy the issue.

In other words, what are you even complaining about?

Dearest Tixx,

I would like:

- Mini Snaff and/or Mini Zojja
- A hero system similar to GW1, but modified to suit the conditions of GW2
- More cosmetic armors and town clothes
- More achievements with titles attached to them
- To fix all the little bugs and niggles with the classes
- Your sexy asuran butt

Lots of love,
Dinny

^ Love love love it.

Hmm doesn’t sound like a 100% match, but… it does sound really close.

I can’t believe you guys missed these:

- Asura personal storyline (Infinity Ball): You go to a place with a Megahedron Collider. There are asura outside protesting it, claiming that turning it on will destroy the world and to “think of the progeny”. Reference to the Large Hadron Collider and the controversy that surrounded it at first.

- Ben Tenstrikes is a reference to the Ben 10 series.

- Necromancers sometimes say “I choose you!”/“Return!”, which you should recognize as referencing Pokemon.

- Shaemoor Graveyard: “Kah Meena, His will be the sword that pierces the Mists.” Apparently the writers really like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

- Professor Gorr is named after Al Gore, and his introductory mission (A Bold New Theory) is a parody of An Inconvenient Truth.

Nah. Tixx isn’t evil, he’s just really… nonchalant. I mean, Toxx has acted up three times now, and he’s still not considering scrapping her.

Toxx is the ‘evil’ one, and it’s less evil and more misguided.

Rhysati.4932:

Dinny.5310:

Can I just step in for a second about the WvW issue?

It’s… meant to be “zergy”, guys. It’s supposed to be full-scale, almost military-like combat between competing servers. When was the last time you saw a battle/war scene in a film or described in a book where it was 1v1 or small groups against one another? I’m pretty willing to bet the answer is never.

Like, to you guys moaning about WvW… instead of rolling your faces on your keyboards and chanting “zerg zerg zerg zerg” repeatedly as though that’s a valid form of criticism (it isn’t)

Do you even know what zerg means?

Zerging originated in Starcraft. The tactic was to produce zerglings(a relatively useless unit) in mass scale and assault your enemy with nothing but sheer numbers. No skill was needed, no coordination required. Nothing but overwhelming numbers to crush anything in their path.

Zerging is not something you should be cheering for as a valid means of gameplay. Why? Because it isn’t rewarding for the players doing the zerging, nor is it rewarding for those getting zerged. You have one side that just washes over the other with no actual skill requirements. If you rush 100 people at 5 people, is that skirmish going to be any fun? No. It’s going to be like a bug just hit your windshield while you are driving down the freeway.

THAT’S why zerging is a terrible thing. If the gameplay was designed for that to be the end-goal, then wow…they really screwed things up. Designing the entire meat of the game around something that provides no fun to either side of the equation just doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.

I’m not sure you understood what I meant. The way you phrase it, it’s like one side has a huge number but the other doesn’t. And of course I know what zerg means and where it came from, I think anyone employing a particular term should be aware of it’s meaning.

WvW is designed to be large mass of people v large mass of people. ‘Zerg’ v ‘Zerg’, in a sense. I’m not defending the idea that one side steamrolls the other(s) with numbers alone, but that you have multiple sides clashing with large-scale groups. That does take some ability. I’m aware of the fact that sometimes one side (or even two) don’t have enough players to make one up every now and then and the other side(s) form one, take them out, and then later the side that gets steamrolled will form one and retaliate, but I don’t really know how to address that particular issue.

Edit: For clarity on the last point, I mean to say that it seems like a lot of the criticism leveled at WvWvW essentially comes from the fact that not all sides have adequate numbers at all times.

So, who are the voice actors? The IMDB page for Guild Wars 2 is pretty comprehensive, but it doesn’t include these VAs.

Need to find out whether the Toxx/Ellen McLain rumor is true, and need to figure out who’s behind Tixx’s voice. Every time he speaks it drives me insane because I swear I’ve heard that voice before, but I can’t put my finger on it.

I can weigh in on asura, but I don’t know about charr or the other subspecies.

Ears are probably the most important thing to asura. For male -> female, there’s a preference toward nicely shaped (whatever that is) ears, and size isn’t a huge concern. For female -> male, there’s a strong preference toward long/big ears: the bigger the better. Back in Guild Wars 1, there was Oggy, a male asura with tiny ears who couldn’t get any female attention as a result of it. The female asura he tries to pick up seem revolted by the tininess of his ears.

Also (I don’t know if this goes both ways), wide foreheads. In Old College Try (a canon piece of asuran lore), a female asura leans forward and traces her own forehead to (successfully) distract a male krewemate, quite reminiscent of a human female bending forward to show her cleavage.

Edit: I think there’s a preference toward females with moderate/small ears and that long ears are viewed as masculine.

Chris.7653:

Dinny.5310:

Can I just step in for a second about the WvW issue?

It’s… meant to be “zergy”, guys. It’s supposed to be full-scale, almost military-like combat between competing servers. When was the last time you saw a battle/war scene in a film or described in a book where it was 1v1 or small groups against one another? I’m pretty willing to bet the answer is never.

Like, to you guys moaning about WvW… instead of rolling your faces on your keyboards and chanting “zerg zerg zerg zerg” repeatedly as though that’s a valid form of criticism (it isn’t), why don’t you take the time to explain why that’s a bad thing and how you think it could be fixed, and what your actual expectations of WvW actually were?

I’m just really sick of people saying “WvW sucks because you need zergs!”. Wow, you need to have a substantial amount of participants on the battlefield in a scenario that requires you driving back large amounts of people and capturing areas, who would have kittening thought.

I’m not saying it doesn’t need work, but the criticism is being levelled incorrectly and it’s unhelpful. Sitting in an echo chamber of “zerg!” isn’t productive in anyw ay, shape or form.

A lot of threads have gone into great detail about what they would fix, how and why. Just because this one hasn’t does not mean they don’t exist.

I see. That’s too bad in a way, I really wanted to read something constructive, but I seem to have missed all of the threads on this topic that do provide comprehensive feedback. Maybe if I feel like digging back in this subforum someday.

I too love the “Get me home” idea. That’s brilliant.

I’m not too fussed about having to pay for teleports, because the actual live game area is smaller than GW1. I went back to play some GW1 today and holy carp, I would ragequit if that game didn’t have free teleporting. The amount of time it takes to walk from one place to another is significantly more than in GW2.

Having said that… I am warming to the idea that waypointing to the main towns should be free. I want to see the other cities with more life, not just LA.

Can I just step in for a second about the WvW issue?

It’s… meant to be “zergy”, guys. It’s supposed to be full-scale, almost military-like combat between competing servers. When was the last time you saw a battle/war scene in a film or described in a book where it was 1v1 or small groups against one another? I’m pretty willing to bet the answer is never.

Like, to you guys moaning about WvW… instead of rolling your faces on your keyboards and chanting “zerg zerg zerg zerg” repeatedly as though that’s a valid form of criticism (it isn’t), why don’t you take the time to explain why that’s a bad thing and how you think it could be fixed, and what your actual expectations of WvW actually were?

I’m just really sick of people saying “WvW sucks because you need zergs!”. Wow, you need to have a substantial amount of participants on the battlefield in a scenario that requires you driving back large amounts of people and capturing areas, who would have kittening thought.

I’m not saying it doesn’t need work, but the criticism is being levelled incorrectly and it’s unhelpful. Sitting in an echo chamber of “zerg!” isn’t productive in anyw ay, shape or form.