Guild Wars 2

(looks around, sees only Asura)

What a relief. I have something I’ve been dying to say, and I don’t want to say it in front of a crowd of bookahs:

On your way up to Dolyak Pass, where all the weirdness is going on right now, did you go up the west side of the pass? Past all of the skirmishes between the Norn and the Grawl? Did you listen to them? Really listen?

We’re all intellectuals and grown-ups here, yes, I know just as well as you do that that fight is really about territory and resources, not religion. But here’s what I want to know about the religious excuses for the fighting. Are the Norn putting us on, or what?

The Norn … are mocking the Grawl … for worshiping just any old thing they find in nature. Considering what the Norn worship, that’s either so stupid I can’t believe even a Norn would say it, or else it’s such subtle meta-humor, so sophisticated, that I can’t believe that any Norn would think of it. There, I got that off of my chest. I feel much better.

(looks around)

Oh, hello, my Norn colleague! How goes the fighting and the drinking and the bragging?

(pretends to listen to and care about the answer, interrupts)

Say, while you’re here, would you go carry that heavy object so I don’t have to send a golem to do it instead? Thanks!

(wry grin)

If Anet didn’t want you to look like a hobo, they wouldn’t offer you the Universal Multitool Pack as a starting costume piece.

Listen, as an Asura, I share your feels. Imagine wearing our racial armor with one of these low-tech backpacks. But we’re probably pretty thoroughly stuck with it, because there probably isn’t any way for them to provide per-character customization options to powers.

Asura. Because while everybody else is playing D&D, we’re playing Shadowrun.

And your personal-story mentor is voiced by Felicia Day. Did I mention that your personal-story mentor is voiced by Felicia Day? Yeah, Felicia Day.

I blew through Fireheart Rise with approximately the same build you described as if it were on fire. (Pun intended.) If it didn’t have a silver or gold ring around its icon, I seldom even had to dodge, let alone kite. Against trash mobs and melee ambushes, I mostly used the bomb kit (rounding up a swarm of trash mobs and bomb kitting them to death is half of why I still have fun with my engineer, it even mostly works in dungeons); against Veterans, I mostly used the flamer; against anything highly mobile or that was stacking conditions on me, I used the e-gun. The Med Kit is mostly there so that my F1 and F2 heals don’t step on each other if I use them back to back; if I’m trying to keep an escorted mob alive or running with a zerg, I replace it with Healing Turret so that I have two AoE regen skills that I can use on the move.

The only explanation I can think of for why you had a harder time is that I may be in better gear than you (all yellow quality, all carrion prefixed) or I may have a different trait layout than you (see link above). I think I died twice getting to 100% zone completion; once to a bad pull against that Veteran Ice Imp (too many adds) and once to an absolutely ridiculous (possibly bugged?) ambush wave in a dynamic event (multiple veterans and adds vs. just li’l ol’ me). I think it took me three evenings; I could have done it in two if I hadn’t stumbled into yet another dynamic event every 15 feet in the southeast corner of the zone.

Hope this helps!

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Sovta.4719:

And what about guys that don’t have unlocked whole map?

You don’t get to play, just like small guilds don’t get to play. Have a nice day.

You don’t have to be a large guild (once you do get them unlocked, which I grant will take forever) because every bounty we found had at least two other guilds pounding on them. You only have to tag them once. Of course, if there aren’t enough large guilds on your server that you can count on someone coming along to help, I don’t know what to tell you.

You don’t have to be at 100% map completion; according to Dulfy, there are only 15 zones they can spawn in, so far.

However, one of those zones is Frostgorge Sound, and another is Southsun Cove. So if you’re not level 80, yeah, you’re pretty much kittened. (Two other members of my guild were running alongside me to get to the bounty in Southsun, both of them level 60 or below. Neither one made it, they each got one-shotted along the way.) You can contribute if you get lucky enough that one or more of your bounties are in lower level zones; otherwise, I guess the message is “learn to power-level, noob, the real game starts at the level cap.”

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

… Or the confusion spamming bounty. …

There’s more than one. Two of the three bounties I fought last night had spammable confusion attacks. As best as I can tell, you’re supposed to bring enough people that everybody can get off one or two attacks before they get confused, then drop out and let other people jump in for the 5 to 10 seconds it takes before your condition dump power recharges or they wear out. Or, failing that, bring enough bunkers to keep them busy while people who aren’t attacking go around rezzing the people who died of confusion spam.

Lucky Shot.7650:

Hawkian.6580:

I don’t understand, would you not have gotten more for getting the second target…?

Also just FYI they can drop outright as a reward upon completing a guild mission.

EDIT: To fully answer your question, you can only do one per week… per tier per mission type. You’ll be rolling in commendations after a few weeks if your guild has 40 players active enough to take on a bounty.

BTW, did you split into two teams, or what?

I don’t know If I would have got more if we cleared the second one. That’s why I was asking! ^^ …

From our experiments,* apparently you wouldn’t have. You only get the rare item/guild commendations for one kill, presumably one per day but obviously we haven’t had time to test that yet. I also don’t know if you can get extra commendations for running a different type the same day; we didn’t get that unlocked in time to try, either.

But as it stands, if you run at least one guild bounty mission per day, every guild member who tags even one of the bounties with even one attack will get 2 guild commendations per day, so it’ll take 6 days, not 6 weeks, to earn 12 of them.

• Experiment: Between 7 pm and midnight CST, approximately 35 members of [SWAT] on Ehmry ran four guild missions: one level 1 success, one level 2 success, two level 3 miserable failures. There were people who joined after the first mission who got guild commendations for the second mission; nobody who was present for both missions got any more commendations than the people who were there for only one. We got no rewards at all for the failed missions, just about 50s each in armor repairs and teleport fees.

AstralDusk.1670:

How many bookahs does it take to install a polyphotonic emitter?

Three: One to hire an asura, and one to call a medic for the third.

I prefer to tell that one the other way around:

Q: How many Asura does it take to install a polyphotonic emitter?

A: One. Who summons three bookahs, reducing it to a previously solved polyphotonic emitter joke.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

… By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased. …

I laughed when I read this. I will be deeply surprised if this is how it turns out. Pleasantly surprised, but deeply surprised nonetheless. This is not what I would bet. My bet would be that what will happen, instead, is that outside of a few exceptional guilds, new people simply won’t be welcome on dungeon teams at all. What your theory leaves out, what this design leaves out, is any in-band, in-game way for players who start out with average skill or below to learn what the alternative to rez-rushing is.

Guilds that (a) have figured it out and (b) have exceptionally patient teachers, people who are willing to have it take a lot longer to get to the reward chest because they have to stop to type, including answering questions, before each fight, will work out the way that you think it will. My experience with MMOs tells me that such teachers are so rare that there will never been enough of them to go around, that not 1 player in 20 will ever get to play alongside one.

The loot table for any boss flagged as [Group Event] should not include anything flagged as blue or below, it should be guaranteed to drop either a green or better item or a rare crafting material.

Since almost every leggings option has a skirt, angle the single-handed weapons outwards from the hip, when holstered, so that they don’t clip so badly. It still wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a lot better.

Doubloons, being crafting materials, should have their own slots in the crafting materials and be transferred to the bank by Deposit Collectibles.

Even though they can be combined in the Mystic Forge (what can’t be, after all), minipets are not really crafting materials and should NOT be stored as such in the bank, in my opinion, and should not get deposited by Deposit Collectibles.

In the Hero panel, under Weapon skills, hovering over a Chain attack should show all attacks in the chain, just like it does when you have the weapon equipped, not just the first attack in the Chain, as it currently is.

In my opinion, jumping puzzle starting points should get their own map/minimap icons. I understand that some people may disagree, but in my opinion, hiding the fact that there even is a jumping puzzle there is kind of capricious.

If the tooltips can’t be easily and quickly modified to show the actual combat multipliers, at least include the words “light,” or “medium,” or “strong” before the word damage or heal or regen or whatever so that we can tell, before picking an ability, approximately how strong it will be. For example, just to pick one at random: Guardian trait Zeal XII (Zealous Blade) currently says, “Greatsword attacks heal you.” A more useful tooltip would read, “Greatsword hits(?) perform a minor(?) heal on you.” Is it per hit, per swing, or per press of the button? Is it a minor heal, or something stronger? The tooltip doesn’t say; each tooltip should be a little more clear as to how exactly it’s triggered and how much of an effect it has.

Under engineer kits, Flamethrower’s Flame Blast should probably be a blast finisher. Elixir Gun’s Acid Bomb should absolutely be a leap finisher.

Even if the only way to kludge it is with an application shortcut option or a slash command, as long as empty-handed Charr NPCs don’t bunny-hop, players need some way to turn off bunny-hop running on their Charr characters.

Needs more pictures.

I’ll add this to your mostly-empty section on Charr/Asura relations. I’ve run into at least one Charr with strong anti-Asura bias, I think he was at Trader’s Green Haven in Caledon Forest. (“Asura are obnoxious. Durmand Priory are obnoxious. Durmand Priory Asura are doubly-obnoxious.” Or words to that effect.) I can’t remember any other examples.

But going the other way, in contrast to their usual attitude towards all bookah, the Asura gate engineer in Black Citadel has a long conversation with his Sylvari partner, from time to time, in which he praises the Charr for being strong enough to bash through a brick wall, but smart enough to know which brick to remove so that the whole wall falls down without them having to bash through it. From an Asura, that’s high praise.

Again, I don’t know how much to generalize from that one example. But it wouldn’t surprise me of most Asura think that Charr, especially Iron Legion Charr, are surprisingly clever for non-Asura, while most Charr think that Asura are dangerously short-sighted, unpredictable, and thus not half as smart as we think we are.

Oh, another data point: one of the Sylvari who knows Asura well, a merchant at Mabon Market in Caledon Forest, tells a fellow Sylvari that most Asura are obnoxious, but that some of them are quite nice. She’s probably right. You don’t run into it as often among female Asura, but most male Asura are pathologically rude.

Per Twitter, it’s a fake patch, to trick the game into logging us out. No changes made.

Raven. A fast-recharging Blind and an even faster-recharging Whirl finisher. But, then, I’m weird.

Aristio.2784:

Mace, Torch, and Hammer are the only ones I can see them adding. …

I hadn’t thought of Torch. As someone who also has an axe & torch ranger, I immediately went “Oo-oo-oo-oo-ooh….”

I’m running full Carrion on my e-gun/grenade/bomb build. I’d run Rampager, but I like the extra margin of error I get from that extra bit of Vitality more than I like a few extra crits.

No, other than the racial armors and the Duelist armor they sell in the WvW zones, medium armor is pretty much trenchcoats all the way down. If I were trying to build a ninja-like build on an Asura, I’d probably go with Duelist; it’s baggy, but at least it’s not a trenchcoat. Or maybe the tier 1 racial; it’s kind of a trench coat, but at least it’s a little bit form-fitting. Or maybe, maybe Ascalon Catacombs in a very dark color. But you can’t order the trenchcoat, trenchcoat, trenchcoat, trenchcoat, ham, trenchcoat, eggs and trenchcoat without any trenchcoat! That’d just be ham and eggs!

Nope. I tried it. But (1) it only shows people in the same area on the same server, and (2) it doesn’t say what you’re LFGing for. Ergo, worthless as the paps on a boar hog.

Chickenshoes.6250:

Actually, I find that if you have a group, champions are a great source of steady gear. It takes about 2 minutes to kill a champ and they always drop a piece of gear. Most of the time it’s blue, …

Emphasis added. If you can survive tanking a champion, tank it for 10 or 15 minutes until people show up (if they do). If you’re lucky, more than one other person shows up to help and you can finish it off in only another 5 minutes. Total reward: one piece of blue-quality salvage trash, plus not quite enough silver to cover your armor repairs.

Which is why you can’t run through southern Kessex Hills without hearing that “the Blood Witch is killing quaggans and feeding quaggans to her pets, please help quaggans.” Nobody wants or needs that aggravation, so nobody bothers with almost any Group Events after the starter zones. They just sit there and block or clog up Points of Interest for days on end.

It is my firmly held opinion that if it’s higher than level 20, any champion should drop either a guaranteed rare ingredient or green gear or above; if it’s higher than level 35, any champion should drop a guaranteed very rare ingredient or yellow gear or above. Then maybe people would bother with them.

Because honestly, after only a couple of months, I’m starting to feel sorry for noobs who sound so excited that a group event has spawned, who stand there for I don’t even know how long spamming map chat for help and who can’t figure out why nobody shows up.

That’s exactly the build I was using, and I ended up swapping out bombs for grenades as soon as I started running dungeons. Too many mobs that run around, too many one-shotting or two-shotting bosses.

Condition removal? I got your condition removal right here: Elixir Gun.

Attack #5, Super Elixir, in addition to being a pulsed heal, is a Light combo field, 10 second up-time out of every 20. (Can be traited for faster recharge.)

Attack #1, Tranquilizer Dart, is a Projectile combo finisher. The tooltip says 20%, but I think that can’t possibly be right, it feels way more reliable than that; I think it may actually be bugged at 100%.

Which means that every projectile you fire into, out of, or across that field spams an AoE condition removal at the point of impact. If I’m right about it being 100% projectile finisher, that’s one AoE condition removal every 0.75 seconds. Granted, the splash radius is a little tight, but that’s not nothing!

Pistols, Pistol and Shield, or Rifle? No. Grenade Kit and Bomb Kit for leveling.

Okay, that being said:

• Pistol and Shield is remarkably tanky, once you learn to use the shield skills. It’ll take you all day to kill things, but you’ll be in little or no danger doing it.

• Dual pistols exists only for one reason: Blowtorch. Dual-pistols is the melee-range weapon combo. It’s fun. But it’ll get you killed. A lot.

• Rifle’s auto-attack hits like a brick. The other 4 attacks are, at best, situational. The good news is, it’s single-target, it doesn’t steal aggro from other players. The bad news is, it’s single target, you’re doing no damage to the other targets when you get swarmed.

I agree. I don’t see the dailies as something you should expect to get on top of (say) dungeon rewards, I see them as something for you to choose between: I have a couple of hours, which would I rather do, run a dungeon, or do today’s daily?

I don’t think you’ll ever see main-hand warhorn, I’m pretty sure it’s intended to always be an off-hand weapon, like torch and focus. I’m not sure what a ranger rifle would do that can’t already be done with shortbow, other than look more high tech. I’m also not really sure what rifle thieves would do that they can’t already do with dual pistols.

But I agree that engineers need at least SOME kind of a melee weapon short of waiting for toolkit, namely hammer and/or main-hand mace.

For mesmers, I really can’t imagine what the main-hand pistol’s illusion power would be or do, but yeah, for theme reasons I have a character that wishes it existed. Now I’ll add one of my own:

Elementalist spear, with powers similar to dual-dagger. Because seriously, no underwater melee weapon at all? How did that get overlooked?

I’d be okay with that with some of them. But the female version of the Acolyte light armor is such an obvious panchiro fanservice thing that it annoys me every time one runs by; that the Asura don’t have that one is a plus, in my book.

And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the heavy armor sets Barbaric and Gladiator look ridiculous on an Asura. Yes, I mean all of the pieces. Yes, I mean on both genders.

I don’t have any objections to the animations, at least not the ones that I’ve seen. In fact, the opposite: the animations are part of what made me a convert to the Asura. Nor do I think that the Asura are the most screwed on weapon models: consider that the Sylvari don’t get any race-appropriate weapon models (except for one or two obscure heart-vendor weapons) prior to level 35, whereas we get Glyphic weapons from level 1. I do agree with you that the Tier 1 weapons shouldn’t be identical to the Glyphics and having no Tier 2 weapon models of our own is lame, but there are people who are worse off.

I won’t disagree with you at all about most of the armor, though. Too much of the armor was just the same patterns shrunk morphed to our shape, and the results look muddy — and, consider who we are, embarrassingly low-magic. At least some of the light armors got redrawn, but the heavy armors in particular are just awful. In particular, I can’t imagine any Asura even wearing the Barbaric or Gladiator armor. It’s so overtly neolithic, so Norn-like! If I wanted to look like a savage primitive swinging around rocks tied to sticks, I’d play a Norn, not an Asura.

Even among the racial-specific armors, at least one of them also has the embarrassingly low tech look: the medium armor tier 1 looks like something a Sylvari would grow, not something an Asura krewe would design.

So, yeah: I wish that, at some point, they would re-texture all of the heavy armors (as worn by Asura) and maybe one or two others to look more cyberpunk and less stone-age or medieval, and simplify almost all of the texture files to reflect our smaller size. Oh, and one more thing: given that it’s canon that Asura are vain about their ears, there is no excuse for any Asura to be wearing a helm with no ear holes. But other than those couple of things, I think we’re doing great on the armor front.

I’m sure this has probably come up before, but I couldn’t find it in a forum search:

• Asura have no underwater-compatible elite skills. None.

• Elementalists have no underwater-compatible elite skills. None.

This means, of course, that if you create an Asuran elementalist, you have no available elite skills.

Suggestions:

• If Mr. Sparkles can swim, and can fight underwater (and he does, in the VOED personal story arc) then the Series 7 and Series D golem elite powers should work underwater.

• In my opinion, honestly, so should the summonable weapon powers. I don’t see any reason why they already don’t, and it would go a long ways towards making up for the fact that the only current underwater weapon that elementalists get is the trident. (Lest anyone misunderstand my point here: I understand that they can’t have two hot-swappable weapons, I’m bringing up the lack of choice as to what they can put in that slot.) If summonable weapons were underwater-compatible, then, of course, elementalists could use Conjure Fiery Greatsword as an underwater elite.

a) tl;dr

b) I think they’re pretty happy with the design that they have. How many games have you sold two million copies of?

c) The suggestion forum is over there.

I bought an Engineer box and got two rare cleric medium armor pieces, fwiw.

Revolution.6301:

Qid.1937:

I’d be more concerned aboot your cpu than another graphics card. BUT. More the merrier!

My cpu is going to be an i5

And yeah my old computer was completly messed up. Hardware was failing, memory was getting cut in half. It was a pain. And the reason I’m getting this computer mostly is cause BestBuy cut 300 off the 1300 computer since they messed up 4 times in a row.

Ah. Personally, I wouldn’t bother putting a 670 into a system with an i5 processor, but it may work out; if so, let us know. I’m running a 560 in an i7 system with 12 GB of RAM and can run best appearance at 25 to 45 FPS just about everywhere in-game.

marnick.4305:

… finding a dungeon group is not difficult. It takes less than 5 minutes to get into any dungeon path you want. …

It took me closer to an hour. Admittedly, half of that was trying to figure out how to use gw2lfg.com and how to join an open party once I found one through it; the other half was trying to find a party that wasn’t already full or canceled, because nearly all of the ones listed there either were already full or the person who listed it had given up and logged off after 10 minutes or so.

I’ve waited longer to get into a raid or dungeon or whatever they called the group content in other MMOs, but the process was a lot more transparent. Anet has already said that they intend to eventually include a group finder tool in GW2; part of me wishes they’d waited until that was done before putting any group-mandatory objectives in the dailies or monthlies.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

How recently have you seen this? With the 1-28 update, I fixed a bug where pirates that were knocked out during a fight wouldn’t respond to water, though they looked identical to drunk pirates.

I can verify that the Bloodtide Coast pirates were not being wakened, or at least not enough to count for the heart credit, last night, January 31st. Buckets of water did nothing to them. Interacting with them appeared to wake them, but they would immediately fall back over and the progress bar did not advance. (If it matters, this was on EB.)

Durian.5419:

Yes, I am absolutely sick of people not knowing what ‘random’ means.

Especially ones that don’t tell you in the subject line what they’re complaining about. That’s getting really old. Descriptive subject lines, people, they’re not that hard — use them!

I’d be less annoyed by the “complete 5 dungeons” objective if the game had a built-in LFG tool (yes, before anybody says anything, after fighting with it all evening I finally did manage to find an open group for the dungeon I wanted via the Android version of gw2lfg.com, but something integrated and in-game would have been a lot easier to figure out) and if even the lowest level, supposedly easiest dungeon (CM story) hadn’t trashed my armor. I’m a casual player; I don’t actually enjoy working that hard at my fun. But I’ll grudgingly put up with it, 4 more times this month, rather than accept a 25% cut in my Laurels. (That being said, it’s better than being forced into the PvP tournaments, which I just flatly refused to do. REALLY not my idea of fun.)

They’ve made it clear in interviews over the last month that they want to incent people to try parts of the game that they haven’t tried before. Well, here’s my opinion on that: “Earn the achievement for doing something once if you haven’t already done it at least once” is an objective that encourages people to try something new. “Do it 5 times even if you’ve done it before and hated it” isn’t an incentive to try something new, it’s a 25% tax on people who don’t like every part of the game equally.

Does this thread contribute anything that the entire Suggestions forum doesn’t? If for no other reason than at least half of the things people have mentioned are currently described as being worked on?

My main problem with Daily Dodger is that it requires me to (a) find mobs with easy “tells” and long-animation attacks, and (b) let them live long enough for them to fire it. But I think I finally found a way to do it, that knocked out the last 25% or so in a hurry: round up a bunch of mobs, spam my AoEs, and just dodge at random. If there are enough mobs, one of them is bound to be attacking whenever I hit the dodge.

Seriously, I’m a bunkered-up Bomb Kit engineer. Unless it’s a Champion, dodging actually lowers my survivability, because time I spend dodging is time that I’m not firing AoE confuse or AoE blind or setting everything around me on fire. I hate this particular objective, because it requires me to play stupid.

As of when I logged out (about half an hour ago) here’s what was up and working that I could find, all of it (so far) in Wayfarer:

There is a steady stream of refugee NPCs heading south along the roads. The bulk of the traffic runs from Dolyak Pass waypoint, west to Crossroads Haven, then south to Taigan Waypoint, then west on the road and south through the pass to Hoelbrak, but there are a few refugees along all the roads in the zone.

1) Some of the refugees didn’t survive. Click on the bodies to collect Refugee Mementos. Turn them in at any memento collector NPC (marked with a star on your map) for 1 point each.

2) The first time you see any of the refugee direction signs (can anybody who reads New Krytan tell me what they say?) you’ll see that they’re broken. Fix them for 1 point each.

3) Each of the Memento Collectors is sitting next to an unlit campfire. Light it for 1 point.

4) Some of the refugees are Wounded Refugees. Click on any of them and /kneel or /bow to heal them, for 1 point each.

5) At at least two points along the road, there are short rocky chimneys that weren’t there before. At very long intervals, they will sprout a bunch of Ice Elementals lead by a Veteran Ice Elemental. Kill the elementals to create Ice Block objects. Click an Ice Block object to pick it up, then right-click the Chimney to use it. Once enough of these have been used on the chimney, the event ends. I don’t know how this one is scored, yet.

When you get to 75 points, you receive the Volunteer title. The next time you zone, you’ll receive a mail with an item that, when used, grants Karma.

There’s almost certainly more coming to the event, but that’s what was up and running as of 5:30 pm Central Standard Time on the 29th.

Edited to add: After the last patch, Diessa Plateau is active, as well. Same deal, refugees streaming south: Butcher’s Block Waypoint, south southeast along the road to Nolan Waypoint by way of Charradis Estate Waypoint. There are a lot fewer of them, though. Again, collect Refugee Mementos from corpses, repair signs, light campfires at the Memento Collectors. Again, look for short stone chimneys along the road. I never saw one of those go off, but from what the Memento Collectors say about them, they appear to work like the steam chimneys in Wayfarer Foothills, only with different monsters.

If one full lap from Black Citadel to Hoelbrak doesn’t generate 75 points for you, the fastest way to finish it would probably be to run it with a second character.

Good ghod, NO. Increasing numbers for the sake of increasing numbers is pointless.

So it looks like the answer is 3 uncommon crafting mats of that level. Yeah, not worth it if you ask me.

Has anybody grabbed one of the laurel vendor’s crafting item bags? If so, what’d you get?

tigirius.9014:

Crafting is fine even tho there’s nothing to craft at this point for most of us at 400 in our skills …

I had the same reaction at first. Then I checked to see if Refinement counted as “crafting an object” and it did. Which means that even if you started the day with 400 (or even 0) points in a crafting skill, all you had to do was go out and harvest 20 wood and craft it into 10 planks and call it done.

The client had not crashed before it happened to me, but I had been kicked off of the server several times. Using Task Manager to kill the extra GW2 processes solved the problem.

(cough) Pol. (cough)

Among the medium armors, I’m especially fond of Outlaw (the level 25+ crafted armor). Honestly, to my eye, all of the level 25+ crafted leather armors look kind of thievish to me. Except maybe for Noble, which is more piractical than thievish.

Dinny.5310:

You can view almost all of the helmets in-game by going to Heart of the Mists (the PvP zone) and going to a PvP Armor Locker.

And by helms do you mean heavy armor? Because yeah, there are quite a few heavy armor headpieces I can think of that hide the ears.

Too kitten many of them, if you ask me. I don’t think any Asura helm should hide the ears, it’s like hiding the horns on a Charr. It just plain looks wrong.

P.S. Looking over your list of your other 4 characters, if it is an engineer problem and you absolutely cannot find an engineer build that suits you? You might not think so, but make a sword & torch guardian. (I carry scepter & focus as my backup weapon for ranged-only problems.) Watch enemies disintegrate. Watch your health bar basically never move. Watch your feet almost never touch the ground. It’s wonderful. It’s hilarious.

(Now if only there were non-racial heavy armor that really looked good on an Asura. Crafted chain is okay, crafted scale is pretty good, but everything between there and the racial armor is kind of meh.)

As old Oola would say if he were still with us, other races use magic. We Asura are magic. It also doesn’t hurt that we’re the first race on Tyria to discover the scientific method, nor that we integrated it into our educational system at all levels. And, yes, that we were the first race to learn to govern ourselves via merit-based adhocracy gives us a nimbleness that the other races can only envy.

But it also must be said that all of the rest of the Tyrian “sentient” species are, compared to us, as dumb as a box of rocks.

Fennecus.7605:

… or is it the engineer profession. …

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an engineer problem.

1. Check the Engineer forum. It’s a whine-fest. It’s still my favorite profession, my highest level character is an Asura engineer. But …

2. They are late bloomers. Engineers get a lot, lot better once you can trait them properly; until then, it’s a bit of a slog. I didn’t really find mine to be fun until I got into the mid 20s, and not really fun until the mid 30s. Once I got it above about 50, it became more fun than the law allows in PvE and still pretty fun in WvW.

3. It may also take you a lot of screwing around to figure out how you want to play it. P/P doesn’t play much like P/S doesn’t play much like R, but that’s not all that different from any other profession. What is different is that everything you put on your utility bar does at least two, and maybe as many as seven or eight, things, and figuring out which combination of those things, in what order, placed under what keys, will be the one that you find enjoyable? It’s time consuming.

I’d offer specific advice, but that could be thread-jacking; ask for beginner engineer builds over in the engineer forum, see if they can’t help you pick a setup that’s more fun for you.

(Can’t be bothered? This may be the easiest cheap skillpoint build I can come up with. Grab Healing Turret early because your F1 toolkit becomes a nice long-duration insta-cast AoE regen power even when the turret isn’t up. Grab dual glyphic pistols and get in the habit of opening at melee range with the blowtorch, static shot, poison dart volley and watch one target per fight simply evaporate. Grab Flame Turret even if you seldom use it just for the lovely flame grenade it puts on your toolbelt; grab the Rifle Turret if you spend a lot of time underwater, to do things like distract adds or champs. Grab the Grenade Kit and switch to it the second you get swarmed by more than 2 targets. Pick any other 1 point skill for the remaining utility slot, anything that seems fun; early on, I’m partial to Elixir B. Keep in mind that this is not the only way to play a low level Engineer, it’s just the one that I found fun. Keep swapping your utility skills and every time you do, make sure you experiment with both the skill and the toolbelt power.)

In the event of a golem uprising, remember not to ask them for directions while standing under a sign post. They hate that.

(I could find it in me to wish that there was a wider variety of dialog in Rata Sum, but everything there is of it is wonderful. I’m also especially fond of the argument between the Peacekeeper Golem and the Merchant up on the upper deck, where he suddenly smartens up and asks himself, “Why am I arguing with a golem?”)

Humpink.2306:

… Someone else asked in here why people who want to play in T1 would leave a T1 server to join a T8 one. I don’t remember the answer, but no matter what it was, the truth is that people who join a “momentum server” do it because they want easy wins. It doesn’t matter how you turn and twist your rationale to say something to the contrary. …

I don’t think so. I asked specifically because, while that feels like the obvious answer (especially when you’re on a 4-person PUG that can’t attack a single dolyak anywhere in a 4 square mile area without instantly being over-run by a bored 30-man swarm), part of me figured that can’t possibly be the answer.

Farther up the thread, you can see why that can’t be the answer: someone from Kaineng admitting that, once we casuals rolled over and mostly stopped even showing up, they (mostly) stopped even getting any decent practice time in. If it takes them four or six weeks of stomping cripples to get back up into tier 3 or 4 (say), what’s going to happen when they get matched up against two servers that have been fighting tier 2-4 opponents the whole last three months? And they have to know that. So I figured that there had to be some explanation; I just couldn’t guess what it was.

That the top-tier servers they wanted to compete with/against were too full for guilds their size, and the need to find a server so small that they could set the culture on it by instantly becoming the majority, those are plausible explanations, it seems to me.

I do remain convinced that it may not have been good for the game for it to have let them, though. Paid server transfers for WvW will be a good thing, if they put a stop to this. Because even if their intent wasn’t to grief every opponent they had to step on to get back into the top tiers (and I accept their word that it wasn’t), I have to say that as a casual player who’s been the recipient of that, it sure felt like it on our end. But, you know, hey. Next week is another week, and presumably we can go back to fighting against fellow casual and RP servers.

Having caught up on and reviewed the thread, there’s a purely theoretical question that won’t leave my mind:

Is it, in fact, good game design to let guilds migrate down? To transfer from high-ranking PvP servers to lower-ranking ones? Never mind that it’s probably impossible to stop if you allow server moves at all, how much of this week’s drama was created by this one design decision?

Having all these high-ranking guilds deliberately drop all the way down to the bottom of the WvW ratings and work their way up again feels, to me, like it griefed a whole lot of people. It guaranteed them a steady stream of opponents who could do nothing but feed them free XP and free loot bags, while costing those opponents more in armor repairs (on top of anything else) than they could possibly earn back. That seems, to my admittedly very limited perspective, to be the source of a lot of QQing: that a lot of us who aren’t on Kaineng feel like it was an abuse of the match-up system to expect us to fight these guys, like having a world heavyweight boxing contender show up at your local gym and go all-out on the local players because he needs some easy wins to boost his confidence or his career stats or something, like having an NFL team practice on a Pee Wee league team.

I’ve only barely thought about this enough to realize that it’s probably not stoppable. Even if you only allowed people in guilds on high-ranked servers to transfer laterally or up, they’d just quit the guild, then transfer, right? It’s not like you could tag every account with a lifetime WvW score, could you, and lock them from transferring to servers full of noobs? Right? I’m not being sarcastic here, I’m thinking out loud; this is the best I could come up with, and I feel like there are probably easily poked holes in the design.

That being said, a question: if you transferred to a tier-15 server from a tier-4 server in hopes of building a WvW culture from the ground up? Why didn’t you, instead, transfer to a tier 1 or tier 2 server where such a culture already existed? What was the appeal of being a big fish in a small pond?