Guild Wars 2

auratus.9854:

AC pants? I am AC-traumatized
Arah Mid is really great, a screen to prove it fits snuggly on Charr:

At least it’s not CM. That place makes me glad for once that most skins there I’d never consider using.

Dustfinger.9510:

…Even making the same attacks the charr would be likely to utilize (since charr are also humanoid), more devastating than the charr could achieve. especially in melee combat. Every hit and swing of a weapon is more devastating from the norn due to it’s massive strength…

If anything I’d expect giving them weapons would make strength less important. So long as they’re both swinging hard enough, adding more force isn’t necessarily going to help, and when it did, it might still be less relevant than other factors (especially agility/speed for obvious reasons). In the case that they’re both well equipped I imagine the norn’s main advantage would be armour, as in the ability to bear (no pun intended) heavier armour more easily.

Charr tending to flex more would need suitably flexible armour (not necessarily the material, but the design; flexible parts could create potential weaker areas or require more material and weight for the same level of protection compared to fairly solid plates) or presumably be limiting themselves to somewhat rigid and uncomfortable movement.¹ A lot more of the weight would also be supported by their spine compared to the norn, given the hunched forward shape – on the norn this weight sits immediately above his legs, and his spine can remain more or less upright. Of course it’s possible charr having such muscled necks and torsos would be quite alright with that, I’m not really sure if any precedent has been established there.

With weapons… I can see sheer force helping to manoeuvre heavier stuff like hammers² and be more useful with blunt weapons in general. Piercing weapons it would depend on whether either of them had armour capable of stopping the other in the first place: impaled on a spear and impaled on a spear harder being notably less important a difference than something like impaled on a spear or really uncomfortable having the tip of a spear lodged between those ribs but not quite dead. With cutting weapons strength would probably be limited to making it slightly more effective vs armour but still not as useful as something specifically meant to tackle armour.

In a no-weapon scenario, strength starts to matter more because in a lack of mechanical advantages it’s less likely to be useless excess. In those cases I think charr would rely on agility, slashing and biting, while norn probably fight like upscaled humans. Or rather… female norn probably fight like upscaled humans. Norn actually seem quite sexually dimorphic, and the males have very thick limbs for their bodies compared to females (and humans). I’m guessing free from e-sport balancing the females would retain fairly human agility, maybe a bit worse for being larger or maybe not if something else compensated for it, while males would be much stronger probably still able to make sudden movements (their limbs are heavier, but don’t seem longer, so they’re keeping the weight fairly close) but once they did commit a lot of momentum to something they may be slower to make adjustments. Though I’m neither a biologist/zoologist nor a physicist and may be missing something in that assessment.

Dustfinger.9510:

Then when we look at two animals we can say a gorilla would beat a puma even though they both fight vastly different ways….

That’s somewhat hard to judge given the two species would never naturally coexist nevermind fight. Cougars can kill things much larger than themselves, though as predators I suspect they’d prefer to kill smaller, safer things if they could. Wiki (as in -pedia) suggests gorillas may sometimes be prey to leopards, and even quotes that “[a] silverback gorilla and a leopard were both found dead from mutually inflicted wounds” as evidence that the leopards may not exclusively scavenge from already dead gorillas, but the citation unfortunately links to a site which no longer exists (well, I can’t load it at the moment, at least). However, it also gives a weight range for cougars which indicates they can actually be notably heavier than leopards, so that’s… interesting, anyway.

¹for whatever it’s worth their cultural heavy armours do appear to reflect this: the first two seem to have segments of overlapping metal something like a carapace, while the last looks like ‘bits of metal attached to otherwise light/medium armour’.

²in the GW2 sense where hammer = maul.

Curious if anyone knows more about this. I remember at one point reading that sometimes AI would target someone with the most toughness, or whoever was closest, etc. but I’m not sure what to make of this case.

This character^ for as long as I can remember, even while levelling and going through all sorts of gear, would attract enemies like a magnet. More than any other character I’ve played, of any class (I’ve played all classes, though I currently lack an elementalist and just recently created a new ranger after deleting an older one ages ago). Sometimes they will fixate on it so much that they basically commit suicide: running after it constantly and ignoring the fact that other people are killing them. They’re drawn to it when it’s near them, when it’s far from them, often regardless of whether it’s attacked them yet or not (never having attacked however is probably the most reliable way to get forgotten when other people keep attacking, like if I was arriving at a boss fight and suddenly it was like ‘screw you I hate you die’ and I ran around not fighting, it’d forget fairly rapidly).

One exception that springs to mind is the possessed statue at the Dwayna temple in Orr. It’ll often select the character for its ranged multi-target attack (Malchor’s tears or something) but doesn’t make any effort to direct other attacks at me unless I move closer to it.

The previous link should be the exact build ATM, down to my incomplete set of asc trinkets, however I notice that it seems much the same when I use different builds (I’ve stuck with the same gear for a long time though, but as I said this was also noticeable before these stat combos were available to it) be they more defensive, offensive, close-ranged or long. One thing I’ve never really done is stack loads of healing or condition damage, since I’d need new gear to do it very well. So far what gets the least aggro is anything centred around turrets, because things often seem to hate turrets just a tiny bit more than the character, and will wait until there are no turrets before attacking it.

What surprises me though is that there just doesn’t seem to be anything special about it, stat wise. I’ve at times used characters with more (by far) toughness, less toughness, more power, less power, more precision, less precision, more health, less health… ranged, melee, a bit of each, it doesn’t seem to matter much. I’ve even tried strafing around vs standing still to see if that made a difference, but it didn’t seem to. I’m starting to think it’s a bit more involved than that, like ratios of some stat to another, or something of the sort, and in this one character I’ve somehow achieved a near perfect level of hatred.

g e o.2589:

I am a mesmer, and yes I am against portal blocking because I like helping community, and I dont ask for tips, there are just some kind people who actually tip, or at least say Thanks before leaving. Yes, there are those lazy as*holes who dont even thank you. Also Portal is a great way to secure your jump. There is also one “JP” its mainly a puzzle where you need to Glitch out asuran portal stuff, you need to set coordinates to certain numbers, if you’re lucky those coordinates are already on, My friend got lucky and I didnt, We are both mesmers. Did it count unfair that he ported me? NO! because we did all the stuff together, he just got lucky.

Heh. The amusing thing here is that the puzzle you’re talking about allows him to send (and you then receive, via accessing the terminal) the correct co-ordinates. So actually he gave you a portal to a puzzle with the inbuilt feature to portal people to the end.

Dustfinger.9510:

I can’t disagree with any of this. I’d say the norn probably saw charr savagery, organization and penchant for battle as pretty impressive and respectable. Maybe not so much jaw strength or anything like that since norn also routinely fight wild animals who’s only weapons are jaws, claws and horns.

My point re: jaw strength and so on was mainly that neither is likely to fight in ways that emphasise the things they’re not good at anyway. Charr being fairly flexible and having lanky arms which they’re still not quite sure whether to run on or not don’t really seem built to use strength in the same ways the norn are.

As a rough comparison, we can probably assume quite safely that the average adult male human is in no danger of ever losing an arm wrestling contest with even the largest of dogs, supposing one learned to make the attempt, because the dog would be incredibly awkward at the motions involved (this being the optimistic version where it can actually make said motions at all, since charr do seem able to operate in roughly similar fashion). This is of course just arms, if you start to look at how our legs compare with a dog’s it’s even further off – ours make theirs look sort of twig-like – and when it comes to things like moving other objects around, our stronger arms/legs and more rigid spine (ignoring the drawbacks of paws in this case) allow us to carry things around when a dog would long ago have been limited to dragging them instead, whether or not it has the strength to move the object in question.

Of course none of this prevents them from being dangerous to us, especially if for the sake of continuing this comparison we assume no weapons are involved. I’m not personally concerned about encounters with a lone angry dog (no rabies here), but nonetheless I recognise that, excluding the punt-able variety, even smaller ones can cause damage and once we reach something like a 20kg difference in bodyweight (in my favour, at that), that fight could go either way more easily than I’d be happy with. Fortunately in this case I’m the only tool user in the fight. Anyway, since it seems to me that comparing the strength of norn and charr probably runs into similar difficulties, I don’t really think which is ‘stronger’ is necessarily helpful to determining which would win in a fight, even if we assume neither is using weapons. So I’m sort of confused why everyone started talking about that, I guess.

Dustfinger.9510:

While the wording can be interpreted different ways, it seems pretty evident that a-nets intent is to compare individual norn to a charr warband. Especiall the way they further extrapolate how the charr could have won bt dedicating an entire Legion. Tha tsaid, it was a very well thought out post and I do agree with much of it. Especially the part where it was easy for the Norn. Really, my entire point in this thread was to show that individual Norn are physically stronger than the individual charr. And I’m surprised that I even needed to introduce this much evidence to show it.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that, I just don’t think ‘physical strength’ was what they were going for in the comparison, because it seems awfully weird that they’d get some sort of mutual respect out of the encounter if a single norn was able to engage a warband based on being so physically powerful he/she was a match for the lot of them. I mean that would be like getting swarmed by very young children or something – it doesn’t really seem fitting that any respect gained would be because ‘oh wow, these are strong enough to be sort of interesting, when you get a half dozen or more’. Rather, since they apparently each came out of it with a new respect for the other, it seems to me the point is that they had very conflicting ideas about what strengths (as in stuff you’re good at) were important, and realized through the experience that maybe these other ways weren’t necessarily as daft as they seemed.

As for their actual physical strength, looking at the way their bodies move and are shaped, I think direct comparisons would be sort of meaningless. I can imagine norn in general would be better at, say, lifting something over their heads because doing so with charr arms looks fairly awkward leverage-wise, and norn probably don’t bite nearly as hard as charr do.* But then as a species which finds lifting things overhead awkward, why in the nine hells would you fight in a way that emphasised doing that? And if you had a jaw which wasn’t really well adapted for killing prey, why aside from desperation would you go biting enemies? Those are just off-hand examples, but still.

*except perhaps transformed, hard to guess to what extent that changes them or how charr compare to the normal animals which norn take on characteristics of.

ccspokai.6941:

and yes skipping will be the new approach for speed farming

Except without ‘new’.

Parisalchuk.9230:

It was designed to keep throwing enemies at you…. while you killed a giant…. not while you farmed them for rewards, disregarding the event itself.

Yes – a problem which stems from the idea behind the design. An oversight – or lack of foresight, if you like – not some kind of accident like an item cost that’s missing a few things.

Parisalchuk.9230:

And yes, dungeons were designed to be repeatable, thus the DR on your rewards.

Their being repeatable and us being meant to repeat them to that extent are not the same. We’re supposed to be able to do it, just like we’re supposed to be able to leash mobs, but in either case they misjudged the incentives. The DR on rewards in theory pointed us to doing all paths, and the inability to progress in the event in theory compelled us to kill the giant. Neither worked out that way; one has been adjusted, the other is about to be adjusted.

At constant risk of being annihilated by ugly winged things which seem to live everywhere but places conductive to flying, tired from fighting waves and waves and waves of rotting undead, pyromaniac cat-demons, the mole-etariat, norn with confidence issues, sadistic weeds, and various elemental whatsits… yeah I’d take any excuse to party at that point too.

Parisalchuk.9230:

Your still not getting it, the event was designed to kill the giant, not kill everything but the giant because it gives out more rewards. That is independent of the fact of how or why they respawn.

And in dungeons we weren’t meant to do the same path over and over and over taking 5 minutes at a time, which should be fairly evident considering the upcoming changes.

Unless they tell us someone made a coding error that caused risen to spawn for that event indefinitely instead of running out after so many were killed, as far as we know it was initially designed to keep throwing them at you until you killed the giant, at which point you’d be allowed to progress – and this just turned out to be a bad idea, because it actually provided incentive not to complete the event.

Parisalchuk.9230:

They can prove who did things with karma prices or ecto salvage exploit. Good luck trying to prove someone exploited an event. It was clearly not designed for players to kill all the mobs and then back out of the fight, resetting it, and having more mobs spawn. Instead the mobs were created to add challenge while killing the giant. So, by the definition of a game exploit people used an event in a manner which it was clearly not intended for in order to achieve personal gain. However, as said, its extremely hard to prove someone exploited this event and thus you won’t see bans.

COF is a different story. You literally DO everything you are supposed to. Skipping mobs has been declared perfectly fine by Anet. You fight the bosses, you just do so with an optimal team comp. You don’t break any events in order to get more loot.

The risen there used to respawn to replace the ones you killed until the event was completed, they didn’t actually need you to leash the giant before the event made more of them. That was just something people did (or tried to do) to keep a buffer of health on it so the event wouldn’t complete, counting on anyone not helping farm it to be unable to deal with the risen and the giant on their own once the farmers backed off (hence ‘tried to do’ because that’s actually pretty easy if you’re prepared to deal with the grubs).

Now they still spawn that way, but they eventually run out, and then it’s either kill the giant or leave it there as a decoration. Though last time I did it, post-fix, risen were still spawning when we killed the giant anyway, so for most people the difference should barely be evident.

MauricioCezar.2673:

If so, Why don’t simple Mail free itens to all players? its more easy, and lesser frustrating for players that like to worth their skill…

The flood filter would stop them, of course.

Or because while you’re running around to all those different puzzles to get a collection of lovely blue items, you’re probably not generating much else, and since they’re also capped per-day it won’t hurt the economy. So if you like puzzles, you can waste time bouncing around without the knowledge in the back of your mind that you’ll come out of this completely emptyhanded. Just… mostly. And if you don’t like puzzles but really want a mediocre chance at getting something valuable you can wait around for someone else to bounce up there and drop a portal, and still not bother the market because the rewards are capped anyway.

Parisalchuk.9230:

There is a MAJOR difference between killing something slower due to gear choice and physically backing out of a fight in order to cause more spawns. Its all about intent. Your intent is to reset an event knowing full well it was not designed in that way. The same way that people knew full well that karma items priced far below the average was not intended, or that crafting an item that salvages into ectos for way below cost was also not intended.

“An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or glitches, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game’s designers.”

Except that in those other examples, it strongly appears someone has made some kind of mistake and didn’t actually end up making the thing according to their design. Events that spawn stuff constantly until x happens aren’t exactly unique, and though they may now be realizing this was a bad idea, AFAIK there’s never been any evidence these were unintended so much as the ability to farm them was unforeseen. Nor does it appear the mob’s leashing or leash range wasn’t part of their design. This is an important distinction: in one case you expect players not to take advantage of obvious errors like a typo in an item price that sticks out from anything else like it, while in the other you ask that they recognize which of your (in the general sense of ‘your’) ideas, in hindsight, were just bad and avoid profiting from it.

Like CoF p1 being completable in 5 minutes. The dungeon is working just like they made it, but I think we can reasonably assume here that they didn’t foresee that meaning it was such a quick source of gold. So in cases like that, they just realize what they’ve done and alter the design. As they did with the giant (amazingly, without ruining the event by doing anything as drastic as making the loot non-existent. I guess they’re starting to notice some of their past ‘fixes’ haven’t been wonderful either) and will do with dungeons and by extension CoF p1.

Whereas on the other hand, I hear a few bans were issued over exploiting those sped karma prices.

It’s not a glitch, it’s a portal doing what portals do. Same reason you sweep for hidden mesmers when you take a fort in WvW.

Siphaed.9235:

I’ve seen players get DUSK from the EB jumping puzzle chest after being ported up by a Mesmer. Think that they’d share that reward they would otherwise not have gotten without the Mesmer’s help? Kitten no!

lol. I’d no more expect a share in dusk for taking a few seconds to drop a portal on my way out of a puzzle than I would expect a share in lottery winnings for dropping someone off at a store when I went shopping, where they subsequently bought the ticket.

Siphaed.9235:

And on that note, …it’s basically welfare for those who are unskilled and cannot do the content themselves. Just as those who can’t get 1st place in Sanctum Sprint beg over and over again for someone to give it to them because they “don’t have the achievement.” Well, if you can’t achieve it, then you don’t deserve it! Simple!

There are puzzles in this game that I simply cannot stand on some characters. Unable to see anything but the back of my head, unable to see what I’m jumping to because the character obscures it, no orientation to my surroundings at all because my view is bouncing off walls like a rubber ball fired out of a cannon…

…and so, I made a human mesmer and finished the ones that annoyed me easily. Using skills like ‘sight’ and ‘has four fingers and a thumb on each hand’. The epitome of difficulty it was. I’m lucky I survived really.

Also I find it hard to believe they’d make champions better reward-wise than legendaries in the same place. That doesn’t even make sense. Whatever buff they give to champion loot I’m sure you’ll see it reflected in legendaries too.

Siphaed.9235:

And honestly those people either need to chill out, or find a better game. They act as content gorging, greed eaters. They care nothing for the game’s story, for the background of the content they do, or for anything else surrounding them other than their speedy ways of getting “lootz”. Even the community is just a means to an end, and if these people could solo the content with the same efficiency and payout they’d do so. [This is clearly seen in the /party kicks and berating against some for “too slow”, “wrong gear”, and other ego filling reasons to put down other players.]

Most groups I’ve ever been in run past unnecessary mobs; I do it too most of the time, unless I’m bored and want to break routine. Not to be über-efficient, to avoid spending more time than necessary repeating the same thing as I’ve done over and over and over and over in order to get tokens, or help someone else get their tokens, or what-have-you. No matter how much you might care for the story to begin with, unless you’ve some sort of medical condition that precludes remembering it, it’s going to get like watching reruns of the same three episodes of a show, maybe a few times a day, or a few times a week, or however often you do it.

Mostly that wouldn’t even matter because you go someplace else, but in this case, if you want skins from a certain dungeon, you’ve no choice but to run it repeatedly. If you want certain runes, you’ve got to run it. Or you may just find it’s the easiest way to get certain stats on your armour/weapon. In any case, if the fight itself isn’t interesting – which they tend not to be, especially after so many times – and there’s no incentive to do it anyway like there is with the dungeon overall, you may as well skip the fight.

I’m not even talking about things like farming CoF p1 forever, the main dungeon I’ve completed in the game is AC, and I’ve probably not even done that 50 times across all my characters yet (playing since pre-release), but with story mode and three exp paths, it’s going to be repetitive no matter what. I even switch to different characters on repeats to get the most tokens out of each run, and with that approach I’d still be well and truly over any story components by the time I got a set of armour from it.

Nor have I ever kicked anyone over it. If they want to kill Kholer, fine, I don’t care. I’m sick of hearing his voice anyway, especially when he speaks in triplicate as we run up the stairs. Murder the irritating sod (again). Jump on the body if you want. Drag Warmaster Grast back from the end of the dungeon to help beat up his irritating lieutenant just for amusement, it’s fine, really. Hell I don’t even care if your gear sucks, or your build sucks, or you just can’t do anything right, or whatever. If I end up in a group that just can’t make it at all, which is thankfully rare, I’ll just keep going until they quit. I can afford the repairs hundreds of times over, and at least it’s different.

Electro.4173:

LameFox.6349:

auratus.9854:

^Agreed.
At “tail not showing correctly”: Arah medium chest! That fits purrfectly, tail support.
And cause of most tails swing “through” the pants, I I got “used” cough to choose pants which DONT look like skirts. Will be difficult as necro…

As a necro you need the AC pants. AFAIK they are literally the only ones that are just pants when it comes to light armour.

I think there’s one of the low level crafted sets that’s pants. The level 20 set, maybe?

Sort of. What I mean by ‘just pants’ is that the AC ones have nothing else attached to them: with light armour (on any race, not counting cultural because I forget) there’s a lot of stuff that has pants… with something else on them. In fact, with the coat and pants together, a lot of it could pass for medium armour – a set of pants and a coat over them – whereas what you really get is this bizarre thing where the lower half is pants and the bottom half of a coat, and the coat is… well, the rest of the coat. That early set is vaguely better in that it’s only got some miscellaneous bit of fabric I’ve no idea what to call, though they look a bit like something (Disney’s version of) Aladdin would wear.

Tier 2 cultural shoulder-thing.

auratus.9854:

^Agreed.
At “tail not showing correctly”: Arah medium chest! That fits purrfectly, tail support.
And cause of most tails swing “through” the pants, I I got “used” cough to choose pants which DONT look like skirts. Will be difficult as necro…

As a necro you need the AC pants. AFAIK they are literally the only ones that are just pants when it comes to light armour.

Dustfinger.9510:

Then later one lone norn hunter is compared to a charr warband when describing what would happen to each when they crossed into each others lands. There’s a reason Norn can live scattered and alone with no central government or ruling body in the unforgiving wild and still survive as a people and a force to be reckoned with. it’s because each individual norn is a major force to be reckoned with.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Movement_of_the_World#Norn

This I expect is because charr tend to move with their warbands or at least members thereof, and charr without warbands probably don’t go looking for fights,* whilst norn may come from the same village, homestead, or loosely affiliated group of friends, but not necessarily travel together even when they live together or otherwise associate. Charr warbands and norn hunters then may simply have been the most likely things to cross over into the other’s land and come to conflict with the inhabitants.

*I notice that there’s one in Gendarran which seems to have settled there after it was separated from its warband (who sound significantly unlikely to be alive from the dialogue) and another in Cragstead which lost its warband during F+F. Of course back then this was probably far less likely to happen, but I think it shows (especially if you talk to the one in Cragstead about it) that individuals simply wouldn’t have a whole lot of incentive to go make a fuss in some other race’s land.

Dustfinger.9510:

another good comparison of charr and norn, In The movement of the World, organized and experienced charr warbands who grew up their whole life training and fighting with each other couldn’t overcome the individual strength of the norn. And states that it would have took a full legion to destroy Norn resistance.

The wording in there doesn’t really seem quite as clear to me. Given the context we can probably assume ‘warbands and smaller raiding parties’ didn’t show up to engage in duels, but scout and/or attack trade and infrastructure. Meanwhile, many of the norn were probably hunters, who would know the land very well, and (based on what I see of them in-game) norn do seem to have a fairly strong sense of community – just not of the sort that places community before being an individual. By which I mean they might not easily raise an army to defend everyone around (see: Cragstead) but they would probably help their friends and/or the other people in their small community (see: all sorts of events in the Shiverpeaks, and I guess also Cragstead) which could easily rival or exceed a warband’s numbers (per either game’s wiki they range from 5-20, though the GW2 wiki entry says more commonly 5-10).

I have doubts this implies their advance halted because the average norn was beating whole warbands by his or her self, at least not ‘in a fight’ (going back to the whole ‘hunters in their own familiar land’ thing, I can see how they’d have found ways to inflict casualties or just harass warbands and smaller groups until they either left or were weakened to the point that actually attacking them outright could be viable). Of course, given a warband could apparently be as little as_5 – and who knows how small the other groups could be – I also don’t doubt that in a fantasy setting some norn were indeed capable of it, because really, ‘I killed 5 <things of a comparable size to me> in combat’ isn’t eyebrow-raising in fantasy. I’m sure the occasional human (without nuking his people ’til they glowed, even) could manage it too, albeit perhaps not by relying on as much strength.

Under the circumstances I’m thinking it’s more like: the charr saw this loosely organized society who were mostly concerned for individual ability rather than that of the whole, and figured they’d be lousy at combat because the charr had always been raised to prioritize virtually the opposite of that, then they discovered a combination of asymmetrical warfare and that actually a warband-sized group of villagers probably wasn’t terribly hard to convince to help each other out when demon-hellcat-things started to interrupt their desire to drink and yell at one another.

Although it’s worded weirdly enough. For instance ‘When the Charr reached the foothills, the Norn drove them back with a single crushing blow, completely decimating every warband sent against them.’ seems highly contradictory to the following sentences, to me. These ‘initial skirmishes’ were a ‘single crushing blow’? And routing your enemy with a ‘single crushing blow’ causes you to respect their strength? I have a feeling their defeat, decisive though it may have been, wasn’t intended to look quite as effortless on the norn’s part as the preceding text made it out to be. Even if the norn were already aware of the extent of the charr and were concerned merely about being washed away by a tsunami of clawed furry things, it wouldn’t make sense then to say that it was the skirmishes which ‘taught both sides to respect the strength of the other’.

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Kurakura.7281:

Part of the problem is that most world bosses don’t move much at all. There is also not much incentive to scatter and dodge for almost all of the bosses…. really you don’t have to pay attention

If you made the bosses able to move around quite a bit, and deal a lot of high damage AoE attacks vs a zerg then it would be more interesting…. or even make the boss teleport around and randomly attack someone from behind…. it’s up to the players to be alert enough to dodge at the last moment if it teleports behind you.

The problem with that is once you get so many people in one place, it gets less and less viable to actually play that way. The boss ends up looking like the .gif my signature links to,* and the ground is coated with effects and various hostile and friendly AOE markers, which normally might convey useful information but in masses just cause a horrible mess. On top of that, even if your own computer can handle its end, the servers don’t necessarily feel the same and things start to lag. This, even though a lot of what you’re fighting may be literally invisible, which is its own issue.

So for one thing we’d need to be able to see everything that could possibly be relevant to us at the time, which would likely make existing performance issues worse. Then, we need to be able to see it clearly instead of just a sea of sparkles and overlapping circles, and finally we need the game/server to be responsive enough that when we try to dodge, use a skill, etc. it will actually happen on time.

*Even in that fight, I was downed twice by ’malchor’s tears’ or something along those lines: the first time because they were literally invisible and I never saw any effect hit me at all, and the second because they were one of so many effects moving down my screen, most of which weren’t even harmful to me (i.e. came from allies), that recognizing I was in danger and dodging just weren’t going to happen in the time it took them to streak down from somewhere vaguely upward and hit me. I’d be in the process of pressing the keys and maybe my character would twitch… oh, downed, too late. So people just got downed, and we revived them, because that was as much of a strategy as the game allowed at that point.

faintsonata.5621:

The Claw of Jormag fight introduces some “anti-zerg” mechanics. There is frozen ground that you can’t just rush through and attack until certain conditions are met whether it is breaking the shield during phase I or defending the golems from crystals during phase II.

These aren’t ‘anti-zerg’ mechanics, they’re just delays. Zerg or no, you still have to do the same things.

I’m sure I’ve seen that character before somewhere (not even in LA).

Anyway I previewed one of those and on my thief with a different head type that arm-piece seemed to wrap a bit further around, not like a strap but more like half a pair of sunglasses.

I’ve seen the veterans and the following champion numerous times over the last 2 days on TC, as I kept porting back in to complete more of the zone. Saw the bridge once or twice, I don’t think it becomes visible on the map from as far away so I only came across it when I was running right past.

Are you sure changing the password didn’t just take long enough that it let you log in again anyway? Because I was only locked out for a few minutes, and I got the exact same message, just a few minutes before you made this thread.

My brother and I both got this a few minutes ago. I also couldn’t log in to the forums for a while.

Eventually the forum just began working again, and I restarted the launcher, which logged in, started the game, and I got to my character (granted, because it had the error while zoning, it erroneously informed me the waypoint was contested and moved me to the ‘nearest’ friendly one, which was actually where I was standing when I tried to zone and not a waypoint at all).

I’m guessing there was just an issue on their end, of some kind. Also, I didn’t get any emails.

Went to do Ascalonian Catacombs earlier today (I think most or all of us were from TC in this case) and somehow we got a really broken instance: the entire party was getting lag and disconnects, in spite of being fine before we entered. I didn’t even notice anything weird out in the world after 1 disconnect and 1 restart of the router just in case, but upon returning to the instance it was just as bad as it had been before, both times. Eventually we had to just close it because it was impossible to play, and after replacing some people who went to sleep, we started a new one which worked fine.

I’m not really sure what that indicates exactly but something seemed pretty messed up and I don’t think it was on our end(s) given the way it was limited to that one instance.

Well I tested it on the shatterer and claw. First (shatterer) the turret didn’t seem to do anything at all, not even turning when branded came into range. At the claw, I also used it at an ice shard thing prior to the dragon landing: the turret fired at the ice one time then appeared to do nothing. When icebrood approached it, it turned to look at them, but I didn’t see any firing animation, nor damage notifier. Unfortunately with their high health and all the players around there’s no way I could tell if the turret did shoot it without the damage floater or animation working, as the damage it caused would be far too minimal. At the dragon itself it didn’t appear to do anything.

I wonder if maybe the turrets are just bugging when there’s too much going on in the area? I’m on TC so these events tend to get pretty high turnouts.

Invisible risens you say?

They wouldn’t point at_its foot btw, unless its foot was in the way. For whatever reason the part we actually attack isn’t in the same place as the part we see/select, just like with SB, only it’s not as obvious because it’s actually under the dragon instead of way the hell out in front of it. I’d say roughly the ground beneath the neck, with dragons. In your video you actually run almost into the spot for the shatterer right after some kind of fire effect hits it (cannons maybe?) and you can see a lot of effects directed there in general.

Probably the easiest way though (to avoid them targeting other stuff) is putting them at the claw during the first half, past the ice-wall thing, and then backing way off to look for damage numbers floating up above its head or something. I’ll see if I can try it today at some point because that’s worked for me before, I think with a rocket turret.

edit: underscores for filter

Essence Snow.3194:

I can definitely see a “surge” of votes “magically” appearing at the last moment to make Evon win.

I can definitely see a ‘surge’ of votes ‘magically’ appearing at the last moment whoever wins… considering there’s not a whole lot of reason to bother turning them in as you get them.

Opynn.2936:

I’m not going to say that we’re never going to do more race-specific armors, but those are definitely going to be less common than the normal, one-size-fits-all armors."

Judging by how many armours actually fit all I guess we’ll be able to count these new specific ones on the fingers of one hand.

I seem to recall that thing used to sit around invulnerable for a while before its event actually began, at which point you’d be able to kill it. Are you saying the event just never starts now, or did you find it lounging about and try to kill it?

StinVec.3621:

I’ve noticed quite an increase in kite fortunes and vote tokens with +30% food buff on. Also, since I use the +30% zhaitaffy food buff that only lasts for 20min, I keep forgetting to eat some more. So when it runs out and I’m running around killing stuff without the MF on, it is my noticing that I’m not really getting any kites/tokens that reminds me to eat some more food, which then start dropping again.

Loot is always like that for me (chests excepted) whether I use MF or not. I’ll be getting blues fairly often with the odd green/yellow, and then for a while it’ll be nothing but ‘trophy’ vendor trash (or the other way around). A few minutes later and I’m back to the beginning.

I really wish I had an easy way to keep track of it, because I’m sure if I had records of my loot and kills I’d find a pattern like that emerged after a while. Or maybe loot and time. I don’t know if it’s diminishing returns, or the way they randomize it just causing cycles or what, but it just doesn’t seem very even. Not precisely predictable, but like random with preferences.

I was at the claw today and noticed someone’s turrets there seemed to be shooting it. Hard to be certain with all the stuff being spammed right over them, but they were all pointing right at the mysterious place under it where it takes damage, at least.

So on closer inspection, it seems like Crusader Angaria’s problem may not be a bug so much as being designed to fail. Given the following:

-NPC follows path to its work-site.
-NPC gives up whatever it’s doing to attack hostiles.
-Hostiles appear frequently, up close, and many teleport to their targets (again, and again, and again, ad nauseam).
-En-route, NPC leaves its path to fight. It must then return to the point at which it left its path and begin again. Then more hostiles spawn.
-At the work-site, NPC leaves its work to fight. It dies in moments to risen nobles spamming their AOE/teleport. It gets revived, runs toward work-site, and more hostiles spawn.
-Event timer.

Didi on the other hand seems to pause waiting for attacks that never arrive, the last few times I did this chain. Presumably because the risen realize that by all spawning at Angaria they can guarantee neither event can be completed.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Vote for Evon everyone. He’s my kind of pirate. Plus he’s focusing on some very important research on what is probably the most important character in the history of Tyria.

Also, Kiel smells of mouse droppings.

I don’t understand why you know what either of those smell like. Not that I want to know, before you start explaining anything.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Most players will only play Abaddon a few times for the story. Then it’s all speed runs to the final boss. Because the LOOT is the only thing they care about in the dungeon.

Also because they remember the story from the last few times they did it.

Xiao Haishou.3691:

He had made his decision before he started speaking again, and after the legionnaire threatened him. He was at the ready as he was speaking and he “expanded his awareness” to take his legionnaire by surprise and kill her.

Of course, if you want to disagree with someone you strongly suspect will kill you for it, it makes sense to be prepared to deal with that. It was a verbal confrontation he had been continuing until she swung a sword at his head.

In either case, under the circumstances I suspect ‘murder’ is simply hyperbolic. Considering the option is available to players who get in all of zero trouble for it, we can probably assume it’s not necessarily considered illegal in charr culture, in a similar way to how the human noble player kills Minister Zamon after he envokes a right to trial by combat. In what I consider to be one of the game’s more amusing moments, Logan Thackeray volunteers (with no more than the proper display of enthusiasm, of course) to help. If you sit a while outside the gates of the Black Citadel (in Ashford, not Diessa) you can even catch a conversation where a NPC charr explains that she killed her legionnaire – and replaced him in the role – after he shot her during an argument. You’ll have to follow them though for the full conversation as they path for a while.

I think this might be bugged (at least in some cases). While screwing about in Orr a few days ago I noticed that my turrets which happened to get hit as they were being placed would die instantly, but weirdly enough I later happened to get the same types of creatures (none of these were >80 btw, just random junk with nobody around but me) attacking the same type of turret which had already been placed, so far as I could tell using the same skills, and the turrets (in both cases traited for health, autorepair, dmg, and knockback on death) were taking significantly less damage.

It looks a bit like the brightness values in that area are inverse for some reason.

Mif.3471:

Way to silence the “ArenaNet favors Evon” voices….

That would be futile. People believe what they want regardless.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/first#post2473160

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/page/2#post2474229

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/cutthroat/IMO-ArenaNet-favors-Evon-Unfair/page/3#post2487293

^As far as experiments go this seems like ‘if I poke this, will the sensation be pleasant, painful, or indifferent?’.

AFAIK they’re not exactly swimming in ways to reliably measure our emotional response to anything, unless some limited in-game communication with staff and masses of forum whining/celebration are considered reliable.

Did you check your guild’s history?

CMF.5461:

There won’t be any real consequences for any of our decisions, so we can take this as a pass to do what we want. Now the question comes up, is doing what you want really what you would do deep down, but social norms stop you?

I feel like this is missing:

c) the effects of my decisions actually affect whether or not I want those things to happen, not just whether or not I’m willing to risk making them happen.

Or that could just be me, either way.

It does create multiple impacts – something you can see very clearly when you have a ‘does x when you take falling damage’ trait, to occasionally hilarious results.

I’m not sure we should hold out much hope of it changing though. Poorly simulated physics seems like the sort of thing that gets fixed between games, when they’re writing a new engine…

These tokens clearly aren’t rare in the sense that they don’t appear often – because they do. Much more often than most ‘rare’ items and in line with blues or greens – and so I can only assume then that they’re particularly well-made tokens, since the item descriptions seem to simultaneously refer to quality and abundance.

Blackwyn.8127:

Don’t hang yourself up on the ‘kill his family’ thing, it’s just an expression.
Although if there was 10,000g on one end and his family on the other and you could only save one. I think he would go for the gold :P

Well, do we know his family? Maybe not saving them isn’t even such a bad idea.

I still get the odd rare item. Not as often as the support tickets or kite things but then, if I ever got that many rares, I could’ve single-handedly flooded the market with them by now.

I’ve been playing since the 2 day headstart and I’ve never known these to work. I mean I’m sure I didn’t find them on that very day, but it’s been months at least. Probably a lost cause.