Guild Wars 2

this is an idea i just posted in another thread, but i feel like it deserves one of its own (and who are you to countermand me?! muahaha!)

~

When you complete the event to bring the Gerent to the surface, it continues to head for the cannon. You have to break its bar to stun it and stop it, which will enrage it, causing it to focus on players but take more damage. When the enrage ends, or perhaps after you’ve done this several times, it reburrows, and you move up the lane to the next event to bring it out.

When it actually reaches the cannon, it unburrows again of its own accord, and its enrage time is shorter but lengthened by the number of lane events you were successful at. whenever it’s not enraged, it will progress towards the cannon, so you have to manage CC carefully to keep it broken or enraged so it doesn’t annihilate the cannon and fail the meta.

I feel too like there should be partial successes – if you can keep any one cannon alive, it still fires and blasts a smaller hole in the wall, through which players can go to get at caches and etc (like the tarir meta failure) but you don’t get the boss chest unless you defeat all four gerents.

If you succeed the cannon part, a gargantuan Chak Hive Queen emerges in the leyline confluence. You have to hurt it badly enough, perhaps using cannon fire to break its shell/shield/whatever mechanic works best, so that it flees through the hole in the wall into dragonstand, thereby accomplishing the order of whisper’s objective.

I feel like each successful lane event should progressively weaken the gerent. If you fail one, it moves on and you must immediately start the next, without the benefit of that first weakening.

Then, rather than heading to the cannon and just annihilating it, it should unburrow there and you have to attempt to distract or kill it before the time runs out. Perhaps it could enrage if it gets that far, to further jeopardize your chances of success, becoming more dangerous the more events you’ve failed, and you should certainly get more rewards for each gerent you kill (which i understand is not a strict requirement to succeed the meta).

I do like the idea of the event, and i think it should be able to fail – and maybe even should stay the hardest of all the metas – but it needs something done, something to make it accessible to others than just the elite few.

edit: how about this: when the gerent unburrows, it continues to head for the cannon. You have to break its bar to stun it and stop it, which will enrage it, causing it to focus on players but take more damage. When the enrage ends, it reburrows, and you move up the lane to the next event to bring it to the surface.

When it actually reaches the cannon, it unburrows again of its own accord, and its enrage time is shorter but lengthened by the number of lane events you were successful at. whenever it’s not enraged, it will progress towards the cannon, so you have to manage CC carefully to keep it broken or enraged so it doesn’t annihilate the cannon and fail the meta.

I feel too like there should be partial successes – if you can keep any one cannon alive, it still fires and blasts a smaller hole in the wall, through which players can go to get at chaches and etc (like the tarir meta failure) but you don’t get the boss chest unless you defeat all four gerents.

I also wish there was some kind of mega-boss brought up by succeeding the meta, a Chak hive queen or something, which emerges (and occupies most of) the leyline confluence. You have to hurt it badly enough that it flees through the hole in the wall into dragonstand, thereby accomplishing the order of whisper’s objective.

They should’ve kept this mission system back til the first major HoT patch, rather than rushing it out for release…

Or, y’no, stuck with the old perfectly functional non-confusing system

Substance E.4852:

Narrrz.7532:

Substance E.4852:

Narrrz.7532:

i gather that even the big organised boss-beating guilds have/had some trouble with it. As of right now i’m tempted to say it’s unpuggable.

You are never going to get enough pugs to care to attempt it if all that is at the end of the stick is just another rev blindfold and a backpack that most won’t ever want or use.

Guess this proves how little people will play for the challenge alone.

It offers a full reward chest + access to a mastery point strongbox and a whole mess of chak caches (from the video of a EU guild beating it)

That’s arguably more than Tarir does.

Edit: i want to say that the confusing nature of the map & the meta itself, coupled with the difficulty and unclear objectives, mean that most people feel their time is spent better elsewhere, and honestly i can’t criticise them. the meta is very punishing – a huge dps check on four separate bosses, interspersed by a mess of unrelated events with not-very-clear objectives, and if any single event fails, in any lane, the entire show is over.

No one of these things is necessarily bad in itself, but all taken together they just make for too punishing an event for open world content.

I didn’t know it had a treasure room but that would make sense.

I would still argue that isn’t enough to make people bother. There are a load of caches across the map unlike Auric Basin which requires the event to access.

It seems the only common drop of real value is the sparks and you can just wander the map to find them.

You’re certainly not wrong though obviously it’s a matter of opinion.

However, given that the events are staggered i imagine people would still participate if they had a reasonable expection of success.

Alas…

hmm, nightfall awarded proper rewards. do you not get any item rewards at 25% map participation or less?

Substance E.4852:

Narrrz.7532:

i gather that even the big organised boss-beating guilds have/had some trouble with it. As of right now i’m tempted to say it’s unpuggable.

You are never going to get enough pugs to care to attempt it if all that is at the end of the stick is just another rev blindfold and a backpack that most won’t ever want or use.

Guess this proves how little people will play for the challenge alone.

It offers a full reward chest + access to a mastery point strongbox and a whole mess of chak caches (from the video of a EU guild beating it)

That’s arguably more than Tarir does.

Edit: i want to say that the confusing nature of the map & the meta itself, coupled with the difficulty and unclear objectives, mean that most people feel their time is spent better elsewhere, and honestly i can’t criticise them. the meta is very punishing – a huge dps check on four separate bosses, interspersed by a mess of unrelated events with not-very-clear objectives, and if any single event fails, in any lane, the entire show is over.

No one of these things is necessarily bad in itself, but all taken together they just make for too punishing an event for open world content.

As title.

I’ll attach a screenshot next time it happens (2x consecutively in this instance)

i gather that even the big organised boss-beating guilds have/had some trouble with it. As of right now i’m tempted to say it’s unpuggable.

Shoe.5821:

I have come to the opposite conclusion.

It’s basic supply and demand. More supply (more mats on market), less demand (less people building precursors.) Maybe you could explain your reasoning?

sure.
More demand (a new sink for ascended mats), unchanged supply (timegated creation)

They only plug into the ground if they detect targets at range, and they’ll unplug again as soon as they have no targets. If they’re trailing along behind you liek a lost puppy, they’re going to do the leech field.

you just have to alternate between range and melee.

Shoe.5821:

This will drive down the price of mats, which will drive down the price of crafting precursors

I have come to the opposite conclusion.

the question is, how much breakbar depletion does “2 damage” equate to? it would vary from mob to mob, and with event scaling, so i’m not sure that it’s especially useful information to have.

Unless you just mean for comparative purposes, to see how much depletion a 2s daze causes compared to, e.g., a 1 second stun?
In that case conditions like chill, taunt, fear, slow etc will also need to be updated to display their depletion/second (and should that scale with condition damage? hard cc scale with power?)

i imagine when it appears, the breakbar page of the wiki will be filled with peoples data/estimates of how much certain abilities or conditions deplete the bar by, which seems the most appropriate place for that info rather than further cluttering up tooltips.

Majic.4801:

Narrrz.7532:

Majic.4801:

A “nice” way would be to offer useful advice, as other players have done, which would be constructive, rather than counterproductive.

Insulting other players gets no point across other than illustrating the shortcomings of those who do it.

We spent the first part of the thread explaining how to beat these enemies. If you still have difficulty doing so when you understand the mechanics, the best advice i can give you is “learn to play better”.
I’m sorry if you take offense from the insinuation that you are not already a good player, but you have to understand that there are bad players out there, and if explanations fail, the best advice we have to offer is “get better”

I take no offense at all, though I’m forced to wonder where you got the idea I’m having trouble with the content, since that was my first comment in the thread and didn’t say anything of the sort.

You claimed you were not sure if there was a nice way to tell other players “you might just not actually be very good at this game.” I suggested a more constructive alternative, since telling players they’re bad accomplishes nothing worthwhile, but that point seems to have been lost.

Should I suggest you “get better” at reading? I don’t think you would appreciate that any more than being told you were a “bad player”, nor do I think it would help you or anyone else.

Instead, please understand there is never a need to tell anyone they are a “bad player” — all that does is alienate people and accomplish less than saying nothing at all.

Offering helpful advice and recommending ways of improving is a much better way to go, which is what I hope is getting across.

If I’m not making that clear enough, I’m quite willing to keep trying, if it can help.

Sorry, i could have phrased that better. the ‘you’ i’m using was intended as an address to the reader, if applicable, not to you as in the person whom i was quoting.

I do feel that helpful advice has its limits. if you are not good at reading, then what else can you do but suggest they get better? If you were, instead, to suggest they read more in lieu of stating your actual intended advice, they can quite reasonably object that they’re not good at it.

I mean, you can go through your advice, ever refining what you are instructing them to do; “struggle with these mobs? learn these mechanics and how to avoid them. can’t avoid them? learn their animation tells and timing so you can better time your dodges” but ultimately that seems more insulting to me, to talk down that way as if they were a child.
If someone says to me they’re having difficulty, I would absolutely, regarding them as an equal, tell them, “you might just need to get better at it”.

I realised with the pre-reveal that this whole system was going to be a bad joke at the players expense. I’m not planning to even select legendary collection mastery for training, not even once i’m done with fractals.

Just did guild puzzle – practically nobody got rewards.

Thagyr.4136:

All the attacks the frogs do are telegraphed to the max, and once you get stealth detection from nuhoch they lose one of their more annoying traits.

I don’t understand how other people here complain about the frog dagger attacks. They literally take 3 seconds to sheath their bow to pull their daggers, then they BEELINE towards you by running. No teleporting or anything. Just plain ol’run.

Sure, if ignoring all these signs and they somehow hit you with their opening stun then you are in for a bad time. But we have stunbreaks. Hit one and take 3 steps to the left or right and the frog will just continue standing there flailing away at the air in front of him. Stunbreaks are useful in HoT cause of the abundance of knockdowns, stuns, dazes and launches.

Not rocket science.

They have several melee attacks, and if you are a melee character there is no telegraph on what attack they are about to do (which is my main complaint).

Also, right now, Nuhoch stealth detection doesn’t seem to function properly/consistently. The frogs are still able to break targeting with their smoke bomb, and they aren’t always made visible while stealthed.

If you keep them at range, then sure, bladedancers can’t really do very much to you, but not every prof/spec has an effective ranged playstyle and if a mob really wants to chase you down (like the champ for the hero point) there’s not all that much you can do to stop it.

I feel like putting a charge-up telegraph into the attack animation for their stun chain would be fair.

Coyote.7031:

Narrrz.7532:

Coyote.7031:

Nice to see we’re back to insulting each other again. Please continue, let’s see this “award winning community” in action.

I’m not sure that there’s a nice way to say, “you might just not actually be very good at this game”
I don’t mind sugar coating but i think it’s less essential than getting the point across.

Funny, doesn’t sound like a skill problem to me, just more like mobs spamming cheesy abilities that don’t sound fun. But then again fun is subjective. So is difficulty, but whatever floats your boat.

You’re right, they are subjective. Most people would agree, though, that boredom is not fun, and most i think would likewise agree that un-engaging gameplay creates boredom. Difficulty may not automagically generate engagement, but it’s difficult to be engaged by combat which requires no attention whatsoever.

Personally, i find the new enemies much more engaging and therefore fun. Some – liek the bladedancers, as mentioned above – have attacks which are very difficult to dodge and have extreme consequences for failure, which i do not enjoy so much, but removing the difficult mechanics entirely won’t make them more fun – it’ll just make them boring, instead of annoying.

Majic.4801:

A “nice” way would be to offer useful advice, as other players have done, which would be constructive, rather than counterproductive.

Insulting other players gets no point across other than illustrating the shortcomings of those who do it.

We spent the first part of the thread explaining how to beat these enemies. If you still have difficulty doing so when you understand the mechanics, the best advice i can give you is “learn to play better”.
I’m sorry if you take offense from the insinuation that you are not already a good player, but you have to understand that there are bad players out there, and if explanations fail, the best advice we have to offer is “get better”

cupcakesandcatnomz.3924:

Do you regret pre-purchasing HoT?

Not even slightly.

You’re not getting the core game. You must pay howevermany money for HoT. Just HoT.
If you don’t already own the core game, or are just playing the free version, you get the full version thrown into the deal.

If you do already own the full core game, you get a free character slot (or you did during prepurchase – that offer may have ended now)

The whole afk/event participation system is very screwy right now, i think. I hope they’re looking into it, because it needs something close to a total overhaul.

Shoe.5821:

i get the impression the original design was that there would always be a surge of people in Dragon’s Stand because you had to ‘break in’ by completing the Tangled Depths meta.

God, can you imagine if that was the only way to unlock the portal?

only like 500 people in the world would have ever set foot in dragonstand

Coyote.7031:

Nice to see we’re back to insulting each other again. Please continue, let’s see this “award winning community” in action.

I’m not sure that there’s a nice way to say, “you might just not actually be very good at this game”
I don’t mind sugar coating but i think it’s less essential than getting the point across.

If they had event particpation scale the way map participation does it could be okay.

say 25% is bronze, 50% is silver, 100% is gold and it goes up to 200%.

So, if you stick with a caravan 2/3rds of the way, that’s 125-150% participation credit. It might degrade slightly if you walk away from the event, but you’ll still get gold.

I feel like the countdown for this map should only begin after the map has become ‘active’

Or, better yet, have a bar like the silverwastes – “Mordremoth’s Ley-energy accumulated”
Once you’ve started the map, it begins to slowly tick up (over perhaps 30 min?). As you take objectives, you drain the bar/slow its progression. Once you’ve disabled the three ley harvesters the bar stops ticking up.

Glider 1
Itzel 1
Glider 2
Exalted 1
Nuhoch 1
Nuhoch 2
Glider 3
Itzel 2
Exalted 2
Nuhoch 3
Itzel 3
Itzel 4
Glider 4
Glider 5
Glider 6
Nuhoch 4

from there just… whatever. The remaining masteries are all very circumstantial if not outright useless

Edit: the bolded ones are merchant unlocks. you might want to move them up a couple of places as there are keys gated behind exalted and nuhoch vendor access. I personally think the extra endurance/speed from lean techniques and the access to nuhoch tunnels is more important, but that’s just me (and i’m past the end of this list in my personal progression anyway, now)

mcwurth.2081:

nice guide but you keep saying things are a chore….. untill you reach a certain “thing”.
I think it shouldn’t be a chore. at all.
thanks for the masteries insight, It is so confuSing to decide which one i should take. no information anywhere.

I didn’t find it a chore at all, and while i agree that having masteries makes places (cough verdant brink) a lot more enjoyable, i had a lot of fun from the get go.

I’ve unlocked all 9 elite specs now and i’d have to say warrior was by far the most torturous. Berserk gives you more tools… but they’re not better tools. If i could give warriors one piece of advice, throw out that greatsword. Give it to your necro. Hundred blades rooting you while it casts makes you absolute fodder for most enemies, and the berserk burst is worse than the normal one because it doesn’t give fury.

Necro and thief i actually had minimal trouble unlocking, but then i find necros very powerful and my thief had full gliding mastery by the time i went in with her (and i am exceptionally good at remembering physical layouts & understanding 3d relationships).

Other than that, a very useful guide!

Everyone who keeps saying that this affects only a fraction of events… i don’t know what events you’re doing. The more of these event chains i participate in, the more events i find where the mobs simply offer no loot or exp.

Again, i get that ANet is terrified of people farming these things to too great personal advantage, but in the process of trying to counteract these few players, they’re really killing a lot of the enjoyment of a major slice of their playerbase.

It seems intermittent, and it only rarely lets me see itzel frogs when they stealth, including their mordrem variants. Mordrem snipers, on the other hand, i maintain vision of much more consistently.

You can argue that any increase in difficulty is an ‘artificial’ extension of the fight – hell, increasing mobs hitpoints does that in the most direct way possible. Why aren’t you complaining that not every mob dies in a single hit? What is the ‘appropriate’ length of a fight beyond which any extension can be considered excessive?

personally i thought the new mechanics are quite innovative and made me have to sit up and pay attention to the enemy and their behaviour, not just semi-afk while hitting a button or two every 10sec. Sure, there are some mechanics that irk me – mentioned above – but i don’t want these taken out or even really changed, just telegraphed a bit better for player-friendliness.

When all is said and done, you can still get practically everything you might want out of this game from central tyria, where the mobs don’t do anything tricky.

The blade frogs are all i really don’t like. Their stun-stab needs a telegraph.

The shadowleapers could maybe use a slightly longer cooldown on their abilities or perhaps be unable to evade CC/while CC’d

smokescales are a joke, they don’t even get rev’s evade when they’re doing their shadowdance thing.

Honestly it’s nice just to have enemies that require you to at least think briefly while fighting them.

since iirc it interacts with vulnerability on the target, your crit chance would change dependant on the target being hit, so showing any single value in your character screen would be misleading regardless.

That’s definitely how it worked in teh living story 2, and from my experiences thus far, running chars through prologue/torn from the sky, it seems to hold there as well, so i would expect so.

I’ve suggested before – any item that has been equipped, soulbound, account bound, runed, transmuted, whatever ever should always confirm when you try to salvage it.

Other than that you get a definite +1

i believe you have to dance for the golem.

yeah, i started from the vista not expecting to receive credit. I guess it’s a little bit generous about where you begin from.

do they all split the way diarmid does? i bet that’s what the problem is.

I have yet to see anything sold for karma in HoT, so i can’t imagine anything has changed

If you mean an unending stream of mobs then yes, i do, but i fail to see how that is so different from anywhere else except in quantity, and like i said, they could have just reduced the supply, not rendered those events hollow and meaningless.

I wasn’t even one of those farming these events – i’ve just gotten snagged by the knee-jerk reaction to some other players profiting more than the devs wanted them to, players who have already profited and moved on to the next farmable area.

Yeah, that updraft definitely doesn’t function as one. I just flew into it from the other side, so that i could enter it at the top. i flew circles through the middle of it – no lift whatsoever.

Ayrilana.1396:

Elyssandariel.2679:

I’ve been doing VB for the past few days and I haven’t seen any mobs not give XP? Sure you don’t get loot with every kill, but even in the core game, I never did? Did anyone else get loot every time they killed something? I’ve usually got all 18 slot bags apart from the backpack you get, and my stuff is always full. So I haven’t seen yet what people are talking about. If there’s 10% of the mobs that don’t give XP, that’s still 90% that do, and I suggest you focus on those if this bothers you so much? Just my opinion and experiences in VB so far.

What I’m thinking that they were doing was farming events that specifically spawned infinite mobs, it got nerfed, so now they’re upset about it. I’ve done maybe 90% of the events out there and only a handful don’t give XP. The most notable one that always comes to my mind is in TD with the Rata Nova event where you protect the NPC from the Chak before the champ event.

There is *always*an unlimited supply of mobs. NPCs respawn, if you run around the world and kill things you’ll never run out of enemies – why is this particular instance problematic? If we’re getting too much loot/sec for some dev’s liking, why didn’t they just cut the rate at which npc numbers scale?

Yes, it might only affect “a few” events (a quarter or more, to some degree or other, in my experience) but it has rendered those events utterly pointless to do for anyone who is not playing the game “just for the experience of it”

This is an enoyable game just to play, and i like doing ‘pointless’ (read: unprofitable) activities like flying around the canopy of VB, but when i’m doing events, even if i’m not thinking specifically of the loot, it is a kitten nice fringe benefit, and the same with exp now that it’s useful again.

It is just plain disheartening to kill an enemy and not profit from the experience. That is more or less the entire point of games of this genre.

The megaserver system likes to spread players prertty thin. This is fine – usually – but the new zones require much higher player density (than ANet seems to have anticipated)

I’m hoping the system will be changed to put new entries into more populated maps rather than creating new instances. If it happens, fewer people will feel the need to taxi as the maps will already be so well populated, and the chance of you winding up in a map players are emigrating from goes down.

Fossilised Amber Weapons 2.0

Well, i was looking for a long term goal, and i DO like the look of that mini…

Though i hope that never comes to pass.
20 was too low in gw1 but 80 really feels very right.

I believe i’ve seen enemies up to 84, though no 85s yet.

Anhedonia

Nah, it never made sense for these to be tradeable. All the other currency containers aren’t. Actually i never even thought to check that they weren’t until by chance i noticed them listed in my sell panel while clearing inv of other things.

Made some nice coins, but i think this change is the right one.

You need to start from Nuhoch WP. Go through the cave into the Decrepit Nest and go to the south side of that cavern. There’s a small tree root you can climb which gives access to a ledge overlooking rata novus.

I personally favour partial cavaliers for overworld content. 2800-3200 toughness will make a lot of things feel significantly less punishing.

Dante.1763:

Malthurius.6870:

Newer zones have their rewards back loaded from the mobs onto the chests and bags you get for completing the events and the map wide rewards to prevent mob farming; wouldn’t want any events to be farmed for their mobs like Orr events have in the past. Random mobs not connected to events still drop a lot of stuff in my experience.

I don’t know about this “event graying out” thing, it has never happened to me.

that event greying out thing is what happens when you dont take part in an event after a set period of time, had it happen once and i realized why it was doing it!

Some events you can still lose credit for while actively participating, just because the escort NPC has gotten caught up on mobs unrelated to the event.

Happens, for instance, when escorting the scrap cannon to the vinewall – there’s a small horde of mordrem that the event doesn’t consider related, and with only one or two people, they can take long enough to kill that the event decides you’re no longer participating in it.

Silverwastes, fr bandit crests + gold.
may require you to own + have completed the living story 2 and all its achievements – that’s how it used to work

Spambot.3625:

whats hilarious is that I never had crashes on the normal client, 5 minutes in with 64bit and I get my first crash… ouch

do you have a 64-bit machine and 64-bit OS?

I do feel like it could do with taking a small nerf in the hp pool department. Other than that i think it’s a well-rounded, interesting meta event.

I do kinda wish there was a big bad boss at the end after you’ve blown the hole in the wall, though… The way the camera zooms out in LLC made me expect there would be one, and i was disappoint.

Inverse.2967:

Btw.. they health pools are not so over-sized if you can complete the side events multiple times to get a damage bonus.

My understanding is that they just get extra stacks of vulnerability? stacks which are probably kept close to capped anyway? in the chaos of the fight i haven’t been able to check this out for myself…