Guild Wars 2

Actually with the twisted election system they have in place, Evon could just buy himself the victory. If it is only the amount of tokens that matter he can win without getting a single vote from all the heroes in the world. In fact, every purchase or listing on the Black Trading Company is several to many votes for Evon.

Come on, how disconnected from the world are the Zephyrites anyway?
“You must prove to me how many people love you, so I shall allow everyone to cast as many votes as they want and make the votes buy-able. Surely this is a fair system?”

Story-wise, Kiel is probably a poor little soldier while Evon is a rich fat cat. On top of that Kiel insists on returning any gold she finds to the “owners” who can then spend that gold on the trading channels and thus vote for Evon either way.

Helping Kiel out means voting on Evon in character!

Alas, the 3 new sets show no effort to Charr anatomy yet again. Frankly I was very exited for the lot of them, but will in the end not buy a single one because each of them has no tail slot (which, yes, is still my main issue).

Unfortunate, Magitech armor would have made my kitty very happy.

People are going to be so disappointed by the Abaddon Fractal. It’s inevitable with the insanely unrealistic expectations people have.

Makes me feel sorry for the team that will have to develop it…

Of course it’s possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s probable.

Well it is supposed to be rather disjointed at the moment. We are deliberately only fed a few clues to a greater connection. It’s not unusual for certain events not having a clear link until later information provides this insight.

I think it’s just player impatience that causes this “we must know NOOOOW”. If indeed the main villain was already known now, most would complain the story is too predictable now.

In the end you can never please everyone, even more so for MMORPG players

We don’t. It’s not like they have much to lose either way, so I doubt they will rig it. Whether or not the black lion keys are going to be cheaper, those skins are going to sell themselves anyway. In fact, they might even prefer Kiel to win considering the initial reaction to weapon tickets and scraps for future weapons.

They supposedly drop in the candidate trials, with higher levels having higher chance. Good luck actually killing something other than a few plunderers in T4 though.

I heard it was actual weapons in the trials and skins from the BLC tickets.

Pfsh, i’m not a big fan of loose ‘fixed floating’ feathers. They defy gravity and fashion in one fell swoop.

The only thing tying the Molten Alliance to the current Aetherblades would be the newly discovered Azurite which may or may not be used in the Aetherblade’s “magitech”.

I’ll try ‘briefly’.

Lost Shores
A Secondborn Sylvari, Canach, and his team of Consortium members accidently tick off the ancient Karka that had made their home on Southsun Cove. These new enemies attack the city of Lions Arch, but are fended off by the heroes. We bring the fight to their home and win, bringing something alike to peace back to the place. Canach is captured by the Lionguard Kiel.

Flame and Frost
The Dredge and Flame Legion Charr have made an alliance, orchestrated by some ‘silver tongued person’ from ‘the city’, in order to both advance their military power. The Dredge bring in machinery which gets powered up by Flame Legion fire magic. In their bases they both test their weapons and mine Azurite, a new gem which has very potent magic conductive power. The weapon facilities are assaulted by the Vigil and the alliance is eventually crushed.

Return to Southson
Some of the refugees which we’re driven out of their homes by the alliance between Dredge and Flame Legion have signed contracts with the Consortium, a shady business society, to be relocated to the Southsun Cove. There they find out that their contracts basically reduce them to slaves while the Consortium continues to build their resort. The Lionguard, which was sent there to maintain the order, has no choice but to support the Consortium as those contracts are legally binding. Canach returns to Southsun Cove in order to act revenge on the Consortium which has sent several assassination attempts on his life since his escape from the Lionguard in the initial Karka attack. He tries to get back at the Consortium in a twisted attempt to free the refugees by making the local wildlife go haywire. The heroes stop Canach (again) and in a ploy to get the contracts off the island, Kiel makes the transport (and contracts) explode, thus ending the slavery on Southsun Cove.

Dragon Bash
During the new festival, more specifically at the Dragon Pyre ceremony, something goes wrong and the council is attacked by the Aetherblade pirates. In all this commotion, a single member is successfully murdered, namely Ashford. Because of old ties with the family, Loghan decides to hire an investigator to figure out the identity of the killers. In a search alongside said investigator we realise it is Mai Trin, a healer who aided the first victims, who is the real brain behind the attack. We confront Mai and her pirates, who seem to be aided by the Inquest and have stolen their airships from the Pact, and in a final showdown we defeat and capture her. She does mention a certain Scarlet will be very displeased by her failure and that she is ‘dead either way’.

Bazaar of the four winds
Right after Mai is captured an opportunity arises and Magnus of the council sends Kiel to the Bazaar in order to procure a trading agreement with the elusive Zephyrites (meaning we get no real time to grill Mai). This will ensure her acceptance as the new Council member (which Magnus seems to prefer). Unfortunately for her, Evon Gnashblade, the Charr behind the Black Lion trading company has overheard said conversation and is also running for this position of power. The Aetherblades, which still seem operational thus meaning Mai is not their highest leader, also attack the Zephyrites to plunder. At the moment we are fighting them whilst gathering support for either candidate.

And that’s where we stand.

Well to be fair, you need some visual tell of what you’re doing. Either they redesign the engineer so that it’s toolkits are on the arms/hands or it stays as it is.

A neat little thing for engineers would be to allow each tool kit to be customised to some degree. Perhaps a couple of theme’s like basic/modern/plantlike/steampunk/etc.
Even dyeable would be great. They are part of the core of the profession after all.

Tom Gore.4035:

I’m sorry but if I do the math it will be cheaper to just convert gems to gold and buy the skin you want.

This is assuming the skin is the only thing you actually want from the chests.

That’s usually true though. That’s how I got my Greatsaw anyway.
Generally the gambling cost will be higher, with only a small potential of being much cheaper.

How do you even know who is the real owner anyway? Did some rich people have an inscription with their names on each piece of treasure they owned?

Or can I go “Omg Kiel, that’s totally my golden sceptre. Yup, I had those rubies set on just like that, no doubt about it. Thank you SO much for finding it for me. You’re my hero!”?

All signs point to new weapon type

Elbegast.6970:

BobbyStein.2315:

The stories are connected. You’ll find out more later this year.

If you string out the plot lines for too long, players will lose interest.

What I’ve gotten from the ‘Living Story’ so far:

Some power hungry Charr teamed up with some underground mole people (seriously? mole people?!?! O.o) the dredge have been around since original GW Prophecies in order to wreck Kryta they actually attacked the Shiverpeaks and Ascalon for some reason. A walking Cabbage (Canach- who is ‘Canach’ anyway? Canach was introduced in the original Karka attack on LA as head of the team that ticked the Karka off. he is also a Secondborn apparently And why should I care?) went to some random resort island (seriously?!?! a resort island?!?! what happened to fantasy?) and got some crabs angry for some reason. Pirates showed up and killed someone for some reason. Then some random merchants came on a flying boat technically, only one party of merchants comes from the flying sanctum and sold us stuff for some reason.

I have no idea what is happening in this game. I could talk for hours about the lore and story of GW1 but this new GW2 ‘story’ is just page 6 tabloid filler.

I honestly don’t see how you are planning to tie the story together in any sort of coherent and meaningful fashion. It’s so utterly fragmented as to be nonexistent.

Not to sound rude, but almost nothing of your plot summarise is actually correct. Of course that by itself might just imply that the story is too stretched for the masses to follow.

Lord, considering she has never heard of a Sylvari, nor seen one, we can assume she’s been in that laboratory for over 10-15 years (Malomedies was the first to contact another race, the Asura, somewhere after the second generation was born). The gate was most likely relocated in that time.

What’s more interesting still is who funds the research to begin with. I’m not sure it’s explicitly stated in the game. Connections to the Consortium could imply it’s them.

If you consider her current research, the nature of the research that was going on beneath the reactor and Dessa’s ‘connection’ to the Consortium, she could very well be a (former) Inquest member.

It makes me question her cooperation on a Fractal that would reveal her past though.

Well that’s your choice and right, but if you don’t bother reading something, don’t answer on it either. That saves us the time and effort of reading through your rage posts too.

Like I said, even though it’s on a negative tone, his arguments are valid and well structured.

I don’t think you do Simplicity. In fact, even though the tone was very negative, the OP makes some sound remarks about some of the mechanics. It’s more of a ‘this could be so much better balanced’ rather than a ‘omg this sucks!!1!’ post.

Well that depends Healix. The point of this subplot is to acquire a trading agreement with the Zephyrites. We’ll decide who gets to apparently, but it seems the agreement will be a fixed thing.

A piece of goodwill from them could very well be access to their aspects for recreational means.

I haven’t played it yet but you make a few good points. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve had a chance to try it out though.

These things will always happen as long as they use vague terms like ‘common’, ‘uncommon’ and ‘rare’. These terms are indicative, but largely open for interpretation.

Apparently Anet considers a 10% chance ‘common’. I’m sure many players will consider ‘common’ to be at least 50%.

Cotheer.2806:

God forbid they implement a system where we need to actually work to get those skins, but instead we are, AGAIN, relying on RNG and ticket/scraps (yo dawg) to get them.
Color me unimpressed :/

It’s even worse actually. We’ve gone from a system where pve world drops provide guaranteed scraps alongside the shop equivalent, to a system where only shop items have a rare chance at dropping scraps. I’m not including Key drops from dailies, map completion or personal story because these are either circumventing regular play, finite in nature or highly rare.

The silver lining is that the weapons do drop from the event challenge though.

Try to put yourself in the role of our characters.

For some reason we volunteer to be sent into ‘unstable’ pocket dimensions in the Mists to explore and gather data. We do this under the watching eye of Dessa, the leader of this project, who gives us ample information on the Fractal and provides us with direction to the extraction point. So far so good.

Then we end up in the Uncategorized Fractal and all of a sudden Dessa ‘freaks out’: “You’ve landed… I… need to go. I’m sorry.” and abandons us to our fate with no sense of direction or goal. We start climbing the place because we conveniently have goal markers as a game mechanic, but in character we just decide up would be the most logical thing to do.

We often say she panics, but what she does is effectively leaving us to die and she apologizes to us for it too. Sure she comes back after a while, directs us to the end and finally urges us to go asap. But her little line of text could imply more than just ‘panic’.

Then there’s the Raving Asura who could possibly know he’s in a Fractal (You can’t be here, you’re not real) and talks about being abandoned. Dessa obviously knows the place too.

When landing Dessa hesitates but decides she needs to go and leave us to fend for ourselves. I would assume the place holds secrets we’re not allowed to know, for one reason or another. Abandoning us there would be the easy way to accomplish this, as we’d be stuck forever, if not dead by local hazards. She does however have a change of heart, and guides us out as swiftly as possible. Mystery? Yes, lots of it!

This is ridiculous. A 50% drop rate for scraps would already have a pretty price tag for weapons (20 keys now, 100 keys after 2 weeks). Now it’s apparently 5 times as much.

Come on, how is this in any way reasonable? Even if you have a guaranteed drop of a scrap from every chest it remains a expensive. I’m sure they’re just worried of BLkey farming, but then address that problem instead.

And so they do, in fact Vigil Warmaster Forgal says ‘Ebonhawke, fall? The hell it will. The hell it will, while I’m here."

I can only advice you to make both and play for a while on both. Engineer is very unusual to play at first, it’s a different sort of experience. You might enjoy it or not, you’ll only know once you tried.

They are intended as an extra for those who reach these levels of achievement points. The real goals are the achievements, not the extras.

Besides, over 90% of the GW2 community had less than 2500 points at the launch of this system (as was established on the leader boards). That means your 5500 points puts you quite in the top percentile of achievers. Of course you’re going to have a hard time pushing your points up fast.

Give yourself a realistic goal and aim for 500 points a month. That seems to be the semi-hardcore mean anyway. And if you don’t like a certain achievement, then don’t do it. These points are spread over the entire player base preferences and activities and will thus obviously not cater to all your personal needs.

I basically hear “Hey, I want to play a profession of which I dislike all the core mechanics, do you think they’ll change them around completely?”

I think the safe answer to this would be “No.”

Redfeather.6401:

I would like a twist.
In the depiction of the event it shows Abaddon as unjustly betrayed by a jealous pantheon and history written to silence him and tarnish his name. And have the reveal done in such a way that you couldn't really tell if the fractal was glitching up its extrapolated data to fill in the blanks, or if there was some truth to the depiction.

Depending on which team you end up in that could very well be true. Abaddon wasn’t a bad guy per sé. His intentions weren’t malicious, they just ended up causing a lot of harm and while the other gods decided it had to be stopped, he didn’t.

If anything, considering the real point of dispute was granting too much magic to the world, I would expect the real plot twister to be Elder Dragon knowledge, either by all the gods, or just Abaddon. I’m really starting to doubt King Doric’s influence in all this.

Keep in mind that Margonites are still humans during the battle, infused with strong magic sure, but there is no real indication that this would have corrupted them at the time being. The demonic manifestations we see in Nightfall are the same human followers, tainted and twisted but the madness of a god long shackled in isolation. Also, as Abaddon had to rebuild his own body from the realm itself, so too is it likely the Margonites did or were made to do.

Anyway, the point is that the Margonites we’d battle would pretty much look very human.

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

Also, I’m fairly certain you do not play all your professions equally. I’m sure the others can manage with exotics while you earn your way through them. Keeps you busy!

Grounder.7381:

it will render all existing legendaries useless!!! (in fashion)

They already are. Unless you’re dragging the chicken harp along, you’re not wielding anything special nor unique anymore.

Depends what’s going to replace the MF. If it is boon duration, as suggested a couple of times, that would still be amazing for the niche celestial fits in (elementalist, engineer/guardian in lesser degree).

The colour in the first picture is rather off, but I love your following 2 pictures. The radiant gloves work well for a guardian and the entire armor goes well with her fur pattern. 8/10

Here’s my female warrior Charr. She’s steampunk themed and even though I have a couple of setups I’ll showcase this one as I find it fits best under her nickname “Master Carver”. Her name is Katsumi Bittersteel, from the Blood Legion Steel warband. Changed her name to Bitter steel after she saw most of her warband slaughtered in the assault against Barradin.

My guardian likes his bling

My steampunk Charr warrior, affectively nicknamed the Master Carver

My necromancer gentleman, lv 31

It doesn’t really make much sense either. Some weapons seem inherently incompatible with some professions. Staff or sceptre wielding warriors come to mind.

Some more is certainly good, but let’s keep it sensible.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

but GW2 doesn’t have enough skills to begin with. Incase you haven’t noticed, GW1 is not the same as GW2. playstyle and even the development team is different.

Guardians have 4 shouts, 3 of them defensive. Warriors cant kite. Thieves have next to no support, etc..

Half of the builds, and 1/3 elites dont work underwater.

Saying no to new skills doesn’t guarantee that they will focus on the current ones. It just means they should stop working on improving the game.

That’s what we need, underwater only utilities and elites!
Seriously, somehow I can see this happening =/

The bankers at Divinities Reach: “I’m rich you know?”
No, that’s my stuff ¬¬

Was totally worth it.

Uhaen.9876:

I think you guys are selling the rapier short:

The Aetherblades are multi-racial and use magic. They also carry a weapon heretofore unseen in Tyria: a long and narrow blade that they call a rapier. It has proven quite effective as a weapon, according to those who survived the Aetherblade raids.

(source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/aetherblade-pirates-look-up/)

It’s not just me who is reading this as the rapier to make an appearance as a new weapon entirely, is it?

~Terraa

Could be, though a rapier really is just a sword. I’m not sure they can justify making it a new weapon all together.

The portable cannon on the other hand…
Ever used a aetherised tonic to turn into Horrik and hit a piniata in LA? Doing so allowed your character to go into combat modus with the cannon. It strikes me as funny that they bothered making idle animations with it if they only plan on using it once on a side boss.

Portable cannons, that’s where the future’s at.

It was officially stated that the politics of the candidate we pick might influence Lions Arch over the next years to come.

Vague as always but something to consider. Though I have a preference for Kiel atm, I’m not completely convinced she’d make a good politician. I think the choice between them boils down to either military support or financial/material support in further dragon campaigns.

Zaxares.5419:

There are 5 players in a Fractal.

There are 5 Gods opposing Abaddon.

~waits for it to sink in~

I can’t take any credit for this idea though. Konig made this suggestion originally in the Lore forum.

I don’t need to wait for it to sink in because as a gameplay mechanic it has almost zero chance of happening. You can’t have 3 warriors being Dwayna, Lyssa and Melandru for example, or if they are, what will decide who becomes who? It’s going to tick people off because there will be one god that’s subpar to another’s moveset and nobody is going to want to be that god. Also people don’t like forced skillbars.

What happens when there’s only 3 of you? It’s possible you know. Will the other gods be taken over by AI?

Nope, not going to happen.

As for why I assume we are going to fight Abaddon as apposed to fighting for him? Well it’s only a story-wise guess. The fractal would very likely end with the fall of Abaddon, which will in turn suck in the Margonites too. That would mean we’d need to be extracted ‘right’ before that happens, which mean our characters would technically not witness the fall of Abaddon. Also, we already know that Abaddon had a powerful general, Jadoth, who had been hunted by the Forgotten, but only had a minor role in GW1 despite his background. He would make for a good boss fight.

Fighting as Forgotten on the seas below the fight of the gods, having environmental stuff happening tied to the domains of the gods, with as final goal defeating Jadoth, the first general of Abaddon.

It only makes sense. We are not going to play as the gods or aspects of the gods as there is no fixed group composition. You also can’t truly tie each profession to one of the five gods. If the transformation would be random that would be a mechanic which would be hated by the playerbase. The power of the gods, finally, is on a whole different level than ours (consider Abaddon is not yet weakened as he was in Nightfall).

We’ll play below the battle, with as big finale a nice cinematic with Abaddon plunging downwards into the vortex.

In the end I want the reactor more.

Well it’s a different approach at the least. I can understand that it’s not for everybody. That said, the subforum name itself says we get to make a choice that impacts the future of Lions Arch. While that might be marketing fluff, I care to think there will be some sort of significant impact and so the characters do matter.

Webba.3071:

They arent real people…

I take it you don’t really get into character much.

He’ll likely remain somewhere in the world, Lions arch being very probable as it’s the last major city. Defeating him during the event is a LS achievement. Beating him afterwards will just aid your Belcher’s Bluff track.

I’m not saying her is the best offer, I’m saying she will sound most interesting to that part of the community.