When will you realize that x times 300%, 400%, 500% or whatever is meaningless without knowing what the x is?
Or whether x gets adjusted relative to cap. Let’s say, for instance, that anet would, in fact increase MF luck cap from 300 to 500%. If at the same time they were to cut down adjust drop rate by 1/3, the max chance from MF would remain unchanged. And you can bet that the drop chances are being set with average mf values (for both the general community and the active farmers) in mind.
So nerf loot for all normal players to account for the few who have bumrushed the luck cap. Sure, sounds like a great idea </sarcasm>
I’d like to think Anet wouldn’t do something like that, but…
The issue is less with the scaling from dead players (even though its usually what people complain about in-game) and more about the time spent on the rez by the players who are still alive. Rezzing fully dead players takes a long time, doubly so if you’re in combat, which if you’re fighting a boss, you almost certainly are.
In terms of the VW events in particular (as well as the breach), time is of the essence, so having 3 players waste 5-10 seconds of their own DPS to rez someone hurts the damage output of the whole group.
And sure, 3 players rezzing one dead person isn’t the end of the world in the grand scheme of things if you have 15-30 players in the group fighting the boss, but then you consider that there are usually multiple people who die during these events, so that gets multiplied for each one who dies.
Then you have the fact that rezzing someone can often put those people in danger of dying themselves, which can lead to a snowball effect where half the group is either wiped out or attempting to rez others (whether they be dead players or those who get downed trying to rez said dead players).
There’s also the fact that while rezzing dead players usually isn’t worth it, rezzing downed players certainly is. But completely dead players sticking around not waypointing makes it harder to rez the downed if they’re all clustered together. Many times I’ll go to rez someone that’s downed only to have my character start the process of reviving someone who’s fully dead nearby instead, at which point I have to move to cancel the revive channel, manually target the downed player (not always easy in a combat situation with the targeting in this game) and start rezzing them instead.
Sounds like a waste of development time to me. Create 9 new weapon types and only let a very specific group of people use each one. Would probably end up shortchanging each weapon type with only a small number of skins to make it less work.
And aside from that, I see no real reason for each profession to have a unique weapon type anyway. They all have unique skills for each weapon, that seems like enough to set them apart to me. Actually having completely unique weapons just seems like overkill and unnecessary bloat.
I don’t see how this is such a huge problem. Its not like you’re getting kicked from a dungeon group after doing most of the dungeon or being scammed out of tons of gold or whatever. You’re wasting a minute (at worst) joining an instance, after which I assume you go right back on LFG and look for another one that’s hopefully telling the truth. I have never stumbled upon one that lied about the SW percentage, so I assume they’re relatively rare.
I mean, I’m not saying I support people who do this. Its still scummy, for certain. But I hardly think its something so horrible that its report-worthy, even if Anet could somehow verify they were lying (which according to multiple people in this thread they can’t).
I think it’d be better if HoT unlocked a new set of faces and hairstyles while the old ones remained makeover kit only. The way people who have already used makeover kits to get some of the new hairstyles would actually have something to look forward to with HoT.
They certainly don’t make me sick, but they do hurt my eyes a bit if I look at them for a while from certain angles. So I guess I can see how they might bother some people even more.
That said, they only do the “pulse effect” which I assume its what causes the problem when they’re drawn (not when sheathed) so it wouldn’t really be anything to worry about from people just standing around. They’d also likely be much further away, which would lessen the effect I imagine.
Plus, since they require so many AP its unlikely that they will ever become particularly widespread.
I’m not really sure these weapons are “finished” anyway, honestly. There are a few oddities with them, like the fact that the torch gives off no light source and has no flame or anything else making it resemble a torch (it looks nearly identical to the scepter at this point), the pistol’s grip moves around in odd ways (bends and stretches) and the warhorn pulses its colors when sheathed. So maybe they will go and do a pass over them and touch them up a bit when it gets to the point when anyone will actually be getting them. Maybe they’ll alter the effect a bit while they’re at it and make it less straining.
Does your Ranger have a high condition damage stat?
I believe pet tooltips were using the Ranger’s stats to determine what damage values they listed in some cases (condition damage possibly being one of them), even though the pet is a separate entity and doesn’t actually use the Ranger’s stats for anything at all.
I don’t think lower level wood / ore is necessary, since even a level 80 character can always go back to a lower level zone and harvest those to their hearts’ content no less effectively than a lower level character. Some people don’t want to do that, which is why the prices of the lower level stuff tends to be higher, but its always a viable option.
Cloth and leather, though… yah. Since a fair portion of those come from salvaging light and medium armors and characters who are 80 generally get very few of those even in lower level zones (usually you get level 80 stuff with an occasional “zone appropriate” leveled item) I would definitely like to see more ways for high level characters to reliably get those types of material.
With the advent of GS Necro’s being a “thing” I NEED the Zodiac Greatsword. So I’d certainly be all in favor of them making a return.
There are 2 different lobber-related achievements. One for killing 4 of them before the first gate is breached, and one for not getting hit by a single rock during the entire instance.
Dodger is the latter one. There are lobbers at both gates as well as scattered around during other parts of the fight, so what you want to do there is basically just avoid every large AoE circle during the entire instance. Large AoE circles = rocks, and getting hit by one will kill the achievement.
I’d recommend sticking to ranged weapons, as the rocks tend to hit specific areas and going ranged lets you move around more freely. Also, during the gate portions, I’d just hang back way inside the gate and only snipe the few mordrem that come inside. It’ll be a bit slower that way, but much safer. You don’t need to kill any Lobbers to get the dodging achievement, so don’t bother doing anything too risky or aggressive.
The easiest part to lose the Dodger achieve, IMO, is at the very end when you get the torch. If you make a beeline directly for the signal fire, there’s a rock that falls basically right in your way. You want to keep closer to the wall and keep your dodge roll ready just in case.
Well, considering this thread…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Pax-presentation-jungle-music
I think its safe to say we’re getting some new music.
Are new specialisations all Maguuma-themed?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Electro.4173
Druid certainly is, as you said. They basically even said as much when they introduced it, saying something along the lines of “the jungle has a rich Druidic history”. But the others we’ve seen so far are Engineer with a hammer and little hovering drones and Mesmer with a shield and what appears to be time based abilities (at least the ability itself creates a clock). And neither of those seem to have anything to do with anything we’ve seen of the expansion. We’ve also heard about Necromancers getting Greatsword, but beyond that and Marjory we haven’t seen or heard much about that, so guesses as to what the theme of that weapon would even be aren’t even really possible.
Its still completely possible they’ll all tie in and we just haven’t seen anything of the tie-in yet. I suppose maybe the Mursaat could be related to the time magic and maybe there’s some crazy inventor in the jungle that’s going to teach us to make drones, who knows. I do hope that the process of learning specializations has some sort of story behind it and we don’t just do some random skill challenge and suddenly specialization out of nowhere.
But its also possible that they chose Druid specifically because it tied in to the theme of Heart of Thorns, and the rest won’t do so.
If it makes you feel any better, Rage is a pretty cheap precursor (as are all the underwater ones), so its not like you would have become super rich from selling it or anything. Still sucks, but its not like you did it with a Dusk or something.
Also, for future reference, you don’t need to account-bind weapons to get the skin, any time you salvage a weapon or armor you get the skin unlocked automatically. Not to say that it would have had any affect on your situation, but it save a bit of clicking if you just want to salvage and get the skin anyway.
I can’t really think of anything quite as bad as yours, but early on in the game I had a White Dye pop out of an Unidentified Dye and without even thinking about it I immediately used it. A few days later when I was browsing the TP for dyes and saw that White was going for something like 15g I was facepalmed pretty hard. I’ve never even actually used it and most likely never will because I find white / celestial horribly overused and I prefer bright colors over whites and blacks anyway, but it’ll forever be there in my color palette taunting me.
Well, OK, I guess I’ve used it a few times around Christmas or Halloween, when I sometimes dye my characters like candy corn or candy canes. But I’ll never use it “permanently” and I could just as easily get by with and “off white” for those situations.
I’m assuming we’ll know all the specializations and what they do (roughly, anyway) by the time HoT releases, so the first thing I’ll be doing is grabbing whichever of my 6 characters I want to spec first and jumping headfirst into the Maguuma Jungle.
Its an OK skin, but I’m not really all that into the dark, skull-adorned skins in general. And it wouldn’t fit the themes of any of my sword users (Mesmer = flashy particle effects, Ranger = nature vs technology, Guardian = crystals).
The devs have said before that they would much rather design armor assets which can apply to all players and not just small groups of them in direct response to requests for more cultural armor, so I don’t have much hope for more cultural armors (nor profession armors). Much as I’d like to see another cultural set at some point, since they tend to look best on the non-human races since they’re actually built for those body types.
I suppose cultural themed armors that are still wearable by all races would work OK, but aside from maybe Sylvari and the obvious plant theme, I’m not even sure if most of the races have enough of a “theme” to create a universal armor set like that. And I’m sure there are armors in the game that you could already apply towards racial themes.
Its been a pretty long time since we last got any hairstyles or faces. Much longer than we’ve ever gone before if I’m not mistaken, at least since they started releasing new ones at all. I would have thought maybe it was because the character artists were hard at work at making stuff for a new race, but since we now know that’s not the case, I suppose maybe it is possible they’re just saving a big batch of them for the expansion.
I have seen people mention that a handful of new ones have been data mined, but I have yet to see them myself (I typically don’t watch that sort of thing too closely) so I can’t really verify that for certain.
I’ve also seen one or two mentions that there are actually NPCs in-game with new hairstyles, which we have seen happen occasionally before a new batch of hairs get released (I remember after Scarlet’s attack on LA one of the refugee coordinators, a Charr, had the bushy lion mane hairstyle long before we players got it) but I have yet to find anything like that either, and the people who mentioned it were to vague for me to track the possible NPCs down. I believe it was someone in the Silverwastes and someone in the Grove, though for the latter there have always been Sylvari with unique hairstyles in the grove, and I’m not so sure those hairstyles aren’t actually hats / helmets, namely the branch ones.
Regardless of whether its with the expansion or just as a normal gem store update, I do hope we get some new hair and faces sometime soon. We’ve gotten 2 new sets of colors somewhat recently, so I’m not really al that interested in that personally.
There is no indication that gold will be able to buy it. It’s most likely real world cash.
I thought i had seen somewhere that it was confirmed to be in the gemstore as a purchase, might be imagining things though
They confirmed there will be a digital release as well as a physical one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be in the gem store. And I’d wager it won’t, since a big purpose for expansions (especially to free-to-play games) is to get a revenue boost for the company, and putting it in the gem store would be in opposition to that.
Leave the first spot of your 2nd weapon switch “blank” (so only equip your pistol in your 2nd slot) and you’ll use your primary mainhand for both sets.
I assume the only enemies you’ll “need” masteries for will be in the Jungle. And if you’re in the jungle doing content (which is the only way you’ll need to kill those enemies), you’re already “grinding” in the jungle. So I don’t really think “grinding an area you don’t want to be” will be a problem.
And who knows exactly how drastic “need” in that context is. Maybe it’ll just be very difficult but possible, or maybe you can do it in a group without the mastery but getting the mastery allows you a smaller group or even solo.
I’ll be jumping into HoT with one of my existing 80’s when the expansion hits and starting my Revenant a bit later, while leveling normally.
The exploration masteries seem like they’re almost going to be required to access a lot of things in HoT (I’m sure the core story might not require it, but if you want to actually explore the areas, then…), and since I’ll probably be jumping headfirst into HoT exploration I’ll probably go for that first, at least until I can get the basic hang glider ability and maybe the basic mushroom jump.
Lore ones also sound pretty interesting. I love me some bonus unlocks, especially since I think somewhere (maybe the IGN article?) it mentioned unlocks for weapons and armor.
Legendaries will probably be the last thing I bother with. Right now, there isn’t a single legendary that’s cool enough to entice me into putting in all the work to get it (namely map completion since I don’t do WvW), and I kind of doubt there will be one introduced in HoT either. Not that all the legendaries are horrible or anything, there are a few I like, but I have to really, really, REALLY love it to put in all that work. I couldn’t care less about the “prestige” of having a legend, only how nice the skin is.
Well, OK, I don’t do Fractals at all so I suppose that would be the last thing I’d bother with.
It’ll also depend on which Masteries tie to which Areas, though. Right now, its sounding like the only things which apply to the “original” GW2 content would be Legendaries or Fractals (MAYBE combat), and if that’s the case then I guess I’ll be working towards Legendaries just by process of elimination when I’m not in the Jungle.
I couldn’t care less about the time gate, I think its fine to have something to work towards long-term, but the ridiculous costs are the reason I don’t have a single character with a single piece of ascended gear (beyond trinkets and such that you can buy, anyway).
Every single one of my characters has at least 2 sets of armor and usually 2-3+ of each weapon type (meaning my Guardian has 3 Scepters, 2 Staffs, 2 GS’s, ect). Because I’m a skin / aesthetics hog and I like to have multiple weapons and armor sets using different skins that I can swap between. Multiple sets so that I don’t have to constantly waste transmute charges, of course. No way in heck am I pulling in the amount of gold needed to replace all that exotic gear with ascended, and if I were to just have 1 ascended weapon per type or 1 ascended armor set then I’d feel pressured to always use that one over the others (not to mention even if I did just do 1, I have 6 characters so it would STILL be pretty insane cost-wise).
Thankfully, I don’t do fractals or WvW, which are really the only places ascended matters (arguably not even WvW except maybe in roaming / duels), so… yah. I’ll just stick to my exotics.
2424hours, 0 precursors.
Then again, I never have and never will gamble in the forge (I know I have crap luck, I’m not about to gamble) so I suppose I’m not helping my chances any there.
I love that I just happened to see this thread now, when my total playtime was a nice number like that. Its funny, because when I list things on the TP that’s the sort of number I usually place my orders for (I’ll do, for example, 5g 5s 5c, or 24g24s24c). Maybe its a sign that my first precursor drop will be soon? LOLyeahright.
I’m calling it now, my first precursor will be an underwater precursor drop that will happen right after prices tank even beyond how low underwater weaps already are thanks to the expansion and precursor hunts.
I’m not 100% sure as I never bought an outfit prior to the wardrobe changes, but I believe you need to talk to the Black Lion Armor Trader on whichever character you had the outfit equipped on to get it converted, since it used to be town clothes. The Armor Trader basically takes your old (now defunct) town clothes and converts them into usable stuff, either wardrobe items or tonics.
You can find them in every city, usually right near the Black Lion Trading Post NPCs.
I seriously doubt that any profession will completely lose their profession mechanic. The things are ingrained into almost every aspect of the classes, from weapon skills to utilities to traits. That applies to some professions more than others (Elementalist, for instance, is pretty much 100% built around attunement swapping, where Engineer could probably get by without toolbelt skills to an extent), but it applies to some degree to every single one. Completely changing them would be a massive overhaul to every profession requiring a ton of work, and perhaps more importantly a ton of balancing.
Plus, I just don’t think it would really fit the description they’ve given of specializations, where they say its like a secondary class / sub class. If you entirely change something as huge as the profession mechanic, then its more like a completely new class altogether, not a secondary.
Could they alter the specific functionality of the mechanics? Absolutely. And that would be my guess of what they are going to do. It could be as simple as Necromancer getting a different set of Death Shroud skills for an otherwise identical Death Shroud, or it could be something more drastic like Death Shroud’s “second life bar” being ditched in place of some sort of power boost to your normal weapon skills and defense / healing.
But the base mechanics of each profession, Necromancer gaining and using Life Force, Rangers using pets, Mesmers using illusions, Elementalist attunements… I really don’t forsee them going anywhere.
That is not climbing, it clearly says, that “Mushroom Jumping” will be one of the masteries, that we will most likely find under Exploration Masteries
Its not literal climbing, no, but it serves the same purpose of getting you from one level of an area to another beyond your normal jumping ability.
The system certainly has positives, as you pointed out.
However, it also has negatives. Its much easier for people to AFK while getting event credit and full rewards, for example. It also encourages people to “tag and run”, because if you’re looking to maximize loot there’s really no reason to stick around for the whole event once you hit enough enemies to get Gold, when you could be going and tagging other events. Which can lead to problems if you’re fighting to defend a fort and half the defenders leave after killing a few enemies, leaving the rest to get overwhelmed.
I think the positives outweigh the negatives, but if they could find a middle ground where you can focus on the event and not AoE spam while solving some of those other issues, it would be even better. So hopefully they don’t just copy-paste the Silverwastes model and call it a day, but continue to improve.
Also, I really wish they’d do away with the chest mechanic and just put the stuff into your inventory automatically. Its so needlessly tedious having to click on the bouncing chest for every….single…. event…. just put them in my inventory, I’ll still see the popup of the items themselves on the side of my screen so I’ll know I’m getting loot, just without all the tedium.
My one and only Ascended drop I’ve ever gotten was a Magi stat combo armor box, which I have no use for. I’d be all in favor of this.
Apparently all of the GW1 expansions which added new classes also included another character slot (or more) so I suppose its certainly possible and perhaps even likely.
So I’m assuming everyone in this thread so far overlooked the mastery IGN stealthily revealed in their article.
Go down to the gliding mastery image and scroll all the way to the right. There’s your “climbing” / positioning related mastery right there. Or at least one, no one says there can’t be multiple.
My personal theory is that the Pale Tree is able to protect all “dreamers”, but that the combination of the Pact’s close proximity to Mordremoth combined with the weakening of the Pale Tree herself meant that Mordy was able to overpower that protection and corrupt a portion of them. Probably a sizeable portion.
Not all of them, though. Trehearne is likely protected by Caladbolg, we’ve seen Canach isn’t corrupted (though its not entirely clear if Canach went with the Pact ships or if he’s going to enter the jungle later, as we don’t see him anywhere during Point of No Return), and the new article on the GW2 main page mentions Laranthir and his group of “elite” Sylvari called the Pale Reavers and events surrounding them so clearly they aren’t corrupted either.
I’m sure they’ll explain the specifics of why some are more susceptible to corruption than others at some point, but I’m guessing it will boil down to either being particularly strong of will OR a deeper connection with the Pale Tree. Possibly both to varying degrees.
Its also possible the player characters and any other Sylvari who enter the jungle starting in HoT will strengthen their resistance in some way before heading in. Perhaps the Pale Tree will provide talismans of protection or perhaps another ritual or something, who knows.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
I’m not the only one who was expecting something based on the Fire Flower from the Mario series, with the white, green, and orange color scheme, am I?
Not sure about disabling that functionality, but you can tap the skill key a second time to activate AoE abilities instead of using left click to trigger it. So, for example, to use your basic grenade throw (1) you just tap 1 once to bring up the targeting reticule, and a second time to use the ability. That would serve as a potential workaround.
Double-tapping the number key is probably faster than tapping the key then clicking anyway, which is particularly nice with grenades since you need to be using AoE constantly.
Stuff like masteries and the new PvE zones, those will obviously be completely locked for players who don’t have the expansion. Expansion zones are pretty much always locked to the expansion itself, and masteries seem specific to the Maguuma Jungle specifically, so obviously if you can’t get into the jungle you can’t use the masteries there either. MAYBE they’ll make precursor crafting game-wide, since that one seems the least tied to the Jungle and its been an extremely requested feature, but I have doubts even of that. I suppose perhaps they could make crafting the old precursors a generic “mastery” that could be gotten anywhere, while keeping the new legendaries Jungle mastery specific.
The specialization system itself will probably NOT be locked to expansion players technically, as I assume that’s a core system change. However, the specific specializations which HoT introduces will probably be expansion locked. So while, in theory, all players will have access to the specialization system, only the people with HoT will actually have access to the specializations introduced there, and since there’s only going to be 1 at launch, it will be sort of “pseudo-expansionlocked”. However, if there are other specializations introduced at a later time via Living Story or whatever, I imagine those would be available to non-expansion buyers.
As for guild halls and WvW… that indeed is the biggest question. They are being introduced specifically in the expansion, so that implies that they’d be expansion content, however there are obvious potential issues with how exactly that would work.
WvW being a game-wide and server-wide thing combined with talk of map “rotations”, it would be pretty strange to restrict anyone from using those maps. You’d be cutting off WvW from certain people for certain periods of time, which would kind of step on the toes of the whole “server wide contributions” it has going on.
For Guild Halls, its more a question of how exactly you’d even handle the whole situation if they are indeed expansion-specific. If a guild leader doesn’t have the expansion, does that mean the whole guild can’t have a hall? If the guild has a hall but individuals don’t have the expansion, can they simply not contribute to the growth of the hall but can still enter, or are they barred from entering completely? If the latter, then that’s going to create some big problems for guilds that want to use the halls for strategy meetings and such.
I do recall some vague mentioning that guild halls might be specifically built in the Maguuma Jungle and not anywhere else, which I suppose would cinch how the guild hall system would work in terms of people who don’t have the expansion (if you can’t get into the zone, you can’t build a hall) but I don’t know if that was speculation on the part of whoever said it or actual confirmed info.
It’s rather embarrassing to me, as a human being, see so many people take a freaking video game so incredibly seriously.
Bad things happen. As do dark things. As do things that aren’t “politically correct”. Develop some thick skin or unplug. My god.
Well of course bad and unpleasant things happen in real life.
But video games are meant to be an escape from real life. So I think its perfectly reasonable for people to not want unpleasant things like internment camps to happen in their escapist fantasies, especially not when those things are potentially involving the actual players themselves. Its one thing to have a bunch of random unassociated NPCs of some random unplayable race locked up, but another to point that level of hostility towards a race which includes thousands of players. Especially in an MMO where it can encourage that sort of hostility and hatred from other players and not just a bunch of NPCs, whether those people are just roleplaying or genuinely using it as an excuse to hate on others.
A celebration like Dragon Bash would probably be in poor taste considering the entire Pact fleet just got blown up.
Scepter #2 wrecks the dragon since its a large unmoving target that will happily eat every hit from the attack. You shouldn’t be having any trouble damaging it using Scepter (which I assume is what you mean by “rod”, though if you mean Staff then that I could see being a problem, staff has lousy single-target damage output) especially if you’re ’zerker. My half Cleric / half Zerker Guard did it no problem.
Heck, you should probably just use Scepter for the entire battle, really. The vines are easily killed by Scepter #2 for the same reason the dragon is, and killing the shades that put out the fires during the 2nd ring phase is also much easier with a ranged weapon since you don’t have to chase them down, but can rather stand in the holy fire, kill them, then get the fire buff back immediately so you can make your next section of the ring. The faster you can get the ring done, the less you have to worry about the lines of rocks ruining the achieve (which IMO is the hardest part, since they don’t have any AoE indicator at all).
And using a ranged weapon comes with the added bonus of letting you focus more on positioning, making it easier to dodge the rocks. I tended to stick near the edges during the 2nd vine phase, since it seems easier to dodge the mass of rocks at that point.
If you’re having trouble seeing the AoE rings, you might try turning down your graphics settings. That can remove some of the effects in the air as well as just generally reducing latency, which means more time to react and less stuff to obstruct your view.
As for the dragon bite attack knocking you into shrubs… you can always just stand perfectly still and take the hit to avoid that. If you aren’t moving it’ll just throw you straight up, so no fear of hitting a shrub or anything.
they should just remove the account bound nature of the base materials now.
since there is a massive influx of them to veteran players / 80s, the time-gating, required high crafting etc. should be enough of a hurdle to create ascended.
Just make the base material able to be sold, done and done, its not like this stuff is rare….
The fact that its not rare is exactly why making it sellable would be either too lucrative (if it was vendorable) or next to useless if it was only sellable via the TP.
Some people convert the laurels to gold via T6 material bags, yah.
I think a lot of people are saving them just in case something else gets introduced as a laurel reward in the future, though. Being an ever-evolving MMO and all, its completely possible that more rewards will be added to the laurel vendor, and people want to have a stock of them saved up in case something pops up that they need to have right away. Lets say, just as a random example, that the new legendaries require some laurel item that costs 200 laurels. That’s more than half a year of waiting if you have to build them up gradually, whereas someone that has a stockpile might get it day 1.
Mawdrey is permanent.
Sure, those who missed the story have to buy some story journal unlocks, but its still 100% achievable for any person who wants it if they’re willing to do that.
The Star, on the other hand… yah, I think it was a bad choice for them to add that the way they did, limited and all that. Its not really the type of item that should be limited-time. Hopefully they’ll either add some way to get the Star itself, or add another alternative Empyreal "transformer’ at some point.
I’m sure more collections will be coming as the game progresses. They just didn’t want to implement a billion of them for every conceivable weapon / armor set right off the bat.
I mean, we’ve already gotten a couple of new ones, like the Bandit weapon collection. So it IS happening, just not very fast. Maybe the expansion will introduce a chunk of them or something though, who knows.
Pretty sure its time based, and meant to hinder gold sellers who buy dozens of new accounts to keep their operations running (as they’re constantly banning them).
“Change class fundamentals” doesn’t have to mean “remove them completely and swap it to something entirely different”. And I very much doubt it will, as the class mechanics are far too engrained into the professions to just do away with them like that on a whim. You’d basically be making every specialization into a completely different class, and that’s not what they’ve said they’re going to be, they’ve said they’re going to be secondary classes / sub classes.
All gem store items are account-bound on purchase, yes.
You’d still need to put them in the bank to transfer them between characters, though. There’s no character-to-character mail system or anything (that is, mail between your own characters). The bank is the one thing you can use to move items from one character to another on the same account.
I was going to make a thread like this a couple days ago when they first went up, but I forgot.
It won’t stop the inevitable posts a week later though, but it still might help someone.
I kind of don’t really expect any existing creatures to be added a pets in this expansion, only new ones introduced in Maguuma (if any at all… quite frankly, I’m having a hard time being optimistic about new pets period at this point since its been soooo long since we’ve gotten any).
But, on the off chance some kind of miracle happens and we do get existing creatures added as pets, my list would be…
~ Wind Riders, with Reef Riders being my #1 choice, since they look cool (all Wind Riders do, but I like Reef the best) and having a boon steal ability would be neat. Also, another ranged pet, which would be nice.
~ Beetles. One of the more interesting non-Mordrem additions to the game lately, and I want more bugs in general. I love bugs! I can imagine the armored beetle having an active block ability, which would be really interesting. Oh, and that one spot in the Silverwastes near the Forbidden wall that has a bunch of small beetles? Total tease! I went up there and saw the little ones and was like “ZOMG are those tameable?!?!” and was sorely disappointed. You need to make it up to me Anet.
~ Skales / Shelk. I dunno, I’ve just always liked skales. They have a nice fantasy vibe to them (what the heck even are they?) and a neat general aesthetic, lots of bright colors and such, and would make for a good new amphibious pet.
~ Griffons. Yah, everyone wants them, blah. But again, more nice fantasy creatures, I want more fantasy pets.
~ Crabs / Shrimp. A bit more mundane, but I like me some crabs.
~ Sea Scorpions. They look awesome, especially the deep sea variants with the glowy bits. Who doesn’t want a prehistoric looking death bug? Easily my most wanted fully aquatic pet.
~ Grubs. Like I said, I like bugs. And these would be another neat ranged pet (actually would have made more sense as a ranged pet than spiders since grubs actually use ranged attacks as enemys, but whatever). Oh, and some of them glow. I love glow.
Aside from completely new pet families, I’d even like a few more palette swap type pets. At this point even that would be better than nothing, though of course I’d much prefer completely new ones. The tropical birds on Southsun would make for a neat bird type, and a white tiger would be cool for cats. And I’d kill for a Swamp Drake (I think that’s what they’re called, anyway? The ones with the long jaws). Spiders could get the Canyon Spider or maybe even the kitten looking Ice Spiders that only appear in that one cave in Dredgehaunt Cliffs.
I’m almost positive we’ll be seeing more Living Story after HoT. LS is the big, unique running feature for GW2, and I don’t see them giving it up just because they release an expansion.
My guess is that HoT will clear up Mordremoth, and then when Living Story resumes we’ll be handling another issue. Whether that be another dragon or a different crisis altogether, who knows.
That would really be the best way to handle it, to let HoT be its own complete thing with a complete storyline. Because if HoT doesn’t wrap up Mordremoth and rather LS returns and we face him there, then you open a whole new can of worms with people who don’t buy HoT. People who don’t buy it obviously won’t be able to get into the Maguuma Jungle areas, so to put LS stuff there means that some people would be locked out of Living Story by virtue of not getting the expansion.
So yah, best way to do it IMO is to have HoT clear Mordy out, then when LS resumes we start working towards something else, in a different direction (map-wise) to allow everyone who doesn’t buy HoT to still participate.
I don’t think I’d be in favor of this.
I suspect there’s a pretty large majority of people who don’t even know about the Stow / Draw command (or know about it but don’t care enough to use it), so something like this would probably just result in a huge amount of players running around with their weapons perma-drawn. Which would look really silly to me.