Guild Wars 2

I think the Sylvari aren’t actually offspring in the sense that an apple is the offsrping of an apple tree, rather Sylvari are more akin to a flower or a leaf that only grows in response to certain stimuli.

Actually I think it would be quite impossible for Malyck to have not had a dream seeing as he is basically equivalent to a fully functional adult despite being only two weeks old. It is more likely that he actually did have a dream similar to the our Sylvari and he forgot about it because of some type of trauma he endured in between his birth and when we met him. Indeed there is some mention of this during the quest where you meet him. Otherwise you’d have to assume he is sometype of super genius who went from being a complete blank slank to a fully functional adult within two weeks and that to me seems preposterous.

What we don’t know is whether the dream he did have is similar to the the dream we have which has both didactic and prophetic components or whether his dream is didactic only.

The shoulder armor on Sylvari needs to be pushed out to reflect the fact that some Sylvari models have naturally large shoulders that jut out a lot more than the shoulders of the other races.

Gregorius.1024:

9/10 follows naming conventions, rolls off the tongue

mine’s an engineer and her bombs keep blowing up on her. The asura krewe she works with gave her a fitting nickname.

Zohra Sootblossom

0/10

If the backstory behind the name really was that it was a nickname given by the technology driven Asura then it isn’t an appropriate Sylvari name because it originated from a race known to be based on artifice instead of nature.

The name also would therefore have come from a source other than the Pale Tree who is the one that is supposed to assign names to Sylvari. Adopting the name given to you by the Asura and thereby refusing the name given to you by the Pale Tree is an unforgiveable complete rejection of your Sylvari heritage making this name supremely unSylvari and thus utterly inappropriate for a Sylvari to have.

I also think Engineer is an inappropriate class for Sylvari so a point was deducted for that as well.

While Zohra by itself is cute and utterly inoffensive, it is also rather generic and doesn’t really suggest anything particularly Sylvarian because it could just as easily be associated with a Human, Norn, Charr or Asura.

Tympana (A femininzed version of Tympanum. According to Wikipedia Cybele was usually shown in Rome as Meter (“Mother”, or in Latin Magna Mater, “Great Mother”) with the tympanum balanced on her left arm).

DreamOfACure.4382:

Toxyn.9608:

So if Sylvari are children of “Mother Earth”, why would Tyria birth this species now? If they are a natural defense against the Elder Dragons, why were they not birthed for the previous awakenings? Doesn’t add up.

My theory is that the Pale Tree is actually Mordemoth the Nature Dragon.

The Nightmare Court is actually right, Ventari’s Tablet corrupted the Nature Dragon in its rising, causing it to change from its true purpose.
But deep down, it still has an instinctual rivalry with Zhaitan (who wields undead magic which conflicts with nature magic), which is why its Firstborn are so bent on killing Zhaitan.

The Pale Tree is not the corrupted Nature Dragon, it is only influenced by the corrupted Nature Dragon which presumeably lies sleeping in the roots of the Pale Tree.

It would almost be amazing how even the distribution would be, except the poll count alts but doesn’t distinguish between serious and nonserious alts.

My own list is like this:

Sylvari – Female – Guardian
Sylvari – Female – Necromancer
Human – Female – Elementalist
Human – Female – Thief
Undecided

I just don’t like playing male characters. I feel that male heroes are incomplete because they lack the beauty that can only be found in the female form.

Skipping mobs might not equal skil but it certainly does equal time saved and that really is the most important thing.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I think they didn’t kill enough people to really make it clear this fight against Zhaitan is serious and is necessary to keep the Risen from burying the human and sylvari realms. Frankly, I’d take the story a lot more dramatic if we had something like the Culling of Stratholme (Warcraft 3) or an actual settlement being torn apart by Risen where innocent civilians were being turned into Risen rather than warriors of the Lionguard.

What if Claw Island had been more than a fortress and been a small walled town with noncombatants?

Killing people isn’t going to make the fight seem any more serious, it is only going to make the character’s actions, choices and decisions seem more pointless.

The problem with Zhaitain not seeming like much of a threat actually stems from the fact that the story isn’t integrated into the game world at all. The game world is for the most part all sunshine and rainbows but the personal story instance usually has a much darker tone where the undead are presented as an actual threat. But the moment you step outside the personal story instance that threat dissapears and the undead become a laughably titular enemy, consisting of nothing more than a few static mobs on maps where they are present and they aren’t present on most maps. As such you are never made to feel while leveling that this is a huge and rising threat that must be dealt with immediately, if you even feel like it is a threat at all. If anything, the Centaurs seem to pose a much bigger threat to nearly everyone and yet we aren’t raising an army to deal with them, so why bother raising an army to deal with the nonthreat of Zhaitain?

If Anet wanted to make Zhaitan and the undead feel like an actual threat then they needed to make Zhaitain a real presence outside of the personal story instances. This would have been a nearly perfect excuse to use phasing, where the initial area was one that was under Zhaitain’s control and as you did heart quests and personal story instances the map would revert to the actual map that we see now. Of course that might only make the threat feel even smaller because you’d be watching yourself single handedly successfully driving back Zhaitain’s forces.

Oglaf.1074:

Ellisande.5218:

Oglaf.1074:

You do realize the complexity involved in Quaggan speech patterns right?

“George is getting VERY angry!”

“Quaggans are unfailingly polite, so much so that they consider most self-reference to be offensive and self-centered. As a result, they rarely use the pronouns “me,” “my,” or “I,” instead preferring to use the general term “quaggan.” As a result, conversations with quaggans may frustrate more direct races. The phrase “I’ve lost my pet fish. I’m sad” becomes “Quaggan has lost quaggan’s pet fish. Quaggan is sad.” This manner of speech leads many to assume the quaggans are childlike or less intelligent. The quaggans are actually quite wise, but in ways that are different from most other races.”

To summarize, the Quaggans refer to themselves in the third person. Guild Wars 2 is hardly the first game to do that. Mass Effect has two seperate species that refer to themselves in the third person (the jellyfish do it for the exact same reason as the Quaggan and the Geth do it because they do not view themselves as individuals but merely part of the whole (since a Geth is a collective entity of as many dumber VIs as can network together as possible in order to form the greatest intelligence possible) which actually would lead to a form of wisdom different and perhaps greater than the other races).

And the Quaggans are 100% childlike and less intelligent than most of the other races. The only wisdom they have different from the other races is that they have a lot less of it.

I don’t think I lost anyone that I cared for. I either didn’t care at all about the characters who died or was happy when they died on Claw Island (Forgal).

GuzziHero.2467:

blinkblinx

What?

A thief’s standard heal, Hide in Shadows, cures bleeding, poison and burning

Why are people struggling with a poisoner?

I might make another thief, JUST to try this. If I recall correctly, my first time round (as a noob to GW2 and to all MMOs) I was downed, retried from checkpoint, and finished it second try.

Because the NPC nearly instantly reapplies all the conditions as soon as they are removed.

Do you seriously think that we are struggling with something so stupidly simple as choosing whether or not to use the heal that cures conditions when we are having problems specifically because of the conditions?

When creating a LFG tool you really need to consider the purpose for which it is going to be used.

I would generally assume that this purpose is to help players form groups of completely unrelated individuals by decreasing the time the players need to create the group and perhaps also to decrease the effort that a player needs to expend in order to form that group. The purpose of the group finder is not to allow players to more easily find friends (while players are free to try making friends with the people in their group that is outside the actual purpose of the tool).

Generally, a lobby system will not be the ideal system because it will require a lot more time and monitoring by the player compared to a system that automatically creates the party for the players thus allowing the player to continue to grind or craft or whatever it is the player wants to do with ininimal interference while waiting for the group to form.

It has also been my experience that lobby systems wind up functioning exactly like a system that automatically creates groups except it requires far more intrusive maintenance. By this I mean that generally when a player is trying to do something other than monitor the party lobby they will wind up just sending an invite to the first X number of people who enter the lobby without asking any questions or making any inquiries. But in order to minimize the amount of maintenance that goes into forming a party with the lobby system that player will have to keep the full window open which inevitably takes up valuable screen space and makes trying to do anything else while waiting for the group to form very distressing.

I think the best option if the devs want to save on the amount of processing the server does is to change condition damage so that when the stack has reached its cap then any additional applications of conditions that would have caused the stack to increase if the stack could increase will instead a certain amount of direct damage to the mob proportional the amount of damage the mob would have taken if the condition had been placed on the stack.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I get 20 shells a day per 2 hour farm if I care to do it. And apothecary weapons sell for a lot of gold if you have the ecto made for free from combining all the greens you get.

That is a horrible drop rate if you consider that you can get 50 dusts in 45 minutes from different mobs (granted that dust is used in consumeables instead of just equipment so it needs a higher drop rate) but only seeing 20 drops in 2 hours is simply disheartening when you consider that one piece of equipment needs 20 of those drops.

I generally agree that the task system is greatly inferior because it causes the player to become much less involved with the NPCs, area, and game itself.

The quests in WoW made the experience memorable whereas the heart quest and desire to speed through the zones to get to 100% exploration as fast as possible for the bonus reward that only accrued upon 100% map completion made the zones in GW some of the most forgettable zones in recent MMO history.

Uh oh, somebody just found out they aren’t a special snowflake.

Oglaf.1074:

You do realize the complexity involved in Quaggan speech patterns right?

“George is getting VERY angry!”

thisolderhead.5127:

Ellisande.5218:

thisolderhead.5127:

For every person unhappy with hard difficulty and imbalance in this game/encounters there is another loving it, and another who is sleepwalking through it (and still doing better than all of us).

I’m pretty positive that there are more who are unhappy than there are who sleptwalk through this one.

And the game can’t be balanced around the best players, that would quickly become untenable.

Pretty sure based on what?

The simple fact that there are always fewer at than in the middle or at the bottom.

And this quest isn’t balanced around the best, middle or worst. It is simply a really cheap, unfair, OP dot whose basic function essentially means that this encounter is completed more out of sheer luck than player skill. The dot was unavoidable and got constantly and almost immediately reapplied at the stack limit, the mob’s ranged damage was unavoidable. There really were no options offered to the player other than hope for the best. If the boss was created in such a way that you could avoid the dot or her normal damage by pillar humping maybe that would have been an ok if completely overused mechanic, but you could not do that here.

Poplolita.2638:

[At least in WoW they make use of phasing to change the way the gameworld looks so that you feel like finishing a long quest chain actually accomplished something. ]

I’m not quite sure what you are trying to get with this comparison. Since mist of pandaria launch, blizzard tried to limit as much as possible phasing quests due to the huge amount of complains they were getting from their players base. In fact, arenaNet made the clever decision to implement story mode instead of phasing to avoid separating the whole community. Also, why are you comparing phasing quests with heart quest/DE? Apple. Orange.

No they are pretty much the same. A lot of DEs are essentially just turn in X at point Y or click on Z or kill all U at Q. Heart quests are the exact same thing. The only real difference is that heart guests usually allow you to fulfill the conditions via all of the above whereas DEs are only 1 of the above. The other inconsequential difference is that DEs’ are repeatable whereas heart quests are not.

And the fact that some people didn’t like phasing doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad idea, perhaps what it meant is that they need to work on the implementation or simply not worry about some of the problems (different people seeing different phases because they are on different steps of the quest chain).

Regardless the point of the comparison is that GW2 is less immersive than other games because nothing you do has any actual effect on the game world, not even superficially.

Uh, you unlock weapon swapping at level 7 and you unlock your final utility skill slot at level 30 (elite skill slot). You can have all your weapon skills unlocked by the time you hit level 3 if you are feeling particularly productive.

There is also no need to be able to explore every area right off the bat. Simply by exploring the areas you can explore at your level will cause you to gain levels and thereby unlock the ability to explore the rest of the levels.

Sylosi.6503:

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that ‘trinity’ gets more mentions in a game that attempts to get away from the commonly used trinity. Saying that I’ve seen ‘trinity’ mentioned many times in other games, not least because if you’ve been playing games long enough you will remember ‘trinty’ originally meant tank, healer and CC, not DPS. So as DPS are still ten a penny they should really of changed it to the ‘duo’ (tank + healer) in games that have dumbed things down enough to the point support/CC is not a vital role anymore.

It’s not that CC is vital but that CC is generally made unuseable because the devs decided to make bosses immune to CC for some unexplainable reason.

hurlockbr.4573:

You can try to play Dark Souls, is not a MMORPG but the game have the best combat controls i’ve ever seen.

I hated Dark Souls combat, probably some of the worst I’ve seen. It wasn’t even all the different from the combat in the Elder Scrolls games which predated it, but at least in the Elder Scrolls games your health regenerated afterwards. I can’t stand games that lack health regeneration (this was also one of my biggest gripes with Tera, Aion and a lot of other MMOs).

Spamming LFG and using a LFG tool are the same thing. They don’t ruin the idea of a server community because there already isn’t one. If there was one you wouldn’t be spamming “LFG” or having to resort to an external website. Furthmore if there was a server community people wouldn’t be relying on their guilds to find groups either, indeed guild reliance is probably one of the biggest ways to destroy the idea of a server community because it makes people extremely insular (anyone outside the guild is greeted with suspicion despite being on the same server).

Vol.5241:

Precursor prices are absolutely fine. Those who complain about it just want things cheaper and easier.

And this is abnormal human behavior how?

Wait what? You found FF14 fun to play? FF14 was a game that was so bad at release the dev’s admitted it was a huge mistake and so gave the players an entire full year of free play until they managed to overhaul the entire game.

And I find that Tera is still “hot-key gaming” for several reasons:
1) When you attack you are rooted in place for the duration of the attack animation
2) The only attacks which are not based on hotkeys are what would be autoattacks in any other MMO because they deal an extremely tiny percentage of damage to the mob
3) The mobs take forever to kill and are placed in such a way throughout the game world that there really isn’t a rhyme or reason to some of their placement.
4) The quests are completely pointless
5) Etc. Basically the only reason why anyone says it is different than most other MMOs is because you can “dodge” in between attacks which is a really paltry reason in my eyes.

And for the record I loved the early part of EnB where it left the player still very much engrossed in the game and the gameworld. It was also the first MMO which used voiceovers for the NPCs (very exciting at the time and it wasn’t until SWTOR that I saw another MMO try doing it). Then it became nothing more than a pointless grind so I quit. But the combat was quite differentiable from Eve because EnB was your normal MMO hot-key combat set in space (it even had rogues) which was much more exciting during the early levels than the boring snoozefest that is Eve combat.

No MMO has ever once come close to becoming Soul Calibur or DMC online.

My Guardian reflecting on all those who gave their lives to see her Wyld Hunt to completion.

I tried taking one which made it look like she and Trahearne were becoming affectionate (because at some point I felt like Trahearne was hitting on character) but alas he wasn’t cooperating.

Dovahnah.6947:

Ambie Rautte Level 80 Ranger, Zalette Level 80 Elementalist

They look like they’re in love <3

Avatar.1923:

my guardian is almost all berserk gear.
greatsword and mace/focus.

(actually mace focus is for the blocks, give you that little for the cooldowns to pop up)

and greatsword is simply op…

2 of the GS attacks are ranged AOE attacks…

Vayne.8563:

Ellisande.5218:

crawlerxp.1536:

Ellisande.5218:

However at level 80 you are essentially just doing it for the purpose of the activity itself.

Oh no, you mean people playing the game to enjoy the game instead of playing it to improve their characters? Heresy!

People can enjoy an activity when it accomplishes dual purposes (the activity and the leveling) but not enjoy the activity when it only accomplishes a single purpose (the activity).

Therefore playing the game solely for the joy of seeing your character grow stronger is just as valid a purpose as playing the game to watch the particle effects when doing DEs.

For the most part the heart quests are extremely repetitive and pointless, and exploration becomes a chore when you are forced to go above and beyond just admiring the scenery (which gets repeated between zones so it ceases to be novel).

That’s like saying I play chess because I like the way the pieces look, rather than why the game is actually designed.

There are games, grindy games, where the entire game is pretty much leveling afterwhich you embark on some kind of end game. And there’s nothing wrong with those games. This isn’t really one of them, though.

Playing this game, you’ve got a couple of options at “end game”, but for a lot of us, we love and enjoy the world. If all you want is advancement and that’s all you care about, this probably isn’t the game for you. That’s the bad news. The good news is there are dozens and dozens of games that you can ride the gear treadmill as high as you like.

This game was designed for people who want the other kind of game…and it’s one of the very few that offer an immersive open world experience as something to viably do at max level.

I mean even the marginally higher stats of ascended gear have sent half the population into a tailspin, so obviously this game isn’t about that kind of progression.

If you don’t like that, nothing anyone can say will make any difference at all.

We both know that was an inappropriate analogy as used. Perhaps if you were talking about competitive chess, where it is possible to play competitively giving rise to the dual purpose of being part of the competitive chess scene and enjoying the competition of very skilled players. It is very easy to imagine that there will be players there who are there there because of the scene and the competition, others who are only there because of the scene and still others only because of the competition.

And don’t kid yourself, this game is a grindy game. SO much of what you do really is working towards marginal stat increases of one type or another. If you were only worried about seeing the world why then also worry about getting 100% exploration, because simply viewing the world should be enough, the actual number towards completion should be meaningless to you. But if you really need to see that bar reach 100% then you have some other motive than just exploring, and that goal can only be character advancement.

Or what about running the same escort DE. Can you honestly tell me that anyone enjoys following an NPC around over and over and over again knowing the entire route, everything that will happen and that nothing will change in the game world when the escort quest is completed other than the quest resetting so it can be done again?

The only thing which is nonstatic in this game is PvP, but I’m not overly thrilled with the PvP in this game. It’s ok but I wouldn’t log on to GW2 just to participate in it.

And I really don’t know what you mean by an “immersive open world experience” considering that in this game your actions mean even less than they do in any other MMO. At least in WoW they make use of phasing to change the way the gameworld looks so that you feel like finishing a long quest chain actually accomplished something. Here you finish a heart quest/DE and then nothing at all. Even the Personal Story is completely secluded from the game. So unless by more immersive you mean less immersive then I really don’t know what you are refering to.

And of course their is you completely incorrect conclusion here, “I mean even the marginally higher stats of ascended gear have sent half the population into a tailspin, so obviously this game isn’t about that kind of progression.” It sent half the population into a tailspin because it made them realize that this game actually is about that kind of progression. Unless you don’t read the forums very much in which case this severe slip is understandable.

thisolderhead.5127:

For every person unhappy with hard difficulty and imbalance in this game/encounters there is another loving it, and another who is sleepwalking through it (and still doing better than all of us).

I’m pretty positive that there are more who are unhappy than there are who sleptwalk through this one.

And the game can’t be balanced around the best players, that would quickly become untenable.

Vayne.8563:

Braindrops.6428:

To make it worse, at last step of YOUR personal story, you get stuck watching dialogue sessions where another player (the first to enter in the dungeon) replaces you in your greatest last act of glory.

This I can get behind. I hated this. It should be changed. It’s supposed to be this is my story, not the story of some guy I’m pugging with.

Well in Anet’s defense they had already changed it to Trahearne’s story by then.

I think the idea that melee should be more risky because of higher reward/risk is a poor counterargument to why melee is more risky generally.

The reason is that the overriding concern isn’t about whether ranged verse melee damage is balanced but only whether it is fair to force players who only want to play using melee combat into ranged combat simply because they can’t cut it in melee combat due to the game’s developers giving mobs abilities that frequently only pose a serious risk to meleers and not ranged players.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Ellisande.5218:

I never had any problems killing characters or civilizations I didn’t like in a video game.

Plus, you don’t exactly pull your punches when fighting Krayt anywhere else on the map, why should you suddenly show compassion here?

That’s the thing I always hated about Bioware games. You mercilessly slaughter all the henchmen up until you get to the boss who was the one directing and more often then not performing the heinous crimes that were the cause of your quest and suddenly you gain darkside points for not showing the person who was actually culpable mercy whereas you don’t gain any darkside points for failing to show mercy to the innocent fools you slaughtered to get there.

Well Charr were evil and merciless too, but now they are a playable race. Besides, the Krait mostly attack the Sylvari which makes them highly sympathetic to me. Oh and Quaggan too, I don’t like them anymore, they are just overused and annoying. So go Krait, enslave them all!

I would kill off all the Charr too.

And the Quaggan. It is quite clear that the Quaggan were meant to be wiped out by evolutionary pressures.

Thereon.3495:

(ideally each player would have separate cut scenes btw but im using the system as it is now)

That was the other thing I abhorred. Why oh why didn’t they implement it so that we each got our own seperate cut scene? I don’t want to watch someone else’s ugly mug during a cutscene where I wanted and rightfully expected to see my character as always. And since this wasn’t an ingame cutscene there was zero reason why they didn’t make it so everyone sees their own seperate cutscene. If you want to talk about amateur hour this was it.

crawlerxp.1536:

Ellisande.5218:

However at level 80 you are essentially just doing it for the purpose of the activity itself.

Oh no, you mean people playing the game to enjoy the game instead of playing it to improve their characters? Heresy!

You clearly are failing to understand the point I am making. People can enjoy an activity when it accomplishes dual purposes (the activity and the leveling) but not enjoy the activity when it only accomplishes a single purpose (the activity). When a player plays a game the reason why they play it or the thing which leads to their enjoying the game might only be the dual purpose and not the single purpose. There is nothing wrong with that anything more than there is something wrong with enjoying the game only from the single purpose. It is simply the recognition that different people gain enjoyment from different things or in different ways.

Therefore playing the game solely for the joy of seeing your character grow stronger is just as valid a purpose as playing the game to watch the particle effects when doing DEs.

And I agree that a lot of the DEs are very dull (especially the long escort missions, YAWN!) and for the most part the heart quests are extremely repetitive and pointless, and exploration becomes a chore when you are forced to go above and beyond just admiring the scenery (which gets repeated between zones so it ceases to be novel).

There is a difference between an activity before level 80 and that same activity at level 80. Before level 80 you can see how that activity is advancing your character. So you are doing it not only for the activity itself but also to advance your character. However at level 80 you are essentially just doing it for the purpose of the activity itself. And let’s be honest, there really isn’t anything that inherently fun about doing DEs more than once, and sometimes not even doing them once. Most of the heart quests are entirely forgettable and generally pointless, heck it’s hard to even know you did or are doing them because they have no relationship to anything and the game world is exactly the same before you start and after you complete it.

darkace.8925:

This is where ArenaNet’s lore team made it’s most egregious mistake. They gave us dragons the size of mountains with the power to corrupt life and literally reshape the planet. They wrote them “big, bad, and scary” to give us the impression that the world really is in need of saving. But they wrote them too “big, bad, and scary”. The dragons can’t win, but there’s no way for them to lose without destroying any suspension of disbelief.

A party of heroes…even the greatest heroes on the planet…wouldn’t scratch one of these dragons with a sword or a staff. Just look at the size of Jormag’s tooth in Hoelbrak. Now use that to extrapolate his full size. What could Hundred Blades, Heartseeker, or Churning Earth possible do against something that large?

And if Kralkatorrik created the Brand with just a passing breath, imagine what he could do to a party of 5, or 50, or even 5,000 players. I suppose the Elder Dragons could just stand around while being beat upon like pinatas, as is the case with their champions; but that’s hardly an epic way for these “big, bad, and scary” foes to be dispatched.

That leaves us with the “Press Button to Kill Dragons” machine. Be it magical or mechanical, a device we all work together to build so we can kill the dragons is boring. It’s trite. It’s been done to death; and it’s usually done poorly. But it’s by far a better option than us whacking them with our weapons until they die.

I disagree. Because the player can use magic, they can compensate for the fact that physically they are very weak but with magic they can have the power of a creature much larger than themselves. And there is plenty of precedent for that in GW, chiefly in the fact that nearly all the human gods started out as normal humans and gained godlike powers thanks to magic.

This also means that the player’s magical power should dwarf the damage that a turret can do.

Thus the better solution is to have the player work towards attaining something akin to godhood (even if it is just temporary) for the purpose of slaying the big bad dragon. That not only allows the fight to fight to make sense but now also provides a reason why the fight happens within a soloable personal story mission. Indeed they could actually dispatch the normal fight system and bring in brand new mechanics just for this fight because the player has godlike powers. I am thinking of something along the lines of Shadow of the Colussus which was really the only game that got boss fights right (generally, but the fights against the little boar bosses were lame).

I generally hate the MMO conceit that the player has to be the weakest character in a dungeon instance as this just doesn’t make any sense. Power in a story should be related on work one does in acquiring that power, and since the player was the only one who put forth effort to attain power they should be the most powerful character in the dungeon. So it makes no sense why a random nobody NPC takes 50% of hp per hit whereas my character only takes 0.02% of this NPC’s hp per hit.

It was a completely lame fight.

You should have taken off on an airship immediately after finishing the last personal story. But for some unexplainable reason you descend into a cave after the rest of the Pact was taking off in airships. There you meet the rest of Destiny’s Edge who are suddenly hanging around in this cave for no explained reason (and magically back together). There you run around killing pointless mobs and bosses (why are their boss mobs in this random cave?) to get engine parts for a skyship that isn’t visible. Finally you take off, leaving Logan behind again for an inadequately explained reason (I am sorry but I don’t buy the BS reason of leaving one person behind to stop an entire army, that just isn’t logical, what are they going to do?) and take off to go do what you should have done from the beginning. And once you do take off you have to ask what happened to the airships of the rest of the Pact? Where are they? There should have been an entire fleet in the sky.

So then after watching dragons fly around and doing anything but attacking you (they could have easily knocked you out of the sky by raking their claws across your really fragile balloon). Then you get randomly attack in a way that instantly destroys the turrets and fall onto another airship piloted by Logan who magically managed to survive all the mobs, get picked up by an Deus Ex Machina airship and catch up to you despite the fact that you were in the middle of nowhere.

Of course the guns on this airship were just as vulnerable as the ones on the prior airship and so Zhaitain should have been able to just as easily blow those guns up. So yeah your magical big canon on top of the air ship blows off Zhaitan’s tail and I guess that cripples him forever (how?) so he lands on a column and just stays there until he gets pounded enough to fall down dead. The whole thing was stupid. I especially hate games that so marginalize the player’s power by essentially saying that everything they did to increase their own power meant nothing and they are completely inferior to an artificial turret such that they might as well not bother ever fighting and just travel around with a turret instead.

Everything about the instance was pretty subpar, from the fact that it was discontinuous with the storyline from the previous personal story mission but every aspect of the instance marginalized all the efforts the player took in leveling their character and giving them better gear and the actual progression of the story within the instance made no sense (Logan magically showing up, the dragons not attacking you, Zhaitan sitting on the pillar until he died, the random bosses in the random cave).

Yukishiro.8792:

Shanna.4762:

It’s not really brilliant, this was unpopular in LOTRO, so much so that they removed it and I think effectively the same system was tried in other games and removed because it was annoying and unpopular.

The problem is it is TOO brilliant. It exposes the lie at the heart of vertical progression schemes too obviously.

Verti progressional people WANT power creep. They WANT to be able to lord it over the plebs. This is what keeps them going, not being able to do the same dungeon with a higher level of agony so they can farm more agony gear so they can do the same dungeon with higher tuned numbers.

Precisely.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Ellisande.5218:

The Krayt are evil. They deserve to be wiped out.

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” – Gandalf

I never had any problems killing characters or civilizations I didn’t like in a video game.

Plus, you don’t exactly pull your punches when fighting Krayt anywhere else on the map, why should you suddenly show compassion here?

That’s the thing I always hated about Bioware games. You mercilessly slaughter all the henchmen up until you get to the boss who was the one directing and more often then not performing the heinous crimes that were the cause of your quest and suddenly you gain darkside points for not showing the person who was actually culpable mercy whereas you don’t gain any darkside points for failing to show mercy to the innocent fools you slaughtered to get there.

SynfulChaot.3169:

I do believe there should be some incentive to return to them, especially the harder ones. With little reward players are loathe to return to them, even to help others.

I think the best way would be fix this would be to give full reward to all players in story as long as at least one of the players had not completed. There. Not easily farmable and rewards become adequate.

I think this is the fairest solution that correctly balances Anet’s and the players’ interests.

The Krayt are evil. They deserve to be wiped out.

Plus there are plenty of other Kraty all over the world which weren’t put into any danger by stealing the orb (which doesn’t actually do much anyway. If you read pay attention to the story you find out that the only thing it actually does is prevent nearby corpses from being turned into risen).

Icarus Pherae.4680:

FYI the pollen effect means that you are literally spewing plant sperm from your pores as you run….. O.O

Ever wonder what’s in the water when you go swimming in the ocean?

Gasoline.2570:

Should have been in the game since day1. How pathetic.

I was suprised to find this simple and common place feature missing.

It is my experience that nearly all solo events scale down when undertaken by only one player.

However the mob respawn rate seems to not scale down so some events are either very hard or impossible to solo simply because the spots respawn so darn fast.

Bosses should only get more CC if our CCs are allowed to work on bosses.

I do that on my Guardian. What separates a Guardian from a thief is ability to stealth/port and ability to frontload all weapon skills at once instead of having them be apportioned over time via reuse timers and maybe access to one or two better slows than the Guardian has.

On top of also having more evasion and stun moves we all have the same ability to dodge attacks, which means a LIGHTER ARMOR CLASS has MORE UTILITY than a HEAVIER ARMOR CLASS and can be MORE FLEXIBLE like I said?
Bunker Build Elem for were hard to kill while having a large amount of CC & having a large amount of buffs (Again, weapon skills), And being able to heal. They didn’t give much up in any field and were strong in all fields.
that isn’t what they said on their class forum where the general consensus was that they gave up a lot in order to gain high survivability

When I said balance I clearly meant the difference in armor needs to be balanced by a difference in damage such that both classes are able to survive the same kitten and come out of combat with the same amount of hp afterwards. I never said that one class should be doing damage and should only be able to do damage and one class should be tanking and should only be able to tank.

Your logic says that the lighter armor classes should be doing more damage and heavier ones should be dealing less while tanking hits. You can’t say that and then say you aren’t saying it.
I’m not denying that my position is that light armor classes should be doing more damage. But you’re misconstruing “more damage” to mean “only damage.”
Damage is a bad thing to say “This class should do more for X reason” because then you’re making a lot of classes null and void. You balance the more fragile class to have more flexibility and utility, not more damage (your opinion). Elem have a ton of variety in their spells that allow them to do just about anything.

I addressed this, “(taking into account that stats can do more to modify the damage a character takes or deals more than the character’s armor class),” “every class will have to be selfsufficient. Selfsufficiency requires that every class is essentially the same in so far as every class needs to be able handle the same exact situations,” and, “given the very limited nature of the skill selections available and over reliance on forcing the players to passively use autoattacks it is impossible for any class to only do Y and not also do X and Z.”

No matter how much “utility” you think differentiates the classes (it isn’t nearly as expansive as you are trying to suggest because your skill choices are limited to 3 utility/healing/damage skills with large cooldowns), at some point you’re need to address the fact that this “utility” is finite and incomplete. An Elem is taking more damage and in order to survive does need to be able to deal more damage if they hope to bring those mobs down before going down themself. Of course each player can within the confines of the stat and skill systems differentiate their character by making it more focused on a certain area (more focused on CC, dots, damage reduction, damage dealing, etc) but that comes at the expense of making them weaker in other areas. This is a deviation from the base class and not substitution of the base class.

All classes can choose to select only healing skills if they wanted, or only CC skills but being able to make those choices cannot be thought of as meaning those choices are what balances your class against the other classes because a different player could choose contrarily. Assuming that all reasonable choices were meant to be functional within the first part of my test (capable of surviving solo PvE) then every class was balanced just as much around pure damage as around pure utility (pure just means your selection of those 3 utility skills). A quick perusal of the class forums seems to suggest that this inference has some validity. Thus the base class must be one that is not built around having or needing more utility to balance lower armor classes against higher armor classes but rather based around how quickly they need to kill mobs in order to survive.

As players make choices about what to positively and negatively choose they deviate from the base class becoming more tanky, healy, more or less utility, doing more or less damage than their peers playing the same class. The fact that a player chooses to focus on CCs doesn’t necessarily imply that the base class was balanced around CCs in comparison to a class with more armor because a player of the same class could ditch CCs entirely and only take the damage utility skills and still be just as successful.

quickthorn.4918:

If you have both ranged and melee options for a class, then it’s not designed to be played solely at melee range. It’s designed to be flexible.

No. It is designed to be flexible in regards to the player’s choice. It is designed to allow the player to choose and not choose for the player.

Atlas.9704:

every character’s actions are the result of a writer’s magical wand,

All the growing that my character did and was going to do happened between the time I was level 1 and saw Destiny’s Edge fall apart.

The entire middle section of the personal story devoted to the 3 orders was nothing but unnecessary filler during which absolutely nothing of note happens and nothing gets developed, either your character or the plot.

I’ll agree about the former, but the latter I won’t.
It may be unnecessary filler to you, but all the races had to get their crap together and fight the Dragons. That’s all the second and early parts of the third were for. There needed to be some transition. Was the transition clunky? Sure I’ll vote on that, but was it needed? Yes it was, at least in my eyes.

Peronally I’m more miffed I didn’t get to ride with parts of Destiny’s Edge more than what we got, but I put that all in another thread.

I don’t completely agree that every action a character performs is the writer waving their magic wand. I feel that a truly talented writer doesn’t so much write as record by allowing the story to give birth to itself. This is done by following the natural progression of the events. When you have discontinuous and unexplained events then the story becomes artificial. Here the story was artificial with the writer dictating and not recording. Admittedly I am not describing my concept correctly and doubt I will ever be able to do so. But the crux of the matter is that making characters perform actions which cannot be seen as natural progression or development is poor writing.

As far as the orders were concerned, you explained exactly why that section doesnt make sense. We needed to get all the species working together, but that isn’t what you do. You wander aimlessly doing nothing of importance. completely ignoring or forgetting about Zhaitan, forgetting about your mission to bring Destiny’s Edge together (you are not bringing Destiny’s Edge together for the purpose of bringing Destiny’s Edge together but for the purpose of using them as representatives/ambassadors of the species/city-states they belong to). This middle section is too far removed from the story to be anything but pointless filler.

I hate both Daily Healer and Daily Veteran Slayer.

I was unable to complete my daily yesterday because it took me so long to trey finding some NPCs to rez that stupid thing turned over (For some reason the daily event resets at 7pm est on my server. Maybe I accidentally joined a EU server?)