Guild Wars 2

It is fine.

They specifically redesigned traits and mastries and removed the costs associated with respeccing in order to bring back some of the first game’s concepts of tweaking your build around the enemies you face.

Having a flamethrower be equally effecive against fire elementals and bandits simply constrains the design space for enemies, eventually resulting on a homogenous bestiary of clone enemies that are just reskinned versions of the same thing over and over.

Your condi gear is equally effective if you swap a couple traits and skills out, and if it isn’t, you should be asking for alternatives in the form of skills and traits, the things you’re meant to switch up regularly that also work well with gear you can’t change out as easily, rather than asking for the enemies to be changed so that you don’t have to change anything ever.

The entire reason microtransaction gambling chests exists is so that people have to spend more than the wanted items are worth to acquire them.

Its gambling, and it is a proven moneymaker in microtransaction shops because no matter how much people say they hate it, they do in fact spend more money when there is only a small chance they will actually get what they want because they fail to get what they want.

This works even better when the “good” items are tradable, as it further incentivizes whales to overspend so that they can make ingame currency from the users that choose not to gamble, meaning that single users with poor impulse control or lots of disposable income are more likely to buy more boxes because they feel they can mitigate the cost.

If you want to see companies stop offering gambling boxes, try and convince people to stop buying them. They don’t exist because users asked for them. They exist because they make money.

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

So what you are saying is that a Charr body is treated just like an Asura when it comes to outfit design? They appear far different conceptually. Look at the wedding dress, for example. I have a hard time believing that they do not have to do separate work to design these outfits. I have one outfit, the Mad Scientist. It fits my female humans all the same no matter the weight of their armor. It does not fit my Charr even remotely like the human females. I dislike outfits generally, I liked the mad scientist for my Charr, but I won’t ever buy another.

It makes no sense for them to not issue new armor through the gem store. I have bought three sets of gem store armor for my main character. The only remaining sets that I haven’t purchased I either don’t care for, or I wouldn’t invest that money in alts. If they put out new armor I liked I would buy it. I don’t understand why people buy outfits.

A Charr female body skeleton is identical when using the wedding dress or light armor. An Asura body skeleton (they don’t have gendered skeletons) is similarly identical. That doesn’t mean the charr and asura skeletons are the same. It does mean the charr in the wedding dress and the charr in light armor are the same. it also means that if you’ve devloped an outfit that fits all five races in both genders you have effectively developed a light armor skin that fits all five races in both genders.

What I’m saying is that creating the entire wedding attire set is virtually the same amount of work as creating a light armor set, using the same principals, same QA, and same design process.

Creating “medium” and "heavy versions of that set is on average less work than creating two more outfits because in many cases a themed design like that can re-use parts that are less variant, as, say, the crown from the light version can be used for the med and heavy versions as well, wheras if you’re putting together a new “outfit” you aren’t extending a theme, and thus are going to find it necessary to concept, model, rig, and deploy an entire new headpiece.

What I’m saying is that the wedding set IS effectively a light armor set from a technical standpoint, and thus, giving people that bought that outfit the ability to use its pieces as light armor skins would make buying the outfit equally useful as an outfit, or as light armor skins for characters that use light armor, without requiring anet to go and design entire armor sets and sell them for the less money than they are worth, to less overall users.

Does that make more sense?

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

So basically your contention is that anet is lying about the amount of work that goes into outfits as opposed to armor, and that they are inventing the clipping issue dilemma? Okay then, in my universe I am going to take their word for it that they know what they are talking about when it comes to designing their game. I don’t develop games, so I am not going to pretend to have the expertise to say that they aren’t lying about this. I will say that if I thought that anet was a dishonest company I wouldn’t be giving them any of my money, my time, and I wouldn’t even be on this forum talking about it, because I don’t do business with liars.

Hey, I get being upset because I am upset STILL over the legendary weapon fiasco, because I bought this game being told there would be all these legendaries (I started playing with the expansion, so I am probably one of the few people that felt like I was sold this game and that they failed to deliver the content I paid for). I don’t think that they “lied” about the legendaries, though. If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here.

I do in fact develop games and do 3d art for a living. I’ll break it down for you.

When creating GW2’s races, a series of animation skeletons were developed. In most games, including GW2, where interchangable clothing is a feature, you take the basic body form and replace that section of your model with the “clothed” version.

So, GW2’s characters are, generally made up of five skinned meshes over a common skeleton. Light, Medium, and Heavy armors have slightly variant seams where those meshes meet. This is why you can’t directly mix, say a medium chest and a light pant. Medium meshes are all built to terminate at a very specific series of belt linne verts, which is in a different position than light meshes, so if you were to combine the two, its likely there would be kitten in your character, or unsightly overlap.

GW2’s art department treats gloves, boots, and shoulders with a bit more leeway. Chests generally have full armor models all the way to the wrist for example, which allows gloves to more easily mix/match between sets. This is why armor parts in the cash shop and game often come in the form of gloves, boots, shoulders, and helms.

A critical examination of every outfit in the store displays the same common rigging practices for all outfits. “Heavy” outfits use the heavy rig, the same sound cues for the “heavy” armor’s jumping and walking noises, the same shoulder heft animations (heavy shoulder are rigged slightly differently than med or light ones) and so on. “Trenchcoat” outfits use the medium rig, “suit” outfits use the light one, etc.

This is the most sensible way to do it because at that point you don’t have to author new animation data per outfit, you simply use the armor type anim flags you already have, and weight the vertices on the new models and perhaps add any addon bones oyou need for streamers and other secondary physics-powered parts for the rig.

Your clipping testing is generally done via randomizer in such systems. usually you load a script that puts all of your character anims for a given anim set on a loop, and build a little button that randomizes the gear so you can visually inspect them for annoying clipping or holes. You’ll never catch them all of course, and MANY of the existing armors in the game still have minor clipping issues for this reason. Unless its super obvious its generally not a good tradeoff to take the asset back for revision to fit a tiny piece of cloth slipping in to a shoulder as long as there isn’t like a foot of one thing sticking through another.

This process is generally either done by the person modeling the armor, or the technical artist who is in charge of the final implementation of art assets from the art team in to the game proper. In some cases teams may have an art intern that gets such boring/unceremonius/repetitive jobs so that more skilled (and better paid) team members can focus on the actual authoring or final implementation of assets.

Once all that is done the armor is generally pushed to a test build for internal QA to play with in a live environment to see if the testers notice anything super annoying about how it interacts with other geam, animations, shader effects if applicable like buff graphics or dye systems, etc.

In many cases, teams will simply give the art team a list of concepts without having yet determined how the assets will be used. This is especialy present in larger games with cosmetic microtransactions, where the ingame or microtransaction avaliability of a given item is often not decided until it is already signed off on as being ready for the game.

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

Harper.4173:

PopeUrban.2578:

I want all existing outfits to also unlock armor skins of the appropriate weight.

You don’t even have to give out transmute charges with them, just unlock their various parts as skins.

They’re all built on the existing light/med/heavy armor rigs anyway, and their very existence throws the idea of “recognizable class silhouettes” out the window.

This would in no way impact outfit sales, and would in stead make them more attractive purchases for all players.

I fully agree with this. There are more than a few outfits out there I haven’t bought because I can’t just use the parts that I like. If this were an option – be sure I’d buy a few more outfits just to use the good bits in them with my armor!

Outfits are much easier to produce than armor is. From what the devs say it is fairly time consuming to make new armor. They have to design it so that you can mix and match each new piece with other armor sets, and they have to do this with each playable race in three different weights. Outfits do not have the clipping issues, only come in one weight, and so they only have to worry about making them appealing for the different races.

False.

Outfits use one of the three existing armor weight rigs. They are built with the exact same animation seams for the exact same character parts, use the exact same audio cues, and have the exact same presence or lack of clipping issues as already existing armor.

They also do not require creating versions for all races in all genders and weights. Mistward armor is a heavy only set. They already have racial only sets. The original cash shop armor skins were single weight sets. The only reason new armor sets are added to all weights, genders, and races is specifically so they can continue to tell you “it’s so hard to do we can’t”

The amount of effort that goes in to three outfits is actually MORE, in terms of art and QA man hours than a single armor set even under these restrictions as each new outfit requires a design pass with no other versions to inform its design, or re-use easily modified parts like helms, gloves, shoulders, and boots.

The reason they don’t add armor has nothing to do with technical constraints and everything to do with the fact they can sell an “outfit” to more users without arbitrary armor weight restrictions than they can sell an armor set.

What I propose is, literally, making the same amount of money in the same system, and enhancing the usability of those outfits so they they make more potential money. This is a Win/Win as it meshes with their current monetization-focused method for players to aquire armor while also giving more users a reason to buy those microtransactions.

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

Beldin.5498:

I would have welcomed every new armor set, however all we get are outfits since over 2.5 years now, and that was one of the many reason that made me stop playing this game

Just take a look here :
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Post-a-pic-of-your-character-only-if-your-armor-is-mix-n-match

and see how many of those armor pieces are not older than 2.5 years.

There were two complete sets of armor for each weight and each race released with the HoT maps that are purchasable with HoT currencies, bladed armor and leyline armor. Perhaps I didn’t understand your point.

Two sets of armor in an expansion that cost as much as the original game which can be earned by playing the game. Contrasted against… well look at the number of outfits since the release of HoT.

Outfits are not only annoyingly limited in terms of character customization, they actively redirect the art team’s man hours in to assets that add to the cash shop at the detriment of rewards for play.

The excuse that every armor set needs to be avaliable for all races, genders, and weights and is thus far more expensive to produce is a convenient fiction used to push players to the cash shop in the absence of anything resembling satisfactory rewards from actually playing the game. There is nothing preventing Anet from releasing an armor set that only fits one weight. In fact they did EXACTLY THAT in the HoT release with the mistward armor!

The lack of meaningful rewards contributed greatly to HoT’s lackluster sales. Anet is far more interested in nickel and diming players for cash shop dollars than creating value in their now-regular expansions. Gliders, a major HoT feature, could ONLY be customized by cash shop purchases, which were sold exclusively in the cash shop on release day.

GW2’s entire reward scheme is built around the acquisition of cosmetics. however, the vast majority of cosmetics added since launch can not be acquired by playing the game. This is akin to simply selling better gear stats in an MMO where the point of the game is to acquire gear with better stats.

Ask yourself, honestly, if after gearing out a character, the entire point of rewards is acquiring cosmetic options… why is the best way to acquire the most new cosmetics the cash shop rather than the game itself?

Arenanet simply doesn’t care if you’re having fun. Having fun is secondary. The most efficient way to “progress” in the reward model that they designed specifically to be more about cosmetics than stats is to whip out your credit card.

Karmapolice.4193:

There’s just too many factors contributing to its rarity. It only drops from a certain mob, that mob is only visible if you’ve trained up to a certain mastery level, that mob only appears in a select few locations, you only have 1 chance per location to potentially loot the skin, and then of course the drop rate is ridiculously low. It just makes it pointless to even bother trying.

How about having treasure mushrooms drop an invisible scrap of cloth when killed. Then, you can turn in maybe 500 of those and trade for an account bound invisible skin. I think after killing 500 and one still hasn’t dropped, that’s enough grinding for a consolation prize. Make it account bound so you can’t just sell the skin. If you want to sell the skin, you still have to hope for a drop.

Or just stick them in the gem store, I’ll buy all three. (Unless the price is just goofy.)
Or, make it a toggle, like it should have been in the first place.

Your complaint is that a rare item is rare.

That’s the point.

Rare items are rare. That’s why rare items in GW2 are cosmetic rather than stat enhancements, so that you don’t NEED rare items, but you can chase them down if you WANT them. It’s the same way they worked in the first game for a good reason. It works. It’s fair. It allows the game to have rare drops without also creating a situation where only the richest or luckiest players have access to the best gear.

Demanding items be more accessible just because you WANT them leads to a homogenized loot table where the very act of looting is broing, and all loot could be easily replaced with nothing but currency.

That is not a game I want to play.

I want all existing outfits to also unlock armor skins of the appropriate weight.

You don’t even have to give out transmute charges with them, just unlock their various parts as skins.

They’re all built on the existing light/med/heavy armor rigs anyway, and their very existence throws the idea of “recognizable class silhouettes” out the window.

This would in no way impact outfit sales, and would in stead make them more attractive purchases for all players.

mauried.5608:

Can you get a pet parrot to sit on the shoulders?
One that can talk and says pieces of eight now and then.

Shoulder skin. If the parrot actually has flight animations and only comes to rest when you’re standing still I’d pay 800 gems for it.

Also, the peg leg is hilarious given how fast GW2’s combat is.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Ranael.6423:

Sorry to hijack your answer but if you think you can break the cycle by having a raid only composed of one wing, do you also think that now bosses could also not live in circular rooms/platforms ?

Sure.

All future encounters will take place on squares. Progress achieved.

Revive orbs were fine the way they were. A good way to revive if you stupidly fell off of something or died from conditions after killing an enemy with nobody around.

Now you’ve created a situation where you are actually capable to engage in combat after using one, making it literally superior to getting a res from another player in any group situation as it can not be interrupted.

This would be fine except for the part where the only reliable source of said orbs is the cash shop.

Stop selling combat mechanics interactions in the shop. Please. They are not “well balanced with the gameplay” and never will be. They are straight up purchases of consumable character power than can only be acquired in reliable supply from the gem store.

Giving them out for daily logins in an effort to advertise their presence in the gem store does not make them fair additions to the game.

I believe there’s room for both.

The dredge fractal mechanic doesn’t get stale because its not threatening. it gets stale because that dude is a huge HP sponge as a result of needing to kite him, and usually being limited to 4 of 5 party members dealing damage. You could keep that mechanic and lower his base HP a bit so his kill time was similar to other bosses at his level.

However, this doesn’t preclude the need for strong, threatening mechanics.

The difference is the mastry element. You need to have a training phase for each invidiual new mechanic that a boss will use before you pile them all on the player.

VG does this pretty well in some ways and badly in others. It does a good job of training you on the green circle, blue circle, and boon strip mechanics with the initial mob. It doesn’t however train you on the split phase. Players get to VG and they have a basic idea of a core strategy. Get people on the green circle, avoid the blue ones, avoid the orbs, DPS the boss.

The split is a curveball that doesn’t really explain to you how it works, and its a curveball you get thrown at you in the middle of the fight. You don’t have any prior knowledge that having the wrong icon on you would cause damage, or that you’re going to need to develop a strat for the split.

This is where its not okay. It’s fine that the mechanic presents a unique challenge, but its not okay that the game doesn’t message this mechanic in any way before confronting you with it. Learning by failing should never be the only option.

Additionally, if learning by failure is the only option AND your encounter has three or more new mechanics it becomes very difficult for players to even internalize the lessons failing should be giving them. Players will know they died, but if there are three different reasons they could have died and they’ve never encountered any of them before, its likely that even if your entire zegr wipes, potentially no one will know exactly why, and that leads to people being simply frustrated rather than educated.

That doesn’t mean you need to make your encounter easier. It just means you need to make sure your players have a chance to learn each new mechanic individually so that when your encounter combines them they have chance, no matter how slim, or realisitcally defeating the encounter on the first try armed with that knowledge.

player’s shouldn’t have to consult a wiki just to understand how a fight mechanic works. The game should train them in how it works first, so that people are cognizant that they failed for reasons they understand, rather than feel they were unfairly killed without any knowledge why.

BrunoDM.6340:

I will be very clear: We need options for the solo players.
Back in time, in Guild Wars, we had the Heroes system. Why not implement this in the game? I mean, look… The major reason for me that made me bought this game was “Play your way”, but that concept was long forgot.
My list:

.Heroes system(like gw1)
.Option to open all bags(like recycler)
.Duel system(seriously, please)
.Home Instance needs more live, basically is a dead zone
.Guild Halls needs to be more accessible to small guilds(really small)

Only your second thing is a QoL suggestion. The rest of them are major balance or system requests.

KhainPride.3987:

it works before august 9th patch, we would have 30~40 people with no problems, now we cant even seem to put 15 people in. when the instance does change, it only prompts 3 or 4 of the 15 members to go to new map.

That’s a nasty bug. I hope they fix that. Can you rightclick>join in new instance on the people that did get the pop up?

No.

PvE in GW2 is designed from the ground of up NEVER be competitive.

I’d love a territory control warfare system, but the PvE map is not the place to do it. Some sort of sharded off/more interesting version of WvW with actual loss and consequences would be a better way to accomplish this.

PvE is not a good place to add competitive systems. GW2 PvE is completely cooperative 100% of the time, and that does not need to change.

Sounds like a good addition to guild arenas.

Those things are fine for dueling or whatever, but it would be nice if they had a PvE use. Some endless mob defense, random boss “gladiator” guild missions for 5 players max, and other things that encourage people to spend some PvE time in their guild halls.

I like the idea of a 5 player limit as is also encourages spectating and hanging out.

They’d just need to add some tech to the arena so that it could phase out your normal decorations and replace them with whatever stuff the particular fight needed.

After that, just add an arena section to the queen’s gauntlet for people without guild halls to access the content, with perhaps different rewards, and you’re done.

Like, say the guild hall version rewards skin drops at certain waves with guild logos on them, wheras the Queens’s gauntlet offers the same skins without the logos or something, but all the other loot is identical. You could also have the guild versions generate aetherium on successful waves so people could use it to supercharge their mine or something.

Maybe put a blue border around skills that do breakbar damage or something so its easier to communicate? Then you could just have one of those text tutorial context things with an arrow “this enemy has a breakbar! Use skills with a blue border to damage break bars!” As well as a break bar damage stat in the mouseover info.

Its not useless, but the extreme throttling of the map limit systems is really annoying and buggy.

They really need to update this so its a dynamic system that doesn’t require switching instances, as instances are notoriously unreliable.

The way it works is that after the 5th person, it spwans a larger cap instance. once there are enough people to cap that, it then spawns ANOTHER, even higher cap instance, and so on. every time that “map swap” icon pops up, everyone that gets it needs to click it, and then pray that it doesn’t bug out, or pray that it didn’t already spawn an even bigger instance that everyone is moving to.

The system is simply not build for a large number of players all entering the hall at once, which is, hilariously, the one design goal they built arenas for, so people could have a place to GvG scimmage, where you’d epect large numbers of players to be joining the map at the same time.

The best way I found around it is to invite everyone that’s going to come to the hall in to a squad, have the squad leader enter first, and then enter in order. once the map swap thing pops up, ahve everyone currently inside switch to the bigger instance, and keep having people enter once at a time and swapping to bigger instances until everyone is there.

The ongoing dedication to the living story and ongoing plot of the world is much appreciated. It is refreshing to have a PvE game in which logging in every few weeks/months without incessant grinding is sufficient to catch up on the new and exciting adventures of your established characters.

It is a model I with more PvE centric MMOs would follow.

I have not too many good things to say about the design of the pvp parts of the game, but as a PvE game I think it does a great job of delivering on the promise of “join a fantasy world and become a hero”

If you only casually play for the story, it still feels good and rewarding, like you only pull out your weapons for dire threats. Meanwhile if you just want to farm that stuff still exists. It doesn’t hold my time hostage and lets me play other games I also enjoy if I choose to, and that’s pretty great.

selling/buying more than 250 of an item at one time.

Its fine that most items have a stack limit of 250, but its pretty often that you need to buy more than 250 of, say, basic ore or logs or something.

I’m tired of needing to buy 827 logs or whatever and having to make multiple purchases. Why can’t I just type 827 in to the field?

This goes back to the poor breakbar messaging for new players.

Remember when they added dodge trainers for new players?

Anet changed defiance to the breakbar mechanic with HoT, but didn’t update the learning/tutorial experience. Couple that with how easy to 1-80 game is, and with the fact thay’re enabling people to instant 80, and it’s no small wonder that people are walking in to GW2’s open world endgame with no clue how to actually play the game.

At the very least there should be a mandatory breakbar tutorial section in the first hoT mission, since prior to HoT breakbars exist, but since they’re just defiance replacements none of them are actually crucial to defeating the bosses and champs that have them.

So what you’re saying is something you want isn’t affordable with gold because you’re not willing to liquidate your assets.

GW2’s entire economy is built around the buying and selling of crafting materials. Raw gold income exists specifically to facilitate that trade. However, the bulk of every players income in GW2 comes in the form of crafting materials, and the entire game is designed in such a way that there’s a reliable buy and sell market for them.

This is why salvaging is a thing, because the component parts of most of the loot you pick up is where it derives its value.

You’re basically saying you can’t afford something because you don’t want to spend the money that is in your bank account.

Using the ‘casual player’ card here means literally nothing. You income is not low because you play casually. It is low because you are actively choosing not to leverage your assets in a manner that helps you achieve your desired goal.

There is no reason to revamp it at this point. The primary problem with scribing was the cost of basic materials, not that certain recipies require rare drops.

Rare drops are rare. there are rare decorations because of it, just like there are rare items for any other system in the game. You don’t need those rare items to level scribing.

This is not a flaw in the design of scribing. This is scribing working as intended. Scribing is easy to level and reasonably priced for the massive number of common decorations at this point.

Expecting it to be practically free with no meaningful achievements through collecting rare pieces is horrible for the system, as it becomes largely useless the moment you get it to 400 and instantly craft every decoration you want.

Scribing is designed for long term use, which means that it must posess some long term goal opportunities. You want to build a massive line of lamps that looks really cool? That’s a great long term goal.

I pray that Anet remains silent on this topic. The answer to this question is hilariously obvious, and I just want to read confused threads like this one for ever.

I blame wiki culture.

You can’t buy the ability to ride ley lines in bloodstone fen.

That skill requires having ley lin gliding already learned to purchase, and creates your own temporary ley lines. There is no way to acquire it without already knowing ley line gliding.

Donari.5237:

Rose, did you do that followup?

I wonder if this is in some way a sneaky voting mechanism, or a psych study, or something. It seems really odd to put in an account-bound one-choice-forever action with no explanation of why it’s there or what the consequences might be.

Or maybe. Just maybe. It’s there for fun and there really are no consequences.

People agonize over “permanent choices” far too much. This is ArenaNet we’re talking about here. The poster children for equity and player opportunity. Being worried yu might miss out on something is probably not something you should lose sleep over in this game.

Khisanth.2948:

Randulf.7614:

Having seen how ships move and animate, I’m not 100% sure the engine could pull it off and look good.

Having said that, I’d love to see airship combat using the Pact Airships we see.. Whether in GvG or pvp or maybe as a fractal, I could see players manning the cannons etc. The Guild Hall could have an airport upgrade, with all the tier relating to airship upgrades in some way. Perhaps the ship could even moor above the Guild Hall.

The game doesn’t handle moving “ground” very well. Watch as things like Lava Font and banners seemingly float away if you try to use them while the airship is moving in Victory or Death.

They fixed this with engine updates as of HoT, though I am fairly certain they didn’t rework the older content using the new tech. You know, because they don’t patch dungeons any more. This was tech they use liberally in the new version of SAB as well as the spinny helix section of the personal story. I was honestly surprised, as they made a really big deal out of this new functionality in the engine pre-release and then barely utilized it.

+1

Archeage had a massive number of problems, but when you were in a legit ship to ship battle with multiple players it was an insanely fun experience. It’s a pity that peace time mechanics, fishing nerfs, and overuse of safe zones eventually meant it was impossible to actually get in to or profit from those awesome battles.

The victim card is strong.

I like how this isn’t phrased as “I don’t like this decision” but rather “YOU ARE ACTIVELY PERSECUTING ME WITH MALICIOUS INTENT!”

This isn’t discriminatory action. Everyone that plays the game has perfectly equal opportunity. This is about you choosing not to use that opportunity because of personal preference.

The game is not discriminating against anyone. You are simply unwilling to engage with the same rules as everyone else and, like most players that have a problem with the game (all players ever) wish the rules were tweaked so as to support your individual preferences.

Breacher
Legendary Dagger

Daggers that are actually whirling circular buzzsaw hand thingies, complete with buzzsaw sound effects and sparks that fly when you hit stuff. The same sparks would spew all over when you draw/power up the weapon.

No body aura or footsteps for these, in stead the weapons themselves emit a thick black smoke and drop a trail of oil as you move.

Special animations for dagger throwing abilities, the weapon fires a buzzsaw and loads another one. The buzzsaw’s visual passes through its last target and bounces around the environment a bit, kicking up sparks off of surfaces it hits. Dagger spin moves throw off a nice shower of sparks and make an appropriate SWWWREEEEAOOWWWW metal grinding noise.

These are based on Scarlet’s breachmaker tech, so slain enemies are ‘reclaimed’ by some clockwork minions dragging them beneath the earth.

The legendary journey would revolve around retracing the steps of Scarlet’s invasion, savlaging parts from old ley line probes, and collecting drops from scarlet’s minions in places like the aetherblade JP, molten test fractal, breachmaker wreckage, etc. as well as defeating leyline anomalies to capture their energy. Maybe a little boss fight inside the breachmaker wreckage with a scarlet hologram, some special interact nodes in the aetherpath, etc.

Thematically you’re piecing together Scarlet’s design for the weapon, finding out it did not work as intended, and using recent advancements from Taimi’s Dragon lab to process the ley line energy to make a working version of the design.

I thought Primordus was still dormant, and the dwarves were busy keeping his minions in check, which is why there are so few of them that make their way to the surface.

At least that’s what I remember from EOTN. That the dwarves got stoned to prevent Primordus from rising by killing its minions, as they somehow fed it.

At the time it was unclear what that meant, but its pretty obvious they needed to deliver it magic or lava or souls or tacos or whatever, and the loosing of leyline magic short circuited that plan by delivering it a buncha magic directly.

Mastries are better than just leveling.

There. I said it.

Just gaining piles of XP is boring, as is having a boatload of “options” with no utility (I’m looking at you core game skill point challenges)

Masteries encourage doing a wide range of activities, specific activities, and actively drive you to achieve new and different things in order to progress, rather that making you rely on RNG drops for better gear or letting you simply farm the easiest, laziest path to progression.

Do people rightly hate the idea of tying masteries to adventures? Yes. Adventures are a good idea (minigames) that was overused (too much of the mastry system is locked behind content that doesn’t use your character at all) but the Mastry system as a whole is FAR better than other methods of advancement we could have been forced in to.

• There are enough mastry points you can skip the few you find seriously onerous.
• You can not simply farm and complete your progression
• SIX MONTHS past the release of HoT I’m still encouraged and rewarded for seeking out and completing new types of content
• The core mastries required for navigation are quick and easy, but the extended mastries feel rewarding and useful when you level them.

I think Anet knows that Adventures were a flop. That’s why there’s no new adventure in Bloodstone Fen. However, the overall design of Bloodstone Fen proves how well the mastry design works. Should you walk in to bloodstone fen with not much in the way of gliding, it’s going to be rough. That’s on purpose. You’re walking in to an area above your progression status. This is a far better way to handle it than just one shotting you with mobs because you didn’t grind out enough XP for three more character levels, or trash your valuable Pre-HoT gear for some new dirt common stuff.

So I use a corsair m95 (which, in my opinion is the best gaming mouse ever designed)

I’ve kept ctrl and alt as thumb buttons for years for work (I do 3d graphics work for a living) so I naturally bound those ony my thumb on my gaming mouse as well, since using my fingers to hit ctrl and alt is alien to me, and a 20 dollar logitech mouse with nothing more than those 2 thumb keys is IMO just mandatory equipment for anybody that works at a computer.

I rebound the more esoteric interface keys (M, I, scroll lock as my push to talk key for teamspeak,and so on) to the tougher to reach spots on the thumb pad, and “P” as my dodge key for the bug giant one in the middle.

For gaming I always try and find a keyboard with multiple thumb buttons. previously I used the zboard merc, IMO the greatest gaming board ever designed. Steelseries acquired that design with zboard’s stupid modular design and all the other stuff when they bought them and produced a pricer version with lights in it. Sadly, they discontinued that design as apperantly all gaming boards must now be designed around boring 108 key layouts to be “tournament legal” or something now.

Faced with the conundrum of continuing to use my preferred board, at ludicrous out of production prices on ebay, or adjusting back to a standard layout, I decided to say goodbye to the merc’s awesome design, but refused to part with the convenience of having more than one key avaliable for my thumb.

So, I replaced it with a (frankly overpriced) Razer Anansi, which doesn’t have that sweet gaming surface layout with the giant WASD, but does have a pretty OK thumb button layout.

Thus, my binds look like:

weapon: 1,2,3,4,r
Util: ctrl1,2,3,4,r (ctrl is on mouse thumb)
Weapon switch: alt (alt is on mouse thumb)
Dodge: P (bound to the biggest/resting thum button on the Corsair m95)
profession skills: q-e-f-g
interact: ctrl-f
Special action: Z
Stow: x
Walk/run: v
Jump: space
Show nameplates: c (next to spacebar on keyboard thumb on the razer anansi)
About face: middlemouse

Oh dang. I’m happy about this.

Between the Elder Dragons Hoovering up all the magic they can, Asura Magitech bottling up and utilizing even more, FloatySpoilerMan sucking up the rest, the egg taking a little more, etc. I think think there’s so many outputs for “raw” magic at this point that the limiting effect of the bloodstones is redundant.

Basically, if the bloodstones were a dam, which just broke, you’d expect the village downstream to perish in a massive tidal wave. The only problem is that someone already built a SECOND dam behind it, and a third and so on, and the owners of all of the above dams have been complaining for hundreds of years that they can’t turn their turbines fast enough.

If it weren’t for floaty absorbing the most catastrophic break, it may have been enough to topple those other dams, but the river itself is pretty well handled. There’s not really a flooding hazard as much as there is a hyroelectric powered laser beam hazard. It’s just a competition at this point to make sure the right parties have access to the largest portion of that output and thus the biggest lasers.

To be fair, the whole map exists within the, what, hour or two directly after a bloodstone exploded. There’s not enough depth in that space to pad out stories aside from the central plot.

Remember, the whole area was a hidden white mantle base which just recently exploded. That doesn’t lend itself to to depth of event storytelling you’d find in magumma, with its ages old native civilizations, or queensdale, with the daily lives of normal people going on.

The only things that make sense are a hasty pact camp, and crazed mantle directly affected by the bloodstone explosion running around.

Could we have used a little more variety in the floor events? Yeah. I thing the cleric shield event is a little overused. However, the narrative element is largely served by the state the map is in. It’s not a living slice of the world at this point. It’s the aftermath of a bloodstone explosion.

I’d imagine an Ascalon city in the hours after leoric’s shattering of Maghder would feel very much the same. A few lucky charr in a camp or two, and lots of kittened off ghosts running around everywhere for no apparent reason other than they happened to be there.

I’m fine with it for the “you don’ have stealth gliding” tax, double so because of the stability skill.

But hey, stealth gliding should be reliable as an aggro dump. Like many mexpensive mastry abilities it has very few contextual uses, so anywhere you can add logical payoffs for leveling them, you really should.

Stealth gliding should really feel like “oh man, I’m so glad I leveled stealth gliding now that I’m flying through this cave of dudes that throw rocks” rather than “why can the cave of dudes throwing rocks hit me while I’m using my mastry skill I did all that stuff to get?”

Without the stealth gliding or stability skill? Totally okay with it being as annoying as it is now. It’s disruptive enough to be annoying, but not so much it ruins the zone. it should just encourage you to seek out the countermeasures.

On a lighter note:

It’s a great thing Anet has done, and even greater that it has uses beyond the somber.

It would be dope if we could use them to power temporary crafting stations or some other consumable thing in the guild hall that has a benefit.

Maybe a permanent set of buffs that need to be “charged” by crystals to work or something. The buffs would give looting players a proc chance to generate mats directly to the Treasury. So the cycle would be harvest>people put crystals toward whatever materials they want to help the guild generate, then they go play as normal.

This would somewhat democratize the treasury without removing its current application as a way to dump resources and sink them from the economy since it’s all RNG, and at a fixed rate, unlike influence which gave accelerated gains for just having more guild members, this one would give the same gains to guilds of all sizes since contributing more crystals just makes the buff longer. They also wouldn’t appreciably change the demand of crating materials now that guild’s needs for them have calmed down to normal levels.

Thematically, you could say that you’re giving them to Esa to go trade for mats out in the world. Would give people in guilds of all sizes, and at all levels of weath that warm fuzzy feling that they’re contributing to those guild upgrades without explicitly requiring them to donate their own mats, though directly donating would still be the fastest and most reliable way.

Be even cooler if you saw Esa walking around in various zones from town to town as if he were actually trading.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Wouldn’t be logical

Are you insinuating that the GW2 plotline is based upon logic and not the writer’s notions of narrative impact?

Logical causes and outcomes are not the bedrock upon which this story has been laid for quite a while.

DeanBB.4268:

PopeUrban.2578

the whole reasoning behind making the core game free to play was to break down barriers between new players and established ones.

Its not a question of how you or I see it, but what ArenaNet actually said, on stage, when F2P was released.

I would have to disagree. I see a FTP account as more of a trial account, “try before you buy,” which then encourages game sales.

You must have missed the bit where everything but the current expansion is free to play. When the next expansion hits, HoT is free to play. The exact reason they gave was that this makes it a better deal for new players to start without massive costs.

This exact strategy was the thing a lot of people thought was unfair to existing players (which was silly, given the length of time between release and expansion, or this expansion and the next)

Thus, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that the LS episodes don’t work on the same model, as it actively undoes the very thing ArenaNet Actually Said was the reason they set it up this way.

They want people to buy the game, new people, every expansion, that was athe reason given for FTP. Make the cost the same for new players now, and four expansions from now. The limitations exist primarily to keep FTP from becoming a network of bots that ruin the economy. I know a lot of people that came to GW2 after FTP, and they find no trouble playing the game like a “real game” and many of them do in fact buy their accounts when they’ve completed the massive amount of content in their free core experience.

Behellagh.1468:

From the most recent AMA on Reddit about this patch.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4uqx15/out_of_the_shadows_devs_here_ask_us_anything/d5s1cj2

Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.

PopeUrban.2578:

It’s a sham really. They say “armor takes a lot more time and effort to make” which is technically true.

However, they then ramp up production of outfits and all but halt development of armor sets. Basically doing the same amount of work by releasing three outfits in that period that would have otherwise been one armor set.

Outfits can be used by any character however, so the idea here is that they can easily sell 1/3 of an armor set to more players, despite offering less overall variation in player looks.

A better compromise would be to unlock armor skins for whatever weight’s animation rig the outfit uses. Thus, you could get a “light” outfit look on a heavy character, but if you have a character that actually uses light armor then you could skin it in pieces.

I think they’d actually sell more outfits this way, since it would require similar amounts of work but create additional value for people that just want part of the skin for whatever weight it is.

We are all aware armor takes longer than outfits. This is a problem of Anet’s own making.

Specifically, Anet decided (in a manner contrary to much of the release armor) that EVERY armor set had to have three weights, and be equipped by every race. They could have just as easily introduced cultural armor sets or single weight sets on a rotating schedule and there is no technical reason not to.

What we’re saying is that they’re already spending the effort, and already producing the same amount of unique assets in terms of weights/races.

It is not LESS work to create three outfits and sell them in the gem store than create one armor set, and hey, look how often they release new outfits!

The difference is that they’re willing to do the same work, on the same animation rigs (by now it should be plainly obvious to anyone which outfits are heavy, med, and light rigs respectively) but CHOOSE to utilize those assets in a way that isn’t interested in adding value to their product, but rather finding the most efficient way to nickel and dime people that already bought it, and in the process choosing NOT to spend the effort of ingame reward armor skins, in a game with the primary advancement model of collecting skins.

They’re running a casino in which the point of the game is to WIN chips, and in stead choosing to just shut down 80% of the poker tables to turn them in to chip vending machines.

The end result is that they make similar money either way, but they way they choose to make that money creates less incentive to repeatedly visit the casino. For the purposes of the game’s primary reward structure GW2 is less of a game and more of a shop at this point.

This is a problem unique to GW2, as most games it is fair to consider heavy cosmetic shops fair for the users, since the primary reward for playing is item power, rather than item cosmetics.

In GW2 the +2 to a stat you’re meant to strive for IS the cosmetic item, which they add at LEAST 4 of for every one they add to the game. It’s akin to just selling better gear in the cash shop in a more traditional MMO.

I dunno, I really liked Lazarus’ voice work.

It also like that they basically just showed up to tell Caudecus who’s boss. That wasn’t really out of the blue, everything leading up to that point in the journals and episode pointed to a schism between “true belivers” in the White Mantle’s original goal (to serve the unseen, and use the bloodstone to recombobulate Lazarus) and Caudecus’ self-serving implementation (Using the manpower of the White mantle for personal ends, to take the krytan throne)

Lazarus didn’t really show up out of nowhere. He just showed up to afform all of the hints suspicios that yep, that’s the guy, that the whole episode had been leading up to.

That said I still wish I’d have gotten at least a nod or a sneer.

Here’s hoping Lazarus recognizes players with linked GW1 accounts with a dialogue line or two in the future.

Diovid.9506:

PopeUrban.2578:

Also opens up space for interesting flame legion political plotlines since without Rytlock in the Black Citadel its a bit more believable that some sneaky flame legion guys can get all subversive and try to retake the hierarchy.

Are you implying that Smodur is that reliant on a single Blood Legion tribune?

Nah.

I’m implying that Rytlock has plot armor and is thus, through the mysticism of GW2’s lore team, somehow more important than he logically should be.

I’m implying that the vacancy screams “HEY HERE IS A GREAT PLACE TO PUT A FLAME LEGION SPY”

Decoration Feedback

Overall a solid patch. The upgrade cost and functionality of the new guild hall signs is great but their character limit seems too small, especially considering the size of their windows.

Interaction distance for the signposts seems too small. Grave markers and statues are good though.

Can we get statues depicting a member of each race maybe?

I’d also like to be able to edit their heading (so in stead of “GRAVE MARKER” you could put “NAME” in the big text and an inscription in the small text.)

As well the single target decoration removal and persistant selection UI is awesome for decorating (protip, you can leave deco mode and that window remains up, selecting a deo automatically returns you to deco mode.)

The biggest QOL with decorating still hasn’t been addressed though. Decorating still uses your default AoE setting, meaning that if you are using the instant setting you don’t get a chance to preview or rotate decorations. This requires me to go to options and change my AoE mode to normal every time I decorate, then remember to change it back when I am done.

Decoration mode should simply force AoE mode to normal, and return AoE mode to its previous state when exited so I don’t have to constantly open the options menu.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Rytlock also said he got two such letters before Almorra handed him one and he crumbled that one.

I think Rytlock must have quit the Blood Legions or something. That’s the feeling I get – and they are not happy about it.

That’s my thought as well. Rytlock has probably excused himself from proper Charr society for a life on the road with our fantastic new guild. he also makes a crack about our “avoiding paperwork” when we turn down the commission as leader of the pact.

Seems like he doesn’t want to sit at a desk any more than we do.

Also opens up space for interesting flame legion political plotlines since without Rytlock in the Black Citadel its a bit more believable that some sneaky flame legion guys can get all subversive and try to retake the hierarchy.

Probably because the fen counts as a HoT map, but the flight ablities are only used in that zone.

So, they want you to derive those zone abilities from playing in that zone rather than from general HoT XP.

Also, the way they are set up you can buy them in any order, which is a little nicer than a mastry track.

I thought it was good stuff, though I’ll admit being a little miffed that lazarus didn’t even acknowledge my existence.

I mean I know he thinks I’m not important, but at least a “Get him, yeeeargh” punctuated by lazarus saying some bad guy ‘silence insect’ or somesuch and striking us down in a single blow of spectral agony would have been nice.

In stead he just roasted the remaining white mantle, talked smack to Caudecus, and left without even acknowledging me at all. I thought I was important to the story QQ.

I mean that’s what made mursaat so terrifying in the first game originally. They knew you were there. They just killed you with a hand wave like swatting a fly before you got infused.

I agree that the counter magic/beam mechanic wasn’t messaged adequately. There probably should have been a more explicit callout during the training fights with the golems. I broke both of the golems and had no idea there was a tether/beam mechanic. I thought just breaking the bloodstone was what took their shields off.

Maybe an additional phase with a shielded bloodstone or something that required the beam to unlock a door before you got in to combat or something.

However, the mechanic is not at all hard to use during the justicar fight once you understand how it works. You only need it when she’s shielded, and when she’s shielded she follows a predictable path and doesn’t deviate from it. Really easy to get the proper range and put the beam on her.