Guild Wars 2

so what class can catch a thief running at +50% speed while stealthed? … none. Most classes can burst to 33% with a skill for a short period but thief has can opt to have permanent 25% signet.

Considering that a Thief on the run can only maintain stealth for a couple of seconds, it’s really not a big deal. A single Warrior Rush would cover that distance. Most classes have long range lunges of some sort. Once the Thief’s stealth runs out, we don’t have a steady source of Swiftness, so the max speed we can maintain is 125%, which most classes can manage now that they’ve buffed all speed signets (which I applaud), PLUS longer Swiftness options available, PLUS more long distance lunges, PLUS better options for Cripple, Chill, Immobilize, and other options to slow a runner down from range.

Keep in mind, I’m saying this as someone who does have a Thief as my main, but who plays a character of each class as well, with my other favorites at the moment being Ranger, Guardian, and Necro. If anything needs work, I’m in favor of it, I just don’t see the issue here.

Only in Anet land does a class trying to sneak away in stealth actually move faster then those not trying to remain hidden. talk about backwards.

In most games with Stealth, it’s relatively permanent. If a Thief could go stealthy and then spend the next ten minutes creeping away at half normal speed then that might be ok, but since Stealth rarely lasts more than a few seconds at a time, they need to be able to either close to within striking range, or zip away from attack range before that limited stealth wears off.

I guess my point I was trying to make was playing I win most of my 1v1s as a thief as a pistol/dagger spec by coming out shooting from stealth, shooting twice then cloak and daggering back into stealth. I use these two moves over and over and I beat every class. I never do anything different. The only time I “add” anything is when I burn Thief Guild and gain 2 extra guys for confusion/dps. That beats every class.

Why don’t you die when they drop hellfire on you once you stealth?

They recently buffed stealth so I can run 50% faster while stealthed. I have 14 seconds of stealth at 150% movement speed.

Ok, now you’ve got me curious, how do you engage Stealth for 14 seconds in a row without using Shadow Refuge? I mean, you could theoretically use Shadow Refuge, but you’d have to camp out in there for five seconds to get the full buff, and they would never let you leave that circle alive.

I don’t know, it sounds like someone who’s theory-crafted a Thief based on rumor and wiki entries rather than actually using any of those abilities in practice.

There seriously has to be some kind of computer issue here. I have seen invis players and not all of them are thieves. If you run into a zerg everyone is invis at first. What doesn’t need to render is your character turning into stone you know all gray and not moving.

Yeah, before they nerf Thief stealth they really need to nerf Ele Stealth, and Warrior Stealth and Guardian Stealth.

My biggest thing is all the stealthing. It’s one thing to combat someone you can see, it’s another to combat someone who disappears every 4-5 seconds and turns up somewhere else. It’s a pretty big annoyance to me. This is why I think bleeds or poison should break stealth or prevent it.

Stealth should be a means to initiate a fight or escape one if possible… not what we have now.

People who feel this way really need to play Thieves more. When a Thief stealths, he’s still there. It’s not like he vanishes and you can’t mess with him until he reappears. Throw some AoE around, ideally some PBAoE. Swing wide with melee attacks. Pretty much any class, at any time, can seriously kitten-up a Thief while he’s still stealthed. If you’re fighting a Thief and he goes into stealth, and you just stand around slack-jawed until you can see him again, then you deserve to die.

I play a thief.

Thieves OP as kitten. I am not a “super awesome pro gamer hell yea I always win because i’m awesome!!” gamer.

I tear it up in WvW w/ that thief. I can engage any sized group of people, and 99% of the time make it out alive. I am the fastest. No one can out run me. I am the fastest. No one can catch me. I solo WvW all the time. Picking off a weak person in groups of 2,3,4, even 5 sometimes. Anyone saying this “try playing the thief, you will see they are not OP.” This is bullkitten. I play the thief, and I own face. I have never played an MMO and had this “top dog” feeling like I do in guild wars. I play other classes as well now, and they are not nearly as strong as the thief. As much as I love my thief, I want to see them nerfed.

Anet. I am a thief, and I’m way way way over powered. Please nerf me. My good time must be stopped… for the good of the land.

And I’m a Quaggan Dervish.

However in regard to CC, that it is not as good as an engy is irrelevant, thief has CC, several of them, claiming the class has none is just flat out incorrect.

Thief does have some CC, but they are relatively minor compared to other classes, not really worth caring about. If a Thief tries to make a CC-dependent build then he’s doomed because the abilities are too weak and too far spread to matter.

thief can escape pretty much any class, if you don’t know how – consult 50 to 70% of thiefs out there.

In one on one? Yes, sometimes, maybe. Especially if they are in terrain where they can visually shake the enemy with a few seconds of stealth. If they are outnumbered, then on land they can get chased down fairly easily, and even in one on one scenarios other classes can out footrace them, or can pin them down with CC effects to catch up.

Now, not every class specs themselves in the ways that would let them catch up to a Thief. I suspect that most Thieves are specced in a way that gives them peak, or near peak mobility, because we need it to live, while less players of other classes focus on their mobility options, like speed signets, in favor of upping their direct offense or defense options, and yes, if you don’t spec in mobility, a mobility-Thief will likely outrun you.

Other than that any group for less than 4 ppl that does not have a tanky warrior or a guardian is screwed against even 1 thief. I will not even comment what happens when you get 2 or 3 thieft tag teaming.

If this is true then you surround yourself with some really horrible players, because any two enemies would tend to destroy any Thief intent on standing his ground.

Direct, aoe or dot’d, being damaged should take anybody out of stealth.

What would be the point then? Stealth would become entirely useless for all purposes if it dropped when you took any damage. I think people grossly underestimate how much damage Thieves actually take.

There needs to be a way for classes to pop characters out of stealth.

No, there doesn’t. This isn’t like other games where a Rogue can stay stealthed for minutes at a time. Stealth in GW2 only lasts a few seconds at a time anyways, there doesn’t need to be any methods to end that prematurely. Now if being invisible also made you invulnerable then I can see your point, but you’re perfectly free to rough up an enemy whether you can see him or not.

If you swing a sword, hit something and hear someone scream, the jig should be up.

You don’t hear Thieves scream when they take damage, we’re hard like that. Also, Stealth is almost always interruptible, pretty much every method Thieves have for activating Stealth involves an interruptible casting time, just play better.

Being able to stealth and dodge is the thieves survivability. Without it they are completely useless. They dont have the health or toughness to survive. Considering anybody can dot/ aoe/ direct damage that would take stealth completely out of the game.

How about this, Thieves lose Stealth when hit, but in exchange they get Heavy Armor and can use Ranger pets.

Yeah, FA needs to get some more people together. I was swimming around in the Dreaming Bay moat in the FA borderlands Friday night for 15-20 minutes while FA members came by and kept throwing themselves against the IoJ that were holding it at the time but without actually accomplishing much. I was hoping I’d be able to slip in while the walls were down and get the viewpoint I needed, but it was just taking forever.

Most of the players I encounter in WvW seem to be Mesmers and Rangers. Well, their clones and pets, at least. And there are probably also Eles in there since I can feel the fire raining from above, but I can’t say as I’ve actually seen one.

If you would be so kind to send me a protip strategy for beating a team of 5 thiefs, as I could probably make a fortune selling this secret that only you know.

I’d be happy too, just let me know what strategy you use for soloing five Warriors, Eles, Mesmers, Guardians, etc. Frankly, whatever class you’re playing that makes you feel that not being able to beat 5 Thieves means that they are OP, that would be the class in need of some serious attention from the Nerf bat.

Why don’t you guys reroll as Thieves and learn how ridiculous you’re being. Yeah, thieves are pretty solid at escaping, but now that most classes have 25% movement signets too we’re far from the “most mobile” anymore (since we have fewer options for true Swiftness), and we die pretty fast if we try to actually engage the enemy. Also, since most practical combat is done at the 1200+ range, and Thieves have VERY few attacks that can reach that range, none of them very well, we have a lot of annoyance in most WvW abilities.

Basically, if a Thief doesn’t bother you, don’t bother him. Chances are he can get away from you, and if you’re in water, it’s completely hopeless, but while you can’t really bother him, he can’t really bother you either, so live and let live.

Man the FA borderlands are just sad tonight. Every time I check in on them they’re all kinds of green and red. Where is the blue, people?!

That would also be great, but they don’t rotate maps properly. Mine’s been blue or green for the past month and a half or so.

I would love to see some of the people posting in here to go into a Las Vegas casino or a carnival booth and complain about how they are being taken advantage of like they are doing to ANet in this thread. You know you are gambling when you spend your money on any chest item in the shop or game. When you gamble, you can lose. If you don’t want to lose, don’t gamble and when you lose, don’t whine about it.

Sure, but the problem is that gambling is the ONLY way Arenanet has presented for acquiring several items in the game. That is the complaint, that many of us would like more sure-fire ways of getting it. If you could spend $10 on a bunch of boxes, and have a chance of getting a desired prize among other prizes, but you could ALSO just spend $10 and get it outright (but with no other prizes), then players would be less upset about it. Yes, if you go to Vegas and gamble then you may lose money, but there are other ways to make money, that do not involve gambling. The problem is that there are not other ways of gaining the mini-pets.

Long story short, the total average cost of acquiring the minis should be cheaper than it is, and should be less based on luck. If you want to roll the dice and take the chance that you can get it for cheaper then that should be an option, but so too should having a direct path that does not involve chance.

People would find ways to exploit your suggestion. You can’t have one side invisible to the other because of SKILL POINTS. Often, defeating a monster is required. Everyone should remain visible to everybody else.

True, but if you were auto-friendly to the other servers then it still wouldn’t matter. They couldn’t hurt you, you couldn’t hurt them, if you both wanted to take on the skillpoint mob then the game would treat you as if you were playing it on a PvE map, or taking on the challenge with WvW players of your own server.

And if nobody is invisible, then even if gagged from chat, people would still use Ventrilo to pass on enemy positions.

Yeah, I considered that, but the same is true for double-boxers. If you want to be a jerky scout you can just have a second account with access to the opponent’s servers and use out of game chat to communicate info to your real server. This would be slightly easier, but still a hassle.

So simple removal of WvW from the requirement is easiest and best. If it is important enough, you can also change servers for free for a week too, can’t you? You’d be a week without your regular companions, which would be a pain. But perhaps you might discover new friends. And one of you might convince the other to move “permanently” if you prefer the population of one server over another.

I started on my server and plan to end on my server. I don’t believe world transfers should be a casual affair, especially when you have to do so for a week at a time, even when the objectives you’d like to complete would only take fifteen minutes to do. Maybe when guesting is in or something.

I agree, most of the problems would have been solved by not making them account bound.

/Second. People bring up Baseball cards and other CCG type stuff, but in those games, you can trade cards. So maybe you spend $50 to buy a bunch of packs, and you luck into getting an ultra-rare card along with a bunch of other stuff, or maybe you decide to just spend $50 straight to buy it from someone else who has it.

This system could bee seen as much more fair if there were a secondary market on which players could sell unwanted pulls, and buy desired items at a market rate.

I’ve been trying to get my World Completion but for the last month or so I’ve been stuck on the “clear the red WvW Borderlands” portion, because my server has never been red during that period, and other servers have been able to hold the locations I’ve needed access to. I think that so long as WvW is necessary for world completion, there needs to be a way for individuals to gain access to keeps controlled by opposing servers. My suggestion would be a “white flag.”

This could be a potion, it could be a piece of gear. It would be available at a reasonable price, and it would server two primary functions.
*It would allow a player to pass through ANY “color gate” on the map, as if they were a member of the appropriate server. This would allow players to enter keeps held by opposing teams.
*It would make players “friendly” to all opposing team members, and therefore unable to be fired upon. Of course the “white flag” player could not make an attack either.

Now I realize that those traits alone could prove extremely unbalancing, so I’m looking for help in fleshing out what traits would be necessary to offset these benefits. Here are a few I’ve considered, one or perhaps even all of these could be applied as necessary:

*Once you activate this ability, you cannot deactivate it without leaving the WVW battlegrounds completely. This would prevent players sneaking into an enemy base and turning off this protection to go on a rampage.
*All chat options would be disabled, preventing flagged players from acting as scouts for the rest of their team (or at least not any better than a player who second-boxes a character on the enemy’s servers and communicates to his team via non-game means).
*While flagged, enemy siege engines, and perhaps even enemy players would be invisible, making it impossible in any way for the flagged player to scout out enemy positions and strengths. This would work since while flagged those elements would be irrelevant to the player anyway.

Any other suggestions on how to tighten it up? I just feel that this is necessary so long as WvW territory is necessary to complete PvE goals, and so long as the battlegrounds are not on a fair rotation that gives players easy access to each of the three colors within a reasonable period of time.

Sooo close. I managed to slip into Garrison and snag the two viewpoints there while IoJ was taking it from FA. Then I managed to slip into the moat of Dreaming Bay while FA was storming it, and swam around in there for about fifteen minutes, waved and pondered a lot, but by the time kitten around to knocking the walls down, I tried slipping in to snag the viewpoint but got blown up. I wish there were some way to letting people know that you mean them no harm. Anyways, two viewpoints and one PoI to go. . .

CD cleared FABL at least twice last week, if not three times.

It doesn’t help if I’m not in the border lands at those times, and checking what keeps belong to whom is not easy to do if you aren’t actually in those borderlands at the time. I’m sorry, I play this game to have fun (which means leveling characters in PvE), and when I’m not playing I have other things to do, I can’t be laying around in the FABL 24/7 in the hopes that maybe we’ll be able to take them over. Every time I do check in, the most we have is the first fort out, and maybe one or most of the nearby depots, and once or twice the east-side keep, all of which I’ve cleared already. Once I also saw the east-side cliff fort, so I got that one too. All the rest of the time, the map was either almost all red, or a good third of it was green.

I’d rather just CD be red team, so that we control most of the points most of the time, rather than just once or twice for a few minutes at random hours during the week.

All I want for Christmas is for CD to finally get the Red Borderlands!

Can you provide specific examples of non-soloable events? At scale 1, they’re all soloable, or should be. Are other players in the area scaling up the event without helping?

All events are definitely not soloable, or at least not by all build types. I recently ran into the Brisban event that involves fighting a Champion Demagogue at the end, nobody else was anywhere nearby, and while I was able to solo it with my Guardian, it took about a half hour to chip him down, and most of my other characters would not have been able to survive long enough to do the job. Most events are soloable, but I’ve encountered plenty that either spawned too many enemies too fast, or that involced Champion+ mobs.

I think part of the problem is that as people get anywhere near a given event, the difficulty level seems to rise, but as they leave, the difficulty level doesn’t seem to go back down. If an event starts with ten people around, and scales to that level, but they all leave before it finishes, the difficulty level should automatically start to scale back down.

Xfer for a week to a team that owns everything.
Score?

You shouldn’t have to bend the rules to clear an objective. I mean, I know that server transfers aren’t against the rules or anything, but they clearly didn’t intend for the game to involve casual server transfers, since they planned to charge for the right. I was on CD on day one, and I’ll be on CD when I leave the game, which unfortunately means that I’ll be stuck at 99% world completion until then.

This sucks. Another week down, another week in which CD isn’t red, and likely will never have access to most of the needed keeps on the Red Borderlands. This “world completion requires WvW maps too” thing is completely broken.

Hey, FA, clear out of the red borderlands so we can take over some of those keeps and stuff.

Still, when I’m actually playing smart I am great with the toys. My usual tactic is to just apply the Stability shout, open the box, grab the goodies, and leg it. If Skritt, Griffons, or Soldiers pop out, I can handle those just fine. If Ventari pop out, maybe, I give it a shot and lately I’ve been winning because I’ve mostly figured them out. If it’s dolls, golems, or, now, the mixed bag, I high tail it.

I was leveling my Guardian (level 31+-1) in Brisban Wildlands, doing pretty well, practically no deaths compared to some of my other characters, and I come across an event that culminated in a fight against a “Champion Demagogue,” some White Mantle ghost or something. I was completely alone on a low population map, in a hidden back corner, so I knew the chances of getting in help were slim to none. I managed to type out a blurred message, but one of the two NPC supporters died as I did so, it was all me.

So I managed to solo him. Took me about a half hour, mostly circling him with my Scepter/Shield secondary weapon set, with a couple of Shouts and a Phantom Sword as sidekicks, but most of the raw damage came from the Book of Wrath, each cycle of which could drop about 10-15% of his HP. Anyways, I beat him.

The reason I’m posting this in the Wintersday section is that as I was exploring the zone, I was opening packages, usually grab-and-run, but I opened one that had a mixed bag, one of each toy, and I figured “hey, I just soloed a Champion. . .”

I was dead within less than a minute.

/second. Or ten rounds that are designed to be played much faster. Maybe faster waves of weaker enemies, with longer gaps between rounds to give you more prep time. Either way, the whole process takes much more time than it is worth.

/second. If there’s an achievement for keeping all five alive, it’s just cruel to send players into instances without all five alive.

To the folks that bail after one gets downed, you not only hurt the team you were on but other gamers trying to have a clean start as well that get sent in to replace you!

Then they probably shouldn’t have an achievement contingent on having all five Dolyaks alive.

I did manage to beat ten rounds, but we were down to one dolyak by the 5th round.
There are elements of fun in there, but way too much frustration for the fun to rise above the surface.

Next time just try reading the introduction at the beginning of the match. It is there for a reason.

I did, of course. There was nothing about how to have any fun in there.

Ok, I’ve played a few rounds of this and I’m struggling to figure out how I’m supposed to enjoy this in any way. The rounds take forever, the weapons are slow and plodding, I don’t heal after combat, the Dolyaks don’t heal either, it just seems like a real chore all around, just an endless deathmarch toward failure. Is there some mechanic I’m missing here?

Those are Wintersday gifts, not mystery boxes.

No, those are Mystery Boxes, not Wintersday Gifts. Click on them before unwrapping them, they say “Mystery Box” in the target indicator. Wintersday Gifs are the rewards for opening the Mystery Boxes.

Seriously guys, they drop CONSTANTLY. I was in Brisban Wildlands tonight and had to have opened at least a dozen of the things. Just look for little peppermint icons on your maps. I ended the night with around 6 small boxes and 20-something medium ones.

Being last, drops get sorted into other bags first by default. Putting your weapon/armor swaps in the invisible bag means that you don’t accidentally sell the weapons/armor you want to use yourself to a merchant/on the broker. Resorting bags using “Compact” leaves the invisible bags alone, so things don’t move around on you either (makes finding a food much easier). Note: I’m using 2×18 slot invisble bags…and they’re generally full or near full with food, potions, equipment, tools, legendary components, etc.

I would, but on my main I already have level 20 bags, and I don’t want to buy a level 20 invisible at the prices being charged for them, so I’d be sacrificing a ton of bag spaces in exchange for having just ONE item that I would rather not move to the bank. This really shouldn’t be an issue, I can’t think of a single reason why a player would go “I’d like to move all my cotton, and ori, and totems into storage, oh, and also my minipet, I want that to go into storage too!” They should go into the collectibles tab, but they should be ignored by the “deposit all collectibles” option.

For how important events are to the game, they can often be hard to find while they’re active, mostly because most events you cannot see from more than about thirty seconds to a minute jog away, sometimes much less than that. This is the case even for events that can last for ten minutes or more, or that players could use Waypoints to get to if they wanted to.

With the Wintersday content, you can see active presents anywhere on the map you’re on, even in areas you haven’t cleared yet. This is great! I see a little peppermint on the map and head off towards it, I know there will be something to do when I get there.

I’d like to see this expanded to all, or at least most dynamic events. Make it so that if an event is happening anywhere on the map you’re on, you can see it on your minimap, even if it’s entirely across the map from where you are.

Ideally this could even extend across the world for the bigger, longer events, so that even if you were in Lion’s Arch you could see that a major event chain was starting in Queensdale or Fields of Ruin, and rush off to it. Getting these details might of course require zooming in on that section of the map or something.

But even if the latter request is impossible, I really think that the main request of map-wide event notifications is practically necessary, especially given how diffuse player populations have become, and how it can often be difficult to get even 2-3 players together to run events that were clearly intended for 5+.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Did you “deposit collectibles” at some point? It will send the miniature to your bank collectibles tab unless you have it in an invisible bag.

Is there any way to turn that off? I don’t want my mini going to the bank when I “deposit collectibles,” but at the same time I don’t want to take up an entire bag slot with an invisible bag, because once you get beyond 8-10 slots they’re more nuisance than they’re worth. There needs to be some way to keep minis around.

The keys are way too rare. I don’t recall ever having gotten one as a drop since launch, although I’ve gotten a few for map completion and of course the story completion ones. I think between all my characters I’ve had a total of maybe 15 keys since launch, and 90 or so chests. Not a good ratio.

I’ve been soloing them ok with my level 25 Guardian. I also was able to solo previous days’ content with a level 25 Engineer. The only ones I just can’t reasonably take down are the Dolls, they apply too much confusion, heal too fast, they’re just impossible if you don’t have just the right options available. The Griffons are no trouble though. They seem to hit pretty hard, but they don’t do anything fancy like the Ventari or Dolls, and they like to group together for AoEs.

With my Guardian I’ve been using Greatsword, the shout that mega-buffs you, the one that regen/protects you, and the phantom sword. My tactic is to summon the sword, drop the GS4 field on the box, open the box, run in, grab the presents, GS5, Buffshout, GS5, GS3, GS2, GS1, GS4, and basically with the Griffons I just backpeddle while swinging away at them until they die, using my heals as necessary.

The Skritt are definitely the easiest, then the Charr, then the Griffons, then the Ventari, then the Dolls. When in doubt, if you keep getting killed, remember that you always have the option to hit and run. Pop the box, grab the visible presents, and get the heck out of there. You’ll get 1-3 level appropriate presents for your troubles, have very little chance of dying (unless it’s bugged and is spawning way high level enemies, in which case, don’t be an idiot and just get out of there), and all you’ll be missing is some XP and a slight chance of getting an additional box or two, but most of the time you only get a few cogs or something.

Sooooo adorable.

- How easy/hard do you find it to get the new minis? (Mystery Box & Giant Wintersday Gift droprate)

Hard, probably a bit too hard. I haven’t gotten a single mini from a dropped gift box (the best I’ve pulled are a few recipes and a single Focus skin), and the Gem Store boxes are a non-starter because they are far far far too expensive.

- Are you satisfied with the given options to get the minipets?

No, not unless they up the drop rate significantly in the gift boxes. There should be packs where you can buy them explicitly, or perhaps even quests to earn each individually.

- Have you bought/Will you buy any Mystery Boxes from the gemstore this Wintersday?

Of course not, do I look like an idiot to you?

- Would you have bought the minipets from the gemstore if you were able to buy them? (No random drop from chest – You simply buy the minipet you want.)

Maybe. I’d like that Quaggan, I suppose I’d buy enough to convert into a Quaggan, but then not get the rest again.

I get a solid amount of loot from the missions. I do think that some waves give zero loot though, but that’s as intended, because otherwise people could just farm those locations infinitely. Basically, and this applies to ALL content in the game, anything where it says you need to kill X number of waves of things, you can assume that you’ll get loot from that. On the other hand, any mission in which enemies will just keep coming infinitely until you hold a certain area long enough or activate a certain widget, then chances are that those enemies, beyond the very first wave, at least, will not drop any loot.

Of the Infinitorium events, there are definitely a few where I would not expect enemies to drop loot.

Defeat the purpose? You realize the purpose is purely for Anet to make money in an attempt to force us to gamble at the gemstore?

No, they need to be tradeable.

Well, there is a fair purpose, which is to make them not an open market commodity, something you need to get for yourself. I can respect that. I do think that they should not tie that element to things that you buy for cash money, however. The use of RNG elements with gem store purchases is unconscionable in my opinion, because it’s straight up real money gambling, which is illegal most places in the US, but they get away with it because they don’t let you turn the prizes back into cash, which is a sad little loophole.

But still, removing the account-bound status is not the solution to that problem, removing the cash RNG boxes is the solution to that problem.

I think removing the account bound status would defeat the purpose, but they should have loads of different ways to shift one account-bound item into a different one. There should be simple recipes where you can combine one ultra-rare component with a bunch of super cheap and common ones to get something comparable in quality to the rare thing, for example one minipet, then a ton of copper, or like low level green gear, or something else you can pick up for a couple silver tops, in order to get a different mini.

I would make a suggestion to ANet on future achievements of this sort.

Don’t make it 100% cleared.

Instead make it something like 99%, or 95%. Make it so that people who put a serious effort into completing the objective will clear it, even if they miss something here or there. I mean, there are what appears to be 200+ destructible items in that stage, missing one or two of them shouldn’t be the end of the world. This would help to correct the most obvious potential bugs of invisible or “in the terrain” items, since if you missed a couple, that’d be ok.

I’ve been running around with a level 23-25 Eng lately, and I’ve had some success with “turret hell,” dropping a Thumper on the box, and a rocket and gun nearby. Using this build, Skritt are easy, the new Soldiers are also fairly easy, Ventari’s are fairly doable, Princesses are still kitten near impossible. I’ve beaten them from time to time, mostly by focusing on one, letting the turrets take the brunt, and downing CONSTANTLY but managing to rally because at least one was near death, but I still wipe more often than I beat them. It’s just not worth it. Snatch and grab, it’s the only sane strategy if you open a box and it’s full of pretty princesses.

No, put this back how it was. Sure, ti could cause some screwy issues, but better to have those screwy issues and being able to preview the items than to not be able to preview the items at all.

My guild did a run through the other day and it took us a few minutes but it was discovered that we had missed a single tree hiding out behind some scenery. It’s not bugged, you just have to look in every crevice and corner.

I don’t see why people keep insisting that it’s one or the other. Can’t it be bugged AND completable? I still believe that while it’s clearly possible to complete using the right classes, and a certain amount of luck, I still doubt whether any class has the tools needed to complete it, and firmly suspect that there are at least a few items that are invisible, under the world, or otherwise very difficult to access via commonly available means, or that there’s some way you can bug it so that you don’t get credit even when everything is destroyed, but that you don’t always trigger this bug so people are sometimes still capable of completing it.

I still contend that when I completed it on my 4th attempt, I cleared no more of the level than I had on my previous two. I know that I’d cleared every one of the little “oh, you must have missed this one” suggestions that people have been making, and it still didn’t complete.

That’s the problem, mobs that are intended to be taking 1-1 can have things like Confusion or Retaliation or other “we can fight you but you can’t fight back” abilities, but mobs that come in concentrated packs of 5-6 should NEVER have these sorts of abilities.

Why is it that the versions of these mobs that are in the 5-man instanced dungeon are soooo much easier to take out than the ones that are soloed in the open world? I know they have pipe dreams about players teaming up to take these down, but out of the dozens that I’ve opened, only 2-3 of them have had anyone else around. The zones are just not that densely populated and the boxes either need to be scaled to solo players, or scalable to fit the number of players around.

The answer is, don’t bother. Just grab the present and run.

I do think these are bad achievements that promote negative values. For those trying to get the “carry” achievement though, no need to be jerks. The best way I’ve found is to just hide near where presents spawn, and then while other people play deathmatch over to the side, just grab the present and run for it. This isn’t always an option but I’m often able to do it more than once per match. I’m no longer aiming to run the ball in though, I still need to get three “stopper” credits.

I think it IS bugged, but still clearly doable. Over the past two days, I cleared the stage four times in total, at least to the best of my ability. I’m 99% sure I cleared it on at least that third run, but it still didn’t count. Now the 4th run it did count, so clearly it’s possible, but I think there’s something wrong because it should have cleared those earlier times too. I think there might be some way to make a run impossible to complete, or maybe certain items are bugged so that they are invisible and indestructible to some weapons.

When it cleared, I did have a team mate with grenade kit, so maybe that made the difference. I was a Thief myself and was using Cluster Bombs and Death Blossoms to take things out, and I seriously think I could have spent hours methodically exploding every square inch of the place and never complete it.

Yeah, the dolls are completely insane. I don’t even bother with them anymore. I just do the “open box, rush for the present, and then run like kitten.” They just aren’t worth killing.