I think he is trolling, nobody would willingly contradict themselves like that. Obviously, trib mode requires twitch reflexes, and that example is actually a really good one. If you don’t jump at the right moment from the right point along the ledge, the rocks knock you off. It’s the very definition of twitch gaming.
So you’re calling the rock section twitchy when you can literally just jump through it without even dodging, air strafing of any kind, having to hit moving targets ?
Trib is far from twitchy. It might be twitchy if you allow it to mess with your mental state, but if you call this twitchy or even twitch intensive i’d hate to think what you call games that require actual twitch reflexes or bullet hell games that use quickswitch mechanics.
Twitchy may not be the correct wording, but that corridor with the troll stones does require an amount of muscle coordination that is beyond many people, especially the older ones.
Personally, my reflexes have never been great, and nearing 50 I notice they get worse every year. The winter wonderland jp is one of the examples of content I am simply unable to do. I can do the jumps just fine, but I can’t turn and move precisely at the same time, at least not quick enough to beat the timer (and I have literally spent hours each year trying that jp).
The need to change directions, jump precisely, and keep the timing to not get knocked off by those troll stones is pretty much beyond me. Since I wanted to get the achievement (and since I had bought the infinite continue coin to better enjoy SAB normal mode which I love, despite not being good at it), I spent half of a Sunday last year on 1-1 tribulation. The troll stone corridor alone took me about 3 hours of continuously trying to get through. I made it in the end, but I doubt I’ll ever repeat that experience, and I can see how this really is beyond a lot of people.
Coordinating direction changes, precision jumping, and timed movement is beyond “just practice” for a lot of players. That said, if I had found myself unable to do it once, I could’ve lived just as well without the achievement. You can get a good many furniture coins daily far more easily by just visiting all of the other shops, and if all else fails I’m sure there are enough people that would gift you with some coins (or rather, buy super clouds for your guild hall) if you ask nicely. My own guild has actually run into the limit of stored clouds, we need to get our scribes to craft some other decorations so that the handfull of SAB fans can keep depositing their daily furniture coins
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I strongly suspect it’s just for the fun of it. Random items are always more interesting if they have actions attached to them. Plus the compulsive cleaners among the playerbase don’t have to live with a dead bird on their doorstep if they don’t want to
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You’re welcome
I’m loving it. I was probably annoying my guildies something bad last night, cruising around on my super cloud glider every chance I got during guild missions, but I was having a great time! The music it makes is an added bonus .
When you log , waypoint or use an Asuran gate, You go behind the scenes like at a theme park where there are lounges. and all sorts of amenities including bathrooms where you can take a break. While it seems only seconds betwwen screens is actually hours in the alt dimension.
Well, that explains the absurd length of some of these loading screens .
Three years ago, I posted this in another SAB thread:
Every now and then, my 8-year old daughter comes up to me playing gw2 and talks me into going back to Rata Sum and checking if the SAB has magically opened the gates again. She’s desperately waiting for the box to get back and to try it herself. Last time the box was online, she hadn’t mastered the game controls enough to play, but enjoyed watching me play it for hours.
She’d be ever so happy if the box finally opened its gates again, and so would I. As much as I like the content available now, the SAB is special, and I can’t wait to have it back.
My little one turned 11 the week before last, has her own account by now (bought with her own pocket money last halloween so she could play the clocktower to her heart’s delight), and is thoroughly excited the SAB is opening up again this week . She’s mostly looking forward to doing things for herself now, instead of only being allowed to play with mom’s characters like last year .
Personally, I’m not good at jumping puzzles, but I love the SAB to bits nonetheless. I’m actually too old to be nostalgic about console games and hardly played any of them (again mostly because I’ve never been good at them), but I love the bright colours and the music that’s giving me a good mood. Watching asura ears flop around while they jump through the box is awesome.
Plus way back in 2013 I was home sick when SAB was a thing and it taught me to actually jump in GW2 and become somewhat decent at jps (as long as they aren’t timed … looking at you winter wonderland ) instead of being a total failure like before.
When they announced SAB returning last year, I actually took a week off work to enjoy it to the fullest. I won’t have the luxury this year, but I’ve already warned my family and friends that I won’t be available for three weeks starting tomorrow, as I’ll be “living in the box” .
SAB is hands down my favourite festival in Tyria!
There have been many many posts calling for Elona and Cantha almost since GW2 launched.
Of the many people I have known in game, by now the vast majority doesn’t even really know what Cantha and Elona are, much less care to go there. Let’s face it, there are new people coming to this game all the time, that maybe haven’t even heard of the previous game, and the people dreaming of “going back” continuously get outnumbered.
Personally I have seen both Cantha and Elona in GW1, but would much prefer ANet to explore new territory with unlimited story possibilities. Somebody mentioned the Charr homelands up above, as well as other places in Tyria we have yet to see, that’s what I’m really looking forward to (aside from more SAB worlds of course ).
Living Story season 3 has brought roughly 5-6 new in-game minis per episode that you get by participating in said episode/map. It’s brought several new back item skins as well as weapon skins and ascended equipment, again through map participation and achievements.
If aquiring those is “too easy” for you, there’s raids with a bunch of minis and skins (I recently looted what looks like an especially ugly piece broken off of the Vale Guardian’s platform but turns out to be an ascended greatswort ) available to those with a larger time investment (but still not totally rng dependent as you can eventually buy the skins for raid currency if you collect long enough).
The recent current events have introduced ascended weapon rewards for those who have played the HoT story. Again these come with (6) new skins (although I’m really dying for a staff skin to go with this set).
Titles I have to admit I haven’t paid much attention to, as I don’t really care for them, but haven’t there been new titles with the recent story releases, too?
If you look at it, there’s actually a lot of fluff coming into the game with each and every living story episode, current events update, raid update, and so on. Some may be aquired too easy for your taste, but perfect for others (e.g. I love that I can get all the minis I want without having to mindlessly farm in my scarce gaming time). Others may be just right for you, but beyond a lot of people that play this game for different reasons.
To me the game currently seems to be on a good balance, putting out a lot of fluff to get in game (remember when the forums were flooded with complaints about not enough fluff available through simple playing not so long ago?) but through a variety of ways that leaves something for everyone. While I always appreciate more fluff available in-game, I don’t see the need to shift that balance towards (large) grouped instanced content right now.
I would love this to happen. My bank space (which is maxed, they can’t sell me any more of it) is clogged with unlocked skins that I have not yet found the right use for. Yet the gem value of the amount of charges I’d have to use is huge enough I don’t want to delete the one-free-use (not that I ever directly buy transmute charges, but I do tend to hoard them so I never would have to buy them if I wanted to change an armor or weapon look, and converting all my unlocked one-use skins to fungible charges would be awesome).
I’m a hoarder, too, but I managed to successfully break myself of the unhealthy habit of saving skins already in my wardrobe. I came to realize that I accumulate charges faster than I use them (through map exploration as well as the occasional wvw or pvp), so I made myself destroy most of the skins. I didn’t manage to get rid of all, but I’m still trying .
Oh, and in case when I do use transmutation charges I often only realize afterwards that I still had a free copy of that skin lying around somewhere, making saving those skins even more stupid.
One class would be hard, but I guess as long as I could play a few dozend different characters of that class I’d be ok . Of course I’d miss my 3 mesmers and 4 eles if I could only play my 4 rangers/druids any more, but I’d survive.
Now if I had to restrict myself to 1 character I’d be out of here faster than light .
I’d go back to exploring the core maps, but somehow that just feels stale without the leveling.
I know I felt similar when my first character hit level 80. This was four years ago, long before HoT or even maps like the Silverwastes and Dry Top, around the time Living Story season 1 just started out. The problem was that leveling was the kind of progression I was used from other games and the force motivating me onward.
With GW2 this really doesn’t work well, and didn’t even work well in the very beginning of the game. Level 80 is not meant to be the end goal of this game, but rather a milestone you reach fairly early on. What comes next is entirely up to you, but the game does offer a lot of alternative progression for you to follow.
First of all, there is map completion of core Tyria. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but you do get a yellow star to your nameplate and an account-wide title (been there, done that) for your first 100% map exploration. Check the upper left of the screen in map view, it’ll show you how far along you are both on the current map (100% each map in game gives some nice rewards of experience, equipment and crafting materials) and on the whole of core Tyria. Once you get to 100%, you will also get two gifts of exploration that you need if you ever want to craft a generation 1 legendary weapon.
Next, check your achievement log. There is a variety of achievements to be done in this game, including character stories, enemy kill counts, some of the large world boss event chains, and much more. There also is a collections tab in the achievement menu with a lot of weird and (sometimes ) interesting collections you could try to complete if that is the kind of goal you enjoy. Those will take you all over the world, too.
Take special notice of the red and green mastery point symbols in the achievement log. Those show achievements yet to be completed that reward you with a mastery point, green for Heart of Maguuma masteries (gliding etc.), and red for core Tyria masteries. One of the most helpful masteries is at the end of the Pact Commander mastery line in core Tyria, namely autoloot, which is an awesome qol feature.
The explorer category under general achievements holds (among others) achievements for what this game calls “mini dungeons”. These are essentially hidden chests and short (non-jumping) puzzles all over the world that you can explore. There also is a category for jumping puzzles if those are what you enjoy. Current Events also holds some interesting activities, some of them similar to the questlines we know from other games.
This game is built in a way that experience is not the main driving factor of its players, and not even one of the major ones. This game is built so that everybody can decide for themselves how and what to play. Everything you do progresses your character and account in some way or another. Levels and masteries are really only a small part of it.
Personally I enjoy dungeons very much. Whether I breeze through, skipping stuff left, right, and center, or stroll through casually while smelling the flowers (and killing the mobs) on the way totally depends on mood as well as who I’m with.
Last week for example I played through Arah path 1 with a group of guildies, none of which had ever set a foot into that path before. We even found out half-way through that one of them had never been in any dungeon in this game before. Of course we didn’t skip a lot, as especially the early skips on that path require a good bit of practice, but were enjoying ourselves all of the way.
As for rewards I’m with the poster above me. Dungeons actually do give a fair bit of reward, from tokens that allow you to trade for free rares (of different level ranges) and exotics (with salvageable inscriptions and insignias), to coin rewards for finishing paths (33 silver to 1 gold per path plus 5 gold per 8 individual paths), to the dungeon loot itself.
Twilight Arbor and Sorrow’s embrace are great sources of t4 cloth and leather. The rare dungeon jewellery that drops quite frequently is worth a good bit of silver or even gold. Masterwork jewellery can be salvaged for orbs. Most dungeon paths also drop quite a few champ bags. It all adds up quickly while you’re having fun (or at least I am having fun ).
I’d rather they keep dungeons the way they are now, explorable off-path for those who feel like it, and rushable for those who are only in it for the loot. Coming from other MMOs it took a bit getting used to that dungeons aren’t just one-way tunnels where every mob is a barrier to advancement, but I’ve come to enjoy the fact that these dungeons are actually places that feel larger than the path you’re going through, with flavor mobs all over the place, and architecture you recognize again when you play through the other paths.
Dungeons aren’t as important in this game as they are in other, similar games. It’s not the be-all end-all endgame, but rather some activity among many, and accessible at different levels, not just at endgame. I feel they are in a decent place for this game, to fill the niche they have found over the years.
My Kudzu is the most beautiful thing that’s ever existed in any game in my opinion. My Asuran can make beautiful flower gardens just spinning around in circles and I spend an embarrassing amount of time doing just that.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who does this . My asura rangers love to stand hip-deep in their own flower gardens. My charr ranger is the only one refusing to use that skin. And to top it all off, the precursor crafting for this one was a ton of fun, too. I still carry around all of the flowers I had to collect for it.
I don’t think it’s bad writing, but rather a different approach to telling the story than what you encounter in other MMOs and what we may have gotten used to.
There is no such thing as the one story you are lead through in this game. Instead, it is more like a jigsaw puzzle, there to be put together by those interested in the whole story and its details, while those who don’t much care for story can easily skip a lot of it.
Personally, I love this jigsaw puzzle of a story, especially since it has lead to a lot of replayability and being able to discover bits and pieces long after I thought I’d been through the whole thing.
There are NPC that turn up in different story instances, and only after a while you realize they are actually not just flavor to the instance at hand, but rather characters that turn up again and again throughout the story. The first time I realized this was when I met Tegwen and Carys, the sylvari that founded the Pale Reavers. My sylvari guard was looking for them in the Caledon Forest (as part of the lvl 10 or 20 racial storyline), and I was vaguely confused because somehow in the back of my head I felt like I was supposed to find her in Bloodtide Coast, which of course doesn’t make sense for a beginner-level story.
A bit later I played my sylvari ele, and I realized it was her who was supposed to find the very same Tegwen in Bloodtide Coast, as part of the level 60 priory questline to recruit her for the pact’s purpose. That’s when I realized it was the very same character and that there was more to her story than I had formerly seen.
Incidentally, the very next day I was on my asura warrior and happened to glance at his current story, and guess what I found? He was supposed to meet Tegwen, Carys and Trahearne together with the Orrian artefact my guard had just recovered in the racial sylvari story, this time as part of the lvl 70 story in the Straits of Devastation.
This was the starting point for me for really getting into the story. I encountered characters like Kekt, Ellie, Shashoo, and many more, that had their own little story scattered throughout the story instances. I was actually sad when some of those stories came to their final end, like Tegwen’s during the lvl 80 assault on Orr, and I actually felt good seeing some of the familiar faces in later story steps, sometimes from the lvl 10 to the lvl 80 stories (like Shrieksy, Kozzak’s pet raptor ), and sometimes even into the HoT and living world stories.
This game’s story isn’t a book you just read from start to finish, nor a movie you sit down and watch in one go. It’s there for you all over the world to explore, meet characters, see places, and bit by bit it will all fall together. The different story choices as well as places, characters, and events all over the open world give you bits and pieces of it. Even dungeons, fractals, and raids hold pieces of this giant jigsaw, and you are welcome (although never forced) to explore and find them if you are curious about the backstory. There are even pieces in the world related to the novels, like the mariner plaques all over LA or Killeen’s grave in the Fields of Ruins. None of this is required to play the game and have fun, but if you enjoy this kind of thing there’s hours upon hours of exploration and discovery here for you.
GW2 has raids, dungeons (and fractals), dailies (and lots of them ), pvp (and wvw), special festivals (next one coming up should be the Super Adventure Box in April), and lots more.
However, due to the way experience and levels are handled in GW2, as well as resources needed for top-level crafting, pretty much all of the game is endgame and relevant at max level. You can go all over the place for world bosses, meta events, material harvesting, collections, achievenemts and so on, so there will be pretty much something to keep anybody interested somewhere around the world.
Then there is personal stories (base and HoT), living world stories (season 2 and parts 1-4 of season 3 currently available), dungeon stories, and full world completion which will take up a lot more of your time than just leveling to 80 does (if you plan to do it … you are always free to skip each and every type of content in this game you don’t enjoy).
To sum it up: endgame in this game is what you like to play, and starts pretty much the moment you start playing. Coming from other MMOs it takes some getting used to, but once you’ve come to terms with choosing your prefered content rather than letting it be dictated by dailies and stuff it’s a habit that’s hard to shake .
As for the best profession that really depends entirely on you. Each class in this game can be played as easily or as complicated as you like. Personally, I like mesmer and ele (and ranger) the most, but many prefer the warrior (survivable without having to get deeply into the class) or necromancer (minionmaster build can survive well while letting the minions do most of the work).
You need over 11 000 MC to craft ONCE all the items requiring MC. Why to craft them? Because the items are ingame. And I seriously doubt Anet put these items ingame with the intention to be ignored by players.
Actually I highly doubt ANet created those items so that all or even just most of the players could gather them all.
From a business perspective ANet wants people to play this game, and the best motivation for many is to aquire items they find desireable to show their progress. Provided that not all people find all items equally desireable, they have to put in enough stuff so that everyone has a chance to at least find a good selection of things they like among what is available and keeps them busy and playing for a decent timeframe.
Now add to that the fact that there are enough people around with a lot of time on their hands. To keep these people moderately busy and invested in the game, you need a lot of items they desire. This automatically leads to the fact that a large part of the playerbase (those with more casual gaming hours) will have to choose what items to go for, as there will be too many for them to gather.
Items that require MC were from the start supposed to be luxury items that people choose from, not something everyone would casually complete in a couple of months. There may not be enough MC sources for a single player with a lot of time and resources to craft all the MC recipes in a year while being totally self-reliant, but for every player that attempts to craft all of those recipes there will be lots that don’t care to craft anything with their MC at all, thus offering them on the trading post to those who want to craft more than they can gather themselves.
As far as I recall, ANet explicitly stated that there are more MCs entering the game over time than are actually consumed. As long as this is the case, there is no reason for ANet to introduce more MC faucets, as it would quickly make MCs worthless again. Things will settle down eventually when people come to terms with the fact that MCs are not worthless. It really is a question of patience … and of realistic expectations. “I expect to craft all recipes that use MC” is by the way not what I would call realistic .
I’m a bit older than most players, I have a partner and child. To me this marketing is new. I literally went from playing Total Annihilation to this because my partner said I needed a new game. I have the mentality that I play games for fun, grinding is not fun. Reminds me of work, grind work, come home to grind a game? I don’t think so.
What does age have to do with it? I’m in my late 40s myself, with husband and two kids (and a fulltime job), and I can play this game very well without grinding and without spending a lot of cash.
If you’re only into WvW and PvP especially, elite specs shouldn’t be a problem for you. For one, you don’t even have to unlock them for pvp, they’re right there for you to use. My main pvp characters are low-levels, 30s and 40s, who haven’t even unlocked a single regular traitline fully, but in pvp they have all traits, including the elite specs, available to them.
And wvw does give you proofs of heroics that you can use to unlock elite specs. Even my 13-year-old daughter, who rarely gets to play more than a couple of hours a week, has unlocked three full elite specs on her account already, purely from the proofs of heroics she’s gained in wvw (unlike her casual old mom she hates pve ).
Myself, I hate to grind and only play whichever character and map interests me that day (as you say, too much stress and grind in real life to continue with it in games). Granted, one of my favourite things to do in this game is just to pick a character and a waypoint and go from there, letting the game direct me with events, gathering nodes, and map explorations. Still, most of my 27 (or is it 28?) characters have their elite spec fully unlocked already. It’s really not as hard as you make it out to be.
Back to the opening post:
My lesson learned in this game is: play the content you enjoy, and the rewards will come. I hated grinding the same map/dungeon/whatever in previous mmos just to get a chance at a specific piece of equipment or cosmetic. This game so far has been great at just letting me play what I enjoy and accumulating wealth in my material storage to get whatever I want to have eventually. I’ve even gotten my first couple of legendary items recently (Ad Infinitum and Kudzu), something I never really expected to happen, but one day I realized that everything was in place to get the shinies .
I second the above suggestion. Start the HoT story first until you unlock the mastery system, then just go around exploring and playing whatever you enjoy.
Just like the personal story in the original game, the HoT story expects you to explore the world outside of the story between episodes. Where the personal story is level-locked (formerly soft, now hard to every 10th level), the HoT story is locked by (few) mastery levels. And just like the personal story, the leveling will come pretty much by itself if you just go out into the maps and explore.
And most of all: Have fun! The HoT maps are really awesome, and if you like pve and exploration you’ll have a great time in them (even though you’ll probably feel totally lost at first, as all of us have in the beginning ).
So while you wait for you guild/friends to to the raid you have nothing to do (PvE wise).
How did you go from “I no longer enjoy fractals” to “there’s nothing to do in pve”? Is your issue that you don’t enjoy fractals at all, that you no longer enjoy them because you’ve run them too often, or that you don’t find anything enjoyable in this game’s vast portfolio of pve activities beyond fractals and raids?
Personally, I have enjoyed my journey through the fractal levels a lot, but then I enjoy a lot of this game’s pve content and don’t easily burn out on a single facet since I switch up what I play all the time. Gearing up for fractals, increasing my ar and my fractal levels was motivated in part by wanting to be able to play fractals with friends at all kinds of different levels (and not feel like I’m being carried in the upper scales but actually being useful instead), in part by wanting to see the different variations of the fractals due to mechanic changes and instabilities, and in part by wanting to finish Ad Infinitum (for which I had to be able to run fractal level 100 and perform decently at it).
I still haven’t gotten my personal reward level all the way to 100 (currently at 88), since I don’t often have a group that is able to play the upper level fractals, but I’ll get there eventually, and I’m still having fun fractalling with guildies at all levels. My friends and guildies are interested in all kinds of different fractal levels, so things won’t get boring any time soon for us I guess .