Guild Wars 2

Thieves get a displacement effect, so I don’t see why they can’t do something for other professions. The big question is whether it’s worth the time it would take to implement.

If you’d rather be playing WoW, go ahead and play WoW. Enjoy all the mounts your trinity-loving hearts can ride into your epic huge raids. The rest of us will still be here, enjoying GW2 for what it is.

That being said:

• Tengu & related map(s)
• Post-Zhaitan Personal Story
• More weapons for each profession
• Earnable BL Keys instead of Aetherkey/Tricolor/&c.
• New home instance object: Scarlet’s head on a pike

They do a random selection of players each year.

Noncombat switching should preferably be introduced as part of a larger Paradigm Swap system that lets you flip between whole builds.

I, for one, refuse to pretend that working toward ascended weapons and armor is mandatory to enjoy the game. In fact, I dare say that I find them to be quite optional! Thus, I find this time-gating and other hullabaloo to be quite fine and fair, thank you very much.

Here’s something I want: Legendary Traits. A single trait line that uses its own resource and provides a minimal boost to all stats. At the end, it lets you select a cosmetic perk, (such as replacing a mesmer’s butterflies with bats, or adding sparkles to a ranger’s pets).

It progresses using [Objects] of Prestige, which are earned by completing difficult profession-specific challenges throughout the world. For example, a guardian would need Beacons of Prestige, gained in public instances that only guardians can enter. The challenges would be exceptionally difficult, but you only need to succeed at each one once.

If a trait synergizes with skills that are only usable on land, the solution is to make those skills usable underwater.

I would rather not have to keep track of a second trait panel, thanks very much.

If 4 skill bars aren’t enough for you to find something useful, I just don’t know what to say.

Theme
Ancient magic, dug up and heavily re-purposed from Jotun, Mursaat, Forgotten, and Seers.

Mechanics
Creates a durable and mobile combo field that remains centered on the player. Each field has its own short durability gauge that charges conditionally and only when not in use, and only one field can be active at a time. While a field is active, its durability gauge goes down over time, when the player takes damage, and whenever the field is triggered by a combo finisher. If a field is destroyed before the player swaps it out, it goes on a longer cooldown.

Heavy armor, high health, weak healing skills.

Abilities

• F1 Veil of the Stricken
  • Dark combo field; gain occasional Retaliation
  • Charges when player takes direct damage from attacks
• F2 Veil of the Unseen
  • Ethereal combo field; gain occasional Determination (new boon: +Healing Power and -Condition Damage rec’d)
  • Charges when player takes condition damage
• F3 Veil of the Fallen
  • Lightning combo field; gain occasional Stability and Vigor
  • Charges when player is hit by control effects, crippled, or immobilized
• F4 Veil of the Forgotten
  • Poison combo field; gain occasional Fury
  • Charges when player evades or heals

Weapons (all have a combo finisher)

• Two-handed
  • Staff (used melee, control & interrupts)
  • Shortbow (mixed boons & conditions)
• Main-hand
  • Dagger (confusion & torment)
  • Scepter (used close-range, control & poison)
  • Axe (mobility)
• Off-hand
  • Axe (teleport)
  • Warhorn (interrupt & fear)
• Underwater
  • Spear (mobility & torment)
  • Trident (mixed boons & conditions)

Traits

• Stargazing (Precision, Critical Damage)
• Influence (Condition Duration, Condition Damage)
• Warding (Toughness, Boon Duration)
• Sacrifice (Vitality, Healing Power)
• Ancient Power (Veil Recharge, Power)

Skill Types

• Revenant (brief summon of ancient race spirit)
• Echo (immediate effect, then becomes a trap to trigger same effect again)
• Rift (teleport + combo finisher)
• Signet
• Memory (pulsing combo finisher)

Hmm. This is built for a role that’s already filled by support guardians and control warriors. They need to bring something original to the table, something the game is lacking that they can do better than everyone else.

The gold sinks are needed to fight inflation. Without them, we’d eventually be paying 2G for an 8 Slot Bag.

When this thread opened to discuss progression, ascended gear was the last thing that came to my mind. Most playtime next year will not be on characters wearing ascended gear, and most of those who do will not notice it, (outside of Fractals).

To me, progression for my characters after 80 is much more about maximizing their potential by finding fun, efficient builds. Finding the right set of traits, skills, and upgrade components will dramatically influence your desired statistics throughout every variety of content. That cannot be said for ascended equipment.

Vertical progression in GW2 needs to come from horizontal progression: increasing synergy between the pillars of what makes a character tick. For one recent example, the new Skelk Venom makes a venom specialist distinctly stronger than when they were stuck with healing skills that didn’t synergize with their traits. Changes like this add up, moreso than a 5% increase on armor stats.

Conjectured forecast: Wintersday and (probably) Nightmare stay the full six weeks. Then:

Jan 21, Feb 4, Feb 18, Mar 4: LS Season 1 wrapup arc
Mar 18: Features-only update
Apr 1: Super Adventure Box
Apr 15: Living Story Season 2 Premier

You don’t have to stay. But it seems you can’t get the all-combat or no-combat achievements on the first passthrough.

Same thing here.

The original Bloodstone (singular) was crafted by the seers to contain magic. After Abaddon used it to gift magic to humanity, the other gods sealed it with a king’s blood and shattered it in order to fragment the magic into its different types, creating the Bloodstones (plural).

In GW1, horses were rather common – in an undead state. The current reliance on dolyaks suggests that they went extinct at some point.

My first guesses are that they fell casualty to plague, were massacred by an enemy such as the charr, or were all eaten in a time of famine.

Alternately, a curse may have fused all the horses and riders into what became known as centaurs.

My impression has always been that the champion oakhearts are infested with mundane parasites and rotting to death as real trees are wont to do.

To me, this simpler and more obvious explanation is also the most poignant. These proud and ancient trees are suffering through an agonizing fate at the hands of no dragon, but a meager bug. The ceaseless and escalating pain has them thrashing against everything in baleful desperation, and they must be put down before they infest their own kin to be chewed away and rotted from the inside. It’s very sad and natural, and I like it.

Occam’s Razor is a beautiful tool that I cannot recommend highly enough.

This would give people a lot of people access to some very expensive dyes for free. (They run up to around 200G.) That’s akin to giving people free dungeon armor.

You also have the issue of people leaving the guild, or simply not representing it. Whether you force them to change dye colors or let them “steal” valuable dyes and run away with them, nobody’s going to be happy.

Maybe if every other weapon type gets three more legendaries to bring them up to the same number.

Hold your dolyaks, people. That the gods favored certain magical energies—and could contain and bestow them—are concepts independent from the origins of those magical energies.

We can manipulate rivers, but that doesn’t mean we invented water.

For all we know, the magic could have spilled out from an eternal Mystic Teapot orbiting the planet, long before the gods ever arrived to meddle on it.

Why should drifting on the air be unlikely? Consider the pod-like “elevators” in the Grove with a little magic. It’s quite possible that Malyck’s tree is as large and powerful as the Pale Tree, so why couldn’t it launch airborne pods into an updraft and let the wind carry them where it may?

If his tree is far enough away, Malyck’s pod could have caught a particularly good draft and been carried far enough to hit our explorable land and roll down some hill into the river.

(Or, you know: Scarlet.)

Guardian
Signet of Arrest
Passive: Replace Virtue of Justice’s burning with cripple and vulnerability.
Active: Your next attack petrifies the target and inflicts 15 stacks of vulnerability.

The purpose is to give guardians an option to focus more on dealing physical damage, instead of the standard condition build.

I don’t see many people bothering with spear on any profession. It’s just too hard to judge distances without a ground plane.

It would take a little more than just darkening things, but I agree fully. Changes in contrast, saturation, and such are needed as well.

Vexander: Good questions.

Status could be displayed right on the world map, with a subtle little icon next to each map name. You should be able to see at a glance which maps need attention, without going out of your way into a special screen. It’s important to avoid things like a ranked list, or flashing up a worldwide alert naming the lowest map. Those tactics would only serve to funnel players into a single map.

Trains should be able to stick with a map rotation for a day or two before swapping anything out. However, the goal should also be to make more events per map worth doing, so the existing mindless zergs would probably need to break up into a few more organized groups to try and hit everything.

Part of the trick would be balancing the swing of score updating, so it keeps players spread out and moving around, without making them all feel like they’re riding a rodeo bull. Perhaps scores could only update at server refreshes, (same time as daily achievements, etc.), and change by a regulated increment each time.

Aside from bug fixes, the next update will probably be Jan 7. Any content released near Dec 24 would just draw ire from all the players who won’t be on during that time.

Devs gave a loud NO! during the livestream. Scarlet will not be appearing during Wintersday.

Straits of Devastation is mostly underwater. We just don’t have a reason to play there.

I would prefer a “Usable by me” check box. This would exclude any weapons or armor unusable by your profession, but also materials and components outside your crafting disciplines and levels, and anything that requires a higher character level.

Read the part in parenthesis. Also, zone level and player group size should always be a larger consideration in scaling.

I would say the current situation for newbies in Queensdale is worse, anyway. They’re made to feel downright unwelcome, even being called “poachers” if they try to play some content as it’s intended.

Fully agreed on all points. The redundancy of clicking through these stacks has been bugging me.

There is currently little incentive for players to spend time on many of the game’s maps. This causes several problems for both the players and developers, and steps need to be taken to resolve this before new permanent explorable maps can be brought out.

Here is my idea for a system that—balanced with other improvements—could bring players into the lesser played zones.

• Give each explorable map a fluctuating Control score.
• Completed events drive the score up. Failed or lapsed events drive the score down.
• All events should have a timer. It can be a generous one, but it should be there.
• Event frequency and scaling should adjust according to how active the server currently is. (So players aren’t punished for going to bed, or for simply being on a low population server.)
• Program daily achievements to automatically include objectives specific to maps that have low Control scores.
• Change daily achievement rewards to scale up when more maps have a high Control score.
• Scale event frequency and rewards up on low Control maps.
• Scale event difficulty up dramatically on high Control maps. (Not so much in a way that makes players die a lot, but more in shortening timers and increasing fail rates.)
• Make more of the champion spawns, (such as most in Frostgorge Sound), count as events, so their frequency, difficulty, and rewards will scale with this system.
• Balance the frequency of champion spawning between all maps. Stagger and slightly randomize frequencies and locations of different champions within each map, to break up trains.

If balanced correctly and used in conjunction with other improvements, players should find that they get the best rewards by shifting their focus across every part of Tyria.

Of course, this demands that every event be both fun and rewarding. It would take a fair amount of work to implement, but I believe the results would be worth it.

I missed out on Wintersday last year, (technical difficulties), so I am glad they kept it the same. It’s like I didn’t really miss anything, because I have the chance to do it all now.

And if Sc*rlet shows up, I’m stuffing her in a snow globe until she suffocates.

Golems reset for me & bf as well. I doubt it’s intentional, but that it doesn’t make it any easier to slog through this whole place now that nobody’s in it.

Gillian.1859:

You are trading your toughness and vitality in a glass build. Don’t complain about downing all the time if you cannot dodge. It’s YOUR build. Own it.

I have ran dungeons with glass warriors complaining about the lack of dps the rest of the team does when he goes down every 5 seconds… not impressed.

Exactly. Let me elaborate: DPS should not be calculated—or estimated—as an ideal maximum, but as an average. This value may not be the same in every situation.

The key is that time spent waiting for your teammates to pick you up off the floor, (over…and over…and over again), counts heavily against you. Here are a couple reasons why:

• You are doing less damage with your downed skills than your standing ones. Make that none when you fall from downed to dead.
• Teammates reviving you are unable to activate most skills. This subtracts from your personal contribution to team DPS.

It is possible for your net damage contribution to be negative. In certain difficult modes of play, you simply cannot dodge everything, and moving points from offense to defense can actually increase your damage output.

The current cadence is great. Any player can wrap up the meta achievement in a few hours. The complaints people have about LS development relate to decisions made, not time spent. The illusion that they represent everyone, and the idea that things they don’t personally like are inherently bad, are things that I’m glad the devs are smart enough to see past.

That said, onward! My favorite LW release was Bazaar of the Four Winds—for reasons others have stated—but I know this isn’t a part of the LS arc. I disagree with erasing the Cliffs from the map just because the Sanctum itself has moved on.

Clockwork Chaos introduced some of the most promising permanent content, but Scarlet makes me cringe.

I passed on Last Stand at Southsun. It had such a small scope to its content, the release felt pointless. Don’t get me started on the annoyances of Dragon Bash.

One of the main boasts of GW2’s PvE design was the death of the classic quest system. I mean the quest log that told you to kill ten rats, fetch a dozen hides, and take down the big bad ogre in the middle of the map.

That quest log was replaced with a combination of the public event system, renown hearts, and the personal story. What happened?

We’re not likely to see hearts on any new maps, as they’ve reportedly lost favor with the devs. They have expressed interest in potentially growing the personal story, but nothing has been added since launch. Events, at least, are still all the rage.

The achievement system started off simple, and built up promise over the last year. But since ramping up the Living Story, it has become more and more like a quest log, albeit one linked to seasonal public events.

We’re right back to a checklist of killing ten rats, collecting a dozen hides, and taking down the big bad ogre.

Thoughts?

The princess kissed the frog to make him a prince. After looking upon him a minute, she shrugged her shoulders and waggled a finger. He was abruptly turned into a hylek.

The entire foundation of the tower is underwater, and I’m sure there will be some action down there.

Comparisons to the backstage process of GW1 are irrelevant, since the lead developers from that game moved on from ArenaNet years ago. The GW2 team does have a select few of the old guard in its ranks, but a decade of musical chairs has jumbled their positions.

This a whole other ANet, folks.

I always use the Durmand Priory one, since it’s the closest to a waypoint.

I don’t think she’s going to be connected with this update. She’s more akin to the Soundless than the Nightmare Court.

Also, the krait and NC are both serious, religious groups, and the building of the tower seems to have much deeper significance to its makers than Scarlet’s trite M.O. of “OMG POWER, DESTROY ALL THE THINGS LOL.”

Ugh. So glad to be free of her taint so we can focus on real story for a couple weeks.

Mordremoth, yes. Scarlet, no. She is definitely not taken into his Nightmare.

This takes place on an existing mid-level map. Sorry, Drage.

My thought is that toxin will be contained to the new tower, like agony is tied to fractals. Enemies and environmental fields there will surely have it, thus the connection, but the I would wager the condition will be tied to the content and not (initially) spread beyond it.

PVE

1. Continue improving build viability
   1. e.g. Conditions & control
2. Expand achievement reward storage
   1. Living Story trophies clog up bank tabs
3. Scale up world boss pre-events
   1. Send out enough mobs for everyone

PLAYER BASE

1. Spread humility
2. Act and speak with dignity
3. Be awesome to each other

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Do I? I got to a room where I can choose between the Clocktower and the PvP minigame. Hmm.

There is also a round portal stone on the floor. This takes you down to the PvE version of the labyrinth.

Here too. Just made one—even though I won’t ever use it—and got nothing. I should have just sold the pieces on the BLTC

Here’s what I might be okay with: extra stacks get converted into a single burst of damage, equal to a fixed percentage of the total damage the stacks would have dealt over their duration and your current level of condition damage at the time of skill activation.

It has to be lowered from the full value so players can’t spoof higher damage by slamming conditions out right before their might expires. This also compensates for the fact that some mobs can clear conditions, and many would normally die before the conditions can run their course.

Health isn’t tied to armor class. Necromancers have the same high pool as warriors, and guardians have just as little as elementalists.