Guild Wars 2

I am still reluctant to try those runes on my necromancer since I did not read anything about the Death Shroud issue being resolved yet. Getting your abilities locked for a couple of seconds after getting hit in DS is not exactly helpful. ^^

HyJinx.4896:

I don’t see this being a problem unless you are running a bot to gather mats for you. I just kill everything then harvest the area. So far it hasn’t failed me yet.

That is nice in theory, but in practice there are places, mostly in Orr, where this is just not possible without support or really impressive killspeed and the incredible luck that players around you are similarly sensible and do not train mobs exactly to your position – the latter condition is quite unrealistic, especially so when your position is right on a rare resource node, but vaguely possible.
I remember many occasions where I had to effectively clear areas (around Skill Challenges etc.) more than once because long-lasting conditions and patrolling groups initially cost me too much time to beat the respawn delay.
As a matter of fact especially bots should be largely unaffected as they mostly seem to appear in droves large enough to keep any area free of mobs. So there is that.

The star means nothing for PvP and little beyond that. One can visit every place in Tyria and still be incompetent at PvP, you do not see how many characters with the star the other person has, and one can have several characters with the star but his favorite PvP character is not among them.
So, somebody who thinks that the world-completion star means anything for an enemy in PvP is either talking about people who are quite easily impressed or deluding himself.
The star being invisible to enemies is nothing but a good thing. Mesmers are people, too, even when they are asuran.

Yup, although in many cases getting killed is quite easy to avoid unless you have only cleared a narrow path to a resource node in the middle of enemy-infested Orr for example or when a train hits you while you are already in combat (probably, again, in enemy-infested Orr where it is easy enough to get additional aggro as is), but all it takes to count as “in combat” is one single hit from an AoE.
Also, not every character has quick-recharge condition removal and some need an enemy for that, and standing around for half a minute next to a node because a mob – just before breathing his last – infected you with one of those age-long conditions that are all too common with certain enemy types in high-level-zones does not sound especially thrilling to me, either.
I can imagine that this was implemented to discourage “ninja-gathering” and I do not know how big the chance of this happening is – usually I am quite meticulous about killing anything red-named in the vicinity just because I can – but especially in the very same areas where those high-level-nodes are enemies are abundant and respawn quickly, so eliminating all possible sources of aggro that you or other players might attract while gathering resources or approaching a node is often impossible without a zerg at your back. And the fact that you can be completely aggro-free and still unexpectedly get ruined goods because of some 30-seconds cripple or weakness that a dead enemy left you with (and that you normally would not waste a cooldown on with no living enemies left) does not help.
As a result, consciously I doubt that it will affect my material-gain significantly, especially since it is only a (probably small) chance, but subconsciously it makes me feel worse, because every now and then I will get ruined goods because of no fault of my own.

Ah, that could be an explanation. Somebody was so kind as to bring an aggroed karka veteran to the node. I was in the middle of harvesting at that point and probably got hit by that massive karka puddle AoE.
May I say that I find the decision to include the possibility that others ruin your harvest doubtful?

I just harvested two Ancient Wood nodes using Orichalcum Logging Axes and got a total of 5 Ancient Wood Logs and 2 Ruined Logs. Somehow I doubt this is working as intended.

Daggers with the Centurion’s Claw skin display a strange graphic glitch: while standing or walking everything appears normal, but while running the dagger shifts its position (via short-range teleport apparently) so that the character does not hold its grip but seriously hurts his hand on the blades.

At the moment the Orrian part of the personal story seems to consist more of waiting for patches than anything else. Recent issue:
The quest “Conscript the Dead Ships” gets stuck at the objective “Clear the final Dead Ship of Risen” due to a complete lack of Risen. Additionally you still (or again?) get dropped off on this very ship instead of the boat with the rest of the squad after the cutscene, but that bug is harmless when compared to the new one that completely blocks mission progress.
Maybe the problem that the enemies on the final ship never spawn has something to do with the fact that Elli and her hologram spaz out on the second to last ship (both permanently running in small circles near the not-so-undead-anymore Captain Yejj) and can not be made to cross the plank to the last one (which is quite likely a condition for spawning the enemies). Resetting the mission does not help, the outcome stays the same.

Drakkar Lake is also affected. Some AoEs hit the corrupted ice wall, but the hitbox is practically completely hidden underground, so most attacks will just get “obstructed”.

+1
Even for necromancer standards this is a bad trait. It ranges somewhere between purely cosmetic and debuff (now with slightly longer duration, yay).

You are not alone. At the moment “Through the Looking Glass” does not progress past the point you describe. I used to complete that mission flawlessly with other characters, but now one of my characters is stuck at that very same step.

Just wanted to let you know that the counter for Dynamic Events once again starts at 5/5 after Daily reset. So, until this issue is fixed, again, if you are online at the time of the Daily reset you might want to zone or relog to make those DEs count towards your Daily Achievement.

Norn totem animal forms = crash

Well, adhering to a strict order like “first stability/bugs, then new content/balancing” is not always possible. First of all, there are different developers working on different things. And if there was a way to do it that way there would be people asking why their balance problems are not adressed yet or why there is never any new content.
So, in my opinion the order is not really the problem. What did present a problem so far is an apparent lack of communication between balancers and bugfixers. On some occasions I had the impressions that balancers were working under the assumption that everything was working as intended which left supposedly buffed professions unchanged in reality (since the builds that would actually benefit from those buffs were still bug-riddled) or weakened professions that were hardly strong to begin with but might have been (too?) strong without all those bugs. In some cases this leaves players with pretty few possibilities unless they are happy getting carried all the way.

I will rate the charr name above as 7/10. I had to deduct points for the invitation to immature puns, but otherwise the name is solid and has a nice ring to it as far as charr names go.

My charr is a necromancer named Lothyr Scareclaw. Because he is scary. And he has claws.

I do not know what you are talking about. Just an hour ago I was fighting some Young Karka and my Flesh Golem joined the battle against the third one. He was obviously learning how to do it by watching me kill the first two. Clearly working as intended.
Although I have to admit he does have a terrible short term memory and apparently needs to learn how to kill every single fight. Sometimes he dies before that happens. :P

I do not think this is a server-specific issue. On Drakkar Lake the Hellion Forest bugs out usually one or two days after server reset (at the latest). It is almost funny to see the rush on Hellion Forest after each server reset when many people try to complete that area before it becomes impossible again. Almost.

I used to have this problem, too, until I did some testing around and found the cause: some rune bonuses – in my case it was the 6th Superior Rune of Vampirism – are bugged. I thought this rune did not do anything, but what it does is “daze” you for some seconds after you receive the first hit after entering DS. In my case the DS icon next to the skill bar changed to a “locked” icon when this happened, so if you see that you might also have a bugged rune.

They are neither, really, but they do have a lot of feline features… and no bovine ones. Seriously, whoever thinks “horns = cow” should at least try and recall some of his biology lessons in school. Would you at least take a look at the different horn options and compare them to real animals? There are “cow horns”, yes, or rather horns that would look like it if there were not four of them, but so are “buffalo horns”, “goat horns”, “stag antlers” etc. Also, when is the last time you saw a cow with predator teeth and claws? So, we have feline features that are shared by every member of the race and one distinct cow feature – the horns and only the horns – that is shared by some members of the race while others have features of other horned animals in its place. So, they could be described at “cat people” if you use the term loosely, just to get the idea across (in the same way humans are “ape people”, so it is a derogative term in any case), but there is really no reason why any sane person would seriously consider the Charr to be “cow people”.

Using 6 Superior Runes of Vampirism interferes with the necromancer’s Death Shroud:
The first received hit (any melee or ranged attack, but apparently not poison fields etc.) after switching on Death Shroud deactivates all skills for a short amount of time (similar to a daze effect of roughly 2 seconds). Channeled skills are interrupted and enter full cooldown. Stability offers no protection. During this time the Death Shroud icon next to the skill bar is replaced with a “locked” icon.
While equipping 6 Runes of Vampirism this effect can be replicated 100% of the time. After unequipping even one of them this bug could no longer be replicated.

I did a translation of the sign a bit earlier and posted it in the Lost Shore thread. Parts of the text are quite hard to decipher since it is quite small. Apart from a few typos your transcription is largely correct. But it is “fruit baskets” and “gooey hats”, so the text reads as follows:
DANGER
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Lion’s Arch authorities cannot be held responsible for missing / stolen / damaged
and/or devoured appendages, small children, dinghies, fruit baskets, skritt,
pumpkin flavored marshmallows, spoons, gooey hats, ascalonian salads, pocket
watches, earrings, in-laws, spirits of the wild, eyepatches, warmachines, seraph,
rhubarb pies, mystical artifacts of unquestionable power, mystical artifacts of
questionable power, seeing-eye squirrels and carp.

And yes, that thing on the sign certainly looks like a giant crab. I am really looking forward to this. ^^

I just finished translating the sign at the waterfall under the jumping tower. The small scripts was awful to read, but I wanted to know what it says. And it was well worth it… kind of. I still do not know more, but it certainly made me laugh. Here is my transcription:
DANGER
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Lion’s Arch authorities cannot be held responsible for missing / stolen / damaged
and/or devoured appendages, small children, dinghies, fruit baskets, skritt,
pumpkin flavored marshmallows, spoons, gooey hats, ascalonian salads, pocket
watches, earrings, in-laws, spirits of the wild, eyepatches, warmachines, seraph,
rhubarb pies, mystical artifacts of unquestionable power, mystical artifacts of
questionable power, seeing-eye squirrels and carp.

EDIT: The text seems to be the same on each sign, so all we have to go on as to what the warning refers to is the picture of a small man fleeing from a giant crab. Fun.

Hehe, that piece of sarcasm was mainly aimed at Picklock who definitely failed to read and/or understand why people quit the clock tower. Maybe he will stop patting himself on the back long enough to realize what nonsense he wrote.
Chances are that next year the clock tower might be fun for me, too. Single-player instances would certainly help. A human-sized character would certainly be better than a humongous charr, maybe even an elementalist for the extra speed to make up for my control setup that is not a friend of infinite circular motions (like, for example, if you are continuously jumping around a tower or something like that). And probably the connection issues are sorted by then, too.
Anyway, next year it can hardly get any worse than it was under this year’s circumstances, so doing it this year would have been nothing less than stupid for me.

It is widely known that people who have better things to do (for example actually having fun in a game) than waste their time on a challenge that might be designed as being fun but is unfortunately biased against their character race, internet connection or control setup (or a mixture thereof) are failures in life. :P

In most cases it is the intention (and how visible your intention is) that makes the difference. If you run across a suspicious location which you might or might not have looted either on your home server or on any overflow server and loot it again nobody will accuse you of using an exploit. If you repeatedly log out and back in to farm the same suspicious locations on different servers things might be seen differently though.

When it comes to gambling roulette is a very popular game. A good part of its success is based on the fact that it is only slightly biased towards the bank (which is the 0’s fault), so it is very fair and requires no special education or gift. Also, basic understanding of mathematics gives you a good understanding about your odds, so that you can make an informed decision if the risk is worth the possible reward or not.
Unfortunately Black Lion Chests are the opposite of that. For a normal player without access to insider information the odds are unknowable and too many contents of the chests feel like a waste of a key. Both factors come together and lead to many players not knowing if they are being ripped off. And a player who suspects he is being ripped off is not a happy player.
If you are the type of person who buys keys regularly Halloween rewards are a welcome bonus. But if you are a person who feels he is not getting his money’s worth when buying keys but does so anyway for a shot at Halloween stuff the experience of not having any luck whatsoever is… well, not so good.
So, we can argue about the odds of getting seasonal stuff are good enough or not, but given the random nature of BLC gambling we should really leave terms like “dedication” or “work” at the door as no amount of work or dedicaton can influence a random number generator.

I think GW2 is trying to troll us. Only medium armor users seem to get any good light and heavy armor drops. (They get significantly less medium armor, though.) Fortunately I am prepared and have a combination of characters that can potentially use anything that could possibly drop.