Guild Wars 2

I really enjoyed the inclusion of SAB the first time. It made me giggle with nostalgia.

It’s return, however, isn’t inspiring me. But I’m looking at this as a boon. For two weeks I have no LS stuff to add to my in-game checklist, so I can go about doing more WvW and zone completion that I keep putting off due to LS.

SAB is your break to enjoy the core game again!

Wholeheartedly agreed!

The time-gating is slowly sucking the fun out of the game. I have a big enough to-do list in real life, I don’t need one in game.

And the patch notes are out, and no mention of adjusting these skills. Perhaps it was done behind the scenes, and no notes, but more likely they haven’t been adjusted.

It would be nice to get a developer response on whether this is being worked on.

Agreed, Pope, but clearly that is a big project that they are not tackling at this time.

Better that players get free top tier damage than get stuck with inferior damage whenever using non-weapon damage sources.

There is evidence that ANet has been learning from past mistakes.

I hope this is one of those cases. I don’t expect to suddenly see non-weapon damage sources suddenly taking their damage from equipped weapons, but I have hope that we will at least see things like kits/turrets/summoned and spirit weapons get their internal damage adjusted upwards, if not this patch, then the next.

It took a long time for them to adjust kits, but they eventually did, and hopefully it’s now on the radar, so there won’t be such a long lag this time.

Ascended weapons are definitely making me consider which alts to put in mothballs. With ascended armor before the end of the year it’s looking like I will be able to keep up with the gear treadmill on two, maybe three characters max.

It’d be great, if this has been overlooked, to know they’ve started work on fixing it. I suppose patch notes tomorrow will give us an idea.

With ascended weapons becoming the new BiS, will we see a scale up of non weapon damage sources this patch?

Engineer kits, elementalist conjure weapons, ranger pet attacks, necro wells, guardian spirit weapons… None of these take their damage from equipped weapons, right? Will they be buffed to reflect ascended weapon damage ranges, or are non-weapon damage sources about to receive a relative nerf?

I love the Asura animations. There’s so much momentum and ferocity in their movements.

Not to mention, they look awesomely ridiculous if you pick some of the more over-the-top (shoulderpads!) juggernaut type armors. Instead of just looking ridiculous, like Norn and Humans.

The purpose of ascended gear….

…is to cure my altoholism once and for all.

Haven’t seen anyone mention here that the Dulfy guide says ascended armor crafting will be coming later this year.

Shiren.9532:

Gibson.4036:

I find villains with ambitions more compelling than the high fantasy typical dark-horde made up of dragon minions.

…

What I don’t see is how this point is relevant to the topic. You can have a fantasy story with compelling villains without turning the game into an episode of Doctor Who. Whether it’s a fantasy or sci-fi setting has no bearing on the character development you have access to.

…

Yes, but the OP specifically mentioned wanting “dragons” and “ancient horrors” as antagonists. The kind of villains that go along with stereotypical “high fantasy”.

Something I haven’t seen brought up in this whole discussion. Champs aren’t just about the loot. The items we need to bring to Vorpp are dropped by Champs. If you are on a server where everyone is nice and spread out doing the event “correctly” it can be a problem to find anything beyond vets.

As for the ten minute mark, if you have a guild you can ask for an invite from a guildie who is doing the event, which will pull you into an active overflow.

Good to know. Just discovered mine is missing as well.

Fascinating to see some of the assumptions about what makes “magic”, and what makes “science”, and the essence of “fantasy”.

Asuran magi-tech is no closer to science than it is to magic. It’s a pretty jumbled mix of cosmetics from both worlds.

Funny how with every fantasy game that launches you’ll have plenty of people complaining about yet another Elf retread (remember when Sylvari didn’t look much like plant people at all?), but if there isn’t an obvious Elf retread you’ll get an equal dose of complaints from people who miss their comfortable, Tolkein-derivative, D&Desque fantasy.

Pre-launch we had people moaning that they were thinking of skipping GW2 because they were tired of quasi-medieval Europe fantasy and were planning on heading to Secret World instead (or recently Wildstar) right along with threads complaining about the reveal of the Engineer profession because it obviously didn’t fit in Tyria.

Everyone’s got different tastes, and it’s pretty clear ANet has committed to a heavy dose of industrial revolution fantasy in GW2 (most of which is only loosely “steampunk”, if at all). Many of us enjoy it. It’s too bad for those who prefer a more medieval fantasy, but perhaps ESO will offer a better home.

I was going to say Rift is still going, but remembered that it has clockwork magi-tech as well. If I remember correctly, though, it’s a lot less present in one of the factions.

It does seem like there’s an awful lot of mechanics there for something, that, at most, is designed to retract the wings on a day with pleasant weather. I’ve been wondering if there’s more to the giant bird, myself.

I think we’re still pretty firmly in fantasy territory here. No real attempt at consistency or scientific foundation is being made for the technology in this game.

Yes, it isn’t your straight forward Tolkien-derivative fantasy, but after decades of reading that I enjoy the mixing of other elements into what seems to be a loosely European Renaissance culture. Trends in fantasy in general over the last decade or so seem to point to the same being true of writers and the general fantasy audience.

Read through some of the World Fantasy Award novels of recent years, for example, and you’ll run into a lot of industrial revolution type fantasy. China Mieville comes to mind as an author who’s work has repeatedly appeared on awards lists with his dark, industrial, magical novels.

If I look at the things that are most intriguing to me in GW2, they aren’t the high fantasy elements. I find the elder dragons kinda dull, the human gods uninspiring. I do enjoy the Asuran unreliable, weird-science, the Zephyrites air ship, and have been getting a kick out of Aetherblade ships around the world.

I find villains with ambitions more compelling than the high fantasy typical dark-horde made up of dragon minions.

I do enjoy the Sylvari, with their roots in Arthurian and Faery lore, with an unusual twist of the Mother Tree and the Dream.

I’d like to add my voice of support for non-RNG weapon skins.

I won’t be buying them either, as I’m not interested in the look. I would, however, have bought some fused weapon skins had they been available outside of gambling boxes.

I hope that if there is not a good response to Sovereign weapons that ANet will not take it as a rejection of being able to buy them and re-institute random tickets from boxes.

I imagine the other races don’t make a great deal of use of Asura tech because of its alarming tendency to explode and rip holes in the fabric of time and space.

The gates were just too useful to be squeamish about.

In GW1 selling trips through dungeons was common, in addition to selling runs for lowbie characters to other areas.

In GW2, people sell ports up jumping puzzles.

Doesn’t seem to be frowned on.

kristof.7182:

@Gibson.4036
Oh lol, half human, half cat? lol

It could be Queen’s Safety too.

Yes!

Crazy Asura Tech™ can make anything possible.

We need a twisted love triangle to make the Logan/Queen thing more interesting.

Add in more Crazy Asura Tech™ and the Queens’ half-Charr son can be part of the story as a young pup, then not too much later enter adolescence, and by the time we hit 2014 he’ll be an integral part of the Living Story™.

Rejected by both of his people for being mixed race, his mother unable to acknowledge him publicly, he strives not only to reconcile the Humans and Charr but also to bring healing to the broken relationship between his biological father and his mother’s husband (now married to Logan for political purposes).

He will also champion a small, but growing population of other mixed race children brought about by the marketing of said Crazy Asura Tech™ in response to demand by mixed race couples who now see the opportunity they’d never thought they’d have to produce children together (and, of course, the Inquest’s evil exploitation of said Tech™ to create Norn/Asura hybrid Genius-Juggernauts!).

Ronah.2869:

How about Queen’s Son.
Jennah was pregnant with Logan when he heard the news he ran to his loved one from Desliny’;s Edge

Too simple. Needs more conflict.

During the Queen’s Son chapter of the Living Story, we discover that the Queen does not actually reciprocate Logan’s feelings for her. She has just been using him to cover up her real love affair, which would cause revolt in the streets of Divinity’s Reach were it to be discovered.

Navigating the webs of intrigue in the Queen’s court, the players are secretly approached by the Queen’s personal physician, an Asura doctor, who has discovered a bizarre side effect from the potion regimen he has been dosing her with to keep her from aging.

Shockingly, they find that the Queen is carrying the child of…

Rytlock Brimstone!

It’d be nice to get a dev response on this one, so we know whether it’s time to delete our rep buttons.

Stability? Dodge? Block? Blind?

Perhaps now is the time to try for this achievement again if you don’t have it.

While in Frostgorge earlier today map chat was filled with comments about not having enough people to do Jormag because everyone is at the Crown Pavilion. This was on a SoR, which has a large population.

So you might not even need to guest to a low pop server if you take advantage of the LS pulling everyone to DR.

I don’t know how anyone can think a “universal weapon” would be a good idea.

Exhibit A: Almost every heart bundle item in the game. :P

gurugeorge.9857:

But no MMO has ever done that kind of thing. You progress only the character you play, in every MMO.

That’s not even entirely true of GW2. Achievements are per account, and now give bonuses to all of your characters. You can also earn things like karma on one character, and use them on another character.

In Final Fantasy, one character can do all classes, so that muddies the waters.

It’s just not as cut and dried as you imply.

To be fair to ANet, we just had a very good quality of life addition for altaholics in the form of the currency wallet.

I was a little taken aback by laurels when they were first introduced, because it seemed to be really harsh on alts, but really with monthlies and dailies you can rack them up at a reasonable rate and get your ascended jewelry pretty quick, even across multiple characters.

There are a few areas I feel do penalize alts. WvW ranks, Legendaries, and many gem store items like everlasting harvesting tools.

WvW ranks and Legendaries are probably not a soulbound issue though. The real problem there is just the huge cost in time compared to the payoff. If you ranked up in WvW like you do in other areas of the game, it wouldn’t be so bad to rank up alts in serial.

The gem store items, though, make no sense. Two people who play 20 hours a week both buy an everlasting mining pick. One, who only has a single character, is getting 20 hours of mining out of that pick. The other, who plays equally on five characters, either spends five times as much, or only gets 4 hours of mining out of that pick.

EchenSketch.9142:

This is the BEST content update so far. You know why? It’s challenging. It took me a day
to do it, but I finally beat Liadri. All of the bosses are tough, but fair and the game needs more of this.

Challenge is great, and sorely needed. But delivered as a series of “wait in line to ride the ride”, contextless encounters?

Euryon.9248:

Instead of going on and on and on and on about the “Manifesto” and what your personal ideals about what the game “should be”, why not just take it at face value? Most of your complaint is centered around stuff from a year ago instead of just evaluating the current content for what it is.

And if you don’t like the current content, don’t play it and instead go play the stuff you do like. And if there isn’t anything you do like, why are you wasting your time complaining here instead of finding some other game?

A company talks about their vision for a product.
You think that they are on track to deliver that vision.
Over time, it seems like they are getting off track.

Which makes more sense:

1) Let the company know that you think they are getting off track, that you really love where they were headed, and where they were, but not where they seem to be now.

or

2) Go buy a product from a company that doesn’t even have that vision.

Or to put it numerically,

If they said they were going for 100% what you wanted, started off with 80%, and seem to be slipping down to 50%, does it make sense to express it to the company, or go find someone delivering 2%?

As much as people like to rant that ANet doesn’t listen to people on the forums, there seem to be changes that reflect the feedback made here. So why is it a waste of time?

I am still enjoying the game a lot. I still have a little bit of joy when I log on, and a little sadness when it’s time to log off. So while I wouldn’t have stated things as strongly as the OP, there are several good points in there:

1) Some parts of this game make me embarrassed. I went to see what all the fuss was about when people were holding up an event in Orr, making sure it didn’t complete so they could farm endlessly spawning mobs. I did that for about 20 minutes before I gave up and fled the mindlessness of it. ANet got around to fixing that event so it couldn’t be farmed, but what about some of the other areas of the game?

The first time I started doing the world boss shuffle, I remember commenting to my guildies, “What a silly way to play a video game.” It’s kind of embarassing that I have gw2stuff sitting there open on a second monitor so I can rotate through pinata zerg after pinata zerg, but it’s so hard to resist when it gets me rares so much faster than any of the other open-world content.

This morning I went to the pavilion to see what was new. After getting hopelessly confused by the upper rings (is there a point to those?) I figured out where the entrance to the center actually is. I jumped in with the Champ zerg, and after the initial excitement at how quickly I was getting loot and getting my dailies/monthly knocked out, I started to feel that familiar sense of embarassment growing. Is this what I really want from an adventure game?

2) We have not seen the living world that ANet set us up to expect, yet. When they talked about having the infrastructure to drop new DEs into existing zones, did anyone imagine that it would look like this? Identical flame and frost portals sprinkled throughout a few zones? Identical balloon escort quests evenly spaced, a couple per zone, across tyria?

I certainly didn’t. I’m a pretty low key person with a lot of patience, so I’m hanging in there, and haven’t given up hope. The festivals are a foundation that can now rotate through next year, so that they can spend more time developing more ambitious content. Perhaps I am naive, but I’m willing to believe, and see what the next six months brings.

Still, Fiontar makes an excellent post, that so far they haven’t delivered in this department except on some, very basic, level.

3) I honestly had no idea how complex some of the game has become with currencies and inventory management until my wife started playing just recently. Explaining which things to vendor, which things to Mystic flush, which to bank, and which to TP is a lot more complicated that I would have imagined, given how automatic of a process it is for me. Last night, after cleaning out our inventories from the previous play session, stocking up on gathering tools, and updating our gear, she said, “Whew, only an hour in and we’re ready to actually do something.”

So while I wouldn’t have stated things as strongly as the OP, neither would I dismiss it as a “wall of hate”. There are several good points made there, and I can feel Fiontar’s very real frustration which comes from a place of really liking the core of the game and world.

Chopps.5047:

…Stated design goal was to make you change up your build if necessary…

Can you link a source for this?

If changing up your build means respeccing into new trait lines, that’s an about face from earlier posts claiming that they wanted trait lines to give us a sense of permanence, and not be something that people change frequently.

Goal-em was the original pronunciation, but it’s since come to be widely pronounced both ways.

Just like a Jubilee was the 50th year after seven Sabbath years, but now it just means big celebration.

And he still hasn’t corrected the typo. Can Charr blush?

I did an escort quest for the balloon west of Altar Brook, opened the chest fine. Went to the balloon north of Krytan Waypoint, and the gate was open, the chest was open, and couldn’t loot. Talked to the pilot, and that kicked off an escort quest. Completed the escort quest. Went up to the chest and it was still open, tried to loot and ended up traveling to DR.

This is the first time I’ve done any of the balloons.

Haven’t played the content yet, so I can’t judge, but one thing did strike me as interesting.

“Adjust your build” is pretty common advice, but I suddenly remembered something I haven’t thought about for a while. ANet has defended the hassle of having to find an NPC and pay a little money to respec by telling us that they want a sense of permanence in our builds. Our builds are supposed to reflect our play style and who our character is, not be something we easily swap out (with the exception of traits within the same line) with ease.

When people talk about swapping out the right builds for the content, are they talking about switching out weapon, utilities, and traits, or are they talking about investing in different trait lines?

lordkrall.7241:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Make every 20+ man team appear on the map to enemies at all times (e.g. moving orange swords)

This would mean enemy would know in advance when a zerg is rushing at their gates etc. but realistically a huge trampling force won’t be able to move unnoticed. Their trampling feet would be heard from long distances.

Now if you’d want to ninja cap a keep you would need to do it with less people.

So, basically make it more or less impossible for guilds to do stuff together in WvW?

That’s a drastic oversimplification. Of course guilds could still run together in WvW.

It would be about choice. How important is staying off the radar? Do you need 40 people to hit that keep? Then the two commanders in your guild organize your 40 guild members into to squads and come at the keep seperately so you don’t show on the map until the point where the crossed swords would appear anyway.

Is stealth vitally important? Than run your guild with several groups of 20 instead of one massive group of 60. How is that not working with your guild? Seems like it would be more like doing something with your guild if your commanders are strategically coordinating multiple 20 man teams rather than just doing the massive blob-zerg that you don’t even need a guild for. You can just join up with one of the server blob-zergs if that’s what you’re looking for.

This suggestion makes a ton of sense. It adds a strategic choice. Which is more important? Limiting enemy awareness of your position, or strength from numbers?

As funny as it is to see and be a part of a eighty man zerg stacking on a commander to hide behind a small hut while the enemy flows past unaware, the suggestion above sounds like it would make for more interesting WvW.

As Vol said.

If you read up on the wiki, you can see the numbers people came up with after testing to see the difference in materials received from BL kits, mystic kits, and master’s kits. You don’t get enough return for the amount you spend on BL kits or mystic kits.

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

Better than a big hole in the ground..

Really? I thought the big hole in the ground was amazing and mysterious. I remember when the screen shot of the great collapse was first released while the game was still in development and people were wildly speculating on Guru about what it was and what kind of content would be involved. Would we be able to explore those exposed undercity layers? Was there something more sinister than poor foundations behind the collapse? The first chance we got people were trying to jump off of the bridge.

I like the look of the Crown Pavilion, but the hole had added a lot of character to an otherwise grand, shining medievalesque city. It will be a shame if this update paves over the Great Collapse, never to be mentioned in game again. It would be so much wasted potential that clearly sparked the imagination of the player base.

The festivals aren’t the entire game. They have concentrated on them for the first year, because now they can set them on their regular cycle and go on to create non-festival content.

So every couple of months we see a return of a festival, giving them more time to beef up new content.

For what it’s worth, this is the last rotating festival content. The festivals are intended to be a foundation for living world, allowing the developers to now rotate them through the next year, starting with the Mad King in October again. They can keep cycling them while spending more time on developing bigger, better updates.

It remains to be seen what this looks like in reality, but it is the stated intent.

Several look like really good skins. When I look at “Knowledge is Power”, I can’t help but see paper towel dispenser.

If only it wasn’t temporary…

Agreed. The current message is, “don’t use LS currency for its intended purpose, it will be worth more later”.

Reward support buttons as much as unused tickets.

“Fashionables New Items in the Gem Store!”

Looks like Evon wasn’t quite recovered from seeking solace in a few bottles after his defeat before he put together his latest sale announcement.

And to think I logged in over my lunch break yesterday just to use my remaining tokens before voting ended.

Wish I could have that couple of gold back.

Sure, a few gold isn’t much for some people, but a huge number of people are willing to do the world boss pinatas for a guaranteed rare worth only about 20s. Not all of us are sitting around on hundreds of gold.

Wonder why they haven’t made a Dhuum finisher, yet. I bet it would be one of the most popular items in the gem store.

lordkrall.7241:

Meglobob.8620:

I want the thaumanova fractal that’s why I vote for Keil, quite a few of the devs have said that fractal is far, far better than the Abaddon one, which apparently is medicore and disappointing…

Actually no.
Not a single dev have said that. The only thing a dev have said about the Fractals is more or less: “I have worked with this one, so I prefer it if it won”.

Actually, neither of those is right.

He said he got excited about what they came up with when they brainstormed the Reactor.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/first#post2473277

JackSlate.8450:

Good point I even heard something like a actuall Audio File from Evon’s Victory Speech in guildchat. I haven’t checked it tho.
But even if you take the Herald and the Audio File into consideration you could still say that they added it so ppl cannot proof that it is made up.

You could also make yourself a chapeau from aluminum food wrapping.

But you’re right, anything’s possible. Which is why conspiracy theories never die.