Guild Wars 2

Yes, if you press H to bring up the character pane you will see a little eye dropper icon above your gear slots. This opens the dye pane which comes with some starter dyes.

You can collect more dyes. They’re a semi-rare drop from anywhere in the world and when you click on them you “learn” them and they’re added to your colour palette.

Quaz.4931:

People aren’t over reacting, they are just making it perfectly clear to A-net what they think about this “addition”.

Maybe it wont stop this ‘ascended’ tier, but the outcry may hopefully stop any further tiers being introduced

There’s nothing to stop. They have already said:

“Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill. Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two. We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards. We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.”

There are no future tiers.

Two hours a day is 2 TV shows. You’re telling me most people in the world are unable to watch 2 TV shows in one day because it’s a hardcore time commitment and they have lives?

I have played plenty of MMO’s with adult, working people, many of whom were married and/or had children. You don’t have to be “people without jobs and students neglecting their classes” to play an MMO for 2 hours.

My guild has over 400 members. All I’ve seen in game are people excited about the new dungeon and people debating whether or not infusions mean the mursaat are about to make a comeback.

People in LA map chat and dungeon pugs are playing as normal. The only place I’ve seen hysterical rage about the patch is on these forums.

Plus they’ve already said there will not be a new tier of gear every 3 months, there will only be Ascended and Legendaries added. It’s not a gear treadmill.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

“We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards. We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.”

Seriously. Stop the gear treadmill nonsense. There isn’t one.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

They’re just adding Ascended. They’re not adding new tiers every 3 months.

That is not a gear treadmill and that is not WoW style progression. People are overreacting like mad.

Michael.6849:

we had to watch them go down a slippery slope of lets add jumping

What on Earth is wrong with being able to jump? O.o

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

xtorma.1283:

Shootsfoot.9276:

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Quitting + getting a refund is essentially boycotting.

OMG, stop it.

You’re not getting a refund after playing the game for hundreds of hours.

Good lord.

I think you can get a refund in the EU up to six months.

This.

I love costumer laws.

“Right of withdrawal

1. For any distance contract the consumer shall have a period of at least seven working days in which to withdraw from the contract without penalty and without giving any reason. The only charge that may be made to the consumer because of the exercise of his right of withdrawal is the direct cost of returning the goods."

Source: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31997L0007:EN:NOT

As for a boycott, I don’t really think there’s anything in the patch that’s worth missing a fun event for but if people do it at least there might be a little less server trouble than there was at Halloween.

As for false advertising – online games include a stipulation in the ToS which states that the game is subject to change over time. You agreed to the ToS.

Logun.2349:

How long do you think it’s going to take before you start to here …” no sorry we are only taking players into our “Guild / Group / Party/ Dungeon Run” with full Ascended sets …sorry try a noob Guild.

People are already doing this with exotics.

People also did this on GW1. I saw it loads of times. They were asked to ping their build and if they didn’t have the build the group leader wanted them to have because they hadn’t unlocked the right skills yet they were told to go away. People were often looking for “experienced players only” for FoW etc.

Where do they say that Ascended armour takes a thousand hours to get?

When he says you need a set of legendaries to enter Ascalonian Catacombs, then you can ask what happened.

Spryt.8012:

Even a small increase in stats will make older content gated.

That’s not correct. People do the old content in rares all the time.

The dungeon section of the forums has been largely full of “the dungeons are pointless, the dungeons aren’t rewarding, there’s no end-game, there’s no goal, dungeons don’t reward you for your time, dungeons are too hard to bother with for only a few silver and some junk items” for the last 2 months.

I’ve had full exotic (including the Orr karma set) for well over a month. I’ve replaced a few pieces with dungeon exotics that I liked the look of and re-skinned the rest in cultural T3 now.

Gearing is really fast.

bamono.7098:

Cool. So this is mostly fear based on speculation that the gear people worked for will quickly become obsolete. Understandable. They haven’t really said that though…so I don’t need to worry about this becoming wow. I hate that game. I hate most MMOs. lol. So I was worried with the sky is falling-ness of all this. I shall carry on. ;D

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to forum hysteria. People are always freaking out and raging about something.

Best thing is to just wait and see the patch and judge it for yourself

“you’ll see more Infusions and Ascended item types being added to the game”

More Ascended item types means Ascended pieces for more slots. At first you won’t be able to get a full set of Ascended gear because they won’t exist for some slots. So that’s not adding more tiers on top of Ascended, it’s just filling out the rest of the slots.

More infusions, well infusions are to deal with agony. Agony is found in the Fractals dungeon. So they can add increasing strengths of infusion, but it’s only useful in the Fractals dungeon.

If you aren’t farming far into the dungeon you don’t need infusions. If you are farming far into the dungeon, you’ll have them by then anyway.

The Ascended items have slightly higher stats than normal items. But, they have no normal upgrade slots. So the stats you would get from a normal upgrade slot is built in. Instead of a normal upgrade slot they have an infusion slot, which is useless everywhere else.

If you add up the power on the 2 items in the screenshot they gave, you gain 5 power. This is something you can easily go without if you don’t want to do the new dungeon.

As it is people are running dungeons in rare MF gear, which is a little worse than “proper” exotics.

So yeah, not sure what exactly warrants the amount of hysteria around the forum.

Morelia.6835:

dirtyklingon.2918:

http://www.buffed.de/Guild-Wars-2-PC-169660/News/Guild-wars-2-November-Update-mit-Item-Progression-1034934/

i wonder who they got this feedback from?

So that means in order to stay competitive in WvW, everyone will have to grind dungeons for gear even if they don’t care about PvE content at all. Brilliant.

For all we know Ascended armour might be usable only within the Lost Shores dungeon.

Calm down people. You haven’t even seen the patch yet.

The scenery in this game is just built for fishing. Yes please!

Yes, this really needs to be added. Even if it’s only for the badges.

@ Quaz Frodo reached the Morgul Road on March 9 and the ring was destroyed on 25th of March 3019. So he spent the entire day and night in Mordor for 2 weeks.

As for the other fortresses, they aren’t equivalent to Orr (the main enemy’s heartland).

But there are similar areas in game already. The big hall in Hoelbrak looks like something the Rohirrim would approve of. Divinity’s Reach looks quite similar to Minas Tirith.

Quaz.4931:

How aout I also drop in one of the most acclaimed fantasy triologies in book and movie history: Lord of the Rings

Arenanet aint gonna backdrop New Zealand for Orr, that’s for sure!

Lord of the Rings has some beautiful scenery, just as GW2 has plenty of pretty lower level areas. But Orr is the equivalent of Mount Doom. Sauron is the “end boss” in his fortress zone filled with hordes of orcs and nothing but ash, smoke and lava in sight.

I don’t really like the Largos, I’d rather have playable Tengu and Skritt.

@ Quaz The story of Orr says that it wasn’t preserved. The Charr invaded Orr and ruined the city in their attack. One of the Orrians used a forbidden scroll in an attempt to destroy the Charr army. He succeeded, but the explosion he created sank the city as well as killing the Charr.

The city was a wreck before any undead were even there. Rotting underwater just made it worse.

I think it would drive me nuts if I had to enter a pin every time I wanted to look at my bank :S

Account authenticators are the way to go, really.

You talk about things being preserved and resurrected, but that’s not the case. They were cursed with undeath and have been rotting underwater for centuries. Zhaitan isn’t a magical dragon in the shiny, arcane way. He’s a lich – an undead necromancer. You’re asking for Orr in it’s heyday, which just wouldn’t look right given the lore surround present day Orr.

But Orr isn’t the only 80 area. There’s also Frostgorge Sound, which has some beautiful scenery.

Thanks for the replies guys.

Frvwfr.4307:

Hardmode instances for private groups that we can vanquish just as in GW1. Problem solved?

I do think that would actually be a plausible solution to this problem.

I was thinking more of keeping the zones open to all who want to join the hard mode map, rather than private instances. Personally I’m enjoying the busier feel with more people around.

Possibly hard mode repeatable hearts could be an alternative to VQ? You could get a reward for clearing all the hearts on the map.

The only thing I would change would be to make them skins you can generate once you unlock them by purchasing. They really should work like HoM items.

A lot has been said on the forums about the issue with Orr and Frostgorge being the only places for 80’s to farm since the low level areas don’t give the same loot and karma.

These areas are also quite boring for general play as an 80, since down levelling doesn’t scale enough and in exotics you can 2-3 shot any normal mob.

Some people prefer the zones to be easier when down levelled and don’t want the current scaling changed.

My solution to these problems would be to make hard mode versions of the maps which would be available to level 80’s only. These maps would drop level 80 appropriate items only, give karma at the same rate as Orr and Frostgorge and have scaled up difficulty.

People who just want to down level and play with friends are still free to do so, and people who want a challenge or to farm without being restricted to Cursed Shore go to the hard mode map.

We already have explorable mode dungeon maps and the ability to hop to overflow versions of maps, plus hard modes were a valuable addition to GW1. The zones of GW2 are still all instanced, so why not use this?

This is getting a bit silly really. You have threads all over the forum complaining that “Anet lied” and that the world isn’t dynamic as advertised. “Where are the world changing events” and “the dragon events shouldn’t be on timers because it feels static and scripted” and so on.

Then any time they implement the advertised dynamic events that change the world people started complaining that they mustn’t do them and that they should loop them so that people can’t miss them…

These events are one of the big selling points of the game. A lot of people bought GW2 because of these one time events. They can’t start looping the things.

Mkalafut.1273:

The problem with a /who feature or something similar is the fact that in a medium to small sized guild that values quality members over a ton of them, they generally don’t have all that many on at once.

That’s not necessarily a problem. I was looking for a more active guild recently and I found myself wishing for /who repeatedly since there’s no way to tell how active a guild is or how many are normally online at once. I, and a lot of people I know, don’t want a massive guild with 700 online at all times. I experienced that in the form of my GW1 alliance and I hated it.

I want a guild like my WoW raid guild. 30-40 people who are online regularly and an active guild chat where you actually know each other. Those massive guilds are like map chat imo and I don’t like them at all. I’m not the only one.

I always complete the event requirement without even noticing. Never had to go hunting for events.

I would very much like the costume maker back, and some kind of mini pet menagerie. I really don’t like the idea that my gem store purchases can be accidentally deleted and they can’t be recovered.

The town clothes are taking up way too much space now as well, and I don’t want to have to pay for space to store the stuff I just paid real money for. -_-

I’d really rather just keep my armour.

Besides, swimming in armour makes more sense than somehow changing your entire outfit in the 1 second it takes you to dive in and out of water. Quickly slapping on the breath mask you keep in your pocket is one thing, changing the lot? Silly.

Also OP, first you say:

“I wasn’t suggesting anything lewd like a bikini Bruno”

then shortly after:

“I was thinking something simple like
Heavy armor: Wetsuits
Medium: One Piece, Swim Trunks
Light: Bikini, Speedo”

Soooo… which is it?

I want the titles to work as they do on WoW.

I’ve seen numerous people in game ask if this game has titles and how do you display them (and no, they weren’t low levels).

Someone in my guild said “oh, you have that HoM title. Just noticed.” about a month after the game came out!

Titles are far too invisible as they are now.

On a related note, the map star should show at all times too and be optionally visible on your own character. I know someone who was quite annoyed that he couldn’t see his own star.

I hope they add a way to save the whales. The water buckets don’t seem to do anything. Yeah they’re graphics, but they look and sound so sad on the beach. I really want to knock them back into the water :S

@ Bladeshock

I haven’t seen anything to do with hunting or abusing the whales in any way in the game though. They’ve just washed up on the shore. The ones I found had NPC’s standing near them and crying as well.

Based on the posters, looks like crabs, lizards and sea monsters.

Daddicus.6128:

On the same subject, why do female plant creatures have mammaries? “Mammary” is the key attribute for … you guessed it: mammals. Plants are not mammals.

Yeah, I thought that was odd too. Though at least they didn’t give them DD implants like all the humans and Norn.

Give Asura boobs so they can wear chain mail bikini’s…? Eww.

Isslair.4908:

Charr actually need to have 6 of them.

Charr are also fine just the way they are. As cats, they wouldn’t have anything that would be visible through their armour.

@ Focksbot

The point that you’re missing is that it’s not about people being unable to do the puzzle. It’s about their reaction to being unable to do the puzzle. Coming onto the forums and complaining that their whole Halloween is ruined because they can’t fill the achievement pane in the first year is childish. Making the poor guy who designed it feel bad for upsetting people because they can’t accept the fact that they were unable to do it is wrong.

There are plenty of other people posting here saying that they couldn’t do it and that either they’re looking forward to trying again next year, or that they weren’t that fussed so they just went to do something else.

The puzzle is not impossible. Many people completed it. If you couldn’t, it doesn’t matter. Just try again next year. There’s nothing wrong with being unable to do it, or being new to gaming and lacking experience with such puzzles. It takes practice and you’ll get there eventually.

But no-one is responsible for your moods other than yourself. People demanding it be removed because they felt too stressed, angry or impatient is wrong. You choose to be angry and impatient with the puzzle.

@ Focksbot

That’s true for some things but not this puzzle. There’s nothing to be confused about or any way to be unaware of what you’re supposed to do. You enter a jumping puzzle and literally all you can do is keep going forwards and jumping or you fail it and go back to the start. They can’t make that clearer.

It’s not a valid comparison to compare the clock tower to things like unresponsive controls. My pet’s F2 skills are unresponsive – that’s Anet’s fault and I await a fix. If I get stressed and grumpy because I can’t finish a puzzle that’s my fault.

As for most players liking a challenge as long as it’s clear what they must do, well that’s debatable either way without statistics. I’ve seen plenty of people rage quitting dungeons and raids on the first wipe and that was not because they lacked instructions or ways to measure progress.

About this part of your reply to someone else:

“You’ve been coddled just enough to feel comfortable with an increased level of challenge. The only difference is preparation. You wouldn’t feel this way if the nature of the puzzle was new to you – you’d be on here saying it made no sense and was unfair etc.”

Not true. I haven’t played platform games since I was a kid, but I remember when they were new to me. I didn’t play much in the way of PC platform games, but the first one was the original Prince of Persia (on a floppy disk). That game had no qualms about suddenly killing you with traps. I died a lot at first but I just kept playing because I was determined to finish it.

Focksbot.6798:

Nope, he’s taking the right lesson from it. You guys begging him to stop have got nothing to back you up – he’s not saying he’s not going to make challenging events in the future, but he recognises that throwing people in at the deep end was a mistake, and that making a significant proportion of your playerbase feel frustrated is not something to be proud of.

The problem with your POV and that of others swarming this thread to say, “No, it was great!” is that you fail to recognise that everything you liked about this puzzle can be accomplished whilst still giving an opportunity for other people to get to grips with it. Obviously, not everyone likes everything, but there are ways to design games and games-within-games so that the majority of players can get something out of them.

‘Difficulty’ isn’t some quantitative concept, where making something more accessible necessitates removing the challenge for others. It’s about ‘arming’ your players equally, so that those coming to something new or with less experience of certain systems can get up to speed with those who are seasoned, and those who don’t have as much time to waste can still get something out of an event, while those who have all the time in the world can find a proportionate increase in reward.

So please stop treating it like an oppositional binary. My hope is that Josh and ANet have the wisdom to see this as a problem that requires a creative solution, rather than a supposed choice between pleasing two different types of player.

The problem I have with that is that it’s not Josh’s fault if people get frustrated. It’s entirely their own fault. They can either practice until they can do it or they can go do something else. This stuff about having to have every achievement, even for things they don’t have the patience or ability to do is ridiculous. So is blaming others for your own lack of patience (using the general you there, not anyone specific).

It was difficult so I decided there was no way Halloween was ending without me finishing it.

That’s all ^^

Iruwen.3164:

I think there would very limited interest because unfortunately, you cannot grind in a theatre. Seriously, I like the idea, but I guess neither casuals, nor roleplayers nor hardcore players would really visit more than once, and considering the amount of work this would require… an open air theatre, right in Lion’s Arch where many people are, with some sort of interaction would be a better idea as would also make the world feel a little more vivid.

That’s a good idea. A little like Mad King Says?

Ickorus.4518:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Maybe make a quest around fixing the statue.

I agree, it is such a lovely icon of Lion’s Arch. It had better come back.
Although it would make for a hilarious running gag if it gets destroyed every event in some way or another.

I’d love for this to happen, it’d be hilarious.

I can see the statue with it’s own wiki page and backstory already.

Oh my God, they killed Ken… I mean the lion!

Yeah, that could be amusing. I support this idea.

I’d like to see more bosses like the Mad King too. He had varied mechanics, actual % phases. Obviously he did low damage since it’s a seasonal event, but the design was good.

That style of boss should be in explorables, but with the numbers tweaked upwards of course.

P.S. People who say it was boring because you could ignore the mechanics – next time don’t take a full group :P I did it solo on my 80 and also in a group with me on my 47 mesmer and a friend on his 18 elementalist. It was more fun that way.

After seeing the little stage in Wayfarer Foothills with an actor on it doing a show about Mad King Thorn for Halloween, I think it would be really cool if you added a theatre to Divinity’s Reach and showed mini plays there.

It would be a bit of work for the writing team, but I think it would be fun and different.

You could sell tickets to attend the play and people could collect them. You could also give achievements for seeing all of the years play’s. Maybe if you see them all you get a special mask skin or something?

They wouldn’t need to be really long or anything. A bit longer than the Halloween guy’s performance maybe, but not hours.

Divinity’s Reach seems most suited to having a theatre to me, but they could have guest performances from Norn npc’s telling people legends as well.

What do people think?

I just want to say that the little details around the place are great. Someone must have spent a lot of time on them so I thought I should point out that they were appreciated.

Specifically I’m talking about the wandering minstrel in LA named after the Halloween theme’s composer and the little stage in Wayfarer Foothills. The actor’s Mad King costume was just perfect and the gramophone playing the Halloween theme was a nice touch.

Also the trick doors in LA labelled “Free Candy! Yay!” and “TREASURE!” were brilliant.

Tuccos.8592:

See Vanguard, Everquest, WoW, AoC, Warhammer, Rift etc etc etc thats how it has to be…. 20-50 Hotkeys filled with nice skills that give me the possibility to play my characters in 99999 different ways. In GW2 theres only 1 way to play a class… yea maybe a 2nd after weapon change.

In WoW you theoretically have a lot of spells, but first exclude all the ones that are useless in your current spec, then exclude the ones that are highly situational. Your main rotation is not going to be anywhere near the number of spells that are available.

There is only one way to play each class & spec in WoW’s endgame. The correct way for you can be found on Elitist Jerks, and it’s backed up with spreadsheet calculations.

If you’re trying to vary things from the way they describe you will be under-performing and making yourself a liability to your raid group.

@ Shadowlancer

1. Why do you keep putting Josh Foreman’s name in quotes like that, like you don’t believe it’s his name or something? O.o

2. I don’t know what your supposed sources are, but I’m more inclined to believe a direct statement from the guy who made the statue in the first place.

3. The Mad King lore has been in GW1 for years and yes, Mad King Day is just a holiday.

4. He was not whining when he talked about how long the statue took to make.

5. In the real world, if an iconic statue or building in a city is destroyed by an enemy it’s quite common to rebuild it as it was. It shows the resilience of the people.

For me, finishing the clock tower was like killing a difficult raid boss on WoW after some 1% wipes used to be. My hands were sweaty, I was a bit shaky and I actually cheered IRL and was grinning like an idiot.

Finishing the clock tower is not only my favourite memory of this Halloween, but of GW2 so far.

I feel really bad for Josh having to read some of the posts around the forum talking about his work, which he’s very clearly put a load of effort into.

I loved the clock tower!

Josh Foreman.8250:

I worked way too hard on that thing to throw it away! That would make me cry. Haha… spent a lot of my free time on it actually. You know it has 4,000 frames of animation, and I had to hand track every single frame that a splash happened on every single fish for the audio guys to sync it up. Not that we will never permanently destroy anything. In fact… well, I can’t say more than that. But NOT the lion statue. It’s the symbol of LA. Like the Statue of Liberty is for New York or the Eiffel Tower is for Paris.

Yay, glad to hear it. I’d miss the lion! It’s my favourite place in LA to stand around /dancing while talking in guild chat.

@ Josh Foreman

The clocktower is by far my favourite memory of this Halloween. My guild & I have already been getting hyped up about what you’ll do for Christmas, we were really hoping for some kind of giant spinning Christmas tree! You did a really great job on the puzzle. We had fun doing it together and last night I went back to do it again by myself and ended up chatting to 2 strangers who also made it to the top. They were also very enthusiastic about it all and saying what a great job you guys have done this year.

I was nervous going into the tower the first time & was giving my guild orders that they aren’t allowed to laugh at me when I fall. I refused to leave until I got it though, and now I can do it pretty consistently. I felt very proud that I’d actually done it and it’s given me confidence with the other puzzles, which now seem really easy.

So please don’t think you’ve made everyone upset. You made my Halloween with that puzzle. Thank you for your hard work and I’d love to see more like the clock tower.