Guild Wars 2

I’m still going with Scarlet’s mapping not ley lines but feeding patterns of the Elder Dragons – the “currents” as they draw magic to themselves to be consumed… and she was specifically looking for green energy as seen in the flashing green report from the lion’s Arch probe.

Green energy, as in Zone Green of the Infinity Coil, as in Mordremoth the Elder Dragon that holds sway over plants.

I was just thinking we need to see “Yellow Circles” from mobs that are them pushing conditions rather than direct hits. Blind fields or even poison. Just a different cue from “this-will-hurt-red”.

So… what is the smallest piece of Cantha that would scratch that itch?

A bit of real estate to explore? Larger than a bread-box/fractal?

Do we need armor for it to “really be Cantha”?

All level 80 or new leveling path?

Separate campaign/personal story or just a visit?

Karkas dodge, but its kinda hard to see so you end up blasting attacks into the wind.

Weird, ‘cause I’ve learned to block noise like that in about a second. it’s like muscle memory now.

Visteri.3821:

Nike.2631:

I think you left out Mad king Thorn and something like 5 wives .

Nah, I got him. But I decided to use his real name, Oswald, for…reasons I guess.

Well played – I did a search for “Thorn” and didn’t get any hits .

I think you left out Mad king Thorn and something like 5 wives .

Please, if you’re going to be cynical, go the distance:

What could be more coldly calculated than to introduce a top tier character that openly has a homosexual orientation, yet because of grief and loyalty to their deceased partner has never and will never actually perform the act?

You get the best of both worlds: the “inclusion” of that edgy out-of-the-closet character while still being able to placate your heterosexual (and even full-blown homophobic) audience by saying with complete sincerity, “yeah, but it never happened. Anywhere. In the entire game.” Because while it sounds racey, a couple of Sylvari “being entwined” is about as sexual as rubbing a couple honey bees together. They are both non-reproductive drones despite the Sylvari’s superficial resemblance to human genders.

Paul.4081:

I worked that out without a decade in the military as far as GW2 goes :P

Sorry, that sounds like I’m being rude. I don’t mean to be.

No offense taken . Just saying I’ve been in situations where obedience to command is the only acceptable response. Chillin’ on-line ain’t one of them .

I played some Guild Missions where orders were given and in some cases barked. I knew what I was singing up for when doing that though and I expected it plus it was with players who I had spent gametime with. I had no qualms about that.

Exactly. And I’m also reasonably likely to fall into line if directions are known good or I simply don’t know enough to tell. A good commander knows the extent of their authority and moderates their tone accordingly.

I’m betting the answer is somehow symmetrical with “Why does every fool with 100g to burn think he’s my boss?”

I’m generally open to guidance, but a decade in the military gave me a highly tuned awareness of who is and isn’t actually in my chain of command.

They all have parental drama? ‘Cept the markedly well adjusted Marjory – one more reason she’s the deader.

They’ve consistently tried to play down profession as your defining aspect. There isn’t a grand guildhall dedicated to each profession the way there is a city for each race. And the game’s fixed party size also speaks heavily to a "team of Five’ structure.

Maybe they will be an 8-member ‘Justice League’, but my money is still on a ‘party’-sized band with the same kinds of restrictions players are accustomed to.

I think the forward and reversed text might be an artifact of Scarlet’s divided psyche.

Maybe its a signature and ‘both of them’ signed it. It will crack me up if ‘Scarlet Briar’ and ‘Mordremoth’ are mirror images when viewed through her personal cypher .

VodCom.6924:

That is a good question albeit one that can be answered easily : it apears that there is no more than one point of junction betwen symbols. This rule is here to avoid confusion (I presume). Let us simulate your example (picture below).

Except to form that box and cause a loss of data you moved the two clusters towards each other twice. A single shift would place the tip of edge of the T above the tip of the tail of the reverse-L without distorting or obscuring either formation.

That suggest the compression is either erratic (encoder wasn’t paying attention), purely aesthetic (some compressions are skipped so that the entire line is ‘justified’ to a target width), or its absence means something.

Looking at other compressible empty gaps, those could be spaces in a short phrase. I’m not convinced I’m on to something, but I’ll keep pecking at it .

Is it ‘make the unique thing more like all the other things’ season again?

By the Six Gods this forum needs a search tool that WORKS…

I think they may be figuring out what to do with all the bonus chests hanging around from the last WXP change and when every alt in the game suddenly leaps forward 1 to 300 levels how exactly that’s going to play out vs. the normal WvW chest system.

There are a few logistical details to resolve beyond ‘throwing the big switch’ .

Zero Day.2594:

:P You’re just trying to justify the spending…

Not at all. Its identifying a personal standard for satisfaction and applying it uniformly.

Not really asking yourself if the game itself deserves it

Are you kidding? I apply INTENSE scrutiny to subscription games when I’m involved with them. I’m constantly evaluating “are they delivering enough consistent bang for MY buck?” And when a Subscription game Dev comes out and says “oh, we’ll have it soon…” I’m not shy at all about dropping the sub and coming back a month after Patch X actually released and had the first two inevitable hot fixes.

I’m way more patient with GW2’s pace than I’ve ever been with a game that has the audacity to expect me to pay in every month.

or what gets you the from the subscription vs a game without a subscription… What’s the $15 worth? Kind of hard to explain…

Comparing 4 months of sub fees and a complete new game is exactly that kind of analysis. A few sub games have held up against for years (CoH), a few lasted until a major systems change blew my entire guild out of the game near simultaneously (EQII), and some have sent me packing after 4-6 months and an abject failure to manage an ongoing MMO after the initial release played itself out (too dang many to list).

That argument is almost on, or nearing, the lines of… what you can’t afford to spend $15?

Never. It is “Is the 15$ going to be worth it? Be honest with yourself. If it’s not, don’t spend it.”

DevonCarver.5370:

The removal is to address the manner in which it is communicated in game. There will be a requirement to reach a rank in WvW prior to purchasing the Gift when we are able to provide adequate messaging to let players know why they can’t purchase it and what they need to do in order to be able to purchase it.

One has to wonder how many times ArenaNet will have to go through the convulsions of “Unannounced shift in rewards/gameplay → Temporary retraction → Actually communicate the change → Permanent shift” before communicating changes ahead of pushing them Live becomes part of the “this will altering gameplay” checklist. A required step before anyone signs off on pushing the alteration to Live Servers.

Liquid karma/karma boosters say ‘hi’.

I was under the impression that when elementalists swap attunement it triggers weapon swap Sigils. Engineers also trigger them when they switch between kits and their actual weapons IIRC. They have fewer Sigils to bounce between, but they have some of the best “on-demand” swapping behaviors.

I go and see movies in the theater 1-2 times a month and come out satisfied at my purchase. As long as an MMO entertains me completely for a couple hours each month I’ve never had an issue with the concept of paying the sub.

But I am much more critical of sub-based games when they falter. If you are going to charge me the equivalent of a whole new game every 4 months, you have better (&^*&#$ing deliver something impressive no less than twice a year. Three times a year preferably.

Yeah. Do want all the shaman armors, but the Raven stuff in particular.

Actually, I kind of like it. We’ve seen a number of Charr who, while not making it their top priority, are still aware of family ties. She does seem to be reaching awfully high if she just wants to lose the stigma of being a gladium…

I think we can safely rule out Personal Story-disrupting levels of damage. If the storytellers of ArenaNet are having meetings to discuss how to work Hero Voice into the climax, then they haven’t had all the hero voice actors in the studio to record any tweaks or restructuring required to move the Lion’s Arch scenes to a new location – both types of recording would have been done at the same time.

BrunoBRS.5178:

but thing is, she used our anti-toxin to create another toxin, immune to our current antitoxin. why would she do that, if her plan was to “antitoxin” the dragon?

Ok, this is more roundabout than I like, but here goes:

Scarlet has a problem. She’s got a dragon in her head that thinks its the boss of her. Yeah, no. Not putting up with that. No, no, no, die, die, die, die…

So she builds her very own baby Mordremoth-Champion (wave your fronds at the audience, little nightmare blossom. Isn’t it cute?) and dares the whole world to come kill it. I’m sorry, did I say kill it? I meant solve her problem for her.

The thing is most of the world have never seen just how incredibly nasty Mordremoth’s blight/toxin really is. In fact, if she uses it at full potency she’ll win. Did I say win? I mean lose. Because dead heroes are absolutely no fun at all and won’t solve. my. problem. now will they?

So she dilutes it. The heroes get all sorts of whacky, wonderful visions but they survive to run the maze to its end and what a lovely solution they’ve cooked up. Scarlet’s a master of oh so many things, but this ‘Jory’ creature really knows her anti-toxins. Did I say her anti-toxin? Sorry, I meant MY ANTI-TOXIN NOW.

What Jory’s laid hands on isn’t Scarlet’s new and improved batch 13. Its the real stuff. Pure, undiluted Blight-in-a-Jar. Thank goodness Scarlet borrowed that human queen What’s-her-name’s little mechanical protectors, since they’re quite immune to the stuff. And won’t there be a lot of it around when Scarlet plunges her 12-story tall needle into that nasty dragon’s eye.

Did I say eye? I meant die, die, die, die, ,die, die, die…

zamalek.2154:

Nike.2631:

if you were expecting irate dragon minions at your job-site

Did you just call us dragon minions? :P

Depends. Are you a Sylvari ?

The thing is Scarlet CAN’T have been planning an attack on Lion’s Arch all this time – even if a certain ditzy blonde – I’ll call her “Kasmeer” – blurts it out and totally derails the investigation.

You don’t need a transcontinental network of energy probes to find Lion’s Arch. And you sure as heck don’t need a drill to attack it. She built the drill while she was still mapping. That says “ready to go wherever the map takes me” not “build it and hope there’s a magic current I can exploit when I get there.”

It’s not a coincidence whatever she’s after is under Lion’s Arch – her target chose to make its lair there. But the battleground is of her enemy’s choosing, not hers.

Found within 15 feet of each other in Scarlet’s office.

Coincidence, I’m sure…

Uruz Six.6594:

‘Scarlet didn’t see what she thought she saw.’

Consider the options:

An Elder Dragon that ignores living creatures as potential minions except as loose templates, and in its entire history has created one sessile minion type that may be based on a plant.

An Elder Dragon that has remained almost entirely hidden, that has made itself known only by infecting plants and taking them over from within to create “husks”.

Are we really taking bets on which one of these has literally ‘planted a seed’ in a Sylvari mind ?

Also:
Her drill flies. That may just be to get it into place, but if you were expecting irate dragon minions at your job-site, would you really consider being airborne a sound defensive strategy against an Elder Dragon that farts Destroyer Harpies? Now compare that to being aloft when dealing with a pack of Husks and Jungle Wurms. Sure, they spit, but you don’t have to put up with boarding parties…

The thing that puzzles me is if letters can be combined by horizontal compression why is there a full gap between the ‘T’ and the backward ‘L’ near the middle of the first line of the 7 line block, since you could push those two symbols together with no loss of data?

Edit: Oh… Those vertical gaps may be the spaces between words. While ‘e’ is the most common letter in a typical blob of English, spaces are the most common character…

Hmm. Maybe the probe in Lion’s Arch started flashing green not because of our standards of “green means go” but because it got a solid lock on green energy…

And now that I think about it, her drill really does look like a scaled up version of Jory’s injector – multiple bulbs, spiral drill/needle, and all.

So Braham and Rox are re-enacting Rytlock and Logan’s bromance, complete with one character endlessly trying to run off in the name of external duty?

Yeah. I can see that.

No matter what you think of Jory and Kasmeer’s relationship, expect it to be short.

The New Destiny’s Edge has exactly one human too many.

Hmm. I guess I’m hoping that about half the NPCs suppositions in the Dead End are about the same level of ‘bunk’ as Scarlet having attended all 3 colleges is being made out to be.

I still hope the entire point of the Nightmare Tower was to force the heroes to come up with something that kills massive, poisonous plants – so that Scarlet could make off with it (we see the injector in her office). Her plan isn’t to use her toxin, its to use the anti-Toxin to KILL MORDREMOTH. Lion’s Arch isn’t the target, it’s collateral damage. Its Mordremoth’s box of hostages/living shield to dissuade heroes from doing anything rash if they ever did find him, and Scarlet couldn’t care less.

She needed the Molten Alliance to give herself subterranean expertise – both tunneling ability and the probes. She needs the Aether Blades to get her assets airborne because when the Dragon of Blight’s vines and wurms come boiling out of the ground, the air is the only safe place to stash your army and weapons. Its no accident her drill FLIES.

The Watchknights are indeed useful because they are poison-proof… making them great against Mordremoth’s blight! …And so much scrap metal in a face-off with Primordius. Hell, Primordious would probably convert them into his own molten-gooey army in even less time than it took Scarlet to seize them.

And while she’s tracing magical currents beneath the ground, that’s not something you need to do to find Primordius – He’s got minions popping up all over the place. He’s comparatively easy to find if you’re of a mind to. No, she’s tracing Moredremoth’s roots to find an Elder Dragon that has been very hard to find indeed, and who has a very direct interest in a race of sapient plants.

She has no motive to pursue Primordius. She has EVERY REASON to try and kill the puppetmaster of the plant kingdom. “If you knew what I have seen you’d wake screaming from the Dream!”

Trickster set (light armor) in the gem Store

I would like to see more variety of Elite skills and specifically a long hard look at having more options in that slot while underwater.

I’d also like a better understanding of how good elite skills are actually supposed to be – on most professions they are a decorative footnote – the single least important choice in setting up a build. Usually due to a gross lack of synergy with other skills and traits.

Recently revamped Guardian with the Gemstore “flame” armor coat and a couple examples of rocking some low tier pieces .

[Why can’t I search the TP by Armor Weight?]

I’m trying to imagine an entire team of marketing professionals working to set up ‘the big reveal’ for 6 months or more, choosing the exact moment to strike for maximum effectiveness in the face of competitors revving up their own hype-engines for their MMOs’ big pitch/media blitzes… and saying “Everything is in readiness. Now all we need is for one poster on our own forum to ask us to spill the beans…”

I expect to be able to search the Trading Post by light, medium and heavy armor SEPARATELY.

Onisuo.8607:

How does this affect your gameplay?

The Devs went to the trouble of including a list so somebody thought it was information worth having, and I do in fact read it out of mild curiosity. It used to actually give me some insight on where I should go and harvest for the evening. Now it’s becoming little more than a record of where bots are hiding their loot.

Obvious failure to read the terms of the lease is obvious . Recalls are mandatory.

You were briefly the beneficiary of a mistake. They’ll try to make it up to you in every way except perpetuating the mistake.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Sometimes I wonder.
#Wildstar2014

As much as I love Ratchet and Clank, the whole low-poly, plays-on-a-dinosaur-machine motif does nothing for me.

If losing a couple percent of damage off the apex predator of gear, and a couple percent of sustain off of THE most all-around competitive profession in the game sends you screaming out the door… There’s maybe nothing the Devs should do to try and keep you as a player.

KStudios.2850:

A car manufacturer can’t repo your car and leave a newer model in your driveway claiming, “The previous design was in error. Here, have this shiny new one!” lol! Same applies here. I liked it when I bought it the first time.

The funniest thing about this analogy is it totally overlooks the trifling detail that you are on A LEASE. They threw some paint on somebody else’s limited edition and started shipping them before they realized “oh crap, we can’t put those into our motor-pool, they’re already reserved for a limited group” and then they pulled all the vehicles that slipped out during a 24 hour window of Oops, and have been trying to negotiate satisfactory terms with the Leaseholders that were shipped the vehicles in error. Sometimes successfully. Often less so.

Yeah. It was a nice car. That’s why it usual costs 119 gold even without the flashy paint job. But you don’t fix a mistake by leaving the evidence scattered around forever when you have the means to clean up after yourself.

Serious as a heart attack: What set would you change to?

Post-Ferocity Berserker will be as Best-in-Slot for Power-based Damage builds as it is now.

The essential difference is the gap between Berserker damage and all other gear types that don’t have Ferocity will be smaller. Assassin gets punished a little worse and Valkyrie and Celestial also take a hit. But you use Assassin gear for crit-proc builds which lessens the sting of the Ferocity change, Celestial for hybrid builds which are still going to have to fall back on Celestial (or maybe Zealot/Keeper now that we have the option), and I have no idea why you’d use Valkyrie on anything outside of a little stat-rounding …

Edit: Totally ninja-d by Tman

Be careful. I once was involved in a very public April Fool’s gag about a book that should never be written… Then I lost 2 years of my life to writing that book because the fans LOVED THE IDEA THAT MUCH.

And I think a fair bit of the controversy over the flame-kissed armor is because people loved it, not because they thought it was forgettable trash. Part of that is undoubtedly because if you are not human, that was the only way to get that mesh/geometry – for 4 out of 5 races it was something completely new. But there are still plenty of proud owners of human characters that are ticked off at the swap to re-skinned Feathered armor.

Make no mistake, they’re looking to bottle that lightning again in the future. Hopefully they succeed. Given how rarely I’ve seen the “flame” armors in game, I’m betting they got the message that the re-skinned Medium and Heavy sets did NOT achieve that sort of wildfire of desirability. I eventually picked up one set of the Flames Heavy, but it took me a long time to work out any sort of look that it improved on…

Ahhh… And here I was thinking “Why are they all slammin’ on low tier armor? There are some great pieces in those sets!” And honestly, I could do with some ’Holy McSmite-Smite" FX after all the “hur, hur, flamez is kewl!”

Sure, I’m with ya that re-skins can be done in a way the comes of as feeling rushed or cheap. But I think it’s probably enough to vote with our wallets than to try and make fun of artists who are just trying to figure out how to make us happy within a limited amount of working hours. ((shrug))

I’d still buy it. It looks like the FX would be particularly well-matched with my Infinite Light… (and not bad for Zenith weapons now that I’m looking at them)

Do we really need for the Trading Post “Top Demanded Items” to be filled up with bogus entries like the Dragon’s Jade Wall Skin just because some wiseguy is hiding 315 gold under his mattress in the form of three-point-one-million 1c orders on an item that unfortunately doesn’t have a minimum price?

Does a new item in the Gemstore have to be pay-to-win to be a really stupid/irritating idea?

‘Cause I’m thinking the Watchwork Pick is evidence that an item can be a bad idea regardless of its win-y-ness…

The new version of the Flame Kissed armor would be a perfect fit to tune up the look of my character “Ivory Phoenix” who already wears a mix of the Phoenix and Feathered sets. And every time I open the black Lion store to get it I think, “No. I’m still ticked about that stupid pick after spending $240 to outfit all my 80s with infinite tools. No more monies for ArenaNet ’til I see which way their going to go on that, and if they go nowhere, then no more monies period…”

I think you could achieve something similar by adding a Mystic Coin Vendor or some new tabs at the Laurel Vendor.

I still think I could use pieces from those sets to make some of my characters look more awesome.

Maybe I’m just not getting the joke…?

So they are lower sets – I find the “moar spikez, moar flamez” that permeates the upper tiers to be really hideously ugly.

Fanum.6598:

It would be super cool, if you would stay on topic if you care for it, instead of bashing the way I choose to get my word out.

Honestly, I’m not – I’m trying to help you avoid a pitfall that is preventing you from getting your thoughts out. I came in open-minded and stopped reading only when I hit something that strikes me as nonsensical. If I’d written you off completely, we wouldn’t be having this conversation .