Guild Wars 2

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

They already did something like that, there’s an “unsuspicious rabbit” at mount maelstrom.

Which is… exactly… where the post came from

I’ll second the engineer.

Between kits, turrets, toolbelts, picking up turrets, dropping the kit to fire a weapon, equipping the kit again, overloading the turrets…

Yeah, he has a lot of buttons. Probably my favorite alt.

PhelanDisturbed.1650:

spvp

large battle

It’s your computer.

Argon.1563:

You’ll know your at the dungeon, beacuse lots of players commonly sit outside it, high and low level alike.

Also, there’s a massive and impossible to ignore door on your map.

The easiest way to rally is to play a condition build. Your DoTs still tick on everything when you go down, and if your DoT kills something, you’ll rally. Condition necros and thieves tend to have the easiest rallies because of this, and its not uncommon when fighting large groups of enemies on such builds to simply insta-rally after an attack that downs you. That said it’s not alone a reason to build for conditions, but rather a nice little extra that makes for some hilarious combat situations now and then.

We’ve had costume brawl pitfights with prizes before. Sometimes FFA and sometimes Themed.

Also fun with tonics: “Guard the thing”

Your VIP takes a tonic, and you set, with banners, a specific route your players need to walk. Its in your best interest to make the route hazardous. Players have to protect the toniced, helpless player and make sure he lives through the entire trip.

Lofat.2406:

I think P/P is very viable when used in combination with S/D, D/D, etc. I mostly roam solo in wvw and have rolled with PP/SD with very good success.

I feel like you might be on to something with treating P/P as a swap for another weapon with built in control and gap closing. In theory I guess you could utilize unload’s burst as a ranged opener to soften up a target once, then swap to your main set, swapping back to P/P whenever it’s tactically sound to do so.

It’s like the inverse of the way most of us use shortbow. We use it as a defensive swap to get out of combat. This sort of use of P/P would be as an “opener swap” which would make using the on swap sigil effects for your main set potentially highly valuable in a burst chain setup.

The fun starts when you start labeling things as “Un-Suspicious”

That one still puzzles me.

Best/Favorite:
Jewelry Boxes. Mostly because karma is largely useless to me for anything else, so it’s essentially a risk-free gamble. That makes it fun because I end up buying a lot of them, and then, once in a while I kick a bunch of boosts on and buy a WHOLE bunch of them. Gambling is fun when you can do a lot of it at once. It allows you to more readily focus on the good rolls than the poor ones.

Worst/least:
Black Lion Chests. I could write a treatise on why, despite the fact that people buy them, “lockbox” cash shop incentivizing items are at best annoying game design and at worst psychologically exploitative cash shop design.

[cut]

Seriously though, I feel like this is a pretty accurate representation of player opinions of the current state of classes. Balance needs work, and this will take time, but it can be said rather plainly that although players may perceive things this way, balance is a lot closer in GW2 than some of its contemporaries, wherin the “low tier” classes aren’t just less optimal, but largely useless. At least in GW2 a lower tier player with a hefty helping of player skill can close that gap pretty easily.

Interesting exercise:

Convert laurels to real world cash value.
Look at how much stuff costs on the laurel vendor.

Ascended amulets are about $600 bucks, which is a pretty nice necklace by any standard.

Also, break down the time to complete your daily, then divide that by twenty bucks. Laugh at how little you get paid compared to your actual life.

Advent.6193:

My Thief’s 65. But I’ve been mixing Carrion and Rampager specced eq. That, plus some Shadow Arts action keeps me a little less glassy. I’m pretty sure Orr has both of those specs floating around. As for Prec/Tough/Cond (i.e. Rabid) – I’ve been using those on my main to good effect. Although he’s a Mesmer, and they’ve got better base health to play with.

Its important to note that, unlike condition builds for most other classes, thief condition builds have no damaging condition-on-crit traits. Thus, unlike every other class, precision is not a very useful stat for thief condition builds as your only source of condition procs is a sigil, which alone doesn’t make up for the extra duration or condition damage you could add to your bleeds with something else.

Carrion is a very, very, solid pick for bleed thieves. If you’re the type of bleed thief that likes to run signet of malice, a mix of carrion/apothecary is a good way to fine tune survivability if the carrion alone doesn’t feel durable enough. Crit gear on thief condition builds is simply not worth the investment for the most part.

ZoiN.4280:

EDIT: I remember Rurik from GW1 – even though you probably didden’t know all to much about him I remember feeling attached to him, having to follow him through the shiverpeaks mountain to see him get killed was touching in a way – atleast I remember that I wished that he wouldn’t die as he did, only to find him at the end undead, having to fight him to get to the Lich dude.

Honostly, the prophecies campaign has so far been my favorite story campaign from GW1 as well as GW2.

I agree. Even though the side quests were often a bore, GW1’s story missions were, at the time of its release, some of the most engaging RPG content at the time. The story itself had interesting characters and plot twists, and in the end, although a largely forgotten footnote in history, the players themselves were largely responsible for the major victories in that story, and were treated as such by the NPCs.

I think the problem with Traherne is that while he’s a cool guy and all, he never does anything that particularly endears him to the player, and moreso, he replaces your order mentor who did a lot to be endearing. We meet him halfway along his story, after he’s already the leading authority on Orr, already a well travelled firstborn, and already someone people seem to know despite our characters having no knowledge of him. He never sticks his neck out for you, but he constantly expects you to stick your neck out for him. You do 90% of the work and he gets 90% of the credit from all of the major NPCs. Traherne’s position and that o the order mentors really should have been reversed. If Traherne was to set you on your path, then fade away quietly as you’re paired up with a mentor who respects and allows you to grow, only to be taken away near the end to leave you to complete their work in fond memory, the story would have been much improved. We’d accept Traherne as a background character, but as a pivotal actor in the plot he’s just not that interesting. he has no interesting quirks or flaws and isn’t particularly endearing.

Geewoody.2017:

A true madman would do this with main-hand light.

Offhand dagger only. Dancing dagger+C&D, add in IDK 30 acrobatics and stealth, throw on zerker gear… and be really annoying to everyone XD

Aside from doing fractals/dungeons (which I do maybe once or twice a week)

Vendor all blues.

Salvage all whites and salvage items

Gather flippin’ everything

Keep greens, and toss them in the mystic forge for rares.

Sell rares/exotics.

Sell any T5/T6 crafting mats you don’t need.

Keep low tier crafting mats, and upgrade them in the MF with philosopher’s stones any time you end up with a stack.

Don’t be afraid to use MF food and guild bonuses. They’re far cheaper than MF gear and you can keep your build largely intact as long as it doesn’t rely on some specific consumable buff to function.

Use your naturally gained karma to buy the new orrian jewelry boxes. Keep the karma drinks until you have a big stack to use with a karma booster (wait to get one from dailies or buy it with gems), and sell the contents. When you’re ready to drink all that karma, stick on a booster and as many karma buffs as possible, buy a bulk of the boxes, open, drink, buy open, etc. until you’re out of karma. This nets a decent amount of money for karma you weren’t doing anything with anyway as the boxes tend to drop high value lodestones and in bulk openings you end up with several stacks of greys worth over 1g to the vendor (and probably multiple minipets which are account bound :P)

Doing the above things I’ve never had gold problems in GW2.

Lemming, I applaud your insanity, but keep in mind the no-offhand skills for thieves exist only so that thieves have a third skill to use in the tutorial like everyone else. Developers have stated they never intended them to be used in an actual build.

That said, if you can put together a build that kills people… well you’re officially killing people with one hand tied behind your back. That’s impressive, and would make some hilarious video.

Daecollo.9578:

Oxygen.5918:

Fleet shadows is actually better than swiftness for a few reasons, but notably these:

1) The 50% speed bonus brings you to 125% while in combat, while swiftness would only bring you to 108%; together, they bring you to the 133% maximum

2) It counteracts the effects of cripple and chill more than swiftness does, and as mentioned above, stacks with swiftness to help counteract these effects even more

3) It cannot be stripped

Movement speed is capped at 33%, regardless of what you have.

133% is Normal move speed +33%

AKA the cap.

Fleet shadows makes the absolute move speed cap achievable while in combat (in stealth), and this is accurate information. It’s a very good trait that’s better than swiftness when in combat, where your stealthed move speed really counts. IMO it’s one of the best 5 point traits we have avaliable.

Its not a matter of difficulty, its a matter of design. Games with a more robust and competitive crafting element (typically sandboxes like UO, EVE, or Mortal Online) use this type of looting system because the crafting is specifically designed around it. The loot in these systems isn’t designed to provide as much of a random profit potential and “woah cool loot” situations because the metagame revolves around more heady resource management. The loot and locations is can be acquired are a lot more spread out, and there’s a very importnat risk versus transport element in these systems.

In a game like GW2, the loot isn’t designed to be realistic as much as it’s designed to be fun. In sandboxes with more realistic loot, the crafting and trading meta is designed around scarcity and a resource gathering, wheras the trading and crafting meta (and hence the loot) in GW2 is designed around plenty and currency gathering. You’re supposed to be able to trip over perfectly good weapons and armor every five minutes, and you’re expected to continually convert the lackluster ones you don’t want or need in to currency at an NPC, and either use or sell the good ones to other players for currency.

In short, for realistic looting systems to work, a framework has to exist to support that system and make it fun. The current state of loot, when combined with the way GW2’s crafting is set up, is simply more fun, and easier for casual players to grasp. If you shoehorned loot realism in to the current systems the game would end up overall worse for it, and you’d be expecting the casual market that GW2 is trying to court to develop a much higher level working knowledge of loot tables rather than use the current system which is simply “higher level foes drop better stuff”

In a recent thread discussing jumping puzzles:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Narcemus.1348:

I hate to point this out, being a person that is in a love/hate relationship with jumping puzzles. It is kinda annoying that two jumping puzzles are required to get world completion (Vizier’s Tower & Great Wall in Diessa). I’m not calling you out to change this, I’ve gotten used to them, but I have friends that have given up on world completion for this reason, their computers are just too terrible on lag to give them the ability to do these puzzles properly. Just food for thought on future creations.

I’ll look into this. I’d like to get the Vistas changed or the jumping challenges reduced on any of them that are too hard for casual players. Anyone know of any others that feel too hard?

Essentially, Early on in development of some maps jumping puzzles weren’t yet considered completely optional content. Josh wants to reduce the difficulty of vistas that are too jump intensive, as he’s stated in the above thread that they want jumping puzzles to be fun but optional content for people who actually enjoy them.

If you’re having a huge problem with a vista, make sure you comment in this or another thread so make your voice known so that these vistas can be brought in line with the majority of other vistas.

There are only a handful of vistas in the game that require real Jumping Puzzle like coordination and platforming play, and its been made clear that the intention is that this kind of play should be reserved specifically for the optional jumping puzzles, and that they’re toning down a number of vistas so that the difficulty is more managable for players who aren’t quite as platforming friendly.

Just skip it for now, and return once Josh and company have adjusted the difficulty. You’ll find there are maybe four vistas in the whole game with this kind of difficulty, and while I found them fun, rest assured it’s not normal or intended that you have to do a medium to hard level jumping challenge to complete vistas, and a fix is coming.

Tamaki Revolution.3548:

Amos.8760:

I went down to the local BB&B and they said I could only get one per day.

Also, they said if I didn’t want to pay for it, I could do the following:
– empty trashcans 0/5 (0%)
– update price tags 0/10 (0%)
– revive employees 0/5 (0%)
– greet customers 0/25 (0%)
– sweep aisles 0/10 (0%)

Nothing to add, except win post of the day :P I doubt their employees want to be revived though.

I also think this thread will be deleted once a mod wakes up tomorrow since it’s fun.

My GF works at one nearby and I can confirm that the majority of BB&B employees are in dire need of revival at least once a day.

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

Any PuG can succeed anywhere with adequate communication. Don’t be afraid to tell people to slot in useful skills – I’ve learned more about my own class when people tell me to use X and Y skills in dungeons than I have experimenting on my own. And also don’t be afraid to tell people that you’re about to go down – better to tell them beforehand so that someone’s nearby to help rather than have everyone clustered on the opposite side of the island while your downed HP bar drops to zero.

This I’ve found very true. People that know their class, know their build, and most importantly know that swapping to different utilities for different encounters is an intended and vital part of the game can usually clear just about anything. People don’t give rangers a lot of love, but honestly, they’ve got some really useful skills for certain situations. Search and rescue is hands down one of my favorite reasons to have a competant ranger in the group for instance. I still feel like they could use a bit more spirit love. Ranger spirits in GW1 were literally game changing, but still balanced. We should really put that power back in the hands of rangers as a viable support option.

Honestly, our best workable strategy for this fight?

Me.

Any bleed thief running signet of malice and daggerstorm with appropriate gear makes it a very easy fight. When the adds pop, I SR the group to draw all aggro from the adds, move directly under the boss, drops caltrops, and Daggerstorm away. After four seconds, the group breaks their stealth and starts wailing on everything with aoes.

The bouncing projectiles+and reflection all in one ends up turning the elementals against themselves, which helps the bleeds and party clean up. Simultaneously, it’s also stacking a good half of the hits on the shield and crippling the boss for a near eternity. The caltrops further enhance the cripple on the boss and bleeds on the adds, and usually, if the group has a lot of high-powered AOE, the pack is dead and the shield is gone before daggerstorm is over. If there’s not as much aoe Avaliable, the shield is down and cleaning up the adds is still pretty fast due to the largely uniform damage they’ve taken from the bleed DoTs.

Every class has skills that make this strategy a snap. Mesmer/guardian bubbles speed it along, necro plague, engineer supply drop/grenades, warrior/ranger/ele AoE, etc.

We’ve found it hands down the easiest way to beat the encounter with minimal risk.

I agree that people should be able to speedrun, but that it shouldn’t me a mechanically superior option.

Speeding should be a difficult undertaking that gives equivalent risk/reward to clearing trash. The way it’s set up now, speeding is simply a better value. If nothing but trash drops were changed (I think the T6 mats idea is a really good one) we’d see a dungeon system that made speeding just as viable, but may put clearing on equal footing time/money wise.

Then you’d have really good reasons to do one or the other. Speeding would be ideal for tokens, or just to prove you can (because half the fun of a speed run is trying to shave down the time) while clearing would be more viable for sheer bulk of reward.

Screaming Cantaloupe.2308:

2. For the crafting level one, would you want a crafting level 25 tray to be made? If that particular food that worthy to be spent on? I’m pretty sure there is better variants that have a higher priority than some vegetable stock.

Yeah, I actually would. Specifically because after you’ve put together the recipe they’d be excessively cheap to make. Cheap enough that when you’re running open world stuff with largish groups where food isn’t really necessary that you could just fling out trays of cheap stuff for little xp boosts. Aside from that, roleplay and event hosting purposes, cheap tray recipies would make putting on the illusion of a “spread” for your party a bit easier. Assuming they use the same models I don’t see them being an inordinate amount of development effort, so I’m wondering what the reasoning was to leave them out.

I’m a Chef. I’ve got all the gear I like, and thus, I’ve moved to a personal endgame goal of mystic forging as many tray recipes as possible.

It’s fun for me.

That said, I have a few small problems with tray recipies.

1. Value
I’m fine with the cost of the tray recipies. However, for something that takes ten units to craft each time, and costs around 10+ gold, 30ish skill points, and a month’s worth of mystic coins, I feel that the five minute time limit on them is a bit short. They’d be a lot more practical to use if they lasted somewhere in the 15-30 minute range.

2. Selection
Post-release foods, and foods below a certain crafting level can’t be made in to trays. Why? Was this just an oversight? I’d like to be able to set out trays of pumpkin cookies, or ice cream, or even low level foods in starter areas.

3. Implementation
The tray model is pretty nice, but a few variant models for alternate food types would really spice these up. Lets face it: food trays are a significant investment that sits somewhere between unique model exotics and ascended gear. I’m not asking for an alternate model for every concievable food type, but having a model for fritters, one for steaks, one for pies, etc. would really make these a bit more pleasurable to work with.

4.Crafting
The mystic forge is kinda peculiar when you’re trying to get these done. You’ve got to specifically put the food in first. It’d be a tiny QoL thing if you could put the ingredients in the forge in any order to check the amounts needed to craft the tray recipe.

JohnLShannonhouse.1820:

Kormir played a vital role in starting Nightfall. However, if it had not been her it would have been someone else eventually. All that was required was for someone to dig around in the forbidden ruins and awaken the Apocrypha. There was no one cause to the start of Nightfall. A trap was set and eventually someone fell into it.

True, but the theory here is that the Sunspears, as guardians of Istan and by extension the First City were directly responsible for preventing exactly that kind of action. Remember that Fahranur was off limits for a reason, even enchanted to be guarded forever by the ghosts of dead sunspears. A sunspear, specifically, was the key to making it all happen. In this case it was kormir, who by extension enabled Varesh, who was a worshipper of Abaddon to actually have a means to obtain power from him. Without the direct actions of a sunspear (Kormir in this case, but any high ranking sunspear could have made the call eventually) Varesh would have had to take istan and the first city by force, and even then figure out a way past the invincible ghosts protecting it, which I’d imagine would prove nearly insurmountable for an army of any size.

You can actually give them away to a commander. Just call out in mapchat that you have siege you want to donate. All you need to do is doubleclick the siege plan to get the box, and then use your swap weapon key to drop it on the ground. Any ally can then pick it up and repack it in to a plan for later use. This has been confirmed by Anet as the current intended method for trading siege.

It sounds like you’ve got a pretty big stock and any commander would happily take your plans if you announced you wanted to donate them.

This is absolutely the direction i wish personal stories had taken. MMO plots are commonly far too focused on making sure everyone is “the chosen one”

In GW2, we’re ALL Traherne’s right hand man, we all get railroaded in to defeating Zhaitan and investigating the risen… and none of these things matter much when we’re not in our own (or the dungeon’s) instances.

There’s no shortage of epic personal story potential. In stead of making us the savior of the world let that be handled via living story, working together with other players and important NPCs. In stead, let us be the sole savior of out home instances. It’s a personal story right? Give us personal nemeses to contend with, problems that affect our home town, and add dimension to our woefully under-utilized early level companions.

Is saving the world from Zhaitan something we shouldn’t be involved in? No, we should be involved, but we shouldn’t be the chosen commander and Traherne’s best friend. We should be saving our home town from whatever giant nasty thing threatens it in ways only instanced content could deliver. We don’t have to take down an elder dragon. Single handedly protecting all of our friends from just one champion could be an appropriately epic battle in and of itself due to the scale of our party size of one, adjusted up with extra trash if we bring friends.

Engineer – Elite – Overdrive
Cooldown – 90
Cast – Instant
Simultaneously cast all of your toolbelt skills twice in a row, ignoring their cooldowns and the presence of turrets. Ground targeted toolbelt skills become enemy targeted, and channeled skills are passively channeled, allowing free action during the duration.

Warrior – Elite – Smashing Stance
Cooldown 120
Duration 5
Breaks Stun
Can chain in to Overpower during duration.

For five seconds, gain swiftness and stability, and push back all foes in melee range while moving. becomes Overpower while active.

Overpower
Range 1200
Cancels Smashing Stance
.5s activation
Leap at target foe, knocking them down for two seconds and applying 5 seconds of cripple, weakness, and vulnerability.

So, uh, what happens when someone decides to crash your carefully orchestrated set of rules?

There are much better, less traveled places in WvW to set up duels. Like out in the middle of a field somewhere. I honestly don’t see the allure myself, but I would imagine it would be as easy as getting in a party and dropping a personal waypoint on the map.

Karolis.4261:

Stiv.1820:

SB has a huge edge for get away because it will port you while rooted/crippled.. and if you get stunned after it fires off it will still port you. Downside is they emeny can see the swirls of the shadowstep if you are doing it in stealth (if they know), with HS they can only hear your first couple.

Well the real downside of Infiltrators arrow is that it breakes stealth.

It actually doesn’t break stealth. This is a well known bug, but although you’ll appear on your client, and those of your allies, to have broken stealth, you’re actually still stealthed. This has been tested multiple times.

Basically, try the following:

Stealth
IA
Check out your buffs, you’ll see you’re still stealthed.

Heck, IA next to some mobs and watch as they completely ignore you.

Additionally, it you wait, you’ll see another “bamf” when stealth wears off for real.

As best as I can figure it, the “bamf” effect is coded in such a way that the effect itself alters the way the model is rendered to the player/allies, and some designer somewhere took a shortcut and reused the same “bamf” effects script for IA as was already present with stealth.

This bug is as old as release, and confusing to new thieves. Really wish they’d fix that.

The only only problem people have with the JP is that it uses the same que slots as the rest of the map.

Personally, I like WvW, and I like the JP. When I run to WvW, the JP is usually the first on my list of things to get out of the way. I go in, scope it out, if there’s a defending massive zerg that I can’t sneak by, I say screw it and leave. If there’s a manageable number of enemies, I’ll fight my way through.

If I have an opportunity to help allies as I work my way through the puzzle I do so, and when I have the opportunity I do what I can to kill any enemies possible on the way through to speed the path for my allies.

However, once I’m through, got the chest, and have cleared out enemies or died trying at the top of the puzzle (past the arena room) that’s it for the day. I feel like this is pretty much how the thing was developed. You go there, you get the chest/help others, and you leave when you’re finished.

The fact that people actually go there in small groups specifically to get good small group PvP (And it’s very good there!) speaks more to a failing of the overall design of WvW than the jumping puzzle. There aren’t enough opportunities in WvW proper for those kinds of fights, despite supply camps. guards, and other such things being the “intended” arenas for those kinds of fights.

Just move them to their own instance, which is accessed from the same portals/caves they are now, and give them a respawn waypoint at the beginning. This means that people still need to hazard enemy territory in borderlands, and still need to make sure their server owns at least on EB keep, but makes sure that people that like to stay there don’t negatively impact the surface numbers, as their que slots free up once they enter, and they’re free to live/die as much as they like, but need to re-que if they’d like to get back to the main map.

Stonemist golem party was fun. Intense three way in the lord room was fun for a while. Lag was not.

Good matchup!

Where are the rams?

It’s funny actually. I rolled on Tarnished Coast at launch because I figured the unofficial roleplay server would be in the toilet rankings and I’d have a chance to really help a server rise with a small guild.

In stead I ended up helping a server fight tooth and nail every week to hang on to its T2 spot among an amazingly diverse group of small guilds.

So yeah, I’m pretty proud to be in the TC militia, simply because it’s a proof that a collection of small groups, working together for a common goal, can actually do pretty well for themselves.

You have some pretty amazing zerg-moving potential with a caltrops+daggerstorm rush, and its largely the most effective tactic on condition builds.

Barring that bomb, thieves are best employed in zerg fights by policing the perimeter of the fight, which helps to either break up the enemy zerg in to bite-sized chunks, or scares them further in to their own stack where they are easier to AoE for your allies.

Also, you are commonly the best weapon against other thieves trying to do the same job, and I often find myself locked in a duel with an enemy thief in the middle of zerg fights while the both of us are attempting to simultaneously do our job and prevent the opposing thief from doing theirs.

These sorts of fights tend to go largely unbothered as the thief’s allies, once they see that the two high-mobility stealth equipped thieves are keeping one another occupied generally tend to go after easier targets in the zerg. It’s a really fun part of the thief meta in WvW I think.

wookie.8934:

As a necro, I oftentimes giggle when a thief daggerstorms and expects to live. Plague Signet and Corrupt Boon make it much too easy to melt thieves.

For sure. Necros don’t often get the proper amount of respect in WvW for their boon mitigating and control abilities. A solidy built necro can all but solo-cancel a portal bomb, protected stomp, or many of the other effective mass combat strategies employed in WvW.

Nothing ruins my day like having my massive bleed stacks thrown back in my face and covered with a bunch of other conditions.

Because it’s just as easy to do tactical instances without upping the player count. Current explorable dungeons have tactical encounters.

Basically all of the graveling burrow events in AC explorable for instance, You can’t just faceroll through those events. You need a plan, you need players to define roles for the event. You need to determine (often in the thick of combat) who needs to go where, defend what, ignore what, kill what, etc.

The fact that it’s very easy for certain class combinations doesn’t change the fact that, if you take on explorables with no previous experience, and without checking the wiki for a walkthrough, these are in fact challenging and tactical encounters on par with what’s avaliable in raids from other games.

Most importantly, that kind of play is workable in GW2 because of its nature as five man content. The vast majority of tactical decisions in GW2 often involve requiring splits, running devices or environmental weapons that prevent certain party members from actively fighting/supporting, and otherwise changing the combat meta from the norm of combat.

When you amp up the number of players, with the trinity-free system that GW2 uses, the tactical decisions in these sorts of events fly out the window. The sheer power designed directly in to most utility skills would end up trivializing content. Imagine a 20 person party. now look at the cooldown on skills like wall of reflection, shadow refuge, and time warp. Think about exactly how trivial it would be to do things like 100% uptime on timewarp, Chaining SR to have an infinite aggro-clearing bubble, or perma-walling. Extremely large player counts in instances would literally break the content.

Large player numbers work in the open world specifically because the groups are expected to be uncoordinated, and the fights are supposed to be a measure of aggregate personal skill rather than a test of teamwide tactical prowess. In scripted tactical instances it simply wouldn’t work without changing everything about the combat system unless you forcibly split the raid in to multiple teams, at which point why bother when you could have just make three new 5 man dungeons that are easier to get groups for?

The problem is, basically, that the drop tables of the chests are technically better than the mobs, but the sheer volume of mobs you can annihilate in the time it takes to do a chest-containing event means tha, mathematically, farming mobs is a better payoff.

The chests shouldn’t be a better option versus time than smacking around chickens, but they should at the very least an equal option in terms of time versus reward.

Basically, give the chests more rolls, they don’t necessarily need better loot, just more of it to make them sit on par with general farming, and allow people to choose which method they like.

Barring that: Karma

The orrian jewelry boxes are a step in the right direction. Add more karma-boxes like those, perhaps some cheap mob-equivalent ones which would make karma a valuable resource for getting the same sorts of drops you’d see off of mobs. Heck, vary up the contents per merchant so that the vast majority of non-heart karma merchants sell something other than a handful of cooking ingredients.

Karma is a powerful system when leveling, as it gives you a pool of rewards and lets you somewhat determine the rewards you like. Once you’re leveled and have decent gear, the utility of karma drops in to the toilet for the most part. Karma should have long lasting utility beyond crafting recipies and parts for legendaries people may or may not want. Karma should be a blanket reward roughly equivalent to just plain killing stuff, but allow the user to be a bit more selective, the same was as it works when you’re leveling. If we could get just plain random drop boxes with karma, with loot depending on who/where we got them from, karma would already be much improved!

Josh Foreman.8250:

Hebee.8460:

My favorite still is the clock tower. It took the longest of all the JP’s for me, but it felt amazing to finish it.
I’d like to know Josh, if the area in Sparkfly Fen near the Point of Interest and Vista The Tower of Modius that you gain access to through Verarium Delves is going to be a JP later?
I’m not online right now to provide a screenshot but what I came across was a rich platnium with a veteran guarding it, then some bushes to the side that were hiding a cave with what looked like a crumbling fort inside that didnt have anything inside.

Thank you Josh for all the amazing work you & everyone have put into these JP’s, ME LOVE YALL LONG TIME.

Hm. Interesting. I worked on that map mid-development. Meaning someone owned before me and after me. That’s the map where I first started playing around with JPs. The tall ruins bridges and the pirate ghost base in the NE of that map were my first experiments. Then the Lich tower was my idea for making them a mandatory part of an event. Originally you had to take a crazy circuitous rout to get to the cave opening above the tower and drop down onto it. But after I handed the map off to someone else, I know we changed our policy so that no JPs are required for events, map complete, etc. I haven’t actually gone back to that map since launch, so I haven’t seen all the changes, but it’s possible that what you’re seeing is left overs from work I did that had to be cut. But I know that several enterprising map artists are digging around for spots to add more JPs, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it got reopened at some point.

When I first discovered it I assumed it was a JP, and then discovered it was a largely pointless room, until I accidentally fell behind the back wall. Down there was a small inescapable area which I figured was a mapping oversight, but after a little shifting around I got an “F-open” prompt. I visited this chest repeatedly for a few days as I was clearing the zone, and always assumed it was left over from some cancelled minidungeon or JP.

I visited that area recently, and much to my dismay, the route to drop down behind the wall at the back of the cave and access the hidden (or possibly bugged not to display) chest was closed off. Someone has done a bit of work in that cave, added some rocks so that you can’t fall behind that back wall any more, but it’s already got the making of the entrance to a JP/minidungeon. Just add a staircase in the little room under the altar in the back and stick the content down there!

Aye.8392:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Influence is still in use, however, it can be earned through relatively unremarkable actions such as simply logging in. Completing the new guild content will require the skill and coordination of your guild, so we have made special rewards deserving of that feat.

Also, influence is a shared currency, whereas the merits are earned both on the guild and personal level. There will be more information soon.

This is very intriguing. Also, a bit frightening. I love the idea of more guild activities, but I don’t really love the idea of yet another currency. Influence, at least as it works right now, isn’t a great thing. It doesn’t actually contribute toward the guild, it contributes toward each server. When I spend my influence on what is supposed to be a guild wide bonus only the members on my particular server benefit. But I do love that the acquisition of influence is mostly invisible on the guild’s main server. No one can accuse any member of not producing enough influence, because no one knows who has or hasn’t been productive. That’s a good thing, and helps keep drama to a minimum.

Will upgrades/perks purchased with Guild Merits benefit every guild member regardless of their server? Will Merits become the new Faction, inspiring OCD type guild leaders to require that each member earn some number of Merits each week or be kicked? Will Guild Merits inspire members to leave guilds they were previously happy to be in?

Guilds, and the entire social meta of GW2 is built around the idea that you choose a server as a “home” and stick with it. This is why WvW is locked to your server, and why guilds are upgraded per server. It’s also why guesting is considered… well… guesting.

Bascially, the way the whole thing is set up, you’re not really intended to have multi-server guilds. I don’t honestly see a problem with it. If the point of guilds is to play the game together, what benefit is there to having a guild with a presence on multiple servers?

As for the merits-as-faction system, it’s a valid concern, but if merits are as useless as faction was I don’t see people caring much. If you’re in a guild with “merit requirements” type of leadership, chances are you’re already used to that sort of high demand in terms of required attendance or inf quotas or something already from such people. That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, but for the people in such guilds already I doubt much would change.

Actually, there are two perfectly viable counters to pineapples in WvW, both of which are demonstrated in this instructional video to varying degrees of success.

That is all.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Good news, everyone! We’ve got a bunch of guild content coming up in the February update:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/february-2013/

Sounds interesting, but why use yet another token system? What was wrong with influence?

Serrated Owl.4176:

Basically, Warrior/Guardian parties are preferred by puggers because you don’t know your teammates and they’re the classes with the lowest skill floor.

A bad player playing a warrior or guardian still contributes without getting killed every five seconds because his survivability is largely passive and doesn’t require as much player reaction, knowledge, or skill as another class does to achieve the same (or often better) degrees of utility or damage.

By that logic, classes other than warrior or guardian are Rube Goldberg inventions that make the game harder, just to make it harder. Granted, wandering through the world with my guardian takes less effort than with my necro, but in a dungeon, anything goes. If a class takes twice the effort to survive in a dungeon as another, with no real benefit, what’s the point? I’m not saying that is necessarily the case, but that’s what it sounded like you were saying.

I’m not saying i agree with the implementation, I don’t. I feel like designing variant “skill levels” directly in to professions in a game without defined roles leads to the exact opposite problem of the one it tried to achieve.

You remove the trinity to remove reliance on specific classes, but by making certain classes simply easier to succeed with, you create the climate of class exclusion that we have now. It’s a problem of player perception that’s reinforced by the design itself, and effectively, creates the “LFG, Heavy armors only” problem that people are seeing.

In essence, you’ve got a system that allows a successful composition of any number of classes, but one that rewards a specific composition with less risk and the same reward.

In essence the other classes, given current instance mechanics are in fact rube goldberg inventions. They add flavor and support variant playstyles, but in the grand scheme of things you don’t need more than one homogenous class to complete content and therefore the path of least resistance and highest chance of success is the one that the most efficiency focused players gravitate toward.

Obsidian Sanctum is a PvP area, in a PvP zone. I suppose you’d also like to complete all three borderlands and the EB map without being “bothered by people”

Those JPs aren’t there for people to hold hands and have dance parties with the enemy. Those JPs are there to serve as a supply line for players with smaller groups or less money to have an alternative way of acquiring siege weaponry. Those JPs also award badges of honor in recognition that they’re intentionally designed as hostile PvP areas, and that completing them means that while you may not have killed anyone, you’re assumed to have run in to and successfully navigated the puzzle under duress from enemies.

These aren’t free badge farms for PvE players. These are WvW areas with WvW rewards. Asking people to “just let you finish” is the wrong response. If I run in to enemies in any JP, I engage them. it paves the way for allies to acquire additional siege for our team, and it prevents the enemy team from doing so.

You can also use projectile reflection skills to bounce them, and as they’re pretty slow moving projectiles they’re pretty easy to intercept for your teammates.

Basically, in instances, thieves are kings of trash mitigation and burning defiance. A lot of dungeons have extremely easy trash, so you don’t need the thief as you can just burn down all of it before it can do anything remotely approaching dangerous. When you ramp up to harder content, you quickly learn to love the guy that can perma-blind, perma-cripple, and perma-weakness endless fields of trash while packing the single best ressing skill in the game. When you’re staring down bosses, a single thief playing extremely well can fizzle every 1HKO the thing throws at you.

Big damage thieves aren’t as useful in instances as big damage warriors, but supportive thieves in instances tend to actually make things easier when paired with a guardian than just getting another guardian.

As people have said (truthfully) time and time again:

It’s easier to play and succeed in instances with a guardian or warrior than any other class. When played well, all classes are equally valuable in instances, but when played badly, the non-soldier professions doesn’t get a free get-out-of-jail passive mitigation card.

Basically, Warrior/Guardian parties are preferred by puggers because you don’t know your teammates and they’re the classes with the lowest skill floor.

A bad player playing a warrior or guardian still contributes without getting killed every five seconds because his survivability is largely passive and doesn’t require as much player reaction, knowledge, or skill as another class does to achieve the same (or often better) degrees of utility or damage.

When you’re pugging, you can’t assume your teammates aren’t bad, so it’s just plain easier to limit the party to the easiest classes to play. This is why people are always screaming for Warrior/Guardian parties. Because a bad non-soldier gets killed a lot and actively harms your team. A bad soldier profession gets killed far less and passively benefits your team while dealing solid DPS.

It’s not that non-soldiers are weak in instances. Every class has really solid utility and damage builds that equal or surpass the situational utility of warriors and guardians, but these builds are just plain harder to play effectively than a standard warrior/guardian setup. Thieves, depending on build, can situationally out-dps or out-control every class in the game, but not both at once, and not without requiring a lot of reflexive and highly skilled play from the thief. Simply put, people don’t like theives because playing them optimally in instances is hard, whilst playing warriors/guardians optimally in instances, especially in full war/guard parties, is easy. People want the easiest, quickest runs.

I run a “tanky bleed” Thief with a 0/0/30/20/20 spread, and actually run a full set of mad king runes, a life sigil, and the condition/vit/toughness ascended gear.

Basically, it’s a P/D/Shortbow spec that trades in some DPS from longer bleeds for an increase in burst and a very large increase in survivability from signet of malice and traits. It’s pretty good and diving in to zerg fights and tanking trash in instances, and I wouldn’t trade the birds+SoM heal for anything now that I’m so used to it.