Guild Wars 2

Just under 21 hours from now to the panel itself, 20.5 to the pre-show.

Having game lore contradict your fan lore is certainly one of the many pitfalls involved in declaring your character central to huge world-impacting events. Almost every RP etiquette guide made for any MMO will counsel against doing so.

Unless there are legal restrictions, I would imagine many people will be recording this for rebroadcast. ANet themselves should have a copy of it eventually posted, as they do with Points of Interest.

I’m still happy I get to watch it live as it unfolds though

A note for those that aren’t already struggling to make the start: There will be a “pre-show” starting 30 minutes earlier. I believe that will be on GW2’s Twitch, while the panel itself will be on PAX’s Twitch, at least as I interpret the announcements. I intend to have both channels open just to be safe

Anyway, if you can start watching 30 minutes earlier, you might want to.

I have one alt who is at level 70 in her PS but I don’t know if she’s done the Battle yet. If not I’d be glad to bring you along some time today (it is now noon my time, Eastern).

First, however, what level is your alt you are doing this on? With the changes, your PS may just not be unlocking due to your not being high enough level.

Have you read the responses in which people have told you the point? To wit, they have a big announcement, they expect to draw in new people, and they are making it easier for those new people to join the game.

It’s directly tied to the ballyhooed panel this Saturday morning, and is celebratory, not a desperate cash grab.

Yar, part of the whole forum reshuffling was to create that section, in readiness for when the next CDI takes off. Meanwhile it’s an archive of past discussions.

Not if you still have the outfit, or any piece of it. Visit the Black Lion Armor Trader (in any major city) with the outfit in inventory, or equipped in your old town clothes slot if you were wearing it before the patch. The Trader will convert it for you and it will unlock in your Outfits tab on your Hero Panel.

In fact, you might already have it unlocked. Take a peek at that tab.

We don’t even know 100% it is an expansion pack. Saturday morning is when they tell us a lot of stuff. No one will be able to answer you until the PAX panel is done.

Albadaran.1283:

Why the hassle? Only the light armor looks great. The heavy: well shiny, but there are other heavy chest armors which can replace this easily; the medium – just ugly.

Some people like to have complete sets. For me, this is an achievable in-game armor set and the game play to get it is fun. Also, I want the title you get for unlocking all Luminescent pieces, even if I may never equip them all. (Not a fan of any of the Carapace hats, even the heavy is not to my taste and it at least isn’t two pastries stuck to my cheekbones. But most of the Light Carapace female version is glorious).

I think a lot of this advice is for people that haven’t got the physical passes yet and need to pick them up at registration. But pass or no pass, the line to enter that hall will be forming asap, so you’ll want to be there early enough to get some choice of seating.

Also the passes, as I understand it, are to the convention as a whole. I’d be surprised if one hall has room for everyone, so the sooner you’re in line to get into the panel the better.

(I’m so psyched for my guildie who snagged a VIFF invite! She’s been beyond giddy).

When they made Season 1, they didn’t intend it to be replayable. They have a ton of work to do to convert it to something one can revisit. They’ve expressed interest in doing this, but I think they have other large things to work on first.

/smiles

Me, I like expecting the best out of people. It makes my world a happier place.

In early testing players were happier getting junk loot than no loot at all.

Me, I don’t mind it, thanks to the Sell Junk button. Plus if you’re not sure you’ve tagged an event enough to get credit for it, having any loot pop up tells you that you did get the tag, even if it’s junk loot. This can matter in the current daily event zerg!

All digital versions bought off this site will be 75% off, they just specifically listed the cheapest one to sound as low as possible. You get a few nice things with upgraded versions.

While this isn’t in-game, and thus is subject to not being canon, in last Friday’s Points of Interest the devs did say that not only were Sylvari dragon minions, but this had been planned well before Alpha, let alone launch. That they were nervous they were putting too many clues in the Sylvari starter Dream experience. The speculations and debunkings in the lore forums on this issue were mentioned. It was most clear from that whole discussion that yes, ‘varis are Mordremoth’s minions unless protected from him.

You do need to fully log in during the active time, as in load a zone of the game. That can be longer than two weeks; Chapter 7 lasted through Wintersday.

You can experience it all for free if you find someone who has it unlocked and is willing to run through it with you. You won’t have control over the dialogues or item interactions, and you won’t get achieves or rewards, but you’ll at least see the content.

Here, this suggests GW2’s stream will have it. At least their link goes to their own stream.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/this-weekend-guild-wars-2-at-pax-south-an-unprecedented-sale-and-double-xp-for-all/

The thing is you did an absolutely stunning job on a clear labor of love. Some knowledgeable sorts have pointed out some problems with specifics of your approach, with very constructive feedback, but you keep responding rather defensively and stating it’s just their opinion.

As Shriketalon strikingly said in LS-2 feedback, “be willing to kill your darlings.” Step back and objectively look at the commentary you’ve received. You might just see an even better approach than what you’ve done so far, using your current iteration as a strong base.

I’m pretty sure ANet employees have to have a very thick skin and be willing to see great gobs of their work redone or never used (apparently it took years for Glint’s Lair to get into GW1, and it happened because Colin nagged his boss on a regular basis to use the assets the artists had created).

The reason the CDI keeps getting brought up is that the CDI is when a large number of people said “YES!!!1 we want Guild Halls.” What you’re asking for has already happened.

So is the Twitch stream of the panel going to be on the PAX channel, not the GW2 one?

Thanks so much for the links, I am sure I will be referring to this Saturday morning.

I don’t know EU time zones, but if you are used to converting from Pacific time, the panel will begin at 8:30 am Pacific. That is 10.5 hours before daily reset (if reset is global).

I may have had sadder moments, but just now only two come to mind, one game-made, one player made.

In game, my first Order was Priory. I was wide eyed and bushy tailed, experiencing many things in the game for the first time. So what happened at the first Claw Island PS blindsided me and I got very choked up.

From players: A guildie’s character and mine had fallen in love and made a home together in LA. It wasn’t working so well and she ended up giving him the boot (oocly planned from the start, neither of us wanted to tie the other to the game because that screws the person left behind if one decides to move on to other games). Not too long thereafter, LA got nuked by Scarlet. And Donari’s beloved died of miasma inhalation. Yep, she permakilled her character so she could focus on RL things, but hoo boy did that make the LA burning feel real.

Really, all the tragedy surrounding LA’s loss had profound impact on many of my alts, so I’d have to say that is the saddest the game has made me.

Well, that’s cynical.

What’s going on is they have been experimenting with content delivery, and some mistakes have been made. Season 1 was designed to be a living evolving world, where if you missed it too bad, just like people born after 1969 didn’t have a chance to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon (I was 4 years old, and I saw it, and it’s one of my earliest memories. Younger people have to watch recordings).

Season 2 fixed a number of mistakes (and made more, because experimentation will not always pan out to perfection), by making the events permanent but needing an unlock to participate. The unlock is free if you log in during the event, or 200 gems thereafter. Once unlocked your whole account has it available forever for all alts forever, even ones made later. This is their current method of having the story phased as you suggest. They are likely to refine it further in Season 3.

If you don’t want to pay a couple of bucks per episode, you can buy gems with gold in game. No, I don’t find that feasible myself as real cash is far easier for me to accrue than game gold, but those more adept at gold generation have posted it doesn’t take much game play at all to make enough gold for 200 gems.

I always enjoy reading your analyses and proposals. Hopefully the writers take this in the loving spirit of constructive feedback in which it is offered, because you have a lot of excellent insight.

Reminder, having a CDI on a topic guarantees nothing. That is laid out at the beginning. It is merely a dev/community brainstorm.

However, as the community requested that the devs pick the topic rather than randomly choosing something that might not be even remotely under consideration, it does seem at least possible that guild halls are something they have an active interest in working on and were willing to use their time discussing.

Let’s just see what all they talk about for an hour and a half Saturday morning

I’m holding off on suggestions until we get that panel. A lot of things might be answered. (Or might not, but we won’t know ‘til it’s over, hey?).

Yeah, I’ve watched a bunch of POI’s on Twitch without being a member, also ESO Live. On the latter it’s a little sad for me since they do giveaways to people that type things in chat, but I really don’t want to sign up.

Just google for GW2 Twitch and you’ll find their page. I like to open it in its own window so I can do other things while watching. You can full-screen it, and keep the chat visible or hidden as you prefer.

Type /age. You will get hours played over a number of days, for the current alt and overall. Then you have to do a little bit of math (for instance I’ve played Donari for 879 days now; he was created Aug 25, 2012, but if I didn’t know that I’d have to calculate what day was 879 days ago).

I keep a Word document with my alt creation dates. When I set that up I was off by a day or two on some of them. However, the day I got their birthday gifts narrowed down the date quite nicely.

I think the opponents to this idea have stated a lot of good reasons to oppose it, and I sign on with those good reasons. The idea that you can just “not die” in order to avoid the penalty is absurd.

An empiric example: In my last Vinewrath fight I was on north lane. I’ve got all my boxes and achieves in that fight and am tired of loot, so I’m doing the fight for fun and I go to whatever lane calls for extra people at the start. I noted that our carrier was in trouble down by the ammo dump and hopped down to help out. A swarm of Mordrem roflstomped me just as our lane opened to the champ. I was well down slope from everyone else. Had a couple of very nice people not run down to rez me I’d never have made it to the fight from the nearest WP in time to help out; being forced to that WP would have been bitter indeed.

Instead they got me up and we all charged up the lane and I added my dps and rezzing of downed people to help take the champ out and win the event for everyone in all lanes.

That fight is not designed to let people run back in time to participate. Kicking people when they’re down will not make them inclined to help afterwards, and you’ll get a nice empty fight with no one dying because no one started fighting in the first place. Enjoy your Vinewrath fight with a handful of friends, please do.

Note: I almost never fully die at Vinewrath. I think that may have been the first time, in fact. When I see someone down or dead, I take a moment to help them if it won’t just also kill me.

I like that it looks good on every race. I saw Hamfast’s complaint that it’s unisex on charr and asura — but it’s unisex on everyone.

The tail clipping is much less egregious than usual imo. The leather flanges out over the tail base, so female tail fringe at the base does clip into the skirt but it’s not nearly as obvious an issue as with most armor. The hood makes up for any clipping by leaving the horns intact and lying nicely along the spine instead of sticking out in the air as it does on the other races.

Some of my guildies and I giddily alt hopped as we dyed the outfit on our alts and showed the results to each other last night. I do find the texturing on the skirt and leather inhibits the use of some dyes as they come out looking coarse and smudgy, though I don’t think this is supposed to be a ball gown so s’all good.

Here are some of the color combos I came up with, not all of which will “stick” but I do have them noted in a Word file for those inevitable times the dye selection gets undone by the glitch:

(forum bug? I seem to have posted a blank box)

For fluid combat systems I’d suggest taking inspiration from Flashing Blades (available in PDF format now). Here is a review http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/06/retrospective-flashing-blades.html

I played it in college while I was doing a lot of fencing and this is the only tabletop system I’ve ever found that really felt like rapid swordplay with reactive parries. I’d also suggest Runequest 3 for spell casting inspiration, though I don’t recall details of that so well. I do remember that spells were malleable. You had daily mana and you could tweak a base spell’s parameters on the fly each time you cast it, so you’d have a core fire spell that you could make into fireballs, walls of flame, pretty dancing images in a cookfire, etc. Flexibility of application is much more fun to me than rigidly defined limits.

Yes, I’d be keen on a tabletop GW2. If. If it has emphasis on story over mechanics. If it allows one to immerse without having to look up a million tables. If it is true to the lore while encouraging creativity. Though really, I can (and do) just RP in GW2 itself; my only tabletop group just now is running an Exalted campaign that I attend for the social aspect, not for the game (I have never liked playing super godlike power).

It depends on the alt. My general scheme:

Backpack kept empty, so I can spot new items quickly and not accidentally sell/salvage something I want to keep. As many spaces below that clear as I can.

Somewhere in the top few bags, left side, a row of weapons to swap to at need. I keep a full selection of the profession’s weapons, though not necessarily exotic or transmuted on weapons I seldom equip. Also near the top, right side, salvage kits. Somewhere in that area I put consumables.

Below that I keep toys and alternate armors for costuming. Donari has the most combat-ready gear, the same statted exotics skinned to different looks. I have to clutter my bags with that because I won’t spend charges changing looks on an hour to hour basis but he’s a noble clothes-horse and won’t always be in the same thing. Jin has way more, however, keeping a sample of most every Light armor there is in quickly wearable form, sorted by armor slot and skimpiness to full coverage. No, I can’t actually PvE with her, she has something like 12 open slots if that I thought the Wardrobe was going to save me all that space. Alas.

At the bottom I keep an invisible bag for unique items I cannot replace. When I need to protect something from Deposit Materials (e.g. the venom sac I had to infuse in SW for the Luminescent collection) I slip it in there.

I am going to state the obvious, but if it saves just one person from being very unhappy on Saturday, it is obviousness well stated.

Do not expect to enter the convention quickly. Large cons tend to have long lines at registration. If you arrive 15 minutes before the panel begins planning to just pick up your day pass and waltz on in to find a seat, you’ll end up missing out.

I don’t know how PAX runs these things, but if there is any feasible way to collect your day pass the night before so you can walk right in Saturday morning, you’ll want to do that. Otherwise try to be there as early as you can.

I believe the issue according to the OP is when the chest zerg forms in a map that has been working to completion and is midway there, runs through the map’s events scaling them up, and then doesn’t help fight the scaled up mobs.

Imo chest farms should form at the start of a map, or in the interlude between Vinewraith and new Pact preparations. If an event-completer finds a chest farming map, s/he should LFG to find an events one (that’s what I do), but chest farmers should likewise take note of the tone of the map they’ve joined and hop elsewhere if things are cooking along towards Breach.

Oh, out of context comments about the organs have been all sorts of hilarious!

We’ll find out in another week or so if we get precision extractors, I suppose.

I must say that having played since beta, this thread is the first I realized the numbers were cumulative, not increasing per hit. Now, I don’t actually pay attention to my damage numbers much (I have no idea how one of my guildies can keep talking about his crit amounts in a dungeon run, I’m too busy fighting to see numbers, also I’m not a min-maxer and I don’t really care for numeric details).

I’ve played MMOs for many years (DaoC, Horizons, WoW, AoC, LotRO, Rift, Aion, to name a few). And I had no idea this was how damage readouts were structured. So yes, I believe it could be quite confusing to new players as well.

Here is another string that gets filtered: “and” then “am” then “not.”

Being creative is not a waste of time! Not only does this look quite cool (though I felt a little blasted by image overload ankitten ot sure how this would feel in actual game play), but it gave the OP a chance to practice skills.

Thanks for sharing and I hope that ANet takes strong note of your effort.

Almost never! I think the Spinal Blade backpacks can’t be upgraded if you change their looks. At least their tooltip warns of that.

The basic game mechanics are the same. Town clothes are gone, replaced by outfits and tonics. Traits are now a real pain to unlock. Many QoL changes have come in such as the Wardrobe, account wide dyes, mini previews, and Hero Panel/TP UI alterations. Tequatl got a revamp to be a much bigger fight, and a similar zone-wide fight got added in Bloodtide (I think … seriously I have just forgotten what zone Wurm is in). You can scan through the Gem Store to see some new items like infinite tools. In your Friends panel there is an LFG tab you can use to find groups doing content (be warned there are some community-developed etiquette rules, and the easy groups fill too fast so you will mostly see only the really picky group makers who want you to be perfect by their definition).

In story, there was a year of Scarlet attacking the world. She nuked LA and woke up an Elder Dragon. That all is not replayable as of yet. More recent Living Story can be played whenever you like but you must pay 200 gems per chapter if you never logged in during the active time of that chapter.

Black Lion Chests from the Gem Store can contain ticket scraps or full tickets, it takes 10 scraps to make a full ticket. The weapon trader in the city BLs sells skin sets at a ticket per skin for current items, 5 tickets for older ones, and the skins can be traded so you can get them for gold on the TP.

Dungeons: TA got a new path and lost an old one.

WvW: I have no idea, I don’t do it, or SPvP.

I hope that gets you started.

In the meantime there is a setting in Win7 Control Panel to make a white circle appear around your cursor when you hit CTRL. That’s helped me out quite a bit since someone mentioned it in these forums.

Since I mouse move, it’s often startling to realize my cursor has gotten off to one corner or another of the screen.

I don’t know if they have. It was mostly discussion of how they came to design certain story elements (like, Glint’s Lair in GW1 happened because some artists made it and Colin bugged his boss a long time until it got added and Glint’s baby etc all came from that). Also they confirmed that Sylvari being (what they turn out to be, and it’s a spoiler if you haven’t done Chapter was a decision well before alpha as they set down the lore of the GW2 era. They discussed the need to synergize various game story elements better, so you don’t have the PS and the LS and the dungeons and open world all feeling like discreet units of story, and said Silverwastes is an attempt at that.

Colin made an interesting comment that Ogden is the only dwarf we know of … Twitch chat was full of “dwarf playable race confirmed!” (lol).

They hyped up PAX and their panel a bit, and gave away a day-pass to someone. Or said they would, I left when they started PvP 101, but I assume the giveaway occurred.

I really think ANet needs to remove all links on their site to the DirectSong fiasco, unless they have a legal obligation to keep them. Of course Soule should still be fully credited as the composer, but ANet should in no way facilitate more players getting ripped off.

I can’t say I don’t like it as I’ve never tried it beyond a short spectator mode join that confused and dizzied me thanks to camera motion I could not control.

It certainly looked fun in the pre-launch videos. On launch weekend my guildies and I decided to try it out, but the NPC that got you in was broken and no one could do it. (We did not know at the time that you could not join as a group anyway). Then I got caught up in many other things and by the time I vaguely considered seeing if ANet’s version of PvP would be more fun for me than in other games (I absolutely hate the feeling that other people are gunning for me, by the way, it’s constant paranoid adrenaline stress that unsettles and frazzles me in short order, and I am usually an easy PK in any PvP scenario), well, I’d found out I could only do it with strangers and I gave up.

Now apparently there is a way to team up. My guildies have been going in, coordinating on Mumble, and doing dailies in it. It’s possible they’ll talk me into giving it a go. Yet somehow I think my life can be complete without PvP. I’m with Xander and LadyRhonwyn in my lack of interest in competitive min-maxing.

Shouts are one type of utility skill (utilities come in categories). As you get traits, some of them affect particular categories of utility. For instance, my support guardian is traited to remove her group’s conditions when she shouts, so having 3 defensive shouts gives her that much more support value.

Hmm, maybe I’ll chime in after all. I would adore it if there’s a pass taken over all the NPC dialogues in the world to update them to reflect new things. And if the sylvari NPC vendors get replaced, such as the merchant by the DR bank … it’s hard to believe they’ll get to stay there cheerfully selling salvage kits if there’s a pogrom.

I’m hoping for massive new maps, ideally new stuff matching the scope of the map at release. And for local issues having effects in the world, more politics and such, instead of having the cities and towns frozen in time. More “living” in this living world!

In no particular order:

The Machine. Seeing that cinematic without any warning or spoilers was epic.

Fighting the Shadow of the Dragon in The Grove. I don’t think I’ve been so invested in any other fight in this game, or so grit-toothed determined to persevere despite ending up naked.

The hidden library and Glint’s Lair. They were drop dead gorgeous and had so much attention to detail.

All the new mechanics to advance sections — Suspicion in the DR party, orange ground fields to warn of bad spots, Canach’s bombs, Caithe’s stealth, the Lair reset motes, etc. Also a lot of the dialogue, especially Canach/Anise.

The cinematics in Point of No Return. The reveals, the tragedies, they had me on the edge of my seat, gasping and cheering and going nooooooo!

Don’t forget to escort the pack bulls to the forts. They bring supplies that upgrade the defenses, and few things are more fun than raining arrows from an arrowcart onto a distant clump of Mordrem and watching them crumple. Not to mention if there is a rebuild-walls event, you get credit for using the siege weapons to suppress the Mordrem harassing the supply officer and rubble gatherers. (Now I’ll never get a chance at using the siege during the rubble event, oh well )

It doesn’t take many to hold a fortress, since the events scale. I’ve successfully defended Amber with just two other people. The problem is when a lot of people arrive, tag the event, and leave. After that the number of mordrem is overwhelming.

It’s all connected. The champions are the mobile parts that can actually go out and hurt people, under the Vinewrath’s direction. Cut them down and the flower’s impotent.