Guild Wars 2

You mean I have to actually play WvW for a legendary now? ;_;
Can my AP loot boxes have track progress in them? :P

Ah well, guess I’m spending badges on Fashion Collector skins.
…if I can find a time when WvW doesn’t have a queue. >_>

Moyayuki.3619:

Rauderi.8706:

cptaylor.2670:

Also not big on the Jormag plot. The snow zones are pretty, but not pretty enough to be trapped in for an entire expansion. The zones should be reasonably contrasting in order to hold people’s attention.

This is suddenly my biggest fear. I’m scared they may focus the next expansion on Jormag. I will have to listen to that butchered pronunciation for an entire expansion. Legions of GEORmags, everywhere.

Also, if Claw of GEORmag is any indication, the fears will be constant and applied liberally.

Haha, yeah, isn’t it technically supposed to be “Yor-mag”? Plenty of other Norn character and place names with “j” in them have it pronounced correctly. But not the big, bad dragon.

Every time I hear JOE-TON, I die a little inside.

So now my biggest fear is that GEORmag will control the JOEtuns, imbuing them with Claw’s annoying 10-second fear-roar. ;__;

cptaylor.2670:

Also not big on the Jormag plot. The snow zones are pretty, but not pretty enough to be trapped in for an entire expansion. The zones should be reasonably contrasting in order to hold people’s attention.

This is suddenly my biggest fear. I’m scared they may focus the next expansion on Jormag. I will have to listen to that butchered pronunciation for an entire expansion. Legions of GEORmags, everywhere.

Also, if Claw of GEORmag is any indication, the fears will be constant and applied liberally.

IndigoSundown.5419:

That the only “lesson learned” as mentioned in NCSoft quarterly report was that they should not predict so much revenue. My hope is that the lessons learned by ANet are more like:

• Making adventures peripheral content with desirable intrinsic rewards rather than a prominent vessel for horizontal progression.
• Making maps about more than just a few exploration objectives packaged around a map meta.
• Making map navigation more intuitive and accessible while still providing some platforming challenges for those who like such things.
• Maintaining a degree of challenge such as HoT offered in terms of mob ability, while avoiding as much as possible the issues of over-scaled events and packs of mobs just standing around as nothing more than a barrier to run around.
• Providing a currency purse.
• Though I’ve no idea how to do it, I hope that there will come a day when taxiing is not the be-all and end-all solution to mega-server problems, because it is at best a contributing cause to the problems, while only working some of the time and for some of the players.
• That there will be a greater emphasis on smaller scale content, as opposed to the almost ubiquitous emphasis on large-scale content seen in HoT.
• That maybe, just maybe, Anet will realize that FotM needs more than just reward and instability changes, it needs actual new encounters.

<3

I appreciate that you frame this in a more positive way. As a design team, ANet is still learning, and HoT was something that may have been overly ambitious for them, which inflicted a large number of oversights in design. So instead of ‘fear’ of the next expansion, let’s hope ANet continues to learn from their current development hurdles.

Pengi-san, if you want a color guard as a show of support, you and all your friends should buy macaw wings and fly over Lion’s Arch. There’s a lighthouse or a tall cliff you can jump off of~
(..o_O I just realized that last part looked wrong. I mean to fly from!)

And, EW, very well stated.

LouWolfskin.3492:

If anything a few things from HoT should get carried over to the core game to ease players into this whole thing.

Certainly. We could certainly do with event areas in early game that teach players about proper crowd control use and what the Defiance bar is. They most often run into it in open world, where it’s either not necessary for core Tyria or it’s done for them by more experienced players.

And feedback is important as well. Especially after three years of CC having no effect, players are likely to ignore CC on larger bosses because they don’t see it working. Some forumites have suggested “blue damage numbers,” and I definitely agree with this. Include the same kinds of condition symbols for immobilize/chill/weakness, so players are aware of the blue damage over time effects.

papry.8096:

Rauderi.8706:

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

Patriach: just turn left, the updraft will make you go up.
Tetrad: never saw a problem there. you are making excuses.
Frog bros: when you learn that they heals when they reach 25% of their HP & that there is a direct mushroom to their healing foutain.
Axemaster: when he Tp get to him & CC. :x

Basically you are just highlighting the thing that I hate the most: don’t learn the boss strategy, then proceed to cry because you still want the reward.

I know the boss strats. I’m also highlighting how many players are going to view those bosses, because it’s not about how the fights are designed, it’s about how they’re played. It’s a level of meta-thought most don’t engage in, either because they’re secure in their own skill and don’t think about others, or they roll over for bad game design because they’re not willing to engage in assessment.

I actually like Patriarch to some extent. But, he’s not done as often as he should, because players don’t hold chopper points and for the little details I listed above.

Go ahead and solo the Tetrad. Guarantee it’ll end poorly. The strike team for that one either needs a really good distraction (solo Lupi candidates, maybe :P) or a team of 5-10 who are decently coordinated. After that, a pack of Flamethower Juggernauts can handle the 4th boss there with no problems.
Thing is, players aren’t going to wait more than about a minute for others to show up to do Tetrad. So Tetrad doesn’t get done that often.

Frog bros aren’t so bad, but there are a lot of misleading jumps on that island. And most players are going to see the loss of progress as a reason to skip the fight in the future. Design versus Play. I got credit for it and now I just shrug at it when it comes time for VB bosses. Probably won’t ever do it again.

Axemaster is by far the worst when it comes to design vs play. Newer players just can’t do it, and that’s bad for something that shows up on the first map. It’s a shame that Axemaster’s bad design qualities far outstrip how interesting a fight it could have been.

Now:

• Constantly spawns veteran smokescales. Basically, killing his adds doesn’t work because he almost immediately makes more.
• Requires Nuhoch Stealth Detection. This is a mastery nestled deep into the Nuhoch line, that is also nestled rather deep into expansion territory. While Axemaster’s stealth wonderful thematically, it’s inappropriate for Verdant Brink.
• Unmanageable instant-KO. I’ve labeled it an ANet fetish for a reason. I get that the area-wide KO is a shtick, and I’m not necessarily mad at that. It’s that it cannot be avoided short of breaking his bar, and that’s a short-sighted gameplay demand. Design vs play. It would be a bigger marker of individual skill if it could be evaded/blocked or if taking to the air stopped the ground-based attack from triggering. (Seriously, wrapping deathvines out of nowhere while I’m in flight?…)

Should:

• Downing an Axemaster minion should force a longer delay in respawn/recovery, perhaps even forcing Axemaster to do more than toot a horn to get all three back.
• Not being against masteries being used in fights, but why not give more love to Poison Mastery? It’s more appropriate for the zone, and it’s available in a reasonable timeframe compared to any of the Nuhoch masteries. Also, the teleport is already hide-and-seek enough without needing stealth detection.
• Noting the previous item, I only see poison mastery used a handful of times, and so far, never in actual combat. In thinking about that, Axemaster could be dramatically redesigned to actually feel engaging instead of stupidly punishing. Write-up for that is below.

For an instant-KO mechanic, Poison Mastery should be the vector for mitigating it. When Axemaster teleports, he calls his smokescales (forcing players to have to fight through them) while the players have to find and CC him. If they fail, he lays a blanket of poison fields on top of each player. The bulk of the damage comes from the sort of uber-high-damage toxin found on the static areas of the map, but those with the mastery still have to put up with the regular damage and stacks of poison that persist until the fields dissipate. 3-4 seconds ought to do it. Characters without Poison Mastery need to take to the air or risk getting downed in one of the toxin fields.

So, looking at the actual skill requirements,
Before:

• Nuhoch Stealth Detection or “gtfo ur ded stop making fight harder”
• Plenty of CC

After:

• Itzel Poison Mastery and/or Updraft mastery (much more appropriate for VB players)
• Plenty of CC
• Condition clearing

It’s a reasonably more robust way of making the fight interesting while retaining the skill requirement to breaking Axemaster’s bar and having a reasonable, not inane, punishment for failing it.

Ayrilana.1396:

Agyaggalamb.4796:

I’m glad you find it fine, it seems our experiences are different. After 3 hours of trying SCRAP field, I got to 83 kills at 4 minutes after watching a couple videos where gold is attained, but I’m still unable to see a method/route behind it.

You’re likely not balling them up so to maximize your kills. For example, it’s impossible to get gold if you only use the auto attack.

Is there a way to get them to actually aggro? Because that’s what I run into. Over an hour of restarting to barely get Silver, and the chak are nothing but cowards. Unless the rovers sneak up from behind. Those always seem to hate on me instantly. The rest will deliberately run away or refuse to engage. I could break eggs while chanting dead baby jokes and they still won’t aggro in any reasonable group size.

EvilTwin.4125:

One-hit kills should be banned from the game. It’s frustrating to an unnecessary degree.

Sure Great Big Bad Guys should be challenging, but if you die in one hit….

…it ruins the point of a defensive build. If characters’ fates are the same regardless of ‘zerker or soldier gear, then just go ’zerker. That’s how it’s been the past 3 years, and it chokes build diversity.

RoseofGilead.8907:

I love it when I accidentally glide by his island while he’s up.

Me: This is a peaceful glide to this area over here. Surely nothing could ruin this for me.
Axemaster: Muhahaha. >target<
Me: Oh hell . . .

>.> Yup.
I actually force myself to ground somewhere on the island if that happens, and I pray I can heal up to leave.
There really should be more than one way of dealing with Axemaster’s crap, but lazy design. :\ One of these days I’ll get around to a proper critical analysis of the fight, as I don’t hate it entirely, it just needs some major adjustments.

At least you tried Axemaster. Kudos.

Though, it does remind me that ANet needs to quit this one-hit-KO fetish, at least in open world. Defiance scaling is terrible and the impact just results in something too punishing.
Same thing happens with the Balthazar fight in Auric Basin. A strike team can actually manage to beat him down, but then at half health, he insta-kills everyone. Very little conveyance. And no, I don’t count a black-armored figure against a muddy brown background raising his sword and then everyone falling over to be sufficient conveyance. The death fireball doesn’t even show up until the characters are dead on the ground, so yay for effect lag.
[/rant]

They really call the damage skill Headshot? :P Last I checked, a headshot didn’t involve personal violations with thorn-tentacles.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Ardid.7203:

Rockin Twilight Sparkle.2615:

The Special Committee for the Removal of Overgrown Lizards and their Ilk.

Best one ATM, by far. Would choose it in an instant.

Come on. You know tasks done by committee are always over budget and over time, if they’re finished at all.

So, maybe Dragon’s Game Design? That way it can take years over time/budget and the results are still underwhelming. :P

“Uh, yeah, we were gonna get rid of Kralkatorik, but it turns out he’s kinda necessary for the meta, so we’re leaving his balance as is.”

Healing power is only decent if you have multiple sources of healing, or a skill with a really good conversion rate (…I’d say 20%, but that’s still abysmal). So it can work well for guardians or particularly tanky warriors, but even then, it’s still mostly a dump stat.

To be honest, healing power just needs to go. It should have been converted to Concentration a long while ago, before the new stat sets showed up. Reactive healing isn’t as powerful in GW2 as having the boon duration to keep Protection, Aegis, and Regen up for longer periods of time.

While we could beg to have heals lowered and healing power coefficients raised to prominence it’s obvious that the balance team is struggling to account for the variable ranges of healing power as an attribute. From what half-cooked calculations I’ve poked at, healing power at 1000+ hardly gives a 20% boost in recovery power.

If there’s some concern about balancing incoming and outgoing heals, kill Healing Power, make Vitality give a slight boost to incoming healing, and give Concentration the outgoing support role. 10% per 1000 should be sufficient for impact.

tl;dr = Normalize all the heals, ditch healing power, and add some other support stat.

So far, most of the maces have been lackluster, at best. Generally boring, eye-roll-inducing.. You get the gist.

I think adding some flails would add some life to an otherwise stiff and boring weapon (that nobody uses. >.>)

trub.1657:

I say call em’ : 2 guys@ 3 chicks?
No?
Alrighty then, I’ll just get back to playing the game, and wait for an announcement :P

I’m gonna get so much hate mail for this, but I’d recommend:
Diversity’s Edge. :P
Or maybe Destiny’s Edgier? I dunno. I do know I’m not feeling any of the recommended names.

Unbroken sounds like one of those pretentious WoW raiding guilds that need some cataclysmic single-word name. Like Entropy, Impact, or Ascension. It reeks of 2srs4u.

Eternity’s Guard is.. eh. It’s choppy to say, and there’s hardly anything about the group that feels “eternal” or that anything they’re guarding is “eternal.” That said “Eternal Guard” would sound better, at least. “Eternity Guard” or “Eternity Ward” gets rid of the sloppy apostrophe.

Dragon’s Watch is so passive. You can practically hear them saying “Yup, that’s a dragon. Let’s go home.” And again with the clunky " ‘s " mucking up the word flow. Also, it’s a possessive, so are they watching for the dragon as its minions?
Throw in a more active verb and pitch the possessive tone, and maybe we’d have a contender.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I think it’s a lot more likely they’ll pull a Gnashblade and flee through the nearest portal with all our money and goods, slamming the portal closed in the face of panicked civilians as they try to escape too.

Wow, if they did that then that’d make Eternity’s Guard / Dragon’s Watch / The Unbroken look a little silly standing there in their brand new single-colored spandex onesies.

(good luck getting that image out of your mind)

~EW

New in the Gem Store: Braham’s Yellow Sentai Onesie Outfit!
And the big seller: Kasmeer’s Pink Sentai Onesie Outfit! (previously worn~)

So I guess Marjory gets black, Rytlock gets red, Taimi gets blue, and ..oh, right, Rox. Her and her gigantic anime eyes gets the green.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Easy to navigate w/o having to look at my mini map. That’s what I want in a player hub.

Gotta head to the bank, look for the octopus. Gotta head to the TP, look for the giant shell.

My only gripe is the npc’s who have paths that take them right next to the merchants, banker, and TP peeps.

~EW

It is more pleasant to get around from the old Lion’s Arch, but getting to services is a chore, because the waypoints are laid out just to be annoying.

Post-Scarlet, Postern Ward, yo. Waypoint in, and it was mere steps to the bank, the Black Lion Trading Post, and the crafting stations. And there were at least two other similar locations with concentrated services. New LA feels designed to waste my time, and I don’t appreciate that.

Sirius.4510:

I’d just settle for “all new armor/outfits from this point forward will work” on that.

I can’t even settle on that. :\ There have been a few outfits with Charr body design in mind, but some are still stretched textures with no thought of where tails and claws exist.
..I might still be bitter about the bandit sniper outfit and how that was utter garbage for Charr.

Randulf.7614:

They will probably emulate the way the last patch dropped. Whilst I’m not a fan of not hyping up forthcoming content/features, it seemed fairly clear people were pleased with the size and surprises of the spring quarterly and that their method worked successfully.

We might get a tiny prelude blog to ls3, but realistically I suspect they will continue with the policy of surprising the playerbase on release day.

While I wouldn’t mind some news on the upcoming changes, the hype train has been left behind at the station. I’m not sure which I prefer, now that I think about it.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

It’s not that people don’t use CC, it’s that the wyverns’ (all of them) break bars scale really harshly and become effectively impossible to break if there’s more than maybe 10 people there. The Mouth of Mordremoth also has a break bar, and you can’t stop people from breaking it most of the time, so clearly people have plenty of CC to throw around.

Break bar scaling is pretty bad, to be honest. Matriarch’s is pretty beefy, and some other critters (Punisher, Mushroom King) have such short openings on their bars that, between typical human reaction times, ping/latency, and cast times, it’s pretty much mathematically impossible to break them in a skillful manner.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Why should this be limited to the Charr? I say give us a general posture toggle for all races. I want my sylvari to be a hunchback.

And I want quadrupedal running on my Asura! Then I can run around Rata Sum barking at people like a chihuahua with a 150 IQ.

Silliness aside, I won’t say Charr need their posture to be ‘fixed’. But options are good, and there are some of my characters I’d use an upright stance for. And while the hunch is appropriate for their huge necks and bestial body type, it’s a little meh-inducing to have that kind of hunch compete with chest armor cosmetics. Coming from WoW, I get this kind of meh all the time with orcs, trolls, and worgen. So I can understand why the desire for the option is there.

Ashen.2907:

Afraid that I have to disagree with the OP (to an extent). Perhaps it is a problem to have way points too far apart. I don’t doubt that there is a lecture to that effect in game design 101. On the other hand I believe that the way points in the core maps are too close together and that those on post-release maps are not too far apart. They seem just about right to me.

Agreed. So long as they’re not contested for too long, it’s fine to have a lower number of waypoints. It does beggar the question why are they building waypoints in heavily contested areas, though. After getting shoved to ‘safe’ waypoints one too many times, I question the tactical intelligence of those laying out the waypoints in these unsafe areas. :P

Overall, Verdant Brink and Auric Basin are fairly well laid out for waypoints. I have my arguments about canopy access during off times, but that was part of the design as intended rather than how the map is actually played.

I’m also generally okay with Silverwastes, oddly enough. It’s a flat enough map that it’s easy to get around and make nearly straight lines to your destination. Skritt holes need pointing arrows like the wallows have, though.
I’m sure there’s a want for there to be waypoints at every base, but that would clip the strategic value of having several teams of players deal with each one.

As I’ve said before in “I hate TD” threads, I’d be much better with it if I could make my own, account-bound map markings. The slop that is the current minimap not only doesn’t help but sometimes actively hurts attempts at navigation.

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

Adding my +1 to this.

I was pretty content with GW2’s underwater experience. I’m sad the devs backed away from it instead of committing to updates to fix the gaps. And poor Revenant…

Now just wait a minute. I…

…

…got nothing. The significantly high correlation can’t be ignored.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

I like Riku’s no waypoint costs idea.

Along those lines another idea might be no cost to transmute skins.

1 free account-bound Black Lion Weapon skin per month?

~EW

As a subscription reward, that’s worth quite a bit. I’d even go so far as to say just give a free Black Lion Ticket per month. But that’s because I don’t give a whit about the rare items market, especially for items that are purely RNG cash grabs.

That bitterness aside, I could also see ANet going for a couple of bundle items or a membership-club style of pricing. Think Costco or Sam’s, but with gems. Gnashblade’s Club? Gnashco?
On top of the usual value of the subscription price (800 gems per month on a $10 sub), give ‘warehouse’ pricing on gem store items, above and beyond the usual. 20% off all items and bundles (but obviously not gem→gold conversions), keys dramatically reduced to 25 gems each. Our real-life cash goes further, and ANet gets gem-cash infusions.

Or perhaps the Executive Satchel, a shared-bag with items that can’t be removed, accessible to all characters on the account.

• home instance portal stone
• Black Lion merchant (something possible to share with those around the subscription-bearer)
• Infinite Repair Canister
• Infinite Revival Orb (on a long-ish cooldown)
• airship access
• Infinite Transmutation Stone (system checks for it and reduces all transmutation costs to zero)
  Basically, grant huge convenience without breaking the game.

Or maybe a Black Lion Revival Contract
Once per two hours (in-game day), if the character is defeated, it spawns a rescue group of NPCs to fight off mobs and revive the character. (Tongue-in-cheek nod to Shadowrun intended.)

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m just waiting until Troll’s Revenge is the daily and you need the actual key to complete it.

And I will delight when a guild or group of coordinated mesmers chain-run everyone to the waypoints. Because GW2’s community is still the nicest I’ve encountered in an MMO.

I had my framerate drop by about 10-15 recently. Had to go update my video drivers before I could reconcile it. I recommend giving that a try and seeing if it helps.
And don’t be fooled if your system had a “user experience” thing installed. Go to the manufacturer website directly. I had to do that for nvidia, but now I’m back where I should be.

Fjaeldmark.9043:

On topic, toughness is a defensive stat it shouldn’t really give offensive bonuses. If retaliation is to scale off something other than power it should be the strength of the incoming hit. At present retaliation does very little to slow attacking enemies (like PvE ones). Making large hits cause larger retaliation hits would make it useful against more types of opponent.

One of the better suggestions on the topic. It’d make power-burst damage more cautious in PvP and the counter damage somewhat hilarious against PvE bosses, which are known for doing too much damage anyway.
Not saying the change is necessary.

There’s a few arguments one could make on coding Retaliation to a different stat. Toughness isn’t one of them. It’s already by far the best defense stat. The use of Power is understandable for the concept of a boon that inflicts counter hits.
Condition Damage might be considered an appropriate swap, since it does damage through Toughness like conditions do.
If anything needs more love, it’s Healing Power. (Love, or to be obliterated and all healing skills normalized…) Unfortunately, with Concentration being a thing now, we can’t even have Healing Power swap to Boon Power and make it more useful overall, but that’s not for this thread.

I’d be okay with this. It lets owners use their unlimited access anywhere, and it stops me from F-ing on an NPC that doesn’t actually work. :P

Mesmer/Chrono is often easy-sauce, since most of the more dangerous mobs are AoE threats and redirecting aggro to clones isn’t too difficult.

Definitely shoot for Silver. Some can be infuriating (most, actually), but there are some easier Gold ranks you can get. Junkyard and On Wings of Gold are simpler ones.

Just remember that some ‘adventures’ require other masteries to get the Gold rank, so relax on trying to get them until you’ve unlocked some of your mobility options, like bouncing mushrooms and advanced gliding.

I too love that they added the old JPs. It’s prompted me into actually doing them.

Sort of. Half the time, at least, I end up catching the mesmer ports, as people are kind enough to offer them. Asking if ports are coming is acceptable, but demanding portals is not. Either wait for the next bus, or learn to do the jumping puzzle.

Legendaries got canned. Don’t expect player housing for at least another 2-3 years.

Serious.7083:

Pifil.5193:

Rauderi.8706:

“Eir’s so brave! I want to be just like her when I grow up.”
-Norn kid

…I don’t have heart to tell her the truth.

It’s OK, just tell her it’s guaranteed that she’ll be just like Eir, sooner or later, and it’s the truth… actually you might want to leave the sooner or later bit out.

I keep thinking it was ’Eir’s so brave, I want to be just as courageous!’ Might be a different NPC tho.

I now miss the young charr and human who used to play together behind the bank in LA.

I heard it last night (and cringed again). You have it right.
I still feel bad for not telling her. One day, kid, one day…

Inimicus.7162:

Rauderi.8706:

So glad I can use the scribe station at the guild hall instead.

Right the scribe station…so I can stand there and listen to a Tengu repeatedly call me racist and moan about being back in the Dominion of Winds, and that loveless prick in the tavern talk about himself. -.-

“You think you are so different, you judge too much with your eyes alone.” NO I’M JUDGING WITH MY EARS AND IF I COULD, I’D BE HAVING A REAL BIG CHICKEN DINNER TONIGHT… COME HERE CHIRPY, THE COLONEL HAS A NEW JOB FOR YE!!!

Don’t be enemies with him though, or he’ll have your body floating by in a river somewhere. o_O

“Eir’s so brave! I want to be just like her when I grow up.”
-Norn kid

…I don’t have heart to tell her the truth.

Aceofsppades.6873:

Ashen.2907:

So far the greatswords feel the most un-legendary to me, although the Longbow are close behind.

A weapon that looks more like a surfboard than a sword seems worthy of ridicule to me.

Really? Because I think the trail effect makes them the most impressive legendary.

Personally I would say the minstrel, it’s just a harp focus with nothing else special.

ANet always gives massive love to its greatswords. From skins to skills, greatsword or bust.
… :\

As for unimpressive, I wouldn’t say greatswords are anywhere near that. Dreamer can die in a fire. Howler is unimpressive in how little ANet seems to care about getting it right.

Danikat.8537:

Edit: or if, as seems to be happening to me, you keep getting the same bounty over and over so you’re unable to progress the achievement for fighting all the different bosses.

Good news: You don’t need the bounty to get credit for killing them. It just makes it harder to find them.

I was out by Fort Salma (repeating some Season 2 stuff for mastery points…), and I wandered over toward a gathering of players. Sure enough, supply box was there, so I waited. Got credit for the kill, just no bounty reward.

I’m not much of a space nazzee when it comes to my inventory, so I don’t overly care. It makes it more orderly and clearly delineated.

But, options are generally better, so I hope an extra click box gets added to the inventory options.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Jhoul.6923:

btw, why do female human and norn have sexy undies while males have boxers… I want sexy underwear for my male characters, like a speedo or a boxer briefs.

Also chars look silly with underwear, they are hairy, let them naked, all their privates will be covered with hair… this way we can do cosplays of Red XIII from FF7.

How do you know their private areas are hairy? They could be hairless in that area you know.

You haven’t been peeking into the Charr barracks again have you?

Note the aforementioned Scallywag legs a few nudges up in the thread. I got a rather brow-raising surprise when I first started gliding with them. o_O

Still voting for Southsun Bathing Outfits.

Last night, I gave Scrap Rifles a poke. I went through a weird cycle of “hate this crap, this is kind of fun, g’kitten this garbage” in the span of about an hour while working on Silver.

Turns out that I ran into some critical issues that made this thing unnecessarily obnoxious:

1. Chak drones are friggin’ cowards. I could break their eggs, insult their mothers, and leave a flaming bag of poo on their little sisters, and they would still hide in a corner while only 3 or 4 of them actually take offense. In a mini-game with time-limited mass kills, the enemies need to actually come at me en masse.
2. Restarting a playthrough immediately after failure doesn’t quite work. I had an entire post-fail run that had almost no enemies in it. Reset ought to include spawns. This is really important in reducing iteration time.
3. The number of times I’ve clenched my teeth and muttered “Why. Won’t. You. Just. Die.” to a bunch of drones tells me they might have too many hitpoints. Or I need shorter cooldowns on my 3 & 4 abilities.
4. Less critical, I could do without the rifle blowing up eggs I happen to be nowhere near. When I’m planning wise heat management, it screws with my plans when an egg I’m not even facing explodes.

Beyond that, not too terrible an adventure. #1 fun killer in it is the AI wandering off instead of trying to kill me.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Saphykun.3206:

Electro.4173:

Also, do you really want to see neon pink and bright green Charr running around?

You know this isn’t a question. Of course I want to see violently bright Charr running around in equally clashing armor colors

There already is. I’ve seen him a couple times at Teq…. Neon green glowing from head to dew-claw… I don’t know how he did it… but I just hope the secret doesn’t get out, or else the next Khan-Ur will need to create the Radioactive Legion.

~EW

He probably was using a poly-luminescent undulating refractor (green) infusion.

Zodiac armor skins. They were wtf when they released (no obvious connection to lore?) and probably got removed in the big gem store cleanout.

Conncept.7638:

Everybody has their problem baddies, Saurians have always been easy for me, even solo, meanwhile I’ve constantly had problems with the bloody mordrem itzel assassins and shadowleapers, which I don’t ever see anyone else having trouble with.

But all in all HoT really is loaded with enemies that are poorly designed like this. Instead of having you use your repertoire of skills excellently against a variety of mechanics and rewarding you for specific build strengths, they require you to repeat a single skill over and over to address a spammy near one-shot mechanic repeated eternally on a rote cooldown, and totally ignore your build save for its DPS output, making the only skill bar discerning and memorizing a mechanic obfuscated by the game engine.

Agreed. So many critters in HoT have one-note abilities that are OP for the sake of making up for the fact they only have one ability.

• Pocket raptors, cute as they are, have huge mobility and damage numbers for being midgets. They’re pretty much an AoE-DPS test.
• Charging mushrooms. If a player had a way to do a knockdown every three seconds, ANet would nerf that crap right quick. It’s not more acceptable to inflict that on a player just because a minor mob has it. (For bosses..? That’s debatable.)
• StoneheadTRex things. Yet another one-note dashing-knockdown attack. With a wider-than-shown problem similar to Teragrifs.
• Arrowheads. A moderate challenge from the front or back (damage is a bit punishing for a failed dodge..), but it’s the anti-melee sideroll that’s terrible. Next to no cooldown on it, the knockdown time is equivalent to the cooldown, and it’s fairly damaging. (Worst, the minipet doesn’t roll on idle. :\)
• Bomber mushrooms. Good to threaten range once in a while, but the AoE is too big and too damaging. But mostly just too big. Attacks don’t change when engaged in melee, so damage bombs are nearly instant when thrown.
• Smokescales and the infamous <8-second kill window. Again, a skill like that in PvP would be decried as the broken mess it is, but it is (here we go again) the only decent attack it has. One-note monster with a slightly longer cooldown. I appreciate the mechanic that forces movement, but I’d rather it reduce damage to zero to allow for push/pull/blowout skills to still allow control of the battlefield. Slightly shorter/faster attack duration on its multi-chomp would do well for not having to waste more than one dodge on it.

So, yeah, saurians are actually OP.

Adding my voice to this, too. My particular irk is wiping at Axemaster. It takes forever to make it back after a waypoint if the nearby camp is dead. (And it usually is, so lol.)

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I don’t know how I feel about gating mastery points behind adventures. It felt satisfying to finish Salvage/Drone/Wings and get those mastery points. It felt …not satisfying, but earned.. to get them from ley line run. I worked really hard for those, and I don’t mind working hard, but in the end victory depended more on luck more than work and repeating the same actions over and over until you get a run where every skill fires when you use it. Some adventures aren’t a test of skill. They’re a test of patience.

There’s a secondary point here: Mastery Points don’t have the same level of time/skill/effort required to get them.

• Finish story
• Find a box
• Vista/JP-like scenery
• Beat a particular boss
• Finish a particular story event chain

All those are fairly simple. They require exploration and participation in the main content, but they aren’t overly unwieldy or obnoxious. They use what’s already in the game’s mechanics. They’re also likely to get bug fixes on a short queue.

• Botched-Execution Minigame (Gold)
• 10 storyline objectives
• As the line above, including “absolutely perfect” runthroughs without quick reset
• Depend on meta-event success

These events are, by point value, equivalently weighted for points, but also aggravating, buggy/inconsistent, and most likely to be cited as “stretching sparse gameplay content” because they force wasting time and emotional investment. They often rely on “unique” mechanics which don’t fit the fluid nature of GW2’s movement controls, and are influenced by precision-wrecking ping times.

Danikat.8537:

Some sites had a lot of players but there were others where I arrived just as the event was starting and there was no one around. So I switched on my mentor tag (I don’t have a commander tag) and told people in map chat there was a leyline event at my location. 2 out of 3 times I did this I was accused of lying and trying to troll people by tricking them into going to the wrong location. I later learned that this is because Dulfy’s site only lists 3 of the 6 locations that are on the Wiki and apparently some people believe that if Dulfy hasn’t said something exists then it doesn’t exist, even if they can see it happening right in front of them.

There’s more than three? Huh!
The reason why people think you might be fibbing is because the NPC that points you to them (after getting the item) only shows those three zones.

I would have liked a bit of other notice, but I find the mini-events to be fairly amusing. There’s a little moment of discovery in getting that “what the huh?” item, but I worry for other players who might not stumble on them before they’re gone.