Guild Wars 2

Not in this game I couldn’t. I’ve got at least one 80 of each, and several each of my favorite professions. Most of them have RP stories to further differentiate them. If I’d had to stick with just my first one, the RP would have held up ok (he’s had the most story of any of them, though several have been tightly woven into guild plots) … but I’d have been miserable in the game play because he’s a Thief and far too squishy and low dps. (I do PvE 99.99% of the time).

Now, in ESO … I’m just approaching the first level cap on my main there after a year of play, since GW2 is my main game time sink. She’s a Dragonknight heavy armor archer and completely murders things. I have one of each other main class. None of them feel remotely comparable, and the game is designed much more to do it all on one alt, so yeah, I wouldn’t weep too much if I got locked to just her. Other than the Clothier crafting I’ve raised on my Sorceror, that is.

But in this game? I’m an altoholic and proud of it!

For those wondering if they are or are not subscribed, an email came out this evening with this header:

Stronghold PvP Public Beta: Play Stronghold April 14!

If you got that, you’re subscribed.

Dead and buried? It gets posts in it almost every day. A lot of repeat requests but occasionally someone comes up with a new idea.

If you mean the Suggestions forum, that wasn’t separate, it was one big mess, hence their moving suggestions to have people post in the appropriate subforum. If you mean the BLTC forum, yeah, it’s odd that went away. The gemstore suggestions thread was originally in BLTC.

I recommend googling something like “GW2 TP fee” to find the many threads that will answer this.

Short version: It’s a designed gold sink to keep the economy under control and has worked quite well through the game’s life span.

Bumping this just once now that it’s later in the day and people might just be logging in to see. It would be sad to have people asking on Tuesday, “So, when can I buy GW2 for ten bucks?”

Ahah, time to toss in my request for the Charleston as a dance once again! (And for couples Viennese waltzing, but I am cognizant of the programming issues involved in the latter).

Yes, please, more dances — preferably not ephemeral pop references — more animated emotes, more facial expression control, more more more!

For those who don’t care enough about PvP to read the whole announcement about the Stronghold beta this coming Tuesday, take heed! At the bottom it says:

“In addition, Guild Wars 2 will be 75% off from 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, April 10 until 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on April 13*. Guild Wars 2 PvP features an active, skill-based combat system; a progression system that rewards skill over stat grind; and a growing competitive scene. Pick up a copy and join the battle!

• Offer applies only to Digital Heroic Edition and Digital Deluxe Edition purchased through buy.guildwars2.com from 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time April 10, 2015 through 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time April 13, 2015."

Careful, Rose, you might get sacked.

(On topic … I’m just pleased the mini moose looks like the full size moose roaming the game. I would have bought the mini ram if it actually was one instead of some sort of deformed lamb. I like minis that could reasonably be animal pets — sure moose aren’t usually that small, but people have bred tiny ponies, so it can be done).

Go to your bank (or any crafting station) and click the Wardrobe tab at the bottom. Select the armor weight you want, as that narrows it down a bit. Scroll to the boots section. Right click each boots icon and select preview. If your pants are hiding the boots, either remove them or preview a much shorter set of pants that leave the lower legs bare. You can right click individual boxes on the preview panel to delete that item without redoing your whole preview (this is helpful when setting up dye previews; you may want to drop a preview of White Dye in, or if your fur is white, Amber Dye for contrast, so you can see the boots better. Keep in mind that some boots will look better with detail obscured, so you could also preview Shadow Abyss to see what that does to your foot appearance).

Some of the boots will be more like sandals, so the claws look properly exposed, depending on armor weight. Since it’s your personal aesthetic preference at stake, only you can determine which boot skin best suits you and blends best with the rest of your armor. That’s why I am suggesting you take the time to do the Wardrobe search yourself. Once you have a short list of skins you like, you can check the wiki for how to obtain them.

Good luck!

Oh don’t quote me on it! I just imagine that it is likely it will remain available. Given how suddenly various skins have left the store, it’s best to get them as soon as you can if you’ll be upset to miss them.

Outfits, though, do seem to have persisted quite well. You should be okay. I’m just not promising you will.

I didn’t plan it that way but my Ambrite short bow blends perfectly with my golden Balthazar armor.

Yep, you’re right! Hence me calling it a bit of a retcon. Sort of the same way people try to make sense of Star Trek physics that were written to serve episodic plots with no original intent to form a cohesive whole

I’m not saying it was planned that way all along, just that I can head-canon it more successfully that way.

I’ve a probably lame theory on this, based on:

-Sylvari are Mordremoth’s minions, with a deep if unwitting mental connection to the dragon.

-Sylvari names do tend to the Gaelic/Arthurian, and “Mor” is a prefix often used for Arthurian villains/dark sorts (Morgan, Mordred, the Morrigu, etc).

-The Priory and the Pact are riddled with Sylvari.

So, though this is a bit of a retcon, perhaps the reason everyone just suddenly knew the dragon’s name, and applied it to its minions, was that enough sylvari were around to feed in the “hey, this is so clearly the name, let’s use it” feeling.

Here are some of mine. It’s hard to do huge variation with the provided dye channels and saturations, so I left out the ones that are similar to these. Yes, I know a couple of my sylvari are eyesores, but they have … odd tastes in color.

Do you know about the UI toggle? It has a complex default keybind (ctrl-shift-h I think) but you can set it to any key you like. I use F11 to have it near PrintScreen. One quick tap, UI is all gone. Another, and it’s back.

As a bonus, you can even fight that way if you remember which hotkeys do what.

Use a makeover kit to look more like this (a friend’s norn, and she made him look very good imo).

Outfits in game:

Executioner (Halloween)
Shadow Assassin — in store
Crystal Nomad — in store
Noble Count — in store
Witch’s (Halloween)
Imperial — in store
Arctic Explorer (gone)
Ancestral — in store
Raiment of the Lich
Mad King’s (Halloween)
Arcane — in store
Jungle Explorer — in store
Balthazar — in store
Cook’s — in store
Ceremonial Plated — in store
Bloody Prince’s (Halloween)
Pirate Captain’s — in store
Hexed (Halloween, earned in game, not a gem store item)
Fancy Winter (Wintersday)

So it looks like of the non-seasonal-event ones, only the Arctic Explorer has vanished. Possibly it was Wintersday-specific.

This suggests that Balthazar will stay with us for quite a while (cook’s and pirate’s have been in since launch, for instance, albeit originally as town clothes).

No matter how fast they set the base speed, someone will always say it takes too long to run places. Some won’t be happy until they can click anything in line of sight, even across the whole map, and be there instantly.

I believe the speed is set where it is for game design reasons, making it not too sludgy to get places but also giving time to see the world. Not to mention it keeps our characters from looking like the Road Runner with pinwheels for legs.

The fourth dye slot is not bugged. They just didn’t put a fourth dye channel on the outfit. The four dye slots are universal across all outfits for the character (which makes me sad). That means that once you select the four dyes, you can cycle through all your outfits and those are the four dyes that will be applied. If you swap from Balth to another, you’ll see your fourth color again.

They have done a surprisingly good job of making the channels work well across outfits. I keep a Word file of each alt’s outfit dye scheme preferences and on many of them I don’t need to change a thing to have the outfit look good.

However, the Balthazar one does suffer from making the armor all one color block. I know they cannot (yet) give us particle effect dye options (again, sad, for the orange lava just does not match my guardian’s blue glowing weapons), but it might have been nice to have all the engraved lines in the metal be color-selectable, as an example.

That may be a hold over from the original version of outfits, Town Clothes. Those were a toggle-able mix and match spare set of clothing that could include a toy but no weapons, and did toggle back to combat gear if you took damage or went underwater. Jumping down just a bit too far in a city swapped you back to armor.

The change to outfits included a much requested feature, the ability to keep them on in combat, while removing the mix and match aspect and completely removing a number of garments such as the hoodie (it is now a tonic, dull brown undyeable, combined with jodhpurs and riding boots, ick).

The effect is actually there even without any extra items, the armor has a subtle heat shimmer with some molten sparks. The dyes and refractors just enhance it to greater visibility, and of course color change it.

I did see someone with the black refractor right after the outfit released and it looked quite impressive.

They were experimenting, they made some mistakes, the lack of retro-access being one of them. Hence their new approach in Season Two, and their hints of yet more refinement for HoT.

That said … MMO’s change. You can’t start playing WoW today and run around in pre-Cataclysm Azeroth or experience the sharks that never lost and chased you no matter how far inland you went. You can’t join Horizons (now Istaria or some such) and partake in the land rush across the community-built bridge to the new housing plots. I’m pretty sure LotRO had unique festivals; I remember getting white wicker chairs for my house from one and never seeing them available again.

Even in RL, you join people in the middle of their stories. If you become friends with a married couple, are you miffed that they won’t re-enact their wedding so you can attend?

It’ll be cool if ANet can find a way to restore some bits of Season One, and has the resources to allocate to it. Meanwhile, I hope you can chalk it up to “nothing’s perfect” and enjoy what is there without feeling cheated because some older things are gone.

Palador.2170:

And today, we got this: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/points-of-interest-episode-18-summary/

A recap summary of something that talks about stuff we’ve pretty much already heard about. Twice.

Woo. The hype train’s really rolling now. Better hold on with both hands, or you might almost be able to pretend you can feel it moving.

To be fair, I think they do try to recap the PoIs for those who missed them regardless of what other news they are/are not planning to provide.

They can’t do it, outfits are made in one piece. The whole reason they are is that they can’t mix with a lot of armor out there, not because of clipping, but because the “animation bones” are different by weight. You just wouldn’t get the effect you’re thinking of, you’d get a hot mess.

Same reasoning on not being able to mix armor weights via the wardrobe.

I am sad about it, but no amount of asking is going to get it done until Anet has the spare resources, and inclination to use those resources, on remaking every single piece of armor in the game in a new system.

Any time you type /(letter or word), you convert your chat to that channel even if you just hit enter instead of typing something to say in it. So,

/s (or /say) — White text, locally visible
/e (or /em) — Grey text, visible a bit further than white text (lets you type custom emotes to describe RP action)
/m (or /map) — Red text, zone wide. Instances in a zone (such as the home instance) count as their own zones for this.
/g (or /guild) — Gold-brown text, guild chat, world-wide.
/t (or /team) — I don’t know the color, I don’t WvW enough or sPvP at all. Reaches everyone on your side of the battle in the zone.
/d (I think? or /squad) — Yellow text, I don’t know if it lasts outside zones but you get it by joining a Commander’s squad, up to … 50 players? … that can communicate in a sub-group in an area

If I want to make sure not to accidentally spam map or whisper with hotkey commands (hey, it happens), I tend to hit /g-space-enter when I have a moment so anything I type after that goes to my guild. They’re most understanding.

I’m thinking of it as fuzzy, not blurry. I guess it helps that I’m very myopic so blurring of objects looks natural to me

Witch of Doom.5739:

Cool pic. Anyone got a shot of it dyed with Celestial? thx

Here you go (it’s in DR’s day lighting, so I include a preview window shot for you).

I’m wracking my brains to think what “heavy news” you mean. We didn’t get anything game related, and while some awful things have happened (and keep happening) in the world, I can’t see how any of them would delay normal business at ANet.

I like it fine. Here it is at night in DR on High settings.

Not only is it a good suggestion, it and variations of it have been made many times. The most recent dev commentary on it (I don’t recall if in interviews or on these forums) is that they agree it would be nice but it is not part of what they’re working on for HoT.

The mini is bought once, used by all alts, but you can individually select which mini which alt has and that choice persists until you change it for that alt.

For tradeable minis, you can use them all you like and then sell them later if you don’t put them in the wardrobe, but in that case you must move them from alt to alt via the bank.

Nice as that would be, I’d guess they want to space out gem store releases enough that people buy everything rather than cherrypick the “must have” and never get around to buying the other one.

rapthorne.7345:

Question: Anyone know what the bottom right dye channel does? doesn’t seem to change anything for me

It’s there since the same four dyes are universal to your outfits, but this one sadly is only a three-channel piece. Note that the horns have a design on their base that only shows up if you have contrasting light/dark between armor and horns.

I’m having fun picking dyes for it on each alt, though the orange glow is constraining me to less variation than I’d like. Except on those of my alts who don’t mind wild color clashes.

Uh, guys?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/balthazars-regalia-mini-moose-and-mini-red-panda-in-the-gem-store/

Rata Sum is far more convenient for fast crafting/TPing, as you can almost instantly WP to pick up TP goods then take a short jog back to the craft station. Plus the craft vendors are in reach of the craft machines.

It drives me crazy in DR how much careful fiddling I have to do to get the vendor and craft windows open at the same time. The NPC’s are just one step too far away so the window of one auto closes as you approach the other. I like to buy vendor mats only as needed for immediate crafting, so I need both windows open.

If ANet’s going to move NPCs around for convenience, the DR craft vendors are the ones in need of help!

I think the OP’s main complaint about the chests is that they just magically appear when a boss dies, even a mobile boss in the case of patrolling champions, and why would the monster be hauling a giant heavy chest around?

While I respect the wish for deeper immersion, I think this is a case where game play trumps realism. If the loot is too well integrated into the landscape, it will become easy to miss it. So events like the giant in the Kessex cave who opens up his landslide to let players open his chest after they help him evict trespassers in his home can retain their cool factor without becoming a standard. I’ve seen a lot of players just run off after the event ends, not knowing there is another reward coming (ok, it’s a small Kessex-level blue, but still!).

The thing is ANet has a history of giving everything a bit of a twist. Mesmer GS for a prime example, but none of the professions and their skills are what you might expect based on other MMO’s except in the broadest sense. Eg yes, a warrior is a heavy armor class using lots of weapons — but banners? How common are those in the genre?

So they could call something a “Priest” and have it be, I don’t know, a gibbering lunatic who chaotically shifts between aspects of various gods and wears scale mail with each scale bearing a different holy symbol.

Gibson.4036:

carabidus.6214:

I have used lesser known languages like Samoan and even Elvish for my character names. Works every time…

Kinda surprised at this, as I went through a ton of Elvish names at one point, and found that even some of the most obscure characters from the Silmarillion were taken.

The trick is not to use a name directly taken from Tolkien. When I was naming elves in other MMOs I went to an English-Tolkien Elvish dictionary, picked English words I wanted, and scanned the various Elvish words that matched to find ones easier to spell and pronounce. For instance I wanted “Sun” in my blood elf mage’s name. “Anar” or something like that was in the dictionary as meaning sun, so her last name became di Anar.

That works for more than Elvish. In making Arthurian sounding Sylvari names I’ve been successful by rapidly generating a lot of Arthurian names to get a feel for their sound and picking pieces of a few names to jam syllables together into something I find pleasing. For my Norn ranger and her pets, I went to an English-Old Norse dictionary, scanned for meanings, and tweaked into easier words for an English speaker to use since I wanted a good flavor to fit game lore more than total authenticity to a Terran language.

(Which all sparks me to wonder if the name “Mordremoth” was also a subtle clue to the Sylvari connection, as “Mor” is a syllable in Arthurian names that frequently goes to villains. And maybe we all suddenly knew the name because the Sylvari in the Priory were just sure that should be what it was … thanks to a deep connection in their subconscious).

It would be nice to have some festivals that are purely Tyrian, not necessarily based on Terran rites. A couple spring to mind when looking at the GW2 timeline in https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Timeline

- DR’s anniversary. They sneakily had the centennial five years before game launch, but why wouldn’t the last strong bastion of humanity’s hope celebrate each year it survives?

- Similarly, the Black Citadel, founded in 1112, might have victory celebrations. I know the Charr aren’t necessarily sentimental in the same way as humans, but we know from Meatoberfest that they like excuses to party.

- Norn moots. You hear a bit about them in the PS but get the impression they’re just a party. A moot is actually a gathering of households to discuss issues affecting everyone, to claim justice against each other … and yes, to party like there’s no tomorrow, with contests and bragging and markets full of trade goods.

There’s a complementary suggestion in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Overhaul-character-in-starterzone/first#post4954773

That one suggests letting us remake our look in the tutorial area for free. I know the OP here doesn’t want to redo after creation, but if the two suggestions were blended somehow we might end up with a great way to make sure a player is happy with their look before getting locked in.

The thing about the kits (and creation itself) is they don’t 100% reflect how you’ll look once animated in the game environment in various lightings. They do a good job, but for those who care about the smallest details in appearance they are just a little bit off. Oh, I’d love to see the kit options in creation, you get a much more detailed closeup than you can get in game (other than going Bobblehead, which provides the creation screen level of facial detail). But then I’d also like to get a final fix during the tutorial as per the other thread.

Restricting the in-creation access to kit contents so you must already have alts in game and/or a kit in your bank seems wise to me. I like the elegance of changing from kits to makeover charges as well, so long as the kit preview function isn’t lost.

This sounds great to me. Lighting can still be a problem in the tutorial for some races as mentioned above, but you’ll spot other problems like not liking your asura’s ear shape once you see it flopping around, or hair physics/clipping, or skin tone blending too much with the hair. GW2 does a superb job of having the in-game look match what you did in creation, though inevitably some nuances of color and shading are lost, but creation offers so much detail that losing just a bit of it can change the “feel” of a character once in the world.

And height, oh yes height. Creation gives you no clue at all how you’ll compare to others around you.

The single word names are harder but not impossible. I was making an Asura less than a year ago (well, some time after the feature patch last April), tried “Blekk,” taken, tossed on a syllable, and “Froblekk” is his name. With the same intonation as “Froderick” as spoken by Eye-gor in Young Frankenstein.

Phoenix, for future reference (eg HoT Revenants), make an entirely random character, just skip to end and take the name, hit Create. You can then delete them any time you want and when you do you have 24 hours to re-use the name. I did that at head start, got all five names I wanted including two single-name ones. Also pay heed to the forums and other news sources the day of launch. The base game told us midday they’d try to release 3 hours early — and they did! So it was midnight my time, not 3 am, when I got to spring into action.

If that happens again, be ready so you don’t saunter in three hours after a million names are taken

Slight addition: It’s not just the Human PS that goes to Zhaitan. Everyone’s PS starts with multiple paths (part one, racial; part two, choosing an Order and studying a subrace) but they all arrow down to the same story at the end.

I know there is a thread somewhere listing a ton of slang, but meanwhile:

Zerg — long standing term in online games for forming a large mob of units to overwhelm with numbers rather than tactics. Here, it’s a crowd of players avalanching over mobs or other players (if in WvW).

Berserk — this game has a stat set called “Berserker” which is aimed at dps without defense. Many feel it is the optimal stat set to use in almost every PvE situation.

Condi — yep, short for Condition, generally applied to someone built and traited to deal condition damage rather than direct damage.

Stats — don’t ask me! I don’t like playing with numbers, I go with a general “this is better than that, I’ll get more of it.” The wiki might give you the best in depth information.

Iason Evan.3806:

In the future I would hope that ArenaNet would see the folly of allowing the game’s currency to be tied to real currency.

I agree with most of your post. However, on this point, the reason they did it was to provide a legitimate, safe way to do the RMT. I’m sure that many people who might have bought gold from third parties did it through the gem store instead. Without this method, the gold sellers would have had far more leverage over impatient people’s wallets.

I’m opposite to you: I was leery when they announced it, due to my general distaste for buying gold, but have found it very well implemented.

I don’t think you can undo a TP transaction. You listed it for cheap, someone somewhere is incredibly happy at snagging that deal.

It could be that the PS revamp they’re making in a couple of months will aid in programming a replayable Season One. That’s pure speculation on my part. However, since one big problem has been they couldn’t give us old maps, and now they will be able to in the PS (old LA will be seen if you’re meeting DE or buying apples or saving Demi, woo!) that seems like one step towards providing Season One map content.

I agree it’s a problem, but it’s one more general to the PS tracker. That green star is in fact near an exit from the map. However, that is not your path to “Tracking the Master.” That is just your nearest path out of the city that will take you in the general direction of the LS.

Zoom out the map much further to find the LS step location, you will see that your next step is in Dry Top. If you waypoint into the zone (or walk in from Brisban), you will get more accurate guidance.

You might do better to list the JPs you need and see who can help with each. That way you aren’t asking someone to spend hours of their time on you.

None of my mesmers have 100% world completion (just my thief and guardian), and I can’t do all the JPs (curse you, Skipping Stones!), but I’m sure I could help with a good chunk of them. I don’t even ask for tips, I like being useful.

Bearhugger.4326:

I would love “Knight” for my warrior although that’s not very jungle-themed. I’m expecting “Barbarian” or something like that.

I hope they don’t name them or theme them all things to do with the jungle. That will make them less generally applicable in the rest of the game.

Otoh that might commit them to full new themed specs with every new land opened up … hmm …