Guild Wars 2

Another random box, another version of this thread.

Boxes are gambling. If you are not prepared to lose, don’t gamble. Arenanet sells gambling boxes because people buy them. If you don’t like gambling boxes don’t buy them.

Thanks to the OP for the unbiased and scientific viewpoint.

Wagnard.4027:

like american football…. where is the foot part? lol

It’s called football because plays are measured in “downs” which describe the distance which your team must advance the ball within a specific number of plays. This distance is calculated in American standard measurements of Yards, Feet and Inches.

Hence, it’s called football because the point of the game is to move the ball a specific number of feet within a limited amount of attempts, or prevent the other team from doing so.

SmartBobby.6283:

Ahh, okay thank you, that’s really interesting. But honestly, is there really an event or item which isn’t discovered until now? :P

I flippin’ hope so.

If there are no secrets in Tyria, only things that haven’t been implemented, That’s kind of sad.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

timidobserver.7925:

Sounds good to me as long as the reward for the harder version is better. It would kind of make the group dungeon pointless if you could just go solo easy mode through it alone and get the same rewards.

go away elitist :P

I don’t think that’s elitist. I think that makes sense. Harder content should, logically, equal better rewards. Without increased rewards there is no point in increased difficulty.

Glad to hear about more mastry ranks, however when you think about it the concept of cauldron mastry is kind of funny. I mean it’s just a big pot really.

“NO! Let SVEN man the cauldron! He’s an EXPERT at pouring things from high places!”

Void.4239:

PopeUrban.2578:

I use a similar build, but mine doesn’t rely on the on-heal effects, in stead of trying to maximize endurance, I supplement the endurance gain from daggers, vigor, and acrobatics with passive SoM heals. Basically this is a “composite” approach of passive healing, dodging, and weakness rather than throwing all my eggs in one basket. In addition, I keep 10 in shadow arts for bonus condition removal and I also pack a shortbow swap to help deal with certain CCs. In addition I’m usually covering my bleeds with three other conditions in my build (plus any bonuses from steal), which makes them a little tougher to get rid of.

I don’t really sPvP but it’s been doing pretty great in WvW and PvE, though I’m still building those omni infusions.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQRAoY4YlYmiOXey5E95Eh3jvO2wqVgmdP46VrKA;TwAgyCuo0yolQLrWOtkatWYsw+j5HA

yeah i’ve seen the build in action very nice

tho i still prefer withdraw it brings so much more then SoM to the field

when i withdraw, i get :

- +4.3 k heal
- vigor
- +50% endurance
- +4 ini
- cripple / chilled /imob cleans
- huge evade ( very nice mobility skill to )

every 15 secs

Sure passive heals are great…
But i prefer not getting hit , if they miss i dont have to heal it up .
And evades work better for me when facing multiple players then passive heals, tho it all depends how you play it and what you like playing .

Honestly your version tends to be a lot more solid in 1v1, but the problem I had with that sort of build (personal playstyle wise) was that a lot of things hinged around said ability being off of cooldown, plus I can get a lot of offensive utility out of my “bursty heals” like the Dancing Dagger/Shadow Refuge Combo, the mad king runes, etc. that I just missed too much when I went for full evades.

Very much a playstyle decision though, and your setup is very solid.

Sunflowers.1729:

Super Riceman.8702:

Every skill type should have access to condi-removal and stun breakers regardless of which type would have the best, that way players are not forced to pick up certain utility types to get them. And it would be more viable if they were tied to skills rather than traits since you wouldn’t have to specialize to make them useful.

The whole point is to force players to make a choice between surviving (condition removal and stun breakers), more damage (Assassin’s signet.etc), and more utility (venoms, traps)

By adding condi-removal and stun breakers to venoms and traps, it means there is no need to make this decision.

Poisons do need a buff but adding these kinds of effects to them isn’t the right way to implement a buff.

Well that’s just it, these skills aren’t underused because they’re bad but rather because they are far too situational to be used realistically in the limited slots we have for them

The idea that’s presented here, giving them more situational utility, actually solves the primary problems with venoms and traps in a really interesting way. Choosing between, say, caltrops or tripwire should be a much more viable choice, however tripwire’s has only one use while caltrops has multiple uses The same can be said of other thief utilites that get a lot of use like Shadow Refuge. They’re not picked because they’re more powerful, but because they’re useful in more situations and thus create interesting and fun tactical decisions

This was something Anet recently addressed with Signets. They felt that many signets had either an active or passive that was really bad, and they wanted the skills to have some more solid decisions. Take a look around the utilities of most other classes and you’ll notice a similar pattern. The skills people use a lot do at least two things, which makes them more worth the utility slot, and much more fun to have on the bar.

I see this sort of post a lot

“My achievements tab will be forever sullied by X missing achievement because Y”

Think about the word “Achievement”

What does it really mean? Is it a checkbox on a list of things you should be guaranteed to have, or is it actually a measure of something you went out of your way to achieve?

What do you need it for? Bragging rights? Completion?

Everyone being essentially given every title and achievement just makes Achievements and titles meaningless and boring. i believe everyone should have a fairly easy shot at souvenier items like backpacks, gloves, and other such things, certain cosmetics should be almost given away as a reward just for playing the content as a souvenier of that leg of the living story.

Achievements and Titles? These have no function other than to prove you went above and beyond. Asking to structure them so that you don’t ever have to go above and beyond to acquire them just makes the entire system a pointless collection of numbers and text.

Why have leaderboards if you’re just handing out achievement points? Why have titles if almost everyone has the same selection for doing a collection of simple tasks?

Honestly, rigging matches for achievements should be grounds for removal of said achievement. It’s like rigging matches to farm glory. You’re not a Crab Toss Champion if you didn’t actually compete in crab toss, and you’re not a Crab Grabber when people are handing you the crab.

Just remove the titles completely from these activites, or enforce a ban on rigged matches so people that actually want to play the game aren’t accused of “trolling” by… playing the game without cheating.

Honestly I don’t have a problem with it. I only wish more classes had valuable and somewhat tricky “adventuring skills” like how a mesmer can portal people up a JP or thieves can shadow refuge people to steal chests and skill points, and resource nodes from aggressive mobs.

What if warriors could smash shortcuts through some things, or necros could res key NPCs to prevent event failures, or guardians could wall off broken doors, or rangers could communicate with animals to change them to green mobs?

I don’t have a problem with classes having special things they’re good at, as long as it’s not required to complete whatever content they’re shortcutting. It makes classes a little more special without actually putting them in to a strict trinity-style dependance hierarchy.

Chuo.4238:

I’m far less interested in even bothering with future content now, because what if it happens again?

Then it happens. I think anet has been really good since the concerns people had with the way Lost Shores was handled with giving everyone ample time to accomplish everything they deem important within the timeframe of living story events.

Two weeks for the MWF, and leaving the entire rest of the arc active up until the end was tons of time to get everything accomplished. I don’t really see how anyone can complain aside from the idea that living story content is temporary, and honestly, I like the idea of the living story and its limited time cosmetics/achievements each arc. They’re like little time capsules, like the cool hats from holiday events in GW1, only all year round.

In fact, just yesterday I was with some guys on their way to the karka hive and we got to the end bit and one of them was like “man, this is tough” and then I was like “Nah, you should have been here when they FIRST settled the island” And I got to tell the mighty tale of the ancient karka, Took the guy on a tour of the entire ancient karka battle across the island, and link my ancient karka bag to prove i wasn’t just making it all up. That was a really nice moment for me, and the guy thought it was awesome that Southsun had real history… like a real place in a real world.

If it happens again, you’ve either got more important things going on in your life than logging in for a few hours on a weekend or something to do some event content, or you just don’t care much about that content or reward.

PHRAETUS.1873:

I’m curious as to why we may need such high volumes of passionfruit & Karka shells?

They’re components in a offensive and defensive infusion recipies, just as Passion Flowers are component in the much more expensive “off slot” omni infusion recipies.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion

Basically, if you want the current “best in slot” stats on your ascended gear, you need to spend some time in southsun or on the AH. Hoever you can get non-agony versions that are almost as good with laurels.

Since release it has always applied revealed if you leave the refuge while it’s still active.

This is a bit of the risk/reward of shadow refuge. You can use it for a very long stealth, but to do so you need to sit in a pretty obvious small area that’s easy for the opponents to nuke.

PearlGore.7419:

On Tarnished Coast I never seen anyone else with D/D, I just enjoy the style. As far as SPVP goes I’ll get back to you when there are more game modes lol.

I run D/D Deathblossom/evasion on TC. You may occasionally see me zerg diving but I spend most of my time on the other side of the map assassinating yaks and, on occasion, killing the people who defend them.

Sadly I haven’t been around as much due to work lately and all of these fun PvE updates, lol

I will agree though, D/D is no longer “hot” in WvW, it’s all about the P/D or D/P for most thieves. Honestly I was a better 1vX and zerg diver with P/D but I feel like I do more for the team with my evasion based yaksassinating build.

Advice:

Stealing may seem kinda tacked on in the beginning, but you’ll find that once you unlock traits you can attach a lot of very useful things to that button. in addition, the items you steal, especially in harder areas or PvP are quite useful. What separates a mediocre thief from a good thief is the knowledge and proper use of stolen abilities, and how they work for your build. Most of them are fairly powerful and designed to be integrated in to a chain with your other attacks. Start using steal regularly, and every time you see a new icon take a moment to mouse over it and learn about what it does so you can use that knowledge in the thick of combat.

Also, when you’re talking about survivability in events, you’re looking at three flavors of mitigation as a thief:

Regen Through traits in either the stealth or acrobatics trees, as well as the option of the Signet of Malice healing skill, thieves can get some pretty good healing just for doing stuff they’d already do, like spending some time invisible or hitting dudes. This alone will not allow you to facetank like a guardian however, but does a nice job of keeping you alive when paired with…

Evasion Pound for pound, you have access to more evasion based abilities than almost every other class (that’s not ranger) You’ve got vigor on steal, traits that refund half of the endurance used to dodge, multiple weapon skills with build in evasion, and even a dagger autoattack that gives you endurance. Thieves shouldn’t mitigate damage from trolls and oakhearts, they should never be hit in the first place And if you screw up and DO get hit you’ve got the comfy option of…

Stealth many thieves are habitual stealth users. Dagger offhand has an on-demand stealth, and in general you’ve got the ability to stealth in a variety of ways. Even if (like me) you’re not built around it, keep in mind that stealth is an integral part of being a thief, and is best used to set up a stealth attack or get a break from a fight to let a heal cooldown tick, find cover from ranged attacks, make distance between you and melee attackers, or just give you a head start running away.

I use a very similar build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAoYVlcmKP3ey7E/JFCXBnyTxXNWaKopGsTxVpVA-jADBoMg4MAIOQUDg0HQsCApQFRjtEsIasKZER1qbYmcC1GfKaiAEXD-e

and it’s extremely viable in terms of survival but isn’t going to do you a lot of favors in terms of damage. Also keep the condition stack limit in mind. As a general rule of thumb people with condition builds need to make sure they’re not in parties with other condition users. However, you can pump out a lot of DoTs and be nigh on invincible with evades if you play it right. The tradeoff for that survivability is lack of stright up damage. You’ll never come up to the kill speed of people stacking tons of power and crit, but you’ll usually be able to take on large packs of trash and melee bosses much more comfortably, which makes you a great tank and emergency rezzer.

It’s an interesting idea for sure, adding utility to things like traps and venoms rather than directly buffing them would make them more practical to use and attach some interesting opportunity cost decisions to them like your more-used shadow refuge, RFI, shadowstep, etc.

Perhaps not the exact effects listed here, but definately adding stunbreaks, condition transfer, boon removal, condition removal, and other such things to skills like these would definately make them more desirable and usable from a practical standpoint. Heck, just integrating something in to traits (as we’ve been told we’re going to get some trait combinations like Warriors are seeing, paving the way for new traits) would pop up the utility of traps or venoms focused builds. I’d like to see something like:

Grandmaster (Some trait line… Deadly Arts? Trickery?)
The Master Plan
Your traps steal one boon and transfer one condition from yourself to your target

Plan B
Traps and venoms may be used as stun breakers.This effect can only trigger once every 30 seconds.

Crooked Chemistry (replaces Residual Venom)
Venoms you apply last one extra strike, remove one condition, and add the removed condition to the venom’s effect at one quarter duration

Djemo.7153:

koopatroopa.5360:

It has been proven that the skin doesn’t change when you upgrade.

What the heck?!
Whats the point?!

There’s no other way to get an ascended Tough/HP/Condition backpiece.

That’s basically the point.

Fiontar.4695:

Good point. Funny how mechanics that they admit aren’t fun and could ruin the game, anywhere else but in Southsun, somehow make perfect sense for the mobs in Southsun.

This game, over all, is incredible, but when they make design mistakes, they really go overboard with those mistakes and then often, stubbornly, cling to them.

To be fair, What’s game breaking in the hands of a player in PvP and what’s game breaking for a mob are two different things. Fights with players are supposed to be relatively fair and even. Mobs aren’t necessarily intended to be on “equal ground” with a player, often being adjusted on purpose to have only a few tricks up their sleeve that are designed to be learned and countered. They have these mechanics adjustments accordingly because AI simply can’t play as well as a player does, and AI is designed to be defeated while players are designed to have a 50/50 chance of defeating one another. I think southsun is challenging, but I don’t feel that it’s broken in any way.

The difference is that Flame and Frost was a sort of meta-incursion in to existing newbie zones. The content from it didn’t really have much potential to hang around.

The SSC content, however, is specifically aimed at changing Southsun permanently by way of settlements and whatever evolution/change/difficulty the Karka seem to be going through.

I’d imagine we’re going to see some stories that leave larger footprints than others, and that SSC is the first example of the Living World teams finally hitting their stride and getting on a stable development schedule, wheras Flame and Frost was being worked on while that whole waterfall development schedule was still gearing up to a point it could do large and regular updates.

I think, if I remember right, Colin or someone said there were three Living Story teams. This means each team has three “off cycles” where they’re working on their update as the other two teams release theirs. For this schedule to work, you have to have teams with content ready to push out each cycle, and I think the problem with the flame and frost cycle was that you had multiple teams still working on their first cycle.

Now that the “waterfall” is in motion, I imagine we won’t see sparse living story patches like the agonizingly slow initial F&F chapters as each update has a decent time period and amount of manpower to be developed.

Nope. The boss fight area can be found in the cave south of point Lion (the one with the event to blow up karka egg clutches.)

Enter the cave, take a left. You’ll notice that behind the first egg clutch location, where there once was a wall, there’s now a vent blocking a passageway. Behind the passageway is a room filled with Eggs. The same room seen on the Secret of Southsun website screenshot of Kiel.

The giant wall around that settlement is largely to keep out animals I’d imagine, as it seems that the central area is the largest of the settler camps.

LameFox.6349:

Stuff you said

I like to think southsun is essentially zerker build hell because the mobs tend to have nasty control or damage return skills, or in the case of the riders, bounce attacks and boon theft. Sure things are easier at ranged, but that’s the entire game for the most part, and it’s pretty much a known fact that in a ranged versus melee damage arms race, melee wins by a pretty darn good margin as long as you can keep swinging. It’s not that you can’t run zerk out there, you can run anything anywhere if you’re good. it’s that the mobs are designed to steal your might, immobilize you, hit you with confusion and retaliation, and do a number of other things that make most “standard” zerker builds a lot more susceptible to serious harm out there.

Yes. I’m aware I could make more shells faster doing XY and buying them off the TP. I could make more of a lot of things faster. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’ve always had fairly good loot rolls on karka, I like fighting them, I’m good at it, and the guaranteed shell is nice mostly because it makes sense and is a 100% guaranteed drop.

Good information on retaliation, I honestly thought it was related to output, which is why it always does such awful damage. I don’t see it enough that I ever bothered to look it up. I was under the impression that’s why people were complaining about it, because it hit them harder. Thanks for teaching me something new! (Is it obvious I’ve never rolled a guardian? Heh.)

I didn’t say I Can’t fight the reef drakes or don’t use a shortbow for it. Cluster bomb is my standard ranged fallback for situations like this (multiple attacks per activation and bleeds) I said my general build wasn’t good against them (as in, the daggers, which I use to kill most things, which the whole thing is built around using as the primary weapon) and in fact this is an instance where I need to vary up tactics and weaponry specifically because AoE confusion fields are something that my build is non-optimal against due to my primary damage source (death blossom) being a leap that’s only semi-controllable. If they’re in big enough groups (like for the lionguard escort event) I’ll actually just dump all of my cooldowns to shadow refuge>caltrops>daggerstorm the whole mob, get killed by my own mad king birds from confusion, and then instantly rally from the bleed kills and finish the stragglers just to save time, and because it makes me laugh to watch the confusion numbers pile on that fast.

Maybe They’re planning to add some new kind of infusion for this event that would make it make more sense? Like a mob-type infusion that works like the mob-type sigils/potions.

If there was an “Infusion of Karka Slaying” or something then the items would instantly make sense.

Cinnamon Goddess.3869:

The Jetpack can just be bought from the auction house. So no it doesn’t require a PVP person to do PVE!

Uh, yeah it does. You can’t earn gold doing sPvP. The loot is all glory boxes and bound stuff. Unless you’re suggesting they buy gems. Which is actually a worse proposition for that amount of gold.

My favorite posts are the ones like “Well yeah I know I can still get the backpacks, but you should put this somewhere where I don’t have to be reminded I didn’t do it.”

Dude… The only thing you need crab toss to do is to get titles… specifically… related to crab toss.

It would be silly to put those achievements anywhere but the living story tab. They’re part of this story arc, and the game will be gone when it’s over. Just because you have some insane idea that “living story” means “All PvE/Solo/Open World/Non-Dungeon/Whatever My Personal Preference Is”

No. It’s a category containing all of the achievements for all of the content for that period of the living story. In this case part of it is competitive. If you don’t like the competition then don’t freakin’ do it.

It’s taught me that Stacking MF is amazingly useful for acquiring crafting mats, greens for the mystic forge, and overall making a lot more money off of vendor trash and a slightly higher average rate of rares.

It’s just not amazingly useful if you want to roll in stacks of rares and exotics every time you go back to town

I almost feel like putting together some MF gear to farm events with now.

Wesnoth.1705:

Nihilus.3015:

Hiring a thief to steal it.

..and than hiring another class to ress the thief

I solo them on my thief regularly. Sometimes two at once if they’re both female egg layers.

Thieves are only as squishy as you build them.

I actually Enjoy soloing karka and have been since… well since I decided I wanted more omni infusions than it really reasonable. This patch is even better as each one guarantees a shell (plus its nice that I don’t need to solo them at the moment because there always happens to be a few people nearby)

I realize a lot of people don’t frequent southsun because they find the mechanics there counter to their build, but lets be fair here. The skills and traits systems are designed specifically to be hot swapped for encounters, and all of southsun is pretty much designed to be murder on zerker builds.

I don’t have a problem with that, considering how much of the rest of the game is so easy you can quite literally stand in one place and hit two buttons with the right build on almost any class.

I play an evasion/bleeds thief with Signet of Malice. This is a build that’s durable but subpar is most other places in the world. I don’t play it because it’s efficient, I play it because it’s fun. I also found out really fast that it’s the only character I’ve got that can take on three or four veteran karkas at once and come out on top. I’ve got low base damage, which makes the retaliation pretty managable, I’ve got passive healing that scales with the number of enemies I hit, and I’m build for enough evasion that if I play it right I can get out of the worst attacks pretty well.

“Well good for you” You’re thinking to yourself “That’s really unfair to the rest of us though, and we don’t find it fun at all”

If you bubble/wall/haste/HB through everything else… that’s fine, but your one trick pony shouldn’t work everywhere. Even if you’re not one of the “glorious three” most-seen PvE builds, chances are there are certain things your build is very good at, which is probably why you built it that way. Dungeon farm builds are very good for that purpose. AoE builds are very good event farmers. The thing is, just because your build is awesome at one thing doesn’t mean it should translate to being equally good at everything else. For instance, take a HB dungeon farmer to any form of PvP and watch what happens. Put a backstab thief in a room with a ton of trash. Put a wells necro in a fight with a boss. Sometimes your build isn’t the most awesome at what you’re doing. That is okay.

My build is horrible, for instance, against anything with a high frequency of ranged poison and confusion applications.(like reef drakes, gangs of blowgun hylek… or really good confusion mesmers). They kill my passive heals, sap my life, and generally make it very difficult for me to maintain well enough to take the occasional hit long enough for my bleed stacks to do their job. See, I don’t have a lot of condition removal and usually rely on my heals and evades to mitigate most damage. Confusion punishes me for using skills, and I need to use skills to get my lifetaps off. Poison brings down my healing numbers, which can be devastating for my sustain since I’m geared around having just enough heal to keep up. When I know I’m going to be in these situations I swap out a few skills and traits and play more conservatively, knowing that I’m not built for the encounter. In addition, it’s a condition build, which means it’s not as efficient in terms of damage as a raw damage build. When I designed my build I knew it had weaknesses, and I knew it had strengths. Your build also has weaknesses, and that’s not because the mobs are badly designed, it’s because you built it to do something else

Certain builds should absolutely be disadvantaged in certain situations, and advantaged in other situations. Not every build will be optimal, or even good for every encounter. That’s fine, it’s what makes people want to hook up with other people, do events with other people, etc. Your build should have weaknesses as well as strengths. If this isn’t true, if your build is good everywhere then either the world is designed poorly, or your build is an outlier option and begging for a nerf.

Stuff like what you see on Southsun is what makes monsters interesting. GW2 does a pretty good job of making most species of monsters behaviorally unique, and in cases of humanoids often with unique and recognizable subtypes. The creatures in southsun have, in my opinion, fun mechanics that tend to punish the laziest builds (HB zerker signet warrior, I’m looking at you) the most and require a slightly higher awareness than normal mobs. I don’t think that’s out of line, considering that southsun is effectively an “endgame zone” and most “standard” builds can simply faceroll through the vast majority of the open world. We need more zones with difficult mobs, difficult mechanics, and difficult events so that there’s a risk/reward basis to have somewhere to go where you’re not just farming and getting bored. The addition of blooming passiflora and the level scaling and re-placement of southsun’s mobs is a good start IMO.

Exroyal.9053:

So let me get this right, after Southsun living story is done, we’ll geat Dragon Bash which i’m guessing is annual because of the Dragon Festival back in GW1. Correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t the Dragon Bash something very asian and Canthan? NCSoft said to not add Cantha, but yet they let you create “asian” content?

There are still PLENTY of people of Canthan descent in Divinity’s reach. Those old traditions don’t just magically go away when your family is stuck on another continent for a few hundred years due to the ocean becoming a deathtrap.

News Flash: Southsun monsters require a certain amount of tactical thinking.

This isn’t new, they’ve been this way since the island was introduced. They’re really not that hard once you learn to fight them, just like the molten alliance special mobs that seemed godlike until you figured out their mechanics.

Calcifire.1864:

so far, all the adult karka we’ve seen have been female, they are all capable of laying eggs after all, and the jokes from november likening them to “a va**na dentata with legs”.

if that’s true, we haven’t seen the male ones yet… and if they are similar to the female ones then those back pieces are going to quickly become the grossest things on tyria

False. There are two types of adult Veteran Karka. Those that lay eggs, and those that roll. The rollers don’t lay eggs, and I always referred to them as males. As a hive species the most powerful specimens (ancient and Champion) have always been female, which makes a certain amount of sense, and there’s no denying that these tend to have some of the “male” abilities tacked on, but there are definately adults that don’t, and likely can’t lay eggs.

Honestly, I think the problem people have with the living story is that they can’t have the rewards all the time. I think that’s precisely what’s neat about the living story from both a loot acquisition and economic standpoint. Rarity isn’t solely based upon a low RNG drop chance, but also on a time frame wherin things are actually happenning.

Yes, some loot will be super-rare. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People complaining “I did 4,682 molten facilities and didn’t get a jetpack” are missing the point of the jetpack. It’s a rare thing, and it’s cosmetic. Without rare things, loot is boring. When rare things confer a gameplay advantage then you’ve got a grindy system. When your rare things are cosmetic you keep the fun of rare loot without putting those who don’t have it at a gameplay disadvantage.

You’re simply not meant to have all the things. Sometimes you won’t get the rare loot. Sometimes you will. It doesn’t horribly matter because you don’t actually need said loot to play the game, so if you don’t get the uber-rare this story, there’s the next one, and the next, and so on.

What you’re failing to realize is that unique rewards, like say the sentinel’s inscriptions or the chef recipies, while seemingly common and worthless NOW are the bulk of your actual tangible reward because they can do nothing but accrue value the longer you hold on to them. Each arc having a few pieces of common special loot and a few pieces of rare special loot creates an economy where stockpiling easy to get things is actually beneficial to you, the player, and that’s a concept that simply can’t exist if said items don’t have that limited one time window.

In addition, it’s FUN.

I mean, themepark MMOs, in general, include a lot of wasted space. Old content, abandoned, sucking up server resources, and frustrating new players because that group thing over there can’t be tackled because everyone is mobbing about the last 20% of the game. The idea of a revolving epicenter of PvE, which is designed to be accessed by all levels is a fantastic one specifically because it avoids the “dead zones” problem that only gets worse with each content addition when every single bit of content is permanent. Not only that, getting new adventures on a regular basis is a lot more fun for both the casual and hardcore player. The hardcore guys can have a new farm every few weeks, which keeps it fresh, and the casual players can have a fresh and new experience every few weeks that other people are actually playing, and then move on with their lives/other games/whatever until the next update.

All in all i really enjoyed F&F after its slow start, I enjoyed the feeling of permanence, that blowing up those molten facilities really did blow them up eventually. I enjoyed going back to cragstead and seeing all of the people I saved and knowing that they really were saved in a global sense. it made my time playing feel much more worthwhile and accomplished because i was part of something that was larger than just a chain of instances related to me.

It’s different, yeah, and not everyone is going to like this kind of content delivery mindset and that’s okay. Not every game has to be the same and there are a lot of other games that are really great and do things differently, but I like the fact that this one is doing things this way and want to see it continue.

The flower backpack essentially tells you the entire plot in its item description without any spoiler warning.

Why Anet? Why?

Grimwolf.7163:

Well, technically, I think once you have enough Toughness that Healing Power would actually start to be more beneficial, regardless of how much healing you have Vitality would then become a better attribute for overall survival.
Especially with Signet of Malice, since it generally provides a pretty massive amount of wasted over-heal.
And then there’s the fact that the Thief has so little base Health, making Vitality, which already provides the most raw defense, even more effective on the Thief than most other classes.

Actually, I’ve found that I’ve been more and more giving up vitality for more toughness. Basically, if you’ve got enough vit to withstand two or three attacks and your evasion timing is good enough to actually use SoM properly, you’re not getting very much out of the vit, and you’re wasting a LOT on overheals when you could be recovering from those hits you took a lot faster numerically by taking the toughness/HP rather than the vit. This is a thing that can vary a LOT due to content type though. VIT is more important in WVW, less in sPvP, and even less in PvE, due largely to factors including number of sources and amount of potential incoming damage.

BrimstoneAshe.5043:

Once it’s pointed out there are builds that could counter unbeatable build… lay down the trap card. Well I suppose that’s a good way to completely evade the point I was trying to make. Fair enough.

Honestly the “trap card” is a viable argument when it comes to thieves. Stealth is literally half of all of our defensive traits and skills.

It’s the equivalent of dropping an anti-aegis card. Some classes will be minorly affected by it, but guardians would be majorly effected by it.

I understand WHY the traps exist. Veil zergs and stealthed portalbombs can make a joke of defensive preparations. However I feel that the implementation is lacking. Applying 30 seconds of revealed is extremely harsh if you’re a stealth thief, and almost ignorable if you’re running any other build. This isn’t like the confusion nerf. Confusion mesmers can still kill people, can still use the build. This trap effectively removes an entire trait line from play for thieves for 30 seconds, regardless of where they go.

A better implementation would have been to create an anti-stealth field around the trap once triggered than ticked 1s revealed every 1.5 seconds. This would be just as effective against those problem tactics.

On a larger scale though, I’m expecting to see more of these traps. I wouldn’t be suprised to see anti-speed traps, anti-boon traps, and all other manner of harsh defenses that will likely hit other classes just as hard. It only makes sense as it promotes combined force efforts and discourages homogenized and stale WvW tactics in favor of being creative and adapatable.

This is a good thing, but only as an end result. These traps really shouldn’t have been released piecemeal as the message that this sort of release sends is a pretty clear “We don’t want stealth thieves in WvW” whether it’s intended or not.

Dang, I’m late.

Healing power, as a stat, does in fact effect SoM as others have stated. The Toughness/HP discussion is an interesting one, but with a passive healing setup like SoM the value of toughness tanks to drop off in favor of healing power if, like most thieves that use SoM, you’re running a very evasion or blind heavy build.

Essentially, while toughness will reduce the damage of the few hits you take, it won’t do it in large enough quantities to make NOT reinforcing SoM with some healing power effective. This is untrue for larger, more active heals, as the “tankability” of the HP they grant is a lot more important than the numbers on the heal.

Basically, when you’ve got an occasional input of damage, and an occasional heal, the act of mitigating the damage is more useful than buffing the heal because you’re only healing once in a great while, but you’re potentially taking damage much more often.

However, think of SoM as a constant stream of heals addressing a less constant source of damage. In the case of SoM (unless you’re doing some weird build that uses the active a lot.) You’re often increasing survivability more by buffing the heal, as your overall benefit in healing often vastly outstrips the utility of toughness the less you get hit, because you’re healing all of the time. That’s not to say toughness isn’t valuable to SoM, it very much is, but in my experience running D/D evasion build around SoM I can definately say that 500 healing power was much more survivable than adding 500 toughness solely due to the multiplicative effect of the healing versus the flat effect of the toughness.

However, I found that adding 250 of each (splitting the difference) was actually more effective overall, as the composite of slight damage reduction and slight heal increase was more effective when combined than dumping everything in to one stat or the other.

In short, the value of toughness to healing power ratios for Signet of Malice is very dependent on playstyle and build. if you’re aggressive and good with evasion, you might want to lean more toward the HP end of the spectrum. If you’re a bit more defensive and rely on soaking smaller hits, you might want to lean heavier on toughness.

I’ll also remember that, no matter what, no matter how much stuff people get, no matter how much fun the content is, no matter how much free stuff they’re handed, they’ll still complain that they didn’t get all of the rare loot, that the world didn’t revolve around their personal schedule, that some items are in the gem store, and that the idea of stories with an actual beginning, middle, and end is an awful idea.

Lighten up. It’s extremely old news that the living story is based around temporary content, and that a large portion of the team is dedicated to delivering these temporary stories. You missed some stuff during a story arc. Do you honestly think that everyone is intended to acquire every cosmetic item in every event and story update? What would be the point of the event loot? There was common event loot and rare event loot just like there’s common and rare normal loot.

Danikat.8537:

I also find it amusing that they’re being overseen by Flamekeepers (at least one of whom is a charr).

Flamekeepers are/were high ranked Flame Legion priests.

And they were really good at opening doors, and being oblivious to bands of adventurers!

I don’t know if that dude getting crushed was “serious” our group actually found it rather comical on our first run.

This guy getting ACME- anviled and then Braham going “Hey I know that guy!”

Comedy Gold. All it was missing was the dredge weapons operator going “meep meep”

The refugees that haven’t moved in at the hatchery or cragstead are either still in camps, or on a boat to southsun.

Their boats are apperantly a lot slower than the one we use to get there.

I agree that I think it would be really nice to wrap up these arcs with an “epilogue” cutscene.

I mean, we got the rox and braham cutscenes after the MWF, but it’d be really nice to get one of those dynamic cutscenes that features our characters, maybe even have one of the NPCs recounting the adventue in voice over (so you only need to record one VO line) but feature our character as the “key” character in the cutscene.

You know, make the living story feel like it’s bookended my something that feels like the whole “and this is my story” stuff.

Put those talented cinematics folks to work!

TBH, someone should rent a room and just start a “singleton” league so any number of these types of teams can be formed and compete. I’d envision the structure to be something like

Preliminary round – Single elmination versus other same-profession teams
Second round – Top 2 teams from each profession join a bracket consisting of one of the top qualifying teams from each profession. Double Elimination, loser’s bracket will automatically be matched against a profession other than the one they lost to as long as one exists.
Final Round – Top teams from each second round bracket go at it single elimination.

I’m not much for sPvP, but it’s definitely something I’d watch.

I agree. As a long time user and lover of Signet of Malice, I can wholeheartedly tell you that the last thing you want to do with it is activate it. Ever. Unless the fight is already over and you’re in danger of bleeding or burning to death and can’t clear it for some reaon. You’re going to be losing more HP during the cooldown than you’re gaining with the effect from the vamp runes. In addition, S/D is a pretty poor set for SoM due to its low hit rate per initiative. The guy that said it’s only really worth it with P/P (power/crit) or D/D (Deathblossom evasion) is forgetting S/P’s pistol whip… but S/P has other issues that make it kinda meh. I run it on a D/D condition build, and if you’re looking for a “vampire” thief you should consider something similar. High toughness, high condition damage, abandon most of stealth in favor of evasion, and pack a life sigil and a set of mad king runes.

In fact, here, steal my build if you like:

Geared with Carrion and ascended Condition/vit/tough jewelry
For SPvP try running carrion or shaman jewels I suppose.
1x Carrion/Chrysacola Orb, 1x Shaman’s dagger/ Life (Your preference for dagger stats may vary. I like the 1x shaman’s)
6x runes of the mad king.

Traits:
Deadly Arts – 20 – Potent Poison/Mug – Improvisation (Poison to mitigate heals, weakness from minor further mitigates incoming damage, Improv for better white damage and game-changing recharge, Swap poison for mug if you need more tank than spank as the mug heal combined with your other heals in the build can be very useful)

Critical Strikes – 0

Shadow Arts 10 – Shadow’s Embrace (Clutch condition removals with CnD, Little Extra Vit, this build rarely stealths and makes last refuge actually help you rather than hurt you most of the time)

Acrobatics 20 – Power of Inertia – Assassin’s reward (Might improves condition damage and you’re dodging constantly. Assassin’s reward backs up Signet of Malice to make the passive healing work.)

Trickery 20 – Uncatchable – Bountiful Theft (Dodge-trops, vigor, and steal cooldown.)

Skills:
Heal- Signet of malice. Build revolves around this.

Slot1 – Trick – Roll For initiative (PvP or bossfights) / Caltrops (General PvE)

Slot2 – Deception – Shadow Refuge (It’s shadow refuge!)

Slot3 – Deception – ShadowStep (Needed for condition removal)

You can also benefit more reliably from Improvisation by taking a venom, trap, or signet in stead, greatly increasing the odds you’ll get a free charge from Improv.

Elite – Daggerstorm (General PvE/ Zergfights) / Basilisk Venom (Bossfights / 1v1)

General sustained attack chain is 2-3 autos > Dodgetrops> Deathblossom in PvE however the build functions best by playing defensively and in stead simply wailing away with autos and using your dodges and deathblossoms to evade attacks, handing out a little stack of bleeds for each big hit your opponent tries. You’ll be using steal mid-fight a lot with this build, especially if you take mug, and you’ll have to live up to the name of the trait and learn to improvise.

Hope that helps.

Guard walls/bubbles don’t either. Tom’s projectiles are supposed to be unblockable in order to make you use the crystals/fans. The fact that various profession skills could block his skills was a bug that made the encounter far easier than it was supposed to be. have you never accomplished tom without using smokescreen and reflection type skills? It’s not that hard.

A pretty amazing one hour buff. 10% to all stats alone is pretty killer, the MF and Xp is a nice plus.

I think I’ll most remember the rabid onset of panic during the first weapons test, and then the panic during the first encounter with the bosses, and the sheer awesomeness of fleeing a collapsing facility under threat of a ticking time bomb.

Everything leading up to the dungeon was nice, but non of it was nearly as memorable as “FIRE EVERYTHING” and my whole guild group in vent going “Wait… seriousl..AHH”

The leadups to the finale? Nothing special, vaguely annoying fetch quests and refugees that just walked a lot without appearing to be in any danger and a molten alliance that never really attacked anything important. The Finale was for sure memorable, especially the first time.

That’s all

Its a very good guide for certain builds, but not in any way a comprehensive thief site.

For instance:

• Evasion – Several Thief attacks include an evasion component, using these attacks in place of a dodge can effectively starve your target of endurance, especially if your build has access to weakness through the deadly arts line. Built and played properly, an evasion based thief using double daggers or sword/dagger can evade over 70% of all incoming damage from a single PvP source, and 100% of all damage from many PvE sources while still outputting damage, and do so for minutes at a time and in some cases permanently

• Condition cover – If playing a condition thief, it is important to find methods to add additional conditions after your bleeds are applied, as most condition removal tools function on a LIFO implementation, removing the most recently applied conditions. Using stolen items or conditions avaliable from your weapons skills can go a long way toward ensuring your bleeds continue to stack and tick on your target.

• The many uses of Shadow Refuge – In addition to its stealth and passive healing, Shadow refuge is the only non-necromancer dark field in the game. Thieves have several attacks with a 100% projectile combo chance that will interact with this field for bonus damage in the form of life stealing, the most notable of these being dancing dagger as it proces the life steal for each hit, giving you four activations when used against two or more targets. The initiative system will allow you to cast these skill multiple times, for multiple combo activations accounting for a potentially substantial situational heal. If using D/D, a 100% whirl finisher, you can leverage the combo field to create multiple instances of leeching bolts by dropping your refuge on a tight clump of enemies, also creating a fairly significant heal.

• In addition opponents in PvP are hard wired to assume any thief that drops a shadow refuge is standing in that shadow refuge. Use this against them. Stealth and drop a shadow refuge in the opposite direction of your retreat and you’ll often get a much better running start!

• Finally, you may want to note that dropping SR on a downed ally, even if you’re not helping to rez them will grant the stealth, but more importantly will heal them consistantly over time, and can not be interrupted once cast. This is a big deal in all modes of play as you have the ability to greatly assist a rez while continuing to fight.

• Downed state Sneak Attack – Your #1 downed skill has a stealth attack that does a larger amount of damage and applies poison + bleeding. If playing a condition thief this can be instrumental in securing a rally for yourself on a weakened opponent in close fights by covering bleeds already ticking on the target as well as debuffing their healing.

• Signet of Malice and Runes of the Mad King When used together, this heal/rune combination turns any of your thief elites in to a rather potent heal. Most useful on evasion focused builds with high hit volumes like D/D bleed or S/P pistolwhip, Signet of Malice synergizes with the birds summoned by the rune, effectively turning your thief elite in to a very good heal in addition to its other effects. Most notable are daggerstorm in large groups of enemies as the hit count of daggerstorm is very high, and is then followed by the birds allowing you to finish, escape, or reposition while still being healed, or Basilisk venom, as its low 45 second cooldown syncs perfectly with the rune and automatically activates the petrification effect on the first bird hit. Very useful in single target encounters like 1v1 fights in PvP or bosses in PvE

Workable compromise I Think:

Either make it heat seeking

or make it unblockable

seeking means a higher overall success rate of connecting the wire, which would mean evasion/blocking are the natural counterplays

Unblockable means less overall success (like now) and a higher skillcap to use, but if you DO use it right against the counterplay of, well, moving, then you’re rewarded for it.

In either case I think the projectile speed could be increased a tad. all things considered it’s our only real 1200 range option designed to deal with long range opponents and is still basically a clone of the necromancer pull. Thing is, the necro has options to actually engage in combat at that distance with a staff, wheras we need to use a closing tool to bridge that gap. Thus, I feel it’s warranted that our pull is a little better.

I do agree that a lot of the leadup events in F&F were underwhelming. In stead of seeing something happen, we were simply told that a thing happenned.

Those refugees would have felt better in the world if they were coupled with events along the periphery of the zones that included an explosion and an impassible door or something.

So, in stead of cruising along and just seeing refugees, you’re walking along and KABLAM, there’s this giant explosion and some refugees come staggering out, babbling incoherantly in shock about whatever just happened, and that leads to a minor escort event wherin you protect them from general wildlife and they try to fill in some details on the trip. If the event sets off and no one is around, have the refugees faint and put an event marker over one of them, in which case you’d res the down refugee and trigger the escort that way.

In stead what we got was very passive, just a bunch of people walking along a road in the aftermath of some disaster we had no interaction or evidence of, and the occasional event to kill some elementals in a tornado storm.

In the end of it all it boiled down to a handful of instanced dungeons, (truthfully a single dungeon, but in theme they were multiple facilities. This makes sense from a development perspective) and while those dungeons were fun it didn’t ever feel like the molten alliance was making a dedicated strike. Those molten alliance events should have dominated those zones, replacing all other events, replacing the mobs in escort events, etc. for the duration of the finale.

All in all I think the story itself was pretty sound, but the presentation was a bit lacking. Hopefully the secret of southsun content is a bit more “in your face” out in the open world. It’d be hard not to be considering that the island is currently almost devoid of pre-existing content.