Guild Wars 2

Magister Tassi, via Golem Assistant

“How interesting. I’m seeing a marked descrease in the candy corn deposits in the world. I wonder if the Bloody Prince is involved.”

So, there is at least a storyline reason for it, in that the Bloody Prince despises candy corn and seems to be interfering with the Mad King’s ability to stock the world with it. No way to know if that’s a sign that it will change once the Princes is defeated or not, though.

There is no title this year, or, if there is, it hasn’t been revealed yet.

Hah, I noticed that! I’m a big fan of Magister Tassi, and giving her a GLaDOS-like voice filter through the golem is a cute touch.

There are several threads on the Blood and Madness board for this subject, if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard more fuss about it.

While there’s no word on returning costumes from last year, it seems there may be a Bloody Prince Thorn costume to look forward to. There may or may not be other goodies in the works before Halloween is over.

I don’t know what they are, but I must have them. o_o

AliceKaye.1903:

Totally agree. I thought for sure there would be a new one to collect. Highly disappointed.

There’s no telling about last year’s costumes, but there will be at least one new one this year.

Just use the ~ key (next to the ¹ key) when you pick it up, just like you would normally use to swap weapons. That should destroy a conjured weapon, and I have no idea if it’ll destroy a banner or just set it down, because I always drop banners as soon as I accidentally pick them up, and forget them just as quickly.

That’s a bit of a nuisance, but I’ve never found it happening often enough for me to mind the mechanic itself.

That was the impression I got from the livestream. Sounds like before, the cap was on how many targets the AOE skill would damage, whereas now it’s the number the AOE skill will attempt to damage. Doesn’t sound like it’s biased towards or against any particular targets.

I’ve already said earlier in this thread that I think it’s a mistake to try to compare GW1 unit sales directly with GW2 sales and try to come to any meaningful or useful comparison between the two. They both rolled with very different business models, and it’s just a difficult comparison all around, for several reasons. That said, if numbers are going to be part of the discussion, here are some numbers:

GW2 sold 3,500,00 games in its first year.

GW1 sold 3,000,000 units in about 20 months after launch, a window that saw all three campaigns, but not yet Eye of the North.The last press release on their official page is from 2009, celebrating 6,000,000 units. You can find other milestones on the press release page, but these two seem like the most significant or relevant.

coglin.1867:

Considering GW2 sold 7 times more copies the GW did. you would need 3 times the population GW1 ever reached just to hit 40%-50% of the GW2 player base.

I think this is the first case of someone using the “7 times” metric that people are referring to (though I didn’t look very thoroughly,) and it’s just nonsensical, especially without any context as to the sales window, what versions of the game are included, etc. GW1 hit 2,000,000 sales about 13 months after launch, which included the first month of Factions sales, which would, extremely roughly, put GW2 at 1.75 times the sales of GW1in a roughly comparable window. Of course, a lot of people who bought Prophecies probably bought factions, which means that anyone trying to use these sales numbers to estimate player population, without any better, more specific data, is just making stuff up / guestimating.

So, yeah, numbers are of very limited use here. Please enjoy numbers responsibly. Carry on.

shockwave.1764:

evasive arcana is one of the most fun traits in the game

Absolutely, yes. I like my alts, but I’m always disappointed that my dodgeroll doesn’t deal damage / cripple / cleanse conditions. It’s pretty fantastic.

I’m surprised anyone would call Ele traits boring, when I find them far more interesting than, say, my Ranger or Mesmer traits. Elemental Attunement is extremely flexible, Cleansing Wave (the trait) is more easy condition removal, and Conjurer is a lot of fun for those days I feel like swapping in conjured weapons. There are a lot I’m not familiar familiar with, so maybe some lines are more exciting than others, but I find myself thinking about and playing into (dodge rolling to cripple, etc.) my traits far more with Ele than my alts.

I don’t play competitively, so I can’t say anything about how it’s balanced there, but I absolutely love Elementalist for PvE. Made on in the first beta weekend, it’s been my main character since launch, and it’s still my favorite, several alts later.

Elementalist skills are flashy, and the constant attunement swapping can make it very fast-paced.

Well, Halloween starts tomorrow, so I’d say that’s a pretty cool place to start. Every two weeks there’s a new Living World release that lasts for 2-4 weeks or so, and while you’re probably not going to love every single one of them, they do generally provide a lot of stuff to do if you’re looking for new content.

There’s always World Completion if you feel like exploring the world without raising alts.

I’m not an expert on builds, much less Guardian builds, but, as Khisanth said, you can probably get good advice from the Guardian forum.

Hrm. Why the change?

While it might add a little support to the group, instead of just the one or two people using the conjured weapons, I expect the buff would have to be decreased in order to compensate for that, which is less useful if you’re soloing, or just playing with a friend or two. And then there’s the fact that making it work like banners makes both banners and conjured weapons each less unique.

It’s not exactly an enormous change, but I’m just not sure it adds much value, while it does affect what makes these skills special.

Think I usually get them around 12:00 PM server time, give or take an hour or two. There’s never any definite, to-the-hour schedule for release times, but they’re usually during “work hours,” as opposed to primetime or midnight before, or anything like that.

There’s really no sense in trying to justify the sneak peak we got with the one advertised on the Halloween event page. There’s no need to. Obviously, one thing was planned when the event page was written, something came up, and they had to change the plan, which is why we got something else. The Facebook announcement reflected the change (even if they didn’t acknowledge that there was a change,) and the Halloween release page was just plain outdated…which isn’t shocking, if the change was at all a last minute thing. Should that have been acknowledged a little more? Possibly, yeah, but a last minute change to the release page isn’t going to inform that many people. That’s what social media is good at and traditional web is not, quick changes.

What really baffles me are the people who make a big point about how they were lied to, like there is any possible motive for luring people in with a preview of Halloween content, then switching them with a balance patch preview. It’s perfectly reasonable to be disappointed or frustrated, but the idea that anyone was being intentionally mislead is absurd.

Looks like it was just a change of plans to show off some of the class revisions, which is a semi-major thing happening tomorrow, even if it’s not as flashy as the holiday event. They’ve had to reschedule particular livestreams before, which is inconvenient if you want to watch a particular one, but it’s just something that happens. Maybe someone who was supposed to present got sick or something.

/shrug

They use the sPVP area for easy access to weapons and training dummies.

CMstorm.8679:

Is it mainly the ppl that have HoM have the higher achievement points, or what? I just want my hellfire helm, laurels, account bonuses and rewards etc plx

A full Hall of Monuments, which is no small feat to obtain in the original GW, nets 500 points. That’s certainly not a small amount, but when you’re talking about people with 10,000 AP, that’s 5% of their total amount, which is enough to get you the Hellfire Helm…if you already have 8,500 AP.

Living Story can earn you a pretty healthy number of AP, if you keep up with it, and you’ll likely be earning skins other prizes at the same time, so that’s something to consider if you aren’t already doing it.

Flawless Defense is a somewhat frustrating achievement, since so much of what matters to it is out out of your hands, assuming you’re just a soldier instead of an organizer. It’s not like you personally can be at all the turrets, and if a turret is getting overwhelmed (possibly because of two champions spawning,) it’s going to take more than just one good player to fix that. Even a generally good Tequatl run can drop a turret now during a fight.

Young Somalia.1706:

Redenaz.8631:

Personally, I prefer the new system. I was never crazy about GW1’s energy system, which was okay, but nothing I got excited about. It probably didn’t help that I was a Ranger/Ele, which meant I was using a lot of energy-sucking fire skills with subpar energy regeneration, without access to Energy Storage.

So you didn’t like energy because you didn’t know how to play efficiently?

Gotcha.

I didn’t say I didn’t like it; it just wasn’t that interesting to me. There’s a difference between “I don’t like this!” and “Eh, I could take it or leave it.” I thought it was okay, regardless of my particular playstyle, which is exactly what I said. <__<

-facepalm-

Good, sweet Mellaggan. Quaggans do not like this plan.

Food for thought: The Shadow Behemoth does a pretty good job of adjusting the camera, doesn’kitten

(Edit: Does. Not. it. C’mon, autocensor, if you want me to pay attention to you, just say something. We don’t have to play these games~)

I’m sure that’s more practical for some bosses than others, but I always thought that fight was pretty cool visually.

Er, what?

I’m really not sure what you’re talking about, but it kinda sounds like you might be having some graphical problems.

While I think a lot of complaints against Anet are misguided, this one would seem fair to me. It’s not like anyone was evil or even stupid about it; it’s just an oversight that causes problems, and could really stand to be fixed.

There are no hints or tool-tips in-game that explain what “Unique” means, and it’s not in the online manual, so unless you look it up on the wiki or another fan site, you have no way of knowing that “Unique” has any particular mechanical function. Honestly, for a long time I thought it was just pointless flavor text, because it showed up on the Mad Memoires and Ancient Karka Shell items I got from Living Story events.

It’s not even possible to equip a second Mad Memoires [Complete] because it’s a back item, even if it wasn’t unique, even if you could got more than one, which just goes to show how unevenly applied the keyword is. Some trophies and other items that cannot be equipped even have it, and it serves no mechanical function for them.

Considering the cost of buying a duplicate ascended trinket that you can’t equip, I think some explanation is warranted somewhere. It can be as simple as a hint that pops up the first time you ever talk to a Laurel merchant.

Edit: Thanks, Khisanth.

It’s not something that “should” be free. It’s something we would like for free. I’d like it if they upgraded me to the Digital Deluxe version for free, but I don’t think my purchase is a bad value just because they could have made it even better, at the expensive of something they could potentially charge for later.

Some games will take that model too far; it’s our job as consumers to do our research and vote with our wallets.

It costs a lot of gold, sure, which can take a lot of time, but, let’s be honest here, if time spent playing the game is such a burden, why does a person need so many character slots?

Sidebar: Is there something secretly profane about the second half of my name that I’m not aware of, that it gets autocensored? Redenaz redenaz redenaz!

Edit: And of course it doesn’t censor here. See Kogam’s post for what I mean. I’ve seen this happen before, and I have no idea why.

Nick.6972:

Why do I have to play Elementalist or Engineer to have access to more skills?
I want to play as a Greatsword guardian, but quite frankly, I’m bored of using same 5 skills since the beta, yes, since beta.

Because elementalist and engineer are designed to be the classes with a ton of skills. If every class got an increase in skill options, elementalist and engineer would have to have even more to retain that same quality. They risk hitting a ceiling, however, where that quality is not longer substantially useful.

I wonder how many skills would have to have “You can only use this with <weapon> equipped.” While I could theoretically use “Shield of Absorption” or “Mighty Blow” with a greatsword, they might seem a little awkward. And I’m certainly not going to be using Mighty Blow with a scepter.

Edit: This is probably obvious, but the above paragraph only applies if someone is wanting to totally decouple weapons from skill sets. If it’s a question of adding more skills to weapons, which can then be swapped out, but only with that weapon, to change the play style of that weapon, that’s a different thing entirely.

I think five slots are a fair value for the cost of the game. Would I like more? Of course I would. But as it is, I have the option to pay ~50 gold or $10 for another character slot, and neither one seems horribly unreasonable to me, especially if I’ve enjoyed the game enough to go through five characters already. That’s enough for one character of each race, and 5/8 of the profession options without having to delete anyone or buy extra slots. Considering a lot of places in the story branch into three major options, five seems to cover quite a bit of the game.

There are a lot of places with potential to nickel-and-dime players, but five character slots just doesn’t feel stingy to me.

Ah, yes, that’s on me. The OP mentioned the huge number of GW1 skills, and my brain immediately jumped to the full-spectrum of cross-class options. If it’s just restricted to one class, the options aren’t as overwhelming.

That’s a tough one to solve. You can only equip one of any given ascended accessory, which is why they say “Unique” in their stat block. That’s not really explained anywhere, however, which is a terrible oversight in the system. You’re not the first person to do this, and you won’t be the last.

To get the earrings onto another character is going to be tricky, and I’m not sure it’s possible. I’ve heard of people using low-level, white-rarity items that are account bound with transmutation crystals/stones to get soulbound gear onto other characters, but I’m not sure where you could get account bound earrings, if they exist. Hopefully someone else can be more helpful!

I hope you get it sorted out! It’s frustrating that they don’t spell out the “one per character” thing more clearly.

That’s the medium Order of Whispers set, in case it wasn’t clear from context. I have it on my ranger, and it’s pretty amazing. It dyes very, very well, and you can mix-and-match pieces with other armors and it pretty easily.

I have the Whispers coat and pants, for example, but use Named/Duelist gloves, Pirate boots, and Caudecus’s Manor shoulderguards.

Personally, I much prefer GW2’s use of weapon sets to determine the first half of our skills, with more customization options for the second half. I’d like to see more skills introduced, but I also think GW1 reached the point where it had too many options for its own good. GW1 took some influence from Magic: The Gathering with it’s heavy-customization system, and I think its telling that MTG’s healthiest formats are Modern and Standard (formats with limited card pools,) rather than Vintage (a card pool stretching back to when the game first launched.) Vintage has innumerably more options, but few viable options. I enjoyed Guild Wars 1 a lot, but I found the number of skills overwhelming, and found myself without any good way to process all the relevant number crunching, even after playing through two complete campaigns, and so I just had to settle into an unoptimized build that I liked, which I also knew was quirky and inefficient.

Setting aside my own preferences, however, I think this is one of the many areas where people need to keep in mind that no one answer is going to please everyone. It’s made even more complicated when you consider that some are playing sPVP, some WvW, some dungeon runs, and some just knocking about casually in PvE. Changing things for one group is going to change them the others, for better or worse. Neither “more choices” nor “fewer choices” is always going to be the correct answer; it’s a balance. Guild Wars 1 vets who are disappointed in the change in direction have an understandable viewpoint, and so do those who prefer the new direction.

What really baffles me are the people who act surprised about the change, including people who still quote the manifesto, but don’t seem to have followed any of the development or pre-launch previews before that. (Before anyone takes that personally, I mean that as a recurring thing I keep seeing, not directed at anyone in particular in this thread.)

Maybe it’s just because I’m an elementalist, but I’m constantly flipping through attunements and letting rip with all, or most, of my skills. It’s a ton of fun, and what I was thinking of more so than utility skills, which generally have a longer cooldown than weapon skills. Even if I just stick to one or two attunements, or my two weapons on another class, I find myself using my other skills more freely than I ever did in GW1. If they feel too long to you, have you considered taking traits that reduce weapon skill cooldowns?

I only played a Thief for a while in one of the Beta Weekends, but isn’t the Initiative mechanic similar to GW1’s energy mechanic?

Personally, I prefer the new system. I was never crazy about GW1’s energy system, which was okay, but nothing I got excited about. It probably didn’t help that I was a Ranger/Ele, which meant I was using a lot of energy-sucking fire skills with subpar energy regeneration, without access to Energy Storage. The GW2 system encourages me to use my other skills a lot more.

(In related news, just because GW1 had a ton of options didn’t mean they were all equally viable.)

GOSU.9574:

Anet just doesn’t seem to get it. When I ran the instances and those peeps who would reply when I asked why they did them would say “They are fun!” and I would ask “fun exactly how?” pointing out the dodge-athons, bang-on-meatbag-athons, and they would inveritably reply “cause I run past X” “cause I glitch out Y” “cause I bug out Z”.

If you find yourself trying to tell other people why they shouldn’t be having fun doing something, you’re probably missing the bigger picture.

I only do dungeons once in a blue moon, but there are plenty of things I do for fun in the game that I don’t expect other people to enjoy, either. That’s one of the great things about a good MMO, that there are multiple ways to have fun with it. If you don’t like one style of play, you’re generally free to find something else you do enjoy.

Since you said you’re new to Guild Wars, I’ll go ahead and say this, although most might find it obvious: Get a lot of high-capacity bags. I wouldn’t bother with 20 slot bags, since the required rune to make them costs five times as much as an 18 slot bag, but whether you make them yourself or buy them off the trading post, 18 slot bags are worth their weight in gold. Even if you can’t afford to level up a crafting discipline high enough to make a hugenormous bag, even a couple of extra 8-slot bags are well worth your while. Each of your characters has four bag slots on top of your starter backpack, and there’s really no reason for any of those to go unused, especially if you do find yourself running out of space.

I keep alternate weapon sets and armor skins (both from events and normal ones I’ve picked up that I like) in 18 slot invisible bags, which has the added benefit of keeping them out of vendor/trading post windows, preventing me from ever selling things accidentally.

Danikat’s advice is also good. Again, since you said you’re new, I’d like to point out that if you click the gear icon in the inventory window, you can deposit all crafting materials in your inventory. I always try to keep a full salvage kit or two on hand if I’m doing a dungeon, so that I can clear inventory space as needed by salvaging, using essences of luck, and depositing crafting materials.

Rata Sum has a pretty sweet merchant quarter, although it doesn’t have the Mystic Forge.

I don’t know what would be a good fix, but it is a pity the racial capitals don’t have more reason to visit them, other than for pure sight-seeing. Divinity’s Reach is hands-down my favorite place in the game, so I was really happy when Beacons of Kryta and the Crown Pavilion gave me more reasons to spend time in it. Hopefully the other cities will get some Living Story love sooner or later.

Seems exactly right to me. Since only the person using it sees it, there’s very little incentive to brag to strangers about it, as simply repeating the text is trivial to fake. People who are interested for themselves can use it without anyone else having to hear about it.

If you don’t like it, just don’t use it. That’s a less-than-ideal answer for most complaints, but as there isn’t any reward for using /deaths, it’s totally applicable here.

New Krytan is just a basic cipher from English, which is why all that would be needed to write it would be a font change. It’s basically Windings; all you have to do is learn/replace the corresponding characters.

If they ever did something like this, I definitely hope it would be an opt-in feature, where if you don’t opt-in, all text people type in New Krytan would display normally. I don’t want more gimmicks in LA chat than there already are, if I can avoid it.

The “why” isn’t that confusing, I think. Whether you find the key pieces randomly or buy them off the trading post, if you want the daily, you’re turning five tradeable key pieces into one account-bound completed key.

So, now you’ve got a completed key. You could just destroy it, but as long as you have it, maybe you should take a run at the Aetherblade path to try to use it. That encourages people to run the Living Story content. And, if you were making keys and running the LS content even without the daily, that rewards additionally for something you were already doing. Instead of encouraging you to tackle other dungeons or beat face in the Aetherblade jumping puzzle, this one is just specifically focused on the Aetherblade path, but is also really easy to complete if you don’t have time to run the dungeon today. It just encourages you to run it sooner or later.

Pity it’s bugged, though, as it seemed like a nice, subtle push to me.

That particular story is interesting, but also obnoxiously long in terms of running around across different zones, as I remember. “Letting an innocent die” was the first one I did, and I seem to remember liking it a lot.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Personal_storyline#Pact_Arc

The first Pact story arc is determined by you character’s greatest fear, as chosen in “A Light in the Darkness,” when you talk to the Pale Tree. The mortar storyline come from the “being dishonored” fear and the orb storyline is from “forcing someone to suffer,” so choose “letting an innocent die” next time and you’ll get the final option.

The second part of the Pact storyline requires you to choose a plan from three proposed by the Orders of Tyria, so there’s a Vigil story, a Whispers story, and a Priory story. Which one you choose is unrelated to the order you’re actually a part of, so you’re free to pick whichever one you haven’t done yet.

So, there are two variable arcs, with three options each, which means you need three characters to see them all, if you don’t repeat choices.

Warrior is the one class I’ve never even tried, so I don’t have any helpful advice on the subject. I did want to say, however, that this is one awesome post on Mercury Ranique’s part.

The advice Seras listed is excellent, so I want to just second everything (s)he said. I actually started typing up a long post on the subject, until I looked over the thread and realized I it was already covered in that one post.

Just ignore the advice about the “champion zerg.” It’s a thing some higher level players do in Queensdale to earn money by repeatedly cycling through the same few events over and over and over, and I wouldn’t recommend it until you’ve more or less completed the game. (Although, personally, I wouldn’t recommend it at all, since I find it extremely tedious.)

Welcome to the game! Seras is right that elementalist is a complicated profession, because you have an absolute ton of options with all your attunements, but it’s far and above my favorite, and well worth the learning curve if you enjoy a profession with a little more flair than most.

Not sure if it’s a bug, or just part of design that wasn’t thought through very far, but it’s a huge problem. I don’t often do dungeons, but after losing two hours in Arah [Story] because our Fearless Leader went AFK after going down in a difficult fight, then decided to bail on us when he got back, has made me even less inclined to do them.

If it gets fixed, at least if we lose the leader, we’re down one player and can just recruit another, instead of the whole party getting shafted.

I’d say the champ farm seems lucrative enough without throwing karma into the mix. I see people complain about not having reasons to do anything but the most efficient farm (which is a very narrow-sighted view; do whatever’s fun,) and keeping karma out of the equation, or minimizing it, is a good incentive for rewards-minded people to do events.

Perhaps the general miasma and pollution of Orr weaken it? I imagine Oakhearts as being very in tune with the land, and Orr’s pretty nasty place to be in tune with.

This topic is five months old, so I wouldn’t expect Merlin or any of the others to reply to it, Shuzsie.

As for the topic, I love, love, LOVE, Queensdale as a zone, but the time or two I’ve tried riding the champ train, I found it agonizingly boring. I get that some people like it, but it’s definitely not for me.

If I feel like farming, the World Boss circuit is more relaxing (if probably less rewarding,) and if I’m going to be playing with the level of attention and motion the train requires (as opposed to drawing or something between World Bosses,) I’d rather be working on my world completion or one of my alts. I can’t always do group events, depending on if there are others nearby, but at least there are plenty of regular events and places to explore elsewhere to keep my attention.

Abberrant — To be clear, I don’t actually care about having a mount. If it’s just a speedboost, I don’t see a point in it, so it would have to offer a distinctly new feel to the game to be worthwhile. Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, provides a very good horseback mechanic, which is a lot faster than running, but also a lot harder to control. Since the open world isn’t designed for wide-turns, however, I’m specifically against the idea of mounts that you can summon anywhere, like in houses or at the end of jumping puzzles.

I just didn’t like Mudbone’s tone. Whether you feel something is cool or not, don’t forget that someone else might feel differently on the subject.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Ok, here is a VALID REASON to not have mounts, that being many would only use them to annoy people by parking said horsey right on top of an NPC making it a chore to target said NPC in order to interact with it, much like many do with the summoned merchants in LA by placing one directly on top of the banker or other interact-able NPC there, you see where this is going.

That is a more valid reason. Of course, people can already do that by parking a large charr or norn character on an NPC (which affects mouse clicking, if not [f] key interaction,) or, as you said, using a summoned NPC. Honestly, though, I’ve never seen anyone actually do that, so I wasn’t even aware if this was a problem before.

Gah, another Trahearne thread? Toss it in with the others.

I wish they’d just sticky it. It’s usually floating near the top, anyway, and this subject has been absolutely beaten to death.

How exactly is an invisible bag a terrible solution? It’s a lot more elegant than the locking slots idea, and it allows you to have as many minis as you have invisible bag space for, instead of just one if it were in the hero panel.

Maybe there’s something I’m misunderstanding here, but it seems like an excellent solution.

I used to have this problem with minis, but you can solve it simply by keeping them in an invisible bag, which keeps its contents from being deposited when you mass-deposit things from the inventory.

I already keep at least one or two on my characters to stop their extra weapons and other junk from showing up on the trading post or vendor windows, so it’s a pretty convenient solution. Hope it helps!