Guild Wars 2

The charr offers mining boosts for 100, and the resonance trader in the workshop will offer you resonance for 10, or the last bit of your influence if it is less than 10. The “less than 10” seems a bit buggy, as I’m currently down to my last point of influence, and I can click the buy button, but I get an error message and he won’t take that last 1 influence.

Basically, if you don’t have enough influence to trade for favor, wait and trade it for either mining boosts or resonance.

The mining boosts are laughably useless, so I highly reccommend saving anything less than 10k and just trading it for influence to use when you need some scribed stuff to build faster.

NTDK.4897:

Jaymee.1560:

ElijahFitzroy.5762:

Yeah that area is cool. I actually found it back when we first opened the guild hall. You can actually get to it without the snow. You just head over to where the guild teleported is and before you go down the steps to it jump to the left and hop up. It’s a bit zig zaggy but you get there. It’s an awesome area. What I want to figure out is how to get to the area that is closed off to the top right of the map which is just beyond what you found there.

Yep, I know what area you mean, husband and I spent 3 hours and TONS of snow piles trying to figure that one out, but… apparently, we’re not meant to be there, not even by accident

You actually dont need any decoration to reach that closed up part. It’s actually a 2-parts jumping puzzle by anet and is legitimately reachable.

To get there: go up the stairs north of the Mine, keep going North until you see a big tree that reaches across the valley, walk on the tree, jump on the ledge and walk a bit north, walk up so you will see a waterfall (move your camera abit), then glide toward the waterfall, reach another short waterfall, then on the east of it is the start of the jumping puzzle that leads up (if you go the other way you will reach the lower part and the other side of the closed door). The end of the jumping puzzle is on top of the building inside the waterfall that you can see in your 4th screenshoot.

I actually made a jp that extends anet’s jp. And another jp that reaches the very top, the highest point of guild hall.

You can contact me in game if you’re interested to try or find anet’s jp :P

And on the note that guild hall is still being developed. The top part of the guild hall keeps being changed these past months. It was empty before. Then they added a big tree. Then they removed the tree later. There are other structures up top. The lv40 upgrade only opens up a very small part below of guild hall. So expect there will be a whole lot more.

You are both taking a stupidly long way to access this area.

To the right of your guild crystal alcove, there are stairs that go down to the portal. to the left of those stairs there’s a grey boulder with moss on it blocking the passageway.

Jump on the boulder, and you’ll see there’s a narrow gap on the right side of it you can jump up to and through.

It takes less than 30 seconds to get to this area, with no decorations, from the starting waypoint.

Scruffy 2.0 as a giant voltron-like mecha, with the biconics piloting the arms and lets and the commander piloting the head.

We’ll use it to punch a dragon to death or something.

Tarn.1374:

I don’t think we should clutter up the UI anymore.
Perhaps a tracker – if one’s needed all – akin to what we have in the Heart of Maguuma for the Map Meta: It’s basically invisible until we mouse over it.

A bit of an aside, but I’d really like to see more basic crafting materials added to the map reward bonuses (cloth, leather, etc). After all they’re more rare these days than many other components.

Doesn’t necessarily need to clutter the UI really. Just add a page to the hero panel, and a corresponding icon to the map for each track in place of the loot icons that are on the map now. Maybe add the option to add it to the achievement tracker for on click access and easy on screen tracking?

CoH was a great game, and the reason it went bottom up wasn’t due to failing player population, but more to do with an absolutely ridiculous F2P scheme that did nothing to bring in new players, and seriously alienated existing players. The switch to F2P, and how badly they handled it basically killed the game in stead of having the intended effect of pulling in new players.

As for balance, I agree that CoH had really excellent mechanical character development. However, it was also based on a hard class/role system that is unlike GW2.

For those that didn’t play it, basically, it worked this way. You chose a class (archetype) from among broad categories like “melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Support, Tank, Pet class, Stealth DPS, Control” and so on.

From there, you chose a primary and secondary set of powers. For example, The blaster (ranged DPS) chose a primary line of ranged DPS powers, and a secondary line of control powers. These lines (called powersets) Were generally themed around a central idea. For example, you could choose to be a blaster that took fire dps powers and gadgets for control powers, or fire/fire, or Assault rifle/wind, or rifle/gadgets, etc.

Those powersets were often shared among classes with some variations. For example, a stalker using the claws powerset had a stealth and an assasination attack, while the scrapper using claws had more sustain powers in those slots, but the rest of the powers were generally the same.

From there as you leveled you also had the option of “power pools” which were little mini-classes of 4 powers each that were avaliable to all classes. These came in various flavors, and stuff like travel abilities, and general buffs and limited damage skills for things like acrobatics, athletics, etc.

Rather than gear, you chose to invest slots in your powers, and you didn’t have slots to fully slot out every power you had access to. You filled these slots with enhancements, so if you had a power you wanted to be extremely accurate, you could slot it and add a bnuch of acc enhancements to it, or in stead enhance the damage, or control elements, etc. Later they added crafted enhancements where you could add sets of enhancements to powers for unique set bonuses, or single unique enhancements to do things like adding a DoT to powers that didn’t have one and so on.

Equipment didn’t exist, as it was completely replaced by the enhancements system, and in stead (being a superhero game) your apperance was completely up to you to determine.

It allowed a great deat of build freedom, but was not without its problems, however, it still worked on a more trinity style system than that found in GW2. The best way to describe their relationship is that GW2 is a lot like playing CoH if the only avaliable classes were the DPS ones. You have a little support and utility, but the bulk of your role is damage. You could build DPS classes tanky in CoH, or build them with more control, etc. but it wasn’t a game designed around taking all DPS everywhere like it is here.

PvE design in GW2 can’t be compared to other games for this reason. Class balance is more about making sure classes can build to any role and do it differently, so it’s more like if CoH had a class called “fire guy” that had access to all the fire powersets, and the powerset you chose determined your role rather than the class.

Thus, encounter balance is designed around different roles, because different classes accomplish these roles in different ways. A lot of the elite specs are built around adding options for roles that the class didn’t already have, and I imagine as we move forward we’ll see more of that design, where a class with no viable support builds gets a support elite, a class with no viable bunker gets a bunker elite, and so on, so that at some point they can be more strict with roles knowing that most players can easily spec in to a required role on any character.

Races are supposed to be largely cosmetic in GW2.

The only way such a thing would work (especially this long after release, with people attached to 3 year old characters) is if there were mastry tracks or other methods to acquire these specializations on any race.

The only reason racial skills exist is to give people more utility choices in early levels. They’re intentionally designed to be weaker than class skills so that you replace them, and so that you don’t compelled to choose races for any reason other than personal preference.

Additionally, the entire reason elite specs were designed the way they were was to make it simpler to balance as new specs are added.

They can’t balance the traits we already have effectively. Asking them to balance traits that can be attached to any class is the exact reverse of why they turned the trait system in to the specialization system in the first place.

I don’t think we need influence back, at least not the way it once was. Influence had a lot of problems, primarily the login influence that automatically rewarded just having more guild members, regardless of what they were doing. With F2P accounts, that login influence could be easily abused.

I think we need to expand resonance.

The initial idea was to have resonance added to the drop table when you’re with guild members in a party or squad, and that was a pretty solid idea.

However, resonance is extremely limited in its applications, currently only being used to speed up creating of schematics in the assembler. Simply allowing it to be used as it once was, however, would completely undermine what’s good about the new systems.

Requiring people to occasionally assemble as a group and complete guild missions is good. It means you can’t upgrade a guild that doesn’t play as a guild. Upgrades are good. They reward guilds that are willing to forego some personal wealth in order to work toward powerful or unique shared benefits.

The new system is better than the old one because it gives personal benefit to people in the form of unique opportunities as a reward for investing time and effort in to the guild, often at the expense of personal goals. Any further changes should reinforce this design, making sure that the hall remains the centerpiece, and that people feel they get a personal return on their investment.

This is where influence was a problem. For the day to day member it was a mostly invisible system that they had no control over. Sure, it helped keep up buffs, que missions, etc, but unless you were a leader or officer, it didn’t really matter to you, the normal member, and you didn’t get to make decisions that made you feel like the guild was a valuable part of your day to day play in a mechanical rather than a social sense.

My guild adores the new system. They like that they get to make choices about things. They like that upgrades always benefit them directly. They feel like its worthwhile to contribute and do missions because they get access to cool merchants, buffs, and other stuff to activate and control when they feel like it.

In stead, how about moving back to the initial design of resonance, but adding resonance to the accepted currencies for a few vendors, and adding a new one?

Guild Trader
Now accepts resonance crystals or guild commendations for items.

Decorations Merchant
Now accepts 50s or a resonance crystal for all wares.

Armor/Weapon merchants
Now accepts gold or an equivalent amount of resonance crystals.

Resonance Trader
Accepts resonance donations as before, but grants a mysterious tonic when donating. These out of print tonics are unique rewards as they can be transformed in to various other tonics, and would be a nice litte thank you for the donation.

Guild Portal
Can be opened to any waypoint you know at the cost of one resonating crystal. Great way to save money or help your guildmates unlock WPs. This isn’t permanent, just for that one portal activation.

Tavern
Bartender will now sell belcher’s bluff tables (single use) and Bottles of Elonian Wine for resonating crystals.

War Room
Will now sell siege blueprints for resonating crystals.

Treasurer
Will now sell “Crate of Surplus Inventory” for resonating crystals. This box contains a random item, 20 currency, or 20 crafting material from all of those acquirable as drops anywhere in GW2. The goal here is a gamble box with low chance but highly desirable payouts. You may get blues and greens, but you may also get a precursor, 20 ectos, or other valuable rewards.

This is a fantastic idea. Keep the map rewards rotating, but use an interface like the pvp reward tracks to keep track of it all better. What’s nice about PvP tracks is the ability to look ahead and go ‘okay, I need 8 more matches to get this armor box’

If map rewards worked the same way, it would be a much better system just a bar with pips on it with each item in the track progression so you could better set goals rather than react to random rewards.

Further, the tracks should be persistant. If I start on a map that is running the dye track, and I leave, that progress should be maintained when I come back, or when that track moves to another map. in this manner I can select rewards I want from that system and follow the maps to get them without losing the ability to go help a guildmate with something for five minutes on another map, or port to go visit a bank, or whatever.

This is not a systemic issue. This is a guild management issue. If anything we need more systems like scribing that encourage player interreliance, not less.

Until HoT, too much of GW2 was all about “me, me, me” with no real incentives to rely on or cooperate on any sort of long term projects with other players.

Guilds, as permanent associations of players, are the perfect place to put systems qhich encourage or require players to foster long term trust and reliance, and scribing, as a basic concept is a good fit for that. It creates cosmetic items and functional items at a high cost that only really pay for themselves when large numbers of players are utilizing them.

Scribing’s problem is that it is too expensive to level, and that the functional items are too expensive to justify their limited durations. If scribing gave out abut 400% of its current crafting XP, decoration costs were halved, and the costs for banners were dropped or the duration of banner effects were raised it would be a perfect system.

Furthermore, scribing schematics should be tradable. That alone would fix a lot of the percieved problems with scribing, by allowing people to just buy from scribes at cost, give much clearer economic metrics for the cost of schematics, and provide an avenue for scribes to provide gold and resources to their guild directly, or for guilds without scribes to acquire those schematics.

It’s easy to forget how expensive this stuff is, but it would be impossible to ignore when you found people selling chairs for 20g on the AH simply to break even.

There is an overarcing theme in hoT pve that states, basically, that the trading post shouldn’t be the most efficient path to gaining everything in the game, and that because GW2’s PvE progression is horizontal rather than vertical that putting play barriers between you and the stuff you want actually incentivizes you to play content to get rewards.

Overall, I think its a better system. You can get a functional build through the TP, but if you want certain specific things, in some cases, you have to go out and play the game for them.

What they need to do is make those pieces also acquirable for WvW badges so people who just want to WvW can acquire them without going to PvE.. or hey, finally split WvW from PvE altogether like they should have done a long time ago.

Just so you know, account trading is a bannable offense.

Simply making this post actually opens you up to a ban.

Making exceptions just because it is your brother doesn’t work from an enforcement perspective. I could easily sell my account for a few hundred dollars and say “but that was my cousin!”

Not a good idea, and I’ll tell you why.

GW2, unlike GW1, is a game with extremely important gear stats. Wheras in GW1, the primary effectiveness of a character came from attribute point changes, GW2 builds are far more about the gear than the traits, with skill selection (and thus weapon selection) being equally important in both.

GW2 is, however, like GW1 a game in which gear progression isn’t a primary mode of advancement. Unlike most games with gear stats being the most important source of character power, GW2 doesn’t simply add more powerful gear with new content releases.

This places Arenanet in an interesting position. How do you add value to new equipment for players that are already happy with their cosmetic look?

This is where stat prefixes come in. While they are technically sidegrades, the release of new prefixes opens up potential new build possibilities and ways for people to tweak builds without also requiring players to chase them in a never ending vertical gear progression system.

In your proposed system, what further wrinkles could they add to equipment as the game moves forward other than skins? With HoT they codified boon and condition duration as stats specifically so that they have more to play with in their current model, and they showed a willingness to even further play with the stat pie on gear.

The current system has potential for a ton of growth. They could release some 2 stat pieces, single stat pieces, there are still a lot of triplet pieces they haven’t gone with, and so on.

When so much of your game is about loot acquisition, you need to ensure people have reasons to find new loot valuable when you implement it. New runes and sigils are a great idea (and I think they could really get some mileage out of different sized rune sets or other non-6 slot upgrades) but for core gear stats, in your system, all gear in new content would only be valuable for its cosmetic appearance, in turn forcing arenanet to spend a lot more time and effort on cosmetics.

I’m not saying the shouldn’t spend more effort on cosmetics. They should. The amount of new cosmetics in HoT was really sad. However, cosmetics can’t be the only compelling reason to acquire new gear in a game where gear means so much to characters.

Ehecatl.9172:

PopeUrban.2578:

The counter to traps is walking in to traps, got it.

I suppose the counter to ranged attacks is getting shot, right?

Those AIs aren’t expendable. They’re actually kinda core parts of those classes/builds. You can’t shatter a dead clone, you can’t use a dead minion, and you can’t really use a pet that’s all screwed up from traps effectively.

The counter is to set off the trap with something that isn’t your body.

The shortest cooldown trap a ranger has is Flame Trap on a 16 second cooldown. A mesmer can output clones much, much faster. So yes, a single clone to clear three utilities worth of traps that will be out of the battle for anywhere between 16 and 36 seconds is a hard counter.

A ranger pet can be swapped out, removing all damage and conditions on it. Again, you just took out three utilities worth of damage by sacrificing what amounts to a 20 second cooldown. Rangers can also capitalize on the second biggest counter to a trap set up which is range. If you don’t come near the trapper you won’t set off the traps, and they have to blow their traps to access stealth to easily close the distance.

A minionmancer would be sacrificing utility skills to stop the ranger’s utility skills, so it isn’t as hard of a counter. But then you consider that a minionmancer’s minions are traited to absorb conditions and transfer them to their target as attacks and the trapper ranger’s main source of damage are conditions. It is again a hard counter. The ranger is being fed their own trap’s damage through the minions.

But then the ranger traps are condition based and anything that hard counters conditions will hard counter them as well. Which means condi immune elementalists and any profession that carries a ton of cleanses will be exceedingly hard to put down with a trapper ranger set up.

I’ve been playing trapper ranger for years. Long before it got any of the more recent buffs. These have always been the hardest fights as a trapper ranger for me, and continue to be so after the buffs to traps.

Trapper ranger is not without hard counters. I only hope my build doesn’t get more hard counters added because the traps of Dragonhunters are over performing.

You obviously haven’t been paying attention to how Arenanet does things.

Take, for example, stealth. After the first nerf to burst damage, thief was actually balanced in regard to stealth. However, people couldn’t be bothered to learn simple counterplay, largely because the game was new and lots of people didn’t understand how stealth worked as it’s a bit different than how many other games approach it.

People that can’t be bothered to learn the counters continued to whine, and we got to where we are today. There are several options for people who can’t be bothered to properly counter stealth to just swap a trait or click a button, and bam, reveal.

Good players don’t take these abilities, but they’re there so pubbies who get stomped have something to fall back on, and because they help control overabundance of stealth based builds. A good ranger probably isn’t using sic ‘em, and a good engi probably isn’t using lock on.

Hence, the signet based approach to traps I outlined. Not only does it give thieves a clear role, but most importantly it incurs significant opportunity cost to use.

Basically, I’m fine with DH traps in terms of damage and utility. If anything ranger traps could use some range and duration upgrades to keep up, but in generally those “big trapper” builds need harder hitting and longer traps with longer trap cast times. Trap ranger took skill and careful use in GW1 due to the necessity to keep yourself from being interrupted mid-cast. In Gw2 it simply takes the ability to hit all the trap buttons because the cast times are so short. The resultant lesser impact traps are allowed to have on an enemy comes from the failed initial implementation of traps.

I advocate for longer effect duration traps, longer trap cast times to prevent their use mid-battle, and hard counters to counter those traps.

Lots of good ideas, but stick with me here.

25% move speed

I’m not even joking. We have a lot of stuff that’s super positional. We need better baseline move speed that doesn’t take up a utility or trait slot.

Release.

It was the golden age of the thief. Before the nerfpocalype and the resulting fallout buried the class for ages to come.

Those nerfs. So hard. So many. So long. So sad.

You don’t have four friends?

My personal favorite:

“I can’t advance in leagues because I get matched against premades!”

You know why you stopped playing the build you used to play and rolled whatever flavor of the month build that makes up the current meta? Because you care more about winning than what’s “fun to play”

The obvious answer, if you want to win a competitively ranked 5v5 game is to form a team of five players. You might want to solo, but 5 man premades are the most efficient meta. Always have been.

I don’t know why people complain about this. It’s really simple logic.

Wanna get ranked>do the things that ensure you have good teams for ranked.

Wanna just kitten around and have fun with random people who could be good or horrible at random?> Play unranked.

Another way to look at it:

People complained that every armor skin was ugly, clipped, and didn’t have sparkles.

So they started designing armor skins that were’nt ugly, didn’t clip, and had sparkles.

They gave the people what they wanted

Longbow

And yeah, no.

That’s dumb.

Ehecatl.9172:

Orpheal.8263:

Traps have incredibly went out of control lately, especially since Anet added the stealth effects to rune of the trapper and traps should be also in itself a skill mechanic, that should be either somehow, or by certain classes/builds COUNTERABLE.

Traps do have counters. Specifically mesmer clones, necromancer minions, and ranger pets. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to fight one of these professions as a trapper ranger when every time you lay down a trap it gets set off by an expendable AI.

Trapper rangers are also very easy to lock down as they will typically have a single stun break on their bar, and only if they’ve chosen to only take two offensive traps.

The counter to traps is walking in to traps, got it.

I suppose the counter to ranged attacks is getting shot, right?

Those AIs aren’t expendable. They’re actually kinda core parts of those classes/builds. You can’t shatter a dead clone, you can’t use a dead minion, and you can’t really use a pet that’s all screwed up from traps effectively.

papry.8096:

PopeUrban.2578:

And by “top” you mean “more damage and less sustain than the other options”

This is not a treadmill. It’s a way to get more damage at the cost of less survivability.

It’s a sidegrade

In a game with active defense as the main defense, thus making defense stats irelevant in PvE.
Sure (sarcasme)

Damage is an upgrade.

So what you’re saying is that defense stats suck.

That’s not the same issue.

Serophous.9085:

PopeUrban.2578:

Serophous.9085:

PopeUrban.2578:

Serophous.9085:

And the death penalty that basically made it after two deaths, reset.

The morale penalty/buff system was one of my favorite features in Guild Wars.

It meant you had to not suck at the game.

At least until they got stupid with all the consumable nonsense in EOTN that just let you turn on easy mode by spending some currency.

It was horrible and easily exploitable. All it took for one person to troll everything and get people killed.

“oops! I didn’t mean to do that!” – party wipe
“Oooops! I did it again!” – party wipe, kick the wiper, reset instance…

If by “exploitable” you mean “required your team to not suck” then sure. Someone wanting to troll your PUG has like five thousand ways to do that in any game. That’s why PUGging is generally less of a good idea than making friends. In any game. Because you will inevitably PUG with trolls at some point. In any game.

except it varies by degrees.

GW1 – troll does his thing either midway or near end of the run, forces you to restart the whole thing.
GW2 – troll does his thing, gets kicked, no progress loss, just some time.

Honestly, if this was your biggest issue, you missed the entire point of the system, and the game in general. It took five wipes to get booted, and only if those were back to back usually, and even more if you were at the middle or end of the run due to the morale bonuses you already had from killing bosses on the way. Are you telling me you let someone troll you through five wipes, and that your comp was so brittle it couldn’t stand losing one member?

I can’t think of a single piece of content in GW1 where I had to kick someone and we couldn’t just finish the run with 7 (or 11 for the factions elite stuff)

The entire point was that you couldn’t do the lazy res zerging you do in GW2, and that getting killed at any point actually mattered. That was far superior to the system we have now, where the same dead weight can die over and over and it doesn’t even matter because you just pick him up and everything’s right as rain.

In GW2 I can routinely lose two party members every encounter in any instance, and those deaths don’t mean anything, and the damage of mobs is tuned so high and their Hp tuned so low to account for that that the whole game devolves in to one big DPS race because death is meaningless. That’s boring and it makes runs boring because it is literally impossible to fail.

Though, if all you want to do is insert buttons and get loot, I can see how it’s annoying. GW1 played better as a game with that system in place, rather than a loot dispenser.

papry.8096:

PopeUrban.2578:

Technically that’s not a treadmill as all new stat sets are sidegrades, not upgrades. They’re preventing you from losing a specific amount of one stat to gain a specific amount of another stat, but they’re not actually giving a raw stat increase.

gear treadmill is based on the idea of planned obsoletion, that you need to grind a specific set of gear, with the knowledge that one day your gear will be absolutely obsolete and you’ll need to farm some more to stay relevant.

Before HoT :
Top alteration stats was sinister & there was rare veggie pizza that was +40% aleration duration.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rare_Veggie_Pizza
Healing stats was useless.

After HoT :
Top alteration stats is viper & rare veggie pizza was nerfed to +20% alteration duration.
Healing stats without toughness became really important (only zealot exist & there was no ascended trinket for it).

Both of those are behind raid.

And by “top” you mean “more damage and less sustain than the other options”

This is not a treadmill. It’s a way to get more damage at the cost of less survivability.

It’s a sidegrade

Serophous.9085:

PopeUrban.2578:

Serophous.9085:

And the death penalty that basically made it after two deaths, reset.

The morale penalty/buff system was one of my favorite features in Guild Wars.

It meant you had to not suck at the game.

At least until they got stupid with all the consumable nonsense in EOTN that just let you turn on easy mode by spending some currency.

It was horrible and easily exploitable. All it took for one person to troll everything and get people killed.

“oops! I didn’t mean to do that!” – party wipe
“Oooops! I did it again!” – party wipe, kick the wiper, reset instance…

If by “exploitable” you mean “required your team to not suck” then sure. Someone wanting to troll your PUG has like five thousand ways to do that in any game. That’s why PUGging is generally less of a good idea than making friends. In any game. Because you will inevitably PUG with trolls at some point. In any game.

Technically that’s not a treadmill as all new stat sets are sidegrades, not upgrades. They’re preventing you from losing a specific amount of one stat to gain a specific amount of another stat, but they’re not actually giving a raw stat increase.

I have no idea who you people are, and I automatically assume every other guild is only full of all of the worst people in the world, so i seriously doubt this officer can besmirch your good name.

Also, why does it matter? It’s not like you can actually lose anything in GW2 due to people not liking you. It’s not like they can lay siege to your guild hall or ganky your lowbies like a game where politics actually matters.

True story:

It is much less work to design and implement a particle effect than it is to design a new shoulder skin.

Combine that with the fact that people go nuts for particle effects and it’s a perfect storm of low art budget and high player desirability so they can sell the things that actually cost significant man hours as black lion ticket and gem store items.

zeldara.4127:

The above is true (not disputing the fact that seperating true money and currency leads to a disconnection in realisation how much money the stuff actually si and it is easier spend). But it isn’t 100 true for the fact that you can simply buy the for instance 62 cents you still need in credits by gathering some in game gold and getting the gems to order exactly. Granted someone bought those gems for sale in the tp in a larger increment though, but still.

Though while the above is technical true it isn’t the full situation which does change the whole thing.

But yeah, translating the gem prices to real money for each store item if i were to buy the gems outright, makes almost all items more expensive then I am willing to pay for. Even if i am not against spending money on games i like. It is why I don’t buy gems for real money to buy in store stuff, but have no problem spending gems i earn though playing the games. So i am glad others do wish to spend money on gems.
I do like GW2, it’s why i bought HoT even if I am not all that impressed by the expansion and a lot in it simply isn;’t for me, but after all this time i thought some investing in the game I like was good, the expansion was a logical thing for it)

The gems/gold exchange is a failsafe you’re seeing a lot of companies do because it solves two problems.

It legitimizes gold buying and selling while ensuring the developer makes all of the money from the transaction, and it allows the developer to claim they have the best interests of players at heart.

In truth, however, Most games which have such a currency trade system don’t factor currency trading at all in to monetization as on the company’s end it simply results in another (albiet unlisted) product.

It’s an invention designed to convince people that a fundamentally anti-consumer monetization setup is actually pro-consumer.

Again, though, imagine what would happen if those amounts were listed in real currency. Change the instances of ‘gems’ to ‘dollars’ in the store and you suddenly have people complaining they have X amount of money that they feel they should be able to withdraw.

That obfuscation is there for multiple reasons, but the biggest reason is to allow you to spend money while forgetting how much money you’re spending, and the gold/gems is designed to make you forget how badly the system treats you while requiring you to log in to the game, pad concurrent subscriber numbers, and most importantly be advertised to for new and exciting items and sales.

I’m not saying people at Arenanet don’t want to make a great game. I am, however, saying that ArenaNet isn’t “one of the good guys” in this regard. They’re using metrics proven monetization schemes driven by profit rather than customer care principles.

Take a look at a game like Path of Exile, which monetizes by microtransactions as well, but does so from a customer care standpoint. They list their items individually, in real dollar amounts, and none of those items are tradable or in any way affect gameplay. They’re all skins, bank slots, or housing decorations, and they’re all permanent. No consumables, no boosters, and none of it is tradable.

PoE has done extremely well with this model. So well they’ve funded development of a massive post-release expansion for a game that has no box cost buy-in, and is otherwise completely free to play without limits.

However, when you’re working for a publisher overseeing your finances, rather than working for yourself, sometimes you don’t get to make decisions about monetization methods for youself either, since you have to make enough to pay your team as well as sufficient profit to pay the publisher that funded your development before you started making money.

Sometimes, when you want to make a game as big, intriciate, and graphically polished as GW2 is, that’s a price you find yourself paying. Selling a bit of your soul to get the game made at all.

Serophous.9085:

And the death penalty that basically made it after two deaths, reset.

The morale penalty/buff system was one of my favorite features in Guild Wars.

It meant you had to not suck at the game.

At least until they got stupid with all the consumable nonsense in EOTN that just let you turn on easy mode by spending some currency.

Never going to happen, and here’s why.

The primary reason microtransaction stores use an internal currency is to abstract the actual financial cost of the items in it, and to charge you arbitrary overages so that you have enough fake money in your fake wallet that you feel like you’re “wasting” it if you don’t buy more fake money so you can use the fake money you have that isn’t enough to buy anything with.

Gems, or all of the various jewels, credits, or whatever a game calls their fake currency is explicitly designed so that you have a much more difficut time determining how much money you have spent, are going to spend, and how many actual dollars items cost.

It’s a consumer abusive model built on tried and true systems designed in the mobile space and eventually ported over to MMOs because just using fake money actually results in people spending more money in your game simply because they are less likely to think about how much money they’re spending when it’s converted to an arbitrary token currency.

Basically, think about it this way.

A harvesting tool costs 1000 gems.

You can buy gems in 10 dollar lots of 800.

This means gems, in real money terms, cost 0.0125 cents per gems.

Now, let’s remove the abstraction, and pretend gems were just their actual dollar equivalent.

While we’re at it, let’s pretend that the gem store was a real place, and your gem store items were real things.

Hello sir, welcom to Gnashmart, are you ready to check out?
Yes, I’d like to buy this harvesting flute, I’m taking a trip to Chile next week and I think it’d be safer to mine from a distance.
Okay, that’s going to be 12 dollars and fifty cents
Alright, here you go.
I’m sorry sir, we only accept ten dollar bills.
What?
Our cash register only accepts ten dollar bills.
Fine. Whatever. Here’s two ten dollar bills,
Alright, thank you for your purchase and enjoy your flute!
Uh. Aren’t you forgetting something?
Excuse me?
My change. You owe me seven fifty.
I’m sorry sir, we don’t give change.
You mean you don’t have change, right?
Uh. Well I suppose that’s technically correct… Don’t worry though. We’ll keep this amount on file so you can come back and spend it later on more of our fine products!
What if I don’t want to?
I’m sorry sir, its nonrefundable. Would you like to purchase something else to use the rest of the amount?
Uh, okay sure, give me that wreath there. I should decorate for the holidays.
Alright sir, one Festive Wreath backpack at six dollars, twenty five cents.
That’s not a backp.- you know what? forget it. Now you only owe me a dollar twenty five.
I’m sorry sir, we don’t give change
Oh I don’t need a bill, I’ll take coins. pennies even, whatever.
I’m afraid you don’t understand. This register doesn’t open. I can’t give you anything.
but you owe me a dollar twenty five
And we’ll hang on to that amount until you’re ready to buy another fine Gnashmart product or service!
What about that thing there? How much is that?
The festive hat? That’s a very popular item right now! It’s one dollar and eighty seven cents. I’m sorry but there isn’t enough here to cover that.
How much am I short again?
Sixty two cents sir
Okay here’s sixty two cents.
We only take ten dollar bills sir, remember?
So you’re telling me, that even though I’m only short sixty two cents, I have to give you ten more dollars?
Yes, but you can buy even more fine Gnashmart products and services with the remaining amount!
Exactly how much stuff do you think I came in here to buy?

As you can see, in real currency it’s probably not something people would put up with.

However, since there’s a legal language loophole in which you’re technically paying for virtual currency and not items, monetization managers the world over discovered that by locking up consumer funds in a nonrefundable vendor locked bank they can exploit people’s perception of the sunk cost fallacy to trick customers in to returning and paying in even more money, and generally charge hoigher costs than people would normally be willing to tolerate were those prices listed in easily accessible real currency amounts.

Honestly, a major problem with GW2 traps is the cast time.

Thief traps, those with relatively minor effects, make sense on short cast timers, but the ranger and DH traps? Those are massively powerful abilities in the right hands.

In Gw1, traps were burly and beastly if you built around them, but they were balanced against their cast times. The average trap took between 2 and 4 seconds to cast, but the end effect of a good stack of traps was very similar to what you see with a trap ranger or trap DH. This meant you had to blow defensive skills to cast them in melee, or you had to use the trap as a trap and set it up in a preparatory manner.

I get that GW2’s combat system is designed around being faster paced, but when your only options are either nerf traps so that they aren’t useful as traps, or hard counter them so that only a select few characters can rock-paper-scissors them in a class system that’s supposed to have viable rock-paper-scissors builds avaliable to all classes… well that’s just silly.

If it took 6-12 seconds to set up a field of traps, you could still fortify a point, but you wouln’t be able to constantly re-fortify that point in the middle of combat and there’d be some useful counterplay due to the trap casting animations. What you’d lose is the melee-trap implementation, which I don’t see an issue with for DH and Ranger specifically because those traps are designed to be used as fortified positions with long range builds, while thief traps are more spur of the moment things for quick supplementary conditions rather than pure kill power.

Honestly, the only way I can see this working is as a utility or an elite signet. Seeing traps is a powerful ability and anet would want to balance it against other options without sticking it in a trait line.

Something like

Signet of Subterfuge
Elite Signet
Passive: You can see enemy traps and stealthed enemies within 600 units
Active: For 3 seconds, remove traps you touch without triggering them, and reveal enemies you strike for 5 seconds.

There’s also a HUGE amount of caches in the sky that pop up after killing meta bosses. These tend to be a little easier to find than the ones on the ground.

Also, keep an eye on your minimap. When events are completed and new chaches spawn, they will ping their locations on the map briefly. if you see a red map ping, head there and you’ll usually find something to crowbar open.

Yes. Living story is a permanent fixture, and a large part of Anet’s content release strategy.

No word yet when the next season begins, but I’d expect some news after the holidays are over in terms of the big WvW update they’re working on, and pvp balance after the current season is over, as those parts of the game are in a mess right now and Anet has said they’re keen on getting them more stable as a priority.

That said, the LS team is, as I understand it, a separate group of staff, so it’s not a thing where we’d necessarily be waiting on those updates before Season 3 starts.

If I had to bet on it, I’d expect a LS update before the next raid wing though.

Arutha.9874:

Thanks for that answer, I always figured the gold reward was approximately around there although the slivers are a very new addition that is good to know.
However on the other hand I am also talking about gold for guild organised events outside of missions, website based things like: lotteries, drawing competitions, 1v1 tourneys, mat gathering events, or simply for guild halls that don’t Demand gold from members.

If you want to provide rewards for events the game doesn’t organize, I don’t see why it would be reasonable for the game to simply generate extra gold for that purpose automatically.

The whole economy (and thus the reason gold has any value in the first place) is because gaining those rewards requires effort from within the game. if you want to provide content in addition to what the game already provides for your members, you must also be willing to provide those rewards.

If the game simply printed money for you to give out, it would make all that money worth less in the process, basically bringing out full circle to a place where the rewards you provide aren’t worth it.

You don’t need to hold the spacebar to jump higher or longer in gw2. A tap jumps the same height and distance and holding the jump key.

You never needed specialized teq builds in the first place. That’s why they got rid of them. You can run any build you want on every single player in a teq fight and still complete it easily.

What gave you the idea that something called a “challenge” was supposed to be “simple”

It took our group a few tries, but basically, it’s tuned so that you can miss ~2 beams total.

Completing it is as easy as making sure eveyrone on your team:

• Doesn’t die.
• Kills enough stuff to have crystals avaliable
• Plays the encounter properly, by picking up crystals when they’re about to get beamed.

It’s supposed to be challenging content. That’s why it’s called a “challenge.” The challenge here is really “Play this boss fight without screwing up what you’re supposed to be doing to complete it anyway.”

Noob.5908:

1.)Capping a camp Perspective… With auto upgrades chances are smaller that I will encounter and enemy while capping it because there isn’t much reason for them to be in their 1/3. Might be some escorting yaks but honestly very few people even do this. So the excitement the enemy will probably be inc soon has dwindled down to boring camp capping. The number of fun fights I’ve had fighting players trying to upgrade a supply camp has been very frequent. Nowadays there isn’t anyone even close by because they have no reason to be and nothing invested in the upgrade. If a player has put the effort to run out and start an upgrade at a camp they usually want to defend it. If I run to a camp and see no upgrades going I see a boring cap and move on, but if it’s been upgraded to say t1 then I know someone has been there and I will watch for them with excitement. Auto upgrades completely removes this entire dynamic and makes the game boring. So basically with the proposed changes its now all about yaks and players fighting each other over yaks, but seeing how that is incredibly boring and barely anyone ever wants to escorts yaks ANET feels they can turn what people don’t like doing into a fun. LOL this falls into the realm of stupidity. The focus should be on the camps not the yaks. Yes I’ve had some good fights over a yak but mostly because an enemy was running by and saw me killing the yak and engaged me. Maybe 1 out of 100 yaks I encounter a player actually escorting a yak. But hey ANET if you think you can turn yak escorting into something exciting and bring more people into WVW… go for it lol. /cry

And that still exists. Camps have always been a problem because they have always been absolutely trivial to take over. The game isn’t built around people camping objectives, and it never was, but for some reason they still refuse to allow camps to upgrades to harder defensive structures. With walls. That actually give people a chance to respond to a camp under attack. What you’re complaining about is a lack of free and easy intelligence to find fights. Fact of the matter is, people care about camps when they care about the objectives those camps feed. just because the camp does basic upgrades doesn’t mean the camps aren’t important to people. If I slot tactics in to a camp because I need that camp to upgrade a nearby tower, you can be sure I’m worried about defending that camp.

Camps have always been too easy to flip. That’s why there are never very good fights over camps. it has nothing to do with making someone click a button. Give a T2 camp an actual wall, which creates an inidcator that it’s under attack, and you fix this problem immediately.

Noob.5908:

2.) Upgrading a Camp Perspective… this entire dynamic has been removed from game along with the players that enjoyed trying to get a camp upgraded. Sure I can go stand around a camp in hopes an enemy will show up, but seeing how I have no time invested in the upgrade I don’t really care, I have been made as useless as kittens on a maggot. Besides if it gets capped I just recap it and move on who cares about defending camps its rather pointless 90% of the time. Before HoT upgrading a camp was an active player participation thingy now its not… enough said!

See point 1. Camps have always been too easy to flip. They are still too easy to flip. This has nothing to do with how the upgrades are acquired, and much more to do with the fact that the upgrades are worthless from a defensive perspective.

Noob.5908:

3.)Gawd forbid people defending have busy work, its way more exciting to stand around in a tower(brings tower humping to a whole new level). Hey if ANET implements a few more automatic type stuff we can all stand at the spawn and watch the game and see who wins. /cry

Literally all making people have to go click a button to do is creates more instances where you have to go visit objectives that are in not danger, on your back line, far away from enemy engagements. How does forcing people to run to a tower halfway across the map to click an upgrade button in stead of allowing that same player to remain on the front line, defending assets actively under attack, or attacking enemy assets create more exiting game play>

Noob.5908:

4.)Placement/Refreshing siege Perspective… Here on earth refreshing siege has become such a thrilling experience you have to stand inline to get the opportunity. Now lets be real, siege doesn’t get refreshed anymore and siege refresh timers is the ultimate in boring busy work. In my opinion siege timers should be increased to 3 hours before we lose more players that are tired of running around refreshing siege, they must of died from boredom because here on SBI most of the siege refreshers have vanished. Probably did what I did, they stopped doing it because they were the only one doing it and gave up. Siege timers was a good idea but 60 minute timers was a terrible implementation. Maybe defending stuff might become a national sport if there were actually some siege in the towers when you got there. Furthermore with enemies placing 3-4-5-6-7-10 rams at the gate and bringing down gates so fast who has time to build siege much-less defend.

I completely agree. Siege refreshing is the same pointless, boring, stupid busy work as manually clicking upgrade buttons. it forces people to break off of active play to go click arbitrary buttons. Manually upgrading things and refreshing siege are the exact same problem in that they make you go do pointless busywork just to keep or rank up stuff you’re already fighting to maintain by holding your front line and keeping the enemy away from those siege emplacements or objectives.

Noob.5908:

5.) Scouting Perspective… I use to enjoy doing this but running around refreshing siege burned me out and now that everything automatically upgrades there really isn’t much for me to do except escort yaks which 99% of players find incredibly boring. Oh wait ANET has some magical fix that is going to make yak escorting exciting, silly me! /cry

Escorting yaks that nobody is harassing is just as pointless as sitting in a tower nobody is attacking. What you should be doing is killing their yaks to prevent their upgrades and disrupt their operations if you’re scouting. This is simple logic. Disrupting yaks actively prevents upgrades. Especially now that the only way upgrades actually happen is when yaks get through.

Noob.5908:

6.)Night capping… Lets have automatic upgrades so everything is fully upgraded during off periods so we can discourage all this night capping. Gawd forbid people actually want to play WVW during off hours and if they do lets make it hard for them. Realm of the stupidity again!
During off time we need things to be easier or the few new players they do decide to come check out WVW will just see a map that’s a hassle. Well if the like staring at a gate for 10 minutes while someone runs a ram I guess ANET has hit the mark with auto upgrades. Fully fortified structures is not going to stop night capping on servers with the population but it will stop the low population servers from even trying. But hey who needs people in WVW during off peak times. /cry

No, upgraded structures because nobody was around to defend them consolidates fights during off peak hours. it incentivizes the defenders to bring more people and siege, and incentivizes the defenders to actually defend assets because they’re in less danger of losing another random objective while they defend the first. My favorite off peak experiences have been fighting over fully upgraded objectives when there are ~5 attackers and defenders simply because it consolidates fights to a single objective in stead of spreading out an already sparse population all over the map so they can easily pvdoor towers in a huge cowardly ring of not fighting each other.

Those upgrades weren’t automatic. They happenned because nobody bothered to cap a supply camp that was sending yaks to them, and nobody bothered to kill yaks. That’s a tactical failure. The automatic upgrade system was stupid because it made the upgrades inevitable. The yak-required system means that you can stop every upgrade by actually taking objectives in stead of repeatedly ganking the same guy over and over in a cycle that will never end

Noob.5908:

Conclusion

Auto upgrades is one of the things killing the game. All changes to WVW should be first and foremost to encourage more players in WVW not discourage them. Furthermore if a couple friends capping your stuff in the middle of the night needs to be discouraged then why not just close WVW except during prime-time and run off even more players. Your not going to stop the servers like SBI night-shift which has a decent night-shift thanks to a commander that spent months building it up (Djixie). This is about match balance not auto upgrades. Shallow thinking and seat of your pants, knee jerk implementations is not bringing players to WVW its running them off.

People should be capping stuff in the night. However, five people shouldn’t be capping half the map just because it’s easy to spam rams on a t1 gate. People want to have fights in WvW. Making it take actual effort to prevent upgrades and take objectives at all hours of the day creates fights. It does not discourage them. What it prevents is people running all over the map quickly PvDooring down more objectives than a small force should be able to just because there are less defenders.

Raids are already quite approachable. The barrier to entry is practically nonexistant. If failure it your problem, that’s not something the encounter needs to be adjusted around.

The problem is with your guild refusing to adjust or practice content specifically designed to be practiced and adjusted to, and with arenanet for failing to adequately balance classes in their ‘every class has a place’ pve class design.

One of these things you can remedy. The other is on Anet’s head, but the encounter isn’t the thing anet needs to adjust.

ekarat.1085:

• Overall, mouse control feels chaotic, with the camera jerking all over the place. This makes muscle memory impossible, as the camera is in a different place from run to run. Plus, now there are more controls, so there is more to keep track of. It just feels harder, though the initial turns are much faster.

It’s going to, for a while.

Think of it like riding a bike. At first, you’d get on the bike, and your arms would flail left and right, the front tire would wobble, and it seemed almost impossible to control.

After a while though, as you get used to the interface, making it do what you want becomes second nature.

The same is true of your mouse camera control. Just practice it and soon it becomes second nature.

I’m not making a case for superior here Gray. I’m making a case for viable. For raids specifically.

I don’t really PUG, but viewing the entire game from a PUG lens is detrimental. It’s not a question of the entire team building around the daredevil when you’re talking constructed raid comps, but a case of the group building around the rest of the group. Little things like “Okay, we can cap out at 25 stacks of might, so we don’t need another might source” or “a significant portion of our DPS is thieves and revs, so alacrity is probably doing less than dps shatter” and other such decisions that get made when you’re raiding with the same group of people every time.

Often that has a lot more to do with people wanting to raid in gear they already own, with characters they’ve already leveled.

I mean, there were meta comps for PvE in GW1 as well, and meta comps exist because they’re the apex of what they do in a bubble, people know the group composition, and all the moving parts do their jobs well without too much reliance on each other. Condi engi is hands down amazing with no external support. That’s why he’s the condi meta. You can slot him in any group, no matter how inefficient the rest of the comp is, and he’ll bring DPS. It’s the same reason alacrity is all the rage, despite it being a horrible choice if rev and thief heavy DPS comps. because people come to the table with certain expectations of what they’ll find in a PUG.

Point here is, meta comps are a commonly known and practiced single group composition, but just as in GW1, alternate compositions exist that can get the job done, and this is a little more freeform than putting together group comps in GW1 due to the more hybrid nature of GW2 character systems.

When you git down and go ‘alright, who has what geared how?’ when you’re forming your static raid comp, a lot of people would rather swap around some traits and skills and figure out how to work it with what they got today than spend a week an a bunch of gold rolling something else if it turns out they don’t actually need to do that just to finish a boss once a week. Occasionally you’ll figure out someone actually does need to get new gear, or someone needs to roll a new character, but often in GW2 you also find that with a few free build tweaks to favor the comp you have in front of you you can get the job done.

Gray.9041:

without burning, thief simply doesn’t stack enough conditions to be that effective. we stack fewer bleeds and poisons combined than a ranger can stack bleeds, and even condition rangers favour burns over bleeds.

basically, we need a chunk more bleed/poison, or access to burning. the latter would be more effective, but it’d be nice to see a viable condi build without burning.

In any constructed setup, condi daredevil has massive amounts of burning access. Every dodge is a whirl finisher. Every deathblossom is also a whirl finisher. If your group is dropping fields, you’re actually outputting a massive amount of burning.

People tend to ignore it, but when you’re in a constructed setup like a raid, constant whirl finishers all proccing cleanses, heals, burns, confusion, etc. actually stack up quite well, and if you’re running venomshare on that build you’ve just given two other party members license to take a cc util off their bar and in stead put in more damage because of your 10s stun on a 40s cooldown.

This is a common thing people overlook with thieves. Anet designed thives to be at the apex of the combo system, and daredevil furthers that goal. Thieves have always had the most spammable finishers.

The trick is that people tend to look at it from a PuG perspective rather than a constructed group perspective.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like more love, but if you’re doing raids in a speed run rather than a completion mentality, it just seems you’re doing it wrong. Speed running in content with a week long cooldown doesn’t mean anything. Condi thieves bring more than enough to the table to be worth a spot in raid groups. One VS thief tends to be far more reliable at spiking break bars than coordinating four or five people, who may have been knocked out of position, killed, or otherwise prevented from contributing to the spike. It also allows the group as a whole to increase DPS.

Basically, replacing one engi with a vs condi thief, if everyone around drops the appropriate CC from their bar and takes more DPS or boons in stead, results in very similar total group DPS.

It’s still not fantastic in PvP though.

Tspatula.9086:

zhonnika.1784:

I don’t wish to derail this thread, but since I was addressed specifically, I’m not actually a wvw forum specialist, and haven’t been since early October. They just haven’t fixed my forum title yet

To keep this on topic, I say HELL NO to manual upgrades in any form. Too much abuse, too many people who don’t understand upgrade order, too many ways that it can and has gone wrong. Auto upgrades are fine with the change. I do not wish to go back to the days of someone starting fortify before anything else because they clicked wrong or just wanted to keep you from having anything else. Sorry, no.

Manual upgrading for the camps, keeps, and towers would not be able to be abused. It would be a simple change that would require a player to manually activate available upgrades, rather than having them automatically activate when available as they are now. They would be the same upgrades that happen now, only the structure would sit at the “upgrades ready to activate” state until a player essentially pushes the button.

That sounds like pointless busywork.

There’s nothing wrong with the upgrades autmatically queing as long as the enemy can actively disrupt the yaks. The problem with the atuo upgrades wasn’t that they upgraded when nobody was watching. it was that they made yaks pointless.

Requiring someone to go to the objective and click a button adds nothing to the game, unless you’re under the assumption that the enemy is going to bother camping the objective to wait for that one guy that’s going to run over and click it when they should be focusing on disrupting yaks.

If enough yak runs ahve already made it through for the objective to upgrade, the enemy has already failed. Making someone click a button doesn’t magically create fights. It just makes it easier to PvDoor, and creates less tanky objectives during off hours, during times they should be tankier to discourage easy night capping and encourage defense even at off hours.

Great Thread.

Nobody said it was hard. They said it was hardER than vanilla GW2’s open world. And it is. You have to do stuff that isn’t autoattacking.

I’d settle for being able to dress up the guild initiative personnell.

Those green adventure suits are so last season.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Zackie.8923:

Why are mobs sometimes immune to CC? mainly for those mobs in fractals with the blue breakbars like the molten boss fractal

Different bosses have different immunities while defiance is up. The only fractal boss I can think of that cannot be CC’d easily is That Shaman in the Volcanic/Grawl fractal, at the middle level (he is immune to direct CC, but not CC over time).

I don’t have any trouble breaking the bar for the transformers in molten boss fractal. What skills are you using?

Bloomhunger is also CC immune. You can break his bar, but it doesn’t stun him.

You already make over 1.30g per person, per week, per mission, or more just from the personal guild mission rewards.

as of this posting, the total, minimum take from a guild mission is:

50s
1 (or more) resonating slivers – 70+s
2x L80 rares – 24+s
1 (or more)guild commendation – tradable for another sliver – 70+s

That’s a grand total of 2.14 gold OR MORE

Per mission.

For every single guild member in the mission.

And even a starting guild can do at least three missions, while more accomplished guild can run up to 12 per week.

Assuming you’ve got all the slots unlocked, and you do all of the mission per week, your guild members are earning at least 25 gold worth of stuff every week from guild missions, usually more as the harder missions pay out better in slivers and commendations.

If you can’t convince people to do guild missions, your guild members obviously don’t care about earning gold, so I don’t really see how trying to entice them with less gold than they could earn easily by just doing the mission would change your situation.

I convince my members to do it by quoting them that magic number. Missions pay at least 2 gold.

It is entirely possible that all of his forces are far too busy fighting off Kralk to do anything else.

Right now, the crystal desert is basically the Orr of the crystal desert, and Joko may have a large number of zombies at his command, but consider what Kralk’s corruption means for his ability to create new soldiers. I’m fairly certain that Kralk can corrupt Joko’s troops. he seems to be able to brand just about anything, but I highly doubt Joko can raise a dead branded soldier. They break in to tiny pieces when defeated usually, right? Joko’s minion seem to require at least some semblance of once living structure to animate.

Then again, how much of some of the bigger onces was zombie and how much was statue is hard to tell.

This means that allowing Kralk to maneuver unchecked would be disastrous for Joko’s future plans, and given how much easier it is for Kralk to recruit more soldiers, and how much harder is it for Joko, I can’t imagine he’s doing anything but trying to hold his borders against the branded for now, assuming he wasn’t simply destroyed by Kralk already in the time between release and now.

In fact, a war with Joko may explain why Kralk hasn’t caused more problems for Tyria since he flew south.

I just had a terrifying thought.

Branded Junundu.