Guild Wars 2

Coldtart.4785:

There is no middle ground. Even if you have 25 stacks of stability, enough line spamming makes it no different to if you had zero.

It’s almost like what the people carrying CC abilities had to put up with for two years – even if you delivered 25 targeted CCs it was no different than if you’d fired 0.

The Wheel turns.

Nope. It’s still not a thing. And the reasons it’s not a thing haven’t changed.

Hybarf Tics.2048:

UnknownRH.4592:

Would have loved if Kodan was playable. But ohh well what can we do.

Well for one thing you can start by accepting the fact that since day one of this game they always claimed that Kodan will remain forever and ever a story race and never a playable one.

Works for me. I don’t see the appeal myself… Anthropomorphic bears stuck up on themselves and worshiping the status quo while calling it “balance”. Their vision of ‘Balance’ is appallingly limited.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

I’m… sorry about your father.

Thank you, both to you and others who have expressed condolences. If there’s an ‘upside’ to a long death, those who survive have some time to prepare for the end.

Test.8734:

That is true, though. We know what happens to someone once they’re addicted to alcohol and how it becomes hard to recover once they are already affected. But the main way to prevent it and to recover is still through will.

It’s worrisome to say otherwise since you could then see people who are addicted to alcohol as unfortunate victims of external circunstances, as opposed to people who need to will to get better and whose recover is their own responsibility.

I hope you never have cause to learn better.

Test.8734:

I’m not really sure the concept of ‘grit’ applies like you’re saying to the Sylvari. You are assuming that joining the army is something that required a strong will…

Are you perchance in the armed services? I was. It’s not something you decide to do lightly. And you don’t last long if you can’t master your own impulses.

Test.8734:

…and while that may be true for human beings in the real world, I’m not so sure the same applies to the Sylvari in Tyria. If a Sylvari feels that his/her wyld hunt is to enlist for the Pact, wouldn’t it be expected of a weak-willed being to follow the flow and just do what he/she thinks he/she is meant to do, instead of fighting it and trying to find one’s own path?

In my experience it doesn’t particularly matter why you take the difficult path – the fact is you did it. Does it matter if you think you’re a coward but keep doing courageous things? The people you help probably don’t think so.

Avascar.9237:

Having it come out late May sounds reasonable.

It sounds reasonable if you know nothing about retail.

Reality says July at the earliest and even that is slipping fast…

Someone has finally master quantum-inversion transparallel transmission – because this thread clearly originated in a different universe from the one I live in…

I like WvWvW, but blob-warfare against incredibly static opponent lists in week long pocket universes that harmlessly fizzle away to nothing is not exactly going out into the greater MMO play space and vacuuming up customers.

myself.2143:

You could try the new Thief Spec: The lawyer.

Yes that’s right, The Lawyer. The thief will hang up his/her daggers for sleazy underhanded tactics of litigation to smite their foes with manipulated justice!

So its a hard counter to the Guardian’s “Prosecutor” specialization?

plorph.4376:

All right my fellow testers, lets break the server for science!

That’s almost one of my guild’s main battle cries~

“We killed the sever! …what did it drop?”

(Only slightly less popular than our main battle cry~ “Plan A!! Kill them all!!”)

irishgorilla.1560:

This is what I came up with… any recommendations or do u think its good

The yellow crystals are good. I would try using a lighter color on the helmet and shoulders and a darker color on the boots.

Orpheal.8263:

Wiz.1543:

Profession themed mail carriers.

Elementalist: a Whirlwind brings the mail to you whirling around you and disappearing in front of you

Necromancer: a undead hand grows from the ground to give you the letter, or a Bone Minnion with the letter in its mouth runs to you, like a dog, that brings the morning mail to you

Mesmer: A Clone of yourself comes and shatters at your side, turning into the mail.

Engineer : A mechanic steampunk helicopter drone like seen in the HoT trailer brigns you the mail

Thief: An other Thief appears out of the shadows like a Ninja, gives you the mail and disappears again with a Smokebomb in the shadows

Ranger is basically already the Griffon Mail Carrier

Warrior: A fiery sword of balthazar with the attached mail falls from the heaven at your side…

Guardian: The Mail appears in a shiny guardian theme bluish white yellow mixed light sphere , which bursts like a bubble and sets the mail free.

Revenant: A legend of the mists appears (Razah) and hands you the Mail over

This is indeed excellent.

Experiment with Flare and Electro Purple.

I’d be cooking mostly. And watching closely to see how well respawning worked out for other people.

And maybe sucking up to Evon Gnashblade…

nathanjameson.3542:

Your ideas?

Really it comes down to running a profession/build you know well enough to spot small changes.

Purple dye needs testing too!

That would be cool . Good idea!

FrizzFreston.5290:

I don’t think many players will go bughunting tbh. Not that I blame them.

Still some very sound advice.

Thanks. I don’t expect active bug hunting from public testers and I doubt ArenaNet does either, but better than average bug reporting helps everybody .

Aomine.5012:

I don’t expect HoT will land in another 3 months at least.

We know it can’t be less than 3 months out – Heart of Thorns is a physical product that sits on actual shelves. You have to tell retailers exact ship dates 3-4 months in advance or you don’t get to be on their shelves.

Oh, I’m sure lots of people will get repeat invites regardless of distinction. But I also like to think that if a QA staffer hits a report that stands out as allowing them to trace the problem they can raise their hand and say “Boss – can we get this player back for the next round? Please? Pretty please with an ‘OMG that report was good’ on top?”

The universe is not always just, but you can still improve your odds .

My objection isn’t to stealth – its to the worst tab target/autotarget system I’ve ever seen in 14 years of MMOs. When a thief stealths I don’t need my attack focus shifting to a gerbil in the adjacent zip code!

Jaymee.1560:

Um, never did a Beta before, a friend who has told me all I have to do is go in there and play but… Okay, is this true? All I have to do is…play?

All you have to do is play, but there are things you can do to be one of the testers they specifically flag for inclusion in later events. I encourage you to read this.

Congratulations .

Strix Nebulosa.3579:

::runs around in circles:: EEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeeeeek!!!

Deep breaths. hyperventilating and passing out will reduce the amount of time you get to play .

I encourage you to read this. There are things you can do to make yourself that guy they really want back in the next test.

As we have a bunch of people going into beta-tests as Heart of Thorns approaches and many have expressed concerns about what they should be doing, I thought I would share some advice from working as an in-house tester.

Follow Instructions. Your email gave fairly simple ones – show up and play during a specified period. This particular test is focused on population and server behavior so you don’t have a lot of other demands this time, but other tests may have different instructions. Stay alert while playing – there may be in-game announcements, such as asking people to travel to specific zones (so they can study how the servers manage tidal shifts). Be ready to drop your personal play to carry out these tasks. If you get picked in the future, be mindful of what you’re being asked to do and read your email fresh each time you get one.

Reproducibility. If you do hit something that looks like a bug – stop and take stock. For the people who will be looking at your bug reports “what went wrong” is actually less important than “what were you doing when something went wrong?” See if you can repeat the action and cause it to happen again. Not being able to trigger it again is as important as succeeding in provoking it. If you can pass along a clear description of how to cause the bug, the people who have to run the bug down will sing your praises. After a few attempts at reproducing the bug yourself, then write your ticket. Be thorough – include what race and profession you are playing, what zone you are in, if you were in radius of a dynamic event at the time, and (this may sound odd) how long you had been playing/how long the client has been open at the time.

Congratulations to those who got invited. Have fun, pay attention, and help squash some bugs!

Yes. They announced in interviews that any public testing from that point forward could be shared/streamed.

Double grats!

Random Wax Orc.7695:

Reward effort, not luck.

In case you were wondering why that will never happen.

Any idea if we’ll see this pre-Heart of Thorns like the camera changes?

I’d be interested to see what they did inside that design space.

There is a world of difference between “traits unlocking system” and “traits system”.

Fanboys love them because when the rest of the world had moved on to guns, the Japanese’s closed society kept making blades and as a result they have a bit more advanced metallurgy – not compared to their contemporaries, because there are no contemporaries, but compared to the final serious efforts of other cultures that were busy shooting each other by then. Its a bit like lusting after an A-10’s Avenger over a civil war Gatling gun. No kidding the version 100 years newer is more impressive. Duh.

Add in a bit of romantic whitewashing of the Samurai warrior culture (a culture that in reality spent long periods considering the spear to be the essential weapon of a warrior…) and you get some ooo and aaah’ing over what is in essence a fairly typical cavalry saber independently developed by pretty much every civilization that had horses.

But mostly I cringe at calling those models “katana” because they lack curvature .

After.

It was suggested long ago (about the time frame when a ton of things in HoT were being discussed in CDIs) that any mechanic called “Adrenaline” could very logically have a f1: fight! and f2: flight! option. Maybe the warrior specialization has fight or flight instincts? But it could be the class as a whole is going to see a little more flexibility in spending its class-resource. Given the design-hours required to add an f2 skill to every weapon, I’m leaning towards it being for the class as a whole…

I Goof Em.6873:

thief: "can you heal me now? "

I giggled. Just a little.

Off hand dagger in earth has a huge wind-up followed by an earthshattering ka-boom. I’ve seen elementalists teleporting in the middle (well a split second before the end, actually) of that wind up, so it could be a combination of a weapon nuke and a utility teleport.

Why does it have to be a set of 4? Having just three attunements could add tons of flavor.

It’d also mean redoing every weapon skill they have, so don’t hold your breath. Specialization are all about change on a budget.

So here in the real world we spent a few millenia treating alcoholism as a failure of willpower. We didn’t need to be sympathetic or give a crap that these people were dying because it was a failure of their moral fiber than brought them to this state. According to these enlightened folks my dad drank himself to death ‘because he was weak’. Rather than any sort of neurochemical loop that ate him alive from the inside out.

I just want to say how incredibly cringeworthy it is to hear that the difference between being a dragon-enslaved “zombarii” and those heroic souls not consumed by ‘the call’ that we look at with such suspicion is “willpower”. That those sylvari who had their free will snatched away ARE AT FAULT in their own total domination because they didn’t, you know, want to resist enough. Weak willed. Active participants in their own victimization.

Specifically we’re talking about Sylvari who were so weak willed that they left their home and enlisted in the Pact to fight and die against slavering undead monsters. Sounds pretty much like a bunch of folks really lacking in ‘character’ and ‘grit’, right?

So do we balance them like they have exotic gear (and they complain) or do they get free ascended gear equivalence in those empty spots (and everyone else complains)?

Yes.

I want tan-gold “Hawk wings” but celestial is ok too.

Leo G.4501:

yhvh.8703:

with everyone making supermodels for characters…

Hmm, do they have a Charr supermodels thread? I was thinking of constructing a nice saucy pin-up calendar for people with a specific kind of taste :-p

I’m making a female Charr when Heart of Thorns comes out. Nothing to offer yet. But I expect she’ll look really good in heavy armor .

ProtoGunner.4953:

Wow, especially Nr. 5 is great! You make the females rather personal and not a lifeless dull of a 15 year old’s wet dreams.

Thank you. I’m glad you see some individual character in them . Number 5 is actually my main, and it’s taken at least three total make over kits to get her to what you see. Interestingly, she has about six sliders driven all the way to the limit. Not lip thickness, obviously. It also probably helps my characters have their clothes on in the screenies .

I’ve enjoyed working with a variety of slider-based systems for years now and how they allow you to really dig down and understand your own tastes if you choose to pay attention to what makes 4 clicks to the left more attractive than 5 clicks. I like some features (like the brow) to resemble my own. Self-selection is quite common in studies of attractiveness — the second to last pic is a good bet for what my sister would look like if she were blessed with perfect skin and I had a sister. After studying my own habits using systems like these I know I have a personal rule that the corners of the mouth should line up with or be just slightly narrower than the pupils. Understanding your own quirks makes working with character generators go much faster and lets you better appreciate when you do stumble across a genuinely exotic combination that unexpectedly appeals to you.

Leo G.4501:

Warrior will get…

…nothing.

That is, they will get skills when they don’t have a weapon equipped.

Because being down that many stat points won’t break the game on the spot…

Theundersigned.4761:

Most of my attempts at making “ugly” characters (or even “old” characters—old people aren’t ugly :[ ) have resulted in semi-unattractive, attractive young people. The only advice I have: when in doubt, go square. Stick with extremes, like stretching out their faces. As much as possible. Make them look like frogs.

Also, psychologically, angry/mean = ugly. Studies have found that people tend to associate unpleasantness with ugliness. So get your frown on >:[

That fifth one, the balding, scratchy thief is fantastic. A real person. How refreshing.

Roda.7468:

I don’t think you guys are really embracing the spirit of this thread..

If by spirit you mean “Slam every slider to one end” I kinda reject that as the definition of ‘exotic’.

Thank you . I’m not necessarily looking to maximize my return, just improve it. You’ve given me considerable food for thought. The notion of selling Ascended Insignia made my jaw drop just a little (I’m a chronic DIYer, so the idea that anyone would buy those slid right past me…).

Seems only fair that if I’m going to comment I should trot out a few of my own.

(Yes, the Human/Norn ones are probably a bit repetitive as I tend to use some of my own features as baselines (e.g. heavy brows) before tweaking them…)

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I’m more of a basic….girl next door kind of person…all the way down to the freckles and pony tail.

I think I went to school with her… and was way too stupid to appreciate her at the time .

That… is kinda revolting.

warbignime.4610:

That’s not true, they never said challenging group content are all just open world, it could be anything that involves grouping.

“It could be anything”… But its not. It’s something. And that something is something they are holding back details on while people’s expectations soar before the crash. The three progressively harder Wyvern fights are “challenging group content”. Whether there is any more waiting in the wings we’ll just have to see.

DanteZero.9736:

Am I? Because it can only be a gold mine if there were enough exotic drops (not dungeon token weapons) to actually use them on. That’s also assuming we’re talking about exotic armor pieces with high value runes.

I think the point being made was there are tons of Exotics on the AH that are (significantly) more valuable broken down with a BLSK than the cost of buying them with a buy order.