Guild Wars 2

Not sure if it’s been pointed out but the same update that made WoP a stunbreak + stability (to ensure it works as such) did the same thing to other profession’s skills, warrior stomp and the engie toolbelt skill for thumper turret are the ones I remember getting the same 1s stability treatment.

Hmm I’m not even sure, probably somewhere in the range of $250-$300. It’s hard to track as I bought a lot of account upgrades near launch with gold when the conversion rate was quite favorable.

KCobraII.8752:

So instead of having the Flamekissed armor use the same mesh as another armor set, you make a new one that uses the same mesh as another set (Feathered)? With this much time, I don’t see why it couldn’t of been something unique. Do the heavy and medium Flame sets use another skin as their basis?

Yup, the medium is a reskin of the medium karma armors in Orr and the heavy is a reskin of some mid level karma armor (pit fighter is the name I know it by).

I would love to see two-handed axes or spears useable on land but barring that, existing weapons I would like to see are:

Necro – Hammer
Ranger – Staff or Hammer
Thief – Rifle
Engineer – Mace or Torch
Guardian – Warhorn
Mesmer – MH Pistol
Elementalist – Sword
Warrior – Pistol or Shortbow I guess?

so it went from a reskin of human t3 to a reskin of the feathered set? wow, very glad i didn’t buy it now.

Astralporing.1957:

One siege devourer can still be seen in the event chain in Iron Marches – though it is presented as an independent NPC.

Also, if Siege Devourers are back, can we expect the return of the magnificent Siege Turtles?

You also fight one during the Blood Legion storyline in The Bane arena under the Black Citadel.

And as long as we’re wishing for GW1 siege-creatures I’d like to see the junundu again, those things were awesome.

Jabberwock.9014:

Ezekiel.1985:

Sadly, human female, I feel, is one of the worst examples.

Are you serious? Human female is the best pc voice in game, and one of the few I can actually take seriously, because the actor is not trying to fit a caricature. You want laughable, go play a female norn or sylvari.

Funny because I find the female sylvari to be the best pc voice in the game. She actually adds inflection to her lines, when she’s angry she sounds angry, etc. Whereas female human while not bad feels very flat by comparison.

Having played through the same order storyline with both a female human and sylvari I must say the sylvari voice acting is much more enjoyable.

If you’re in Queensdale that looks exactly like the human tutorial boss minus the hands holding it up. I’ve not encountered this but I’m guessing it’s some sort of bizarre bug causing a distance imposter of it to appear outside the tutorial.

I really do miss that mechanic, made you really aware of your environment and made holding the high ground a very legitimate strategy.

Kain Francois.4328:

#Stoners
/15charrs

Speaking of which, stoned sylvari: potted plant

dusanyu.4057:

“For the Panini!!”

for the longest time i thought the centaurs were hungry to die for a sandwich.

I’m so glad I’m not the only one to hear their sandwich battle cries!

Variations have been mentioned but asura getting swiftness, I always hear, “Eat celery!”

It’s beautiful! Takes me back to GW1 when I set up a multi-MM team that could sustain 30-40 minions.

Ellie.5203:

if the logic is wintersday is back so obviously the skins would come back

answer us why last years halloween skins were the only ones not to be brought back

Because everyone hated that they didn’t bring back the Halloween skins. Thus they’ve brought back the Wintersday skins to avoid a similar situation. This thread along with the “re-revert the Grenth Hood” thread are the most indisputable proof I’ve yet seen that you can never please everyone.

Braham is very young (17 or 18 iirc). I think he’s the only one we’re told an exact age for. It’s hard to say for the others, but if I had to guess…
Kasmeer I doubt is over 25, and based on her backstory I’m guessing she could be as young as 18.
Marjory I’d put closer to 30, she’s got a long history (enough time to be both a ministry guard and later make a name for herself as a private investigator).
Rox, I really have no idea about, I’m not even sure we know how old charr can get much less how fast they reach adulthood. Still based on how she acts towards Rytlock (mainly her desire to join him seems born out of hero-worship) makes me think she’s rather young, probably the charr equivalent of 17-low 20’s.

Personally I don’t think you should not be trying to tie 01 Zephyr to the spring equinox, Wintersday in it’s original form is a sort of divine “groundhog’s day” to determine the length of winter. I doesn’t make much sense to be determining such a thing right at the spring equinox when regardless of the outcome “winter” will only ever last maybe 1-3 more weeks and things are likely in fact already thawing by Wintersday.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Well, spell wise GW2 did give the necro the Blood Fiend, which is the first flying minion. So lore wise I would say this indicates magical progress, even if it’s just a game mechanic. But hey, I’m a necromancer, and minions are serious business.

Well sure a flying minion is an accomplishment but overall it feels like in focusing on improving individual minion abilities (blood fiend’s flying, active spells designed for specific minions, eliminating their degeneration, even allowing some to regenerate) they lost some of the sheer power that GW1 minions had. Namely the ability to summon large numbers of them quickly (with high death magic and abilities like Aura of the Lich) and augment their damage and abilities to truly impressive levels with abilities like Order of Undeath. (Seriously a GW2 version of Order of Undeath is my biggest wish for necromancers)

Shiren.9532:

I’m really glad the Massively article touched on the handwaving that goes on in the Living Story. … Why is Kasmeer investigating the tower? She conveniently a mesmer of notability (despite that not being noted prior to the tower) with an illusion to dispel.

I would just like to point out that Marjory & Kasmeer’s involvement in the tower is very well explained. They’re private investigators. Before the Tower of Nightmares update they stated (in game) that they were hired by an asura (who was already captured by the Toxic Alliance by the time we arrived) to investigate the disturbances in Kessex Hills.

As for why we didn’t know Kasmeer was a mesmer before, well we also didn’t know Marjory was a necromancer. We saw neither of them in combat before this update so their profession was irrelevant at the time.

Hickeroar.9734:

I had the theory that Scarlet was Anise and googled this thread up :P

I haven’t been following the storyline lately. Is there any proof yet that she’s not?

Pretty sure Anise and Scarlet appeared simultaneously in every major event during the Queen’s Jubilee. Basically we’ve seen Anise and Scarlet in the same room so they’re not alter egos or anything.

draxynnic.3719:

Actually, there are some indications as to why Scarlet has to be sylvari: Her background indicates that what she’s doing is a backlash against the perceived predetermination of the Dream and, to a lesser extent, a kind of teenage rebellion against the authority of the Pale Tree. That makes me think she’s building up to some kind of showdown with the Pale Tree.

While that is certainly there, I like that the article also points out that she completely trivializes how big of an impact the dream has on sylvari by shrugging it off effortlessly. Becoming soundless is a long difficult road by all accounts yet Scarlet just kind of blows it off like it’s nothing. Additionally I’ve gotten the impression she more sees the Dreamers and Nightmare Court as equally foolish and simply not worth her time (unless she can use them as minions apparently).

Really her incredible intelligence and abilities would have been far easier to swallow if she was asura. That race is pretty much built on the premise of being vastly intelligent. Having her be a true genius among asura would have generated much less backlash even though she would then be an over the top stereotypical asuran supervillain. Still I think I’d prefer that to the mary sue we got.

Overall very good article that articulates very well what is wrong with Scarlet without letting too much emotional bias cloud the statements.

Sadly most of the content added over the last year is inaccessible. Personally I still think it’s incredibly wasteful to simply throw out so much content like they do, but I digress.

There are some new/revamped locations you can visit and some content that is still around to enjoy. Namely Kessex Hills got a rather large makeover thanks to the most recent LS, you can see the fallout there now.

The Great Collapse in Divinity’s Reach has been rebuilt into the Crown Pavilion and is a very nice location now. Sadly you cannot access the arena built into the bottom of the pavilion anymore.

There are a few new mini-games you can try your hand at, there’s Sanctum Sprint; a sort of magical “mario-kart meets parkour” that’s actually rather fun once you get the hang of it. As well as Southsun Survival, which seems to be a revamped version of the hunger games inspired event used at the end of one of the betas. There’s also Crab Toss but I’m not actually sure that one’s still around. Regardless these minigames (in addition to good ole’ Keg Brawl) are available on a daily rotation by talking to “Activity” Npcs in major cities.

The world boss Tequatl in Sparkfly Fen got a massive revamp and is now essentially an open world raid, expect to be completely lost and/or useless unless you’re in a guild/group dedicated to it.

Haha norn santa! Awesome!

Bhawb.7408:

No, they simply add the functionality of Reanimator to death nova. Death Nova would then cause Death Nova as it does right now, and summon a jagged horror on enemy death.

JonPeters.5630:

We will talk today about changing duration on weakening shroud instead of cooldown .

Also we have some plans for death magic including merging reanimated with death nova, and moving Protection of the Horde to be a major trait, and then reworking the minors in this line. This kind of change is not going to happen for dec 10 for 3 reasons.
1) testing time
2) implementation time
3) most importantly: if we rework this we want to make sure it is correct the second time around so we will take our time deciding on the “right” design.

Point 3 is something I’m happy to discuss here to list some ideas and break down some pros and cons.

Thanks,

Jon

Interesting. I’ve been away for a while so this is the first I’ve seen of this. Sounds good overall. I am curious though what they intend with Protection of the Horde, it’s not terribly great even as a minor, I don’t think it would stand on it’s own at all as a major unless it gets reworked a lot or simply gets merged with Minion Master or Flesh of the Master (that’s the minion HP one right?)

And on topic I must say as Minion Master I’m all for any and all reanimator buffs.

Did a preview of the new faces with the makeover kit I keep around for just these occasions. I must say all the female faces are excellent, the male ones…idk the faces seem decent overall it’s just the eyes. I played with the sliders on them for a while and have yet to find a way to make them look less psychotic.

Beautiful day here in northern Wisconsin sunny and 2 F. out with a good six or so inches of snow on the ground. It’s quite nice really, now that we’re past that annoying “freezing rain turning to several inches of ice on everything” stage.

I love these parodies, reminds me of the monk/necro carolers in GW1. Well done!

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

Shadowwaka.1952:

It’s nowhere near perfect, but I was bored and took a stab at it a few days ago.
http://prntscr.com/29dyt5
I do agree though, a whole set would be awesome

nice, mine necro (can’t get deathly shoulders, none on TP)

Very nice, there was a split second after I first saw it that I thought I was looking at GW1 shot of a Grenth-form dervish.

Thank you for thinking of us necros on Wintersday Anet! Well, aesthetically at least, not exactly enthused about our new heal skill but that’s a different matter entirely.

I’d rather not have open style PvP like that, all of GW2 PvE is about working together and because of well pretty much everything about the game story player characters can only be varying degrees of good.

However I wouldn’t mind if there was an option to challenge players to a sparring match, basically 1v1 duels. A sparring/duel system would let people who enjoy random pvp in other games get their kicks without any sort of griefing. It’d also be a great RP tool considering how often we spar with friendly npcs throughout the world.

Good to see you’ve gotten off on the right foot with our illustrious queen of the living story. And no that wasn’t sarcasm, the more you know about Scarlet the less you will care about her.

Essentially she is the catch all mastermind behind the vast majority of the living story plots up until now. (I think the Southsun stuff is the only time she or her agents weren’t at least peripherally involved).

To summarize her story she started off as Cera, the smartest sylvari ever, so smart in fact she surpassed even the smartest asura and graduated from all three of their colleges (this has since been retconned to read she merely studied at the colleges). Then having academically trounced the asura she set off across Tyria and studied under the greatest Norn blacksmith and Charr engineers mastering their crafts in weeks then left because, “meh”. Eventually she gets involved with an asuran experiment that involves sealing her in some sort of chamber to improve her intelligence (iirc). Well it instead lets her “see the eternal alchemy” (basically life, the universe and everything) and she goes crazy after that, taking the name Scarlet Briar and basically devolving into a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

Since then she’s basically been forming alliances (like the Molten and Toxic ones) and generally making a big rukus for our heroes to deal with all because, reasons. She apparently has some grand plan but she’s yet to even hint at it.

The cutscene you saw was basically her summarizing all the crap she’s done over the past year before heading off on holiday for a while. You basically caught the season finale of the show that ends on…well it’s not really a cliffhanger just sort of a lame recap, not sure what to call it honestly.

Heta.8629:

The living story arcs can still be unique even though Scarlet is behind it all. The molten alliance is nothing like the toxic alliance. They both have unique looks and mechanics plus completely different stories.

Yes, but it’s the same basic formula; enemy faction A + enemy faction B = new mystery alliance.
There was the Molten Alliance (Flame Legion + Dredge), the Aetherblades (Inquest + Pirates), the aetherblades themselves contributed to one in Twighlight Arbor’s Aetherpath making the clockheart, and finally the Toxic Alliance (Krait + Nightmare Court).

You can mash up disparate factions all day long and get some cool effects but it doesn’t change the fact that with scarlet being the unifying force between all of them as soon as we see enemy factions working together we’re going to assume it’s scarlet.

Singer.8740:

Except your ignoring the fact that this living story arc is about Scarlet, it has been for almost a year. She is the main antagonist. Can you be anymore captain obvious.

You can’t really blame him when they try and make every new LS sound like a new and unique threat despite the fact that we all know it’s Scarlet again. I distinctly remember the teaser page for the tower of nightmares being unnecessarily vague about who was behind it despite the fact that anyone who’s played in the past year could guess it was another scarlet-based enemy mashup from the get-go.

Toypocalypse wasn’t PvP unless there was a way to play as the rampaging toys that I was unaware of. o.O

At any rate I do agree that not being able to enter the same instance of it as your friends was rather annoying, fortunately the game itself was lots of fun and I look forward to playing it again regardless.

So I’ve begun to notice a strange habit I’ve picked up playing GW2. In most other third person games I have my camera set to be roughly behind and a little above my character, usually with what I assume to be about a 10-15 degree downward tilt so I can see over them effectively.

Now enter GW2 with it’s horde of AoE indicator rings, sure other games have had this but it never appeared with the frequency that they do in GW2. These days I find myself habitually tilting the camera down far more so I’m always aware of my footing and am ready to dive out of a red ring at a moment’s notice.

While this is clearly a good practice as I virtually never fall victim to any sort of AoE effect I’ve noticed a downside. That being, that I’ve noticed that I’m more and more susceptible to heavy non-AoE attacks since my habitual camera angle now puts target enemies much higher on the screen, and usually directly under the enemy status bar. With larger enemies I only see about half of them. I simply can’t see those big tell animations because I’m too busy making sure I’m not stepping in an AoE field.

On that note I could really have the best of both worlds if I could move that big enemy status bar a bit higher or somewhere else entirely.

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this in their gameplay?

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

RyanThomas.4182:

However, the enemies I killed would respawn before I could finish off the whole group.

<snip>

After all, we’re supposed to be INVADING the tower, right? That actually implies
fighting.

I should be able to clear a path, going to the top. But you can’t. Because, as you said, they respawn before you even get a chance to kill them. It doesn’t feel like you’re making any progress at all.

Invading in my book means pushing the foe in front of me, until they’re all dead and I have a clear path. And in this game that means, at least for a short time (unless they make it instanced, you need to have respawning foes for those that can’t play within the very first hour of content coming live…). And not killing a foe and having a replacement respawn before I even managed to get one step closer to my goal.

Gotta agree with this, I can deal with the crazy amounts of AoE, conditions and everything else but the scaling and respawn rates in there are just absurd.

I tried it out with my thief a bit ago and if you don’t have a zerg it is practically impossible to make any headway in there by fighting. In the very first hallway on the first floor a random ranger and I spent a good five minutes trying to fight down the hallway and after killing the same two elite+2 vet/normal patrols for the third time in the same spot I threw down Shadow Refuge on us and told them to just run it. Needless to say despite being able to run the gauntlet with relative ease we could do virtually nothing vs the champion at the gate to the next area.

I’m not so sure I agree. The main reasons the elder races fell, mainly the Seers and Mursaat is that they failed to stop the dragons, but more over they failed to come together in the way the current generation of races has. iirc the mursaat essentially betrayed the Seers and other races in order to save themselves from the dragons.

The jotun are a great cautionary tale to be sure and I think all the current races would be wise to check their greed and vanity lest they end up like the jotun. Personally, I think the asura are the most likely to fall to this sort of thing.

The dwarves had the Stone Summit sure, but I don’t see having a civil war as a sign of a race failing. I mean the humans had the Guild Wars, the Luxon/Kurzick feud, the Krytan Civil War and lots of other infighting in Elonian history. The dwarves are rather inspiring imo, they basically martyred their entire race to stem the tide of Primordous’ minions. I think the mere fact that destroyers haven’t completely overrun the surface is thanks to the dwarves.

There are are some similarities but overall I think the main thing that will decide the future of the current races is the success or failure of the Pact. Ideally if they can defeat all the elder dragons there would be a sort of golden age to follow. I mean after banding together with so many different peoples for the common good for so long (wiping out the elder dragons is going to take a long time) I doubt many people would fall back to old feuds, at least not for a while.

I have come to the conclusion that Scarlet’s master plan is to keep coming up with random stuff for us to fight every two weeks. Shes so smart she’s broken the fourth wall and realized that our characters only exist to fight things and so she’s happy to keep them entertained with an every increasing mixed variety of foes.

See, Scarlet’s not the villian, the writing staff are the villians for not being able to come up with a coherent story after a year. She’s just been ad-libbing the whole thing so far to try and keep us entertained. She’s really kind of a tragic character when it comes down to it; hated by the players when all she wants to do is make sure we’re having fun.

This is the reason my engineer is a charr. Charrzooka ftw!

VitalSuit.1980:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/5/5e/Mini_Toxic_Hybrid.png

No it’s not Abaddon.

Man I got all excited for a minute thinking the big guy behind scarlet and the hints at a “more insidious enemy” might give us the real mastermind behind everything. But no it’s just another mashup enemy like the clockheart. Scarlet Sue’s still in control and I can go back to ignoring the LS.

Seras.5702:

I thought it was overpriced but I unlocked it with 25SP on my main. That’s it though. Can’t see the sense in doing so for my alts.

What bothers me is the steep cost potentially foreshadowing future new skills. Anet has said they plan to unlock all weapons and intro new skills. I’m hoping they won’t cost 25SP a piece for all my characters.

My thoughts exactly. I went to check out the LS stuff on my lvl 80 thief alt and after donating the 50 spore samples I’d managed to scrape together only to find I’d need a whole stack + 5 gold for this I checked the skills menu. My thief only had 12 skill points to spare and I decided I’d rather unlock all of her profession/racial skills first.

Hell my main doesn’t even have that many spare skill points as I have spent most of her earnings on eldritch scrolls for unique skinned mystic forge weps.

I really do hope this isn’t setting the bar for any future skills they add, I don’t want to do map completion or spend every waking hour grinding champions on every character just to be able to unlock all their available skills.

Lily.1935:

How about No greatsword. Greatswords are way over used, and harm diversity in the game. No on the Hammer as well. This is an extremely brutish weapon and I feel dirty just thinking about a necromancer using a hammer.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Necromancer_Munne

Check her trivia. ;-)

Also as far as casters go necromancers ARE extremely brutish, everything about the class is built around inflicting pain in as unsubtle and unpleasant a way as possible.

DaShi.1368:

And yet, many things have stayed the same. The overall tone remains just as light as GW1. GW1 villains were just as over-the-top as Scarlet. Khilbron was a mustache twirling schemer. Shiro was an unrelenting, also obtuse, unstoppable force. Varesh was a wild-eyed megalomaniac. There are multiple kinds of villains. Scarlet is different from the others, but just as an extreme caricature of her archetype as the GW1 villains were.

I’m not going to say that the GW1 villains were masterful pieces of writing but they were a hell of a lot more engaging than Scarlet currently is. I mean just to go down the list:
Khilbron: Is a master manipulator, but thanks to his mustache-twirling air most players saw his eventual betrayal coming a mile off. However that doesn’t change the fact that he was a very big help to the players for most of the story. You can’t deny we would have been SOL at Sanctum Cay without him.
Shiro: Is a character built on madness and revenge. The second part is important because it made his motives easy to guess relatively early on. What’s more is that as early as Vizunah Square we are getting some flashback info about Shiro himself that lets us understand the character more.
Varesh: Is a megalomaniac warlord and the head of a religion of evil, sets her up as pretty bad news right? Well there’s also a fair bit of depth to her character that comes out in her interactions with Gen. Morgahn. We get to see that she wasn’t always this axe-crazy kitten bent on hell-raising (in the most literal sense), and that her ongoing corruption is really straining her relationships with those who actually care about her.

What do all these villains have that Scarlet doesn’t?
Well for one her being a master manipulator able to bring together incredibly disparate groups, it is something we are told not shown. With Khilbron we witness first hand how he is able to play people for his own goals. What we see of Scarlet makes us question how she could convince xenophobic and misogynistic groups like the Dredge and Flame legion work together, she’s not coherent and certainly not persuasive.

Her backstory, apart from not being in game whatsoever, is rather hard to believe. I hate to once again use the term as it’s almost becoming cliche around here, but her backstory really does read like a checklist for a mary sue character. Everyone likes her for no apparent reason; she is very arrogant and vain yet people still fawn over her instead of finding her attitude off putting. Similarly she is able to convince everyone to do what she wants despite having very little in the way of apparent persuasive skill. She excels in everything she tries, mastering in weeks or months what usually takes people lifetimes to accomplish.

Compare this to Shiro, who we are shown a lot of backstory for. He is an incredibly skilled warrior but is still rather humble, he scoffs at the notion that the emperor would make him his personal bodyguard. He’s not overly likeable, he’s gruff and stoic (and sounds like he’s constipated most of the time), and the only manipulation in his story is his being manipulated by the fortune teller, slowly driving him to insanity.

Then there’s the possibility of character depth via interpersonal relations. And despite Scarlet’s amazingly likeable personality, massive history of past contacts with renowned and influential people, almost no one even mentions her. Her cronies hardly even interact with her in a visible way. She’s got no second in command there’s not even an opposite adversary for her to riff off of, maybe they’re intending the player character to be this but so far I don’t think we’ve said two words directly to her.

Finally there’s the issue of motive. Scarlet apparently went all “Krikkit” upon seeing the eternal alchemy an said, “It’ll have to go”. Except that’s apparently been revised to mean that she merely thought she saw the eternal alchemy as a hallucination while she went insane. Another motive hinted at in her backstory is her rebelling against the Dream vs. Nightmare dichotomy. Except she apparently never considers the option of becoming soundless, and now she’s also working directly with the Nightmare Court. Well so much for that. So far she’s organized armies and attacked peasants in Ascalon and the Shiverpeaks. Killed an LA Captain’s Council member. Attacked the Queen of Kryta. Started invading random patches of countryside for half-hour periods. And to top it off she has stolen Caithe’s dairy apparently. If there’s a pattern here I’m not seeing it. I mean even Shiro who was well off the deep end at least had a pretty clear goal of “take bloody vengeance on all of Cantha and get my mortality back”.

TLDR: GW1 villains may not have been examples of literary masterworks, but they were all compelling and interesting on some level. So far Scarlet has failed to deliver on any aspect of being a compelling villain.

So I just got to thinking about how absurd it is to acquire these Halloween weapon skins and the reaction to it on here.

And then I remembered the Wintersday weapons in GW1. Where they were fun silly (functionally useless) weapons that could be easily acquired by anyone doing the holiday content.

Why can’t there be a compromise? What if, say there was a set of costume brawl weapons that anyone could get for a meager investment of candy corn? Say 25-50 for a toy weapon.

I’m not big on town clothes and stuff myself but honestly I’d be a lot more charitable and happy with this Halloween if there was some fun souvenirs I could get from it without farming my face off or dropping tons of cash/gold in the gem store/TP.

KyreneZA.8617:

draxynnic.3719:

That would work if people hated her like Joffrey in Game of Thrones. The problem is, people hate her like Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels.

The reason for the hate is rather unimportant. All that’s important is that is fuels animosity towards her from the players. If we ever get to kill her, the longer it drags out before we can, the more satisfying that kill will be. Regardless of why.

Is she shallow? Is she crazy? Is she a Sue? Does she break lore? Is she badly executed, or worse, just a bad idea? Doesn’t matter, we hates her Precious!

Bullkitten, hating scarlet as a character does not make me want to kill her, it does not make me even want to partake in any content involving her. I hate her because she makes new content that could otherwise be enjoyable, absolutely intolerable for me.

The female sylvari’s voice reminds you of fem-shep? o.O Honestly I didn’t even know it was Hale at first, the sylvari voice and femshep are worlds apart imo. Part of the reason I like her as a voice actress so much, she has a really wide array of ability.

Personally I really urge you to try and get over your fem-shep comparisons because the female sylvari has the best delivery of lines of all player characters I’ve seen. If you’ve played a female human or norn then the sylvari’s voice acting should be a breath of fresh air.

At any rate as far as class recommendations, if you want to play to the sylvari’s chivalrous themes a guardian or warrior with the “green knight” starting story is probably the most fitting story for any character archetype I’ve seen. Really though sylvari works well with just about anything, engineer might be a bit odd but you’ve ruled that out anyways.

Golgathoth.3967:

I remade my female recently, and when I messed with the iris size, she had the crazy eyes goin. Doesn’t happen if you leave it alone, so that’s something anyway.

I’ve noticed that every screenshot I’ve seen of someone with this glitch has their irises set to larger than standard. My sylvari thief uses this face but her irises are set to smaller than default and I’ve never had an issue with this. Though that could be that it’s just not as noticeable when the irises are smaller.

Ellisande.5218:

Why would Scarlet go to Hoelbrok to learn metalsmithing? From what I’ve seen of their steel it is a much inferior quality to that of Kryta or Rata Sum with Rata Sum actually experimenting to create advanced ores. Seems like a step backwards to me.

And of course this raises the question why she would have ignored the Sylvari’s own metalworking capabilities and capacity to turn plants on magical stones into weapons that rival even those created in Rata Sum out of advanced materials.

The high quality steel Ulfbert swords were made using imported steel. The Vikings themselves didn’t have the knowledge to create the high quality steel used in those swords and I imagine the same holds true of the Norn who were based on Vikings. And even if the Norn do know how to make high quality metal alloys, the Sylvari possess the same knowledge. At least my Sylvari does and she only learned from other Sylvari so that knowledge would have been just as available to Scarlet thus begging the question of why Scarlet went to the Norns? Probably just so the Norn wouldn’t feel left out.

She didn’t go to Hoelbrak to learn smithing from any random norn she went to learn from Beigarth who is responsible for rediscovering the secret of making Deldrimor steel. Additionally Beigarth is one of the three smiths chosen to design weapons for the Pact’s army. So his and by extension the Norn’s metalsmithing ability isn’t something to scoff at.

Fleaman.9864:

She would probably be pretty tolerable if she WAS a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

Part of the problem is that Scarlet’s a troll character with no one to troll but the players. Harley Quinn is fun when she’s trolling Poison Ivy; the Joker is fun when he’s trolling Batman. The reaction is extremely important; without it, it becomes a cry for attention that’s being ignored, which just makes it pitiful and definitely not suitable for a character the story is at constant pains to point out is incredibly hot kitten.

So yeah, just give her someone to bounce off of. Give her a Norn Aetherblade captain as an ever-present second-in-command to be all stern and Norny and Crispin while she’s japing around, who she makes do all the paperwork and who never laughs at her jokes.

“Captain, I think these ne’er-do-wells are here to spoil our fun!”
“I’m not having fun.”
“You’re too late, fools! The captain has already spoiled the fun.”

It could be the other way around, too; she could troll you, but have bumbling henchmen around to troll her. A tall guy/short guy buffoon combo (Scratcharr and Groundredge) who keep screwing up her orders and get yelled at a lot (“You molten morons!”). Or a gang of Skritt minions who shovel all the coal but who keep interrupting her speeches with Skrittisms (“ARE QUEENS SHINY?”).

This would make her Suck, which is really the main feature of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Megatron can be intimidating, but he loses constantly, some of his schemes are petty or ridiculous, and he’s surrounded by noisy idiots. And frankly, given that we already know what hot kitten looks like (it looks like a dragon that is an actual hurricane), funny is probably the way to go here.

That is actually an incredibly good point. She’s a cartoon villian who doesn’t have the rest of the cast of the cartoon around to make her interesting or amusing. She really does need someone to riff off of to at least be entertaining. (Not going to touch how she gets to fudge the lore or her many “sue-ish” traits) As right now she’s just insufferably annoying and feels really out of place.

I would love there to be more interesting things in the home instance than reward mining nodes. The home instance was supposed to be a place where players could always go to and catch up with characters from their personal story, it was also supposed to be noticeably affected by your decisions in the personal story. To my knowledge only the human home instance has any notable changes based on your story choices.

So yes, anything to make the home instance more interesting and worth visiting, daily node mining isn’t terribly compelling.

GoldenTruth.2853:

Well besides the obvious “wouldn’t exhibit a changing world” which I think is a bad argument and could easily be solved by adding herald flashbacks.

The biggest problem in my mind has to do with people actually playing the content. One could see a glimpse of this at the end of the Sky Pirates patch where Aetherblade Retreat wasn’t being run much (in a non-dungeon setting you could see this with how few people were doing Crown Pavilion when Clockwork Chaos came out).

Not to contest your point but people not doing Crown Pavilion stuff after Clockwork came out was more to do with the fact that Clockwork actively locked the Pavilion until you completed some invasions. That combined with the fact that the invasions proved to be more profitable than anything in the Pavilion ensured that nobody bothered going back anyways.

Wonder does it have to be with candy corn? I know zhaitaffy will have you hurling after just a couple pieces.

Oh god, I just remembered the Wintersday mini’s from last year. If the Halloween weapons got cranked up this much in cost I…I really hope they don’t do the same for the Wintersday rewards.