Guild Wars 2

NinjaEd.3946:

1. Big isn’t always scary.

I get a far greater fright from Pocket Raptors if I don’t see them coming than I do from large bosses! I know what point you’re trying to make, however,

NinjaEd.3946:

2. Major events not contesting waypoints. Main one I’ve noticed so far is the legendary wyvern where if you die you just respawn at the center wp, glide down to the chopper and re-enter the fight. Its been done before, contest nearby waypoints to prevent this but also tie in to #1 to make the fight evolve more so players are encouraged more to rally allies.

This is something I’ve always thought could have been used to drive up player skill. If people fear that dying will mean a really long run back, maybe they will be further incentivized to run defensive builds, use a mix of defensive and offensive armour, or just play better.

NinjaEd.3946:

Make em a little more dangerous and ambush people with a spike leap from some bushes.

That would be a very cool thing, and a bit of a throw-back to GW1 where mobs just used to appear out of the ground. You get it here and there in GW2 when spiders drops from the ceiling of a cave, but it’s underused.

NinjaEd.3946:

4. Lastly, I see at night the events shift towards defense but in general exploration could the jungle get a little more fearful at night? Things like making snare traps that lead to an ambush from mis-guided bandits trying to score loot from the airship crashes, or increasing the attack/movement speed of certain creatures, or even patrolling mordrem hunting groups that are absolute terror to attack alone (elites and on mounts). I know some may say the jungle has enough troubles but I havn’t seen a game make night time really dangerous in a long time and so far, it seems like the aim of these maps (atleast the first one).

I like this. The first few times I played in HoT at night I was a bit rattled, but you get over it quickly. The only place I’ve ever consistently felt nervous and on-edge was the Tower of Nightmares. Without a doubt the most genius piece of (temporary) content ArenaNet have dropped into Guild Wars 2. I don’t want to feel scared all the time, but that’s where the night and day cycle could come into it’s own.

General Health.9678:

Actually are there any non-mordrem enemies in VB? Not sure how bandits would end up in the jungle if the only way in is via pact-controlled airships but I do like the idea.

They would spill out of the raid area, looking to scavenge airship loot, of course.

Diovid.9506:

1. There are reasons why some professions have access to fewer weapon types than others. In the case of Elementalists this is due to attunements, in the case of Engineers this is due toolbelt skills and kits, in the case of Revenants this is due to Legend swapping. Thieves probably suffer the most from this however..

The reason I always assumed is that the weapons professions start off with in the core game are there because they fit thematically.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’ve capped out on it, but I still do it for the reward. =)

Likewise.

Part of me wonders if they’ll be like the “old” Shining Blade War Supplies – You can open them for a boost (or in GW2’s case, items), or you can trade them in for something better…

Skittish.4539:

skullmount.1758:

I thought they said it LS3 wouldn’t start till after Raid Wing 3 was out.

Raid Wing 3 will be out this month, more than likely.

Really?

I can see Raid Wing 3 coming with the summer quarterly update, and LS3 coming the quarterly patch after that. I can see LS3 being held off until the autumn/winter patch, whenever that might be.

Garock.2854:

once I finished the storyline I avoid that zone completely, I feel bad for the developers, that zone had to be hard to design, yet its so hard to navigate and survive in its almost always empty. Next time focus on maps that are more open, the most “vertical” landscape I want to see is maybe up to the verdant brink level, and even that was a pain until you got all the masteries.

Has anyone actually enjoyed tangled depths?

I like Tangled Depths a lot, however it suffers from a lack of content.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – the thing that lets HoT down the most for me is the lack of side-events in the HoT maps. There’s no side-story, it’s just all Meta-Meta-Meta. Tangled Depths suffers most from this because it’s so big that it’s very easy to think that there’s noone else on the map with you.

There are a myriad of caves in TD that noone ever has a reason to go to unless you’re doing Map Completion. There’s a whole underwater cave system you never have a reason to go to unless you’re doing world completion. It’s quite sad. There could be side story and lore snippets shoe-horned into these locations to make them feel more worthwhile, but there’s not.

Travelling around TD is not a problem once you know what you’re doing and where the shortcuts are – that does take some effort, but once you’ve got it down you can travel to… certainly any Meta event pretty quick.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

So having to do each living story 3 or 4 times in order to get all the achievements and hence the mastery point isn’t repetitive? Seems like a lot of you like them korean grindfests and think that this isn’t grind here.

Koreans don’t do the same content 3 or 4 times… they do it 3 or 4… hundred…times.

So no, doing the same story step a couple of times, especially given how short most of them are, is not a big deal.

People define grind in different ways. You, like most, consider playing the game in any way you don’t like to be “grinding”. Got to go back and kill a boss you already did once? Oh no…let me reach for my grind alarm.

Danicus.4952:

Pretty sure I won’t buy another GW2 expansion – especially if it follows the map design and skill progression structure HOT model. It’s a shame – I am a long time dedicated GW player – sorry to see the franchise pick this path.

For me, there needs to be a balance to the map types. I enjoy a bit of the HoT-esque full map meta, but what I enjoy more than that is a great open map with no map-wide meta that can just be explored and enjoyed. I don’t enjoy a map as much when there’s a constant pressure to keep pushing the meta.

The full map metas should be reserved for big story events. The remaining maps should resemble the core maps more closely. I want more side-story…that’s where the bulk of the interesting lore was in GW1 anyway. Heart quests, or collection-style “quests” (such as the Chuka and Champawat achievement to track the tigers) would be good ways of doing this…but I also want interesting dialogue, both spoken and in text.

HoT does not do side-story. I think that’s what lets it down the most for me. I can overlook the fact that each map is one big meta event since there’s only four maps, but I can’t forgive the lack of side story, in whatever form it comes. There needs to be plenty of it to make maps feel alive, and other than a little around Tarir, there’s nothing that sticks out.

What am I looking for in new maps?
Full-map meta events in key story locations.
Expansive open maps full of side-story and lore nuggets to make up the bulk of the rest.
Well thought out links back to Guild Wars 1 – not just “hey, there’s the falls. Good huh?”.

People might roll their eyes at that last one – but those of us who played through GW1 don’t want that experience to be for nothing. We want to see how times have changed, and how the areas we loved now look in GW2. I want further lore snippets and mysteries cleaned up. Guild Wars 2 could be doing this but… HoT did not deliver in this regard.

Daroon.1736:

The lack of hair when wearing a hat is even more bothering.

That’s definitely a statement I can get behind. I’d love to see my hair peeking out of the bottom of my witch’kitten…at it is, I can’t being myself to wear such a thing.

Underwater combat needs a dedicated expansion, not a quick fix. I hope we’ll get an underwater themed expansion one day, and with Steve, there’s good reason to go down that route.

Khisanth.2948:

A lv80 rune set would involve 8 runes. You’ll never benefit from the full set.

Alternatively you just puff up the numbers which is just the most boring type of power creep.

Unless you started pairing up rune sets with like-minded sigils. For instance:

L80 Ascended quality Runes of the Ice could pair up with L80 Ascended quality Sigil of Ice and Sigil of Paralyzation. This would give you your extra 2 modifiers for the 8-set bonus and could encourage use of lesser used sigils in order to take advantage of what could be a great 8-set bonus. This could also promote deeper specialisation into specific ways of playing your profession.

Bonus 1: +30 Vitality
Bonus 2: +15% Chilled Duration
Bonus 3: +60 Vitality
Bonus 4: 30% chance when struck to cause an ice nova
Bonus 5: +115 Vitality
Bonus 6: +30% Chilled Duration, +10% damage against chilled foes
Bonus 7: Cause an ice nova on weapon swap
Bonus 8: +200 Power for 30 seconds when you kill a foe inflicted with Chill, +25% damage versus Stunned foes, 25% chance to inflict 1 second of Chill on Hit (Cooldown 5 seconds)

This game definitely needs a Fedora Salesman NPC.

Rinn.2375:

momorif.3619:

meow mewo pew pew more runes~

Maybe legendary runes and sigils? Random drops from dungeon chests and in raids?
Tradeable right?
Then we shoud have ascended runes too

Starting to sound more and more like Godstones from Aion.

No thanks.

No to Player Housing.

No a million times to Player Housing.

Every time ArenaNet focuses on features it’s always to the detriment of “real content”. I do not understand the obsession with GW2: The Sims, and likely never will.

Character suspended under an Infinarium. Full sized one would be hilarious, of course, but best stick to a small version.

My first legendary was The Flameseeker Prophecies, so the title I gave my Guardian was “Flameseeker”, despite the fact that there are many more impressive titles out there.

Even though I don’t use shield so much on Guardian any more I’ve kept that title active. I like it.

All these responses along the lines of “But the game mechanics allow me to do this” make me facepalm.

When I play the game, I play it “as intended”. I chat, I complete events, complete achievements, etc. I think there’s a very big grey area somewhere between that, and botting which players seem to think is acceptable and for whatever reason will swear blind that it’s an acceptable and legitimate way to play the game just because it’s not specifically prohibited within the rules.

I have one thing to say to these people.

“Why do you feel like you have to play the game within the rules, but pressed right up against the rules to such a point of obscurity that noone is even sure what is acceptable any more?”

If the answer back is anything other than “I want to Bot but I’m too much of a wimp to actually Bot so I’m going to get as close to it as I can, so long as it’s ‘within’ the rules” then it’s … well, it’s basically a lie, isn’kitten

My wish list:

Elementalist: Off-Hand Sceper, gaining use of Spirit Weapons.

Revenant: After the HoT story I would suggest that a Trahearne Legend with Greatsword seems quite likely (although probably not my favourite), perhaps with a larger amount of hard and soft crowd control abilities mixed with protective support.

Guardian: Paragon, landspear. Yes, I went there. If the Crystal Desert was to be the next expansion destination it would seem more fitting than to give us the paragon-type specialisation in a jungle region.

Mesmer: MH Pistol, gaining a set of skills which cause environmental effects such as the ability to call down phantom rockfalls onto enemies, open up spectral crevasses in the ground to pull foes in, throw illusionary tree trunks at foes to knock them back etc. I’d really like Mesmer to play more on the “illusion” side, and I don’t just mean clones & phantasms. Again, if we go to the Crystal Desert for the next expansion, the whole mirage theme fits.

Tiger Ashante.1792:

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

What happened to play “our” way?

allowing us to “play how we want”

Is this phrase still being banded about whenever people don’t like a certain piece of content?

I get that people don’t like certain parts of the game, but everyone is different in their likes and dislikes. I have to applaud ArenaNet on having multiple uses for the same piece of content, however. One of the hardest things I thought they’d be able to pull off would be to keep the lower level areas of the game populated, yet here we are nearly four years on and you can wander around any zone and see people playing in it – for a whole variety of reasons. Some are levelling, some are going back to do world completion, some are going back again to do core achievements, and some are going back yet again to fill out collections.

The issue here though is Jumping Puzzles. I don’t think ArenaNet can be criticised for encouraging PvE players for going into different features of core PvE in order to gain specific rewards. They set the rules. No amount of “play how you want” can convince me that making as much of the game replayable as possible is a bad thing. Notwithstanding that, “play how you want” was about four years ago, and if I remember right, mainly referred to the method at which you levelled and progressed your character, and not necessarily referred to the acquisition of shiny loot.

Seems like 99% of issues could be solved with a gemstore PvP-only upgrade pack.

That way players could spend far less money upgrading the PvP side of the game to allow them to use HoT abilities, whilst only having access to the Core PvE content that these players likely don’t care about anyway.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Triangular glider with giant eye design. Illuminati confirmed!

A glider which is simply the Eye of Janthir. The player character floats effortlessly beneath it.

The game doesn’t need more minis.

It needs more story.

YaYa.5879:

5 month in, still no Living word season 3, still no legendary back pack, we have 3 new legendary weapons…

I believe what was said in the AMA was that Raid Wing 3 would be coming May/June time with L.W. S3 coming the quarter after that. I’m going to choose to believe that “the quarter after” means “October – December”.

That’s a long wait.

Did I read somewhere that living world episodes would be released at a rate of one per quarter also?

I get that ArenaNet don’t want to commit themselves to a 2-week timetable for living world. I always thought that was a little on the “too frequent” side. I hope it doesn’t mean that they are not setting themselves any targets for content delivery. It would end up being a true “it’s ready when it’s ready” scenario.

tattyana.2356:

By now that raids were a bad idea unless they do something like blizzard did with there looking for raid thing. Otherwise your creating content only a fraction of the player base will ever see………

Whilst I feel slightly aggrieved that I have to spend time downloading 600 Mb of content that I shall not play I do really hope that those who want raids will get their thirsts quenched with the three initial wings.

I am making the most of the “real content” drought and trying to get various other things in and out of the game done.

I would like to see a Raid story mode introduced. No rewards, no achievements, just the ability to go in and experience the story without the frustration of spending hours headbutting a block wall. The biggest shame I see in Raids is that the likes of Wooden Potatoes keep saying that it’s such an amazing way of telling the story….aaand it’s locked away for people with the time, contacts and staying power to participate in it.

Pretty sure there’s a setting in options that makes you auto-target nearest foe, or something like that. I can’t remember exactly and I’m not as my usual machine to check.

If you turn it off, as I have, you shouldn’t accidentally range enemies when you use retreat I think.

Bryzy.2719:

@Sarie your entire post is one gigantic straw man argument. Nobody is asking for everything “straight away” so stop being ridiculous. In response, I’ll refer you to my post above:

My post was meant to be ridiculous. Had a serious undertone though.

kuritsutian.2987:

Grind is optional

Actually, grind is highly subjective.

I think it’s quite acceptable to expect players to level up to 80 to complete the story and level up a few basic masteries to complete the HoT story. I think when it comes to gearing up exotic is fine on the basis that Raids and Fractals are very, very optional content, and that exotic gear is very easy and quick to obtain once you have reached level 80.

After that, grinding for skins…totally fine with that.

But you see, some people seem to have got it into their heads that even entering their bank card details to buy the game in the first case is grind. None of them ever stop and cancel their purchase on the basis of this, they all carry on and proceed to whine about grind for the rest of their days, but wont quit playing, because they need to justify (to themselves) the amount they spent on the game.

Bryzy.2719:

“Also, you can’t enjoy the Elite Spec you basically bought HoT for because we’ve locked that behind a load of HP grind too! Oh, and you’ll have to do it aaaalll over again for each of the 8 other Elite Specs. Enjoy!”

Seen people complaining about this before. As I said right at the start: grind is subjective. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for ArenaNet to expect you to work on your elite specialisation. They wanted to introduce further progression into the game and I think they achieved that well with a mixture of Elite Specs and Masteries. Personally wouldn’t change a thing about it. You would though, I know, because if it’s not right here, right now, it’s intolerable grind.

Tell me something. You seem to be in the camp of “I paid for this game so I could use the elite spec so I should just have it unlocked”. Would you also like them to unlock every skin, reward, story, waypoint, PvP rank, WvW rank and auto-complete every single achievement on your account when you buy it also so that you can just log in, maybe play the final instance of the story just to get a taste of it, then leave?

Perhaps there should be a legendary item seller who sells every legendary item for zero copper so you can just gear up how you want, load on any skin you want, and play that final story mission like a pro.

Nah, that would still be “too much grind”.

Bryzy.2719:

Fallout 4 seems pretty good.

I don’t know anything about Fallout 4. Is this a game that doesn’t require you to undertake any character progression or unlock anything? Is everything fully unlocked from the start so you don’t actually need to try?

I guess it must be like that. Off you go then..it sounds perfect!

Tier 1: +10% Damage to other players
Tier 2: PvP poison lore. You take no damage from Poison.
Tier 3: +10% Damage to other players
Tier 4: PvP Stealth detection.
Tier 5: +10% Damage to other players
Tier 6: PvP Trap detection.

…. on second thoughts. No thanks.

Tumult.2578:

Most important of all? Expect what you craft to become obsolete.
That’s how it’s done here.

This is a very important lesson to learn with ArenaNet.

Sometimes, also, they go full circle and those items which were useful, then made obsolete, get dragged back into play again.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Sarie.1630:

I’m going to have to sound blunt…but you don’t really seem to like anything about this game – so why stick around?

I do like this game. That’s why it’s so hard to swallow that its first expansion is such a horrible, lukewarm pile of kitten excrement.

I trust you shall not be buying the next expansion, if there is to be one, until it has been well and truly tested and reviewed after release.

Manasa Devi.7958:

softblackcarbon.1537:

Ah. So here we find the issue. There is content you want to do, and you’re not interested in anything else. (It’s certainly not the case that there is nothing else to do. The first few days of HoT I didn’t participate in any big meta events – in fact, most were consistently failing still – and spent hours running around the different maps completing random events and exploration points. And easily got the mastery levels required for the story. There is 100% no requirement to participate in map meta events in order to have things to do and get mastery levels.

I ran around plenty. Almost done with exploring. And now I want to do the meat and drink of those areas.

softblackcarbon.1537:

So my question to you is this: What if in core Tyria, you really wanted to fight the shatterer? Or you wanted to run Arah path 2? Well, you’d either have to wait for – you guessed it – a timer to fight the shatterer (and hope that the pre-events got completed), or you’d spend sometimes several hours looking for a group for some dungeon content (remember the days before lfg…?).

Actually, I stopped doing world bosses when they went on a fixed clock at the time of the megaserver introduction. I’ve done most of them only once or twice since, if I happened to come across them or someone asked me to join them there and I felt bad of saying “no” and ruining their fun. I don’t do dungeons.

Unfortunately, HoT has no significant new content at all that’s not on a fixed clock rotation.

softblackcarbon.1537:

GW2 has always had content that you can’t just log on and do literally whenever you feel like it. The problem occurs when that content is the only thing to do, and for some reason people seem to think that the meta events are just that.

But it is. It most definitely is.

softblackcarbon.1537:

Instead, explore the maps

Yep, and after that?

softblackcarbon.1537:

play the adventures

Tied to the kitten meta.

softblackcarbon.1537:

participate in random smaller events

Done that, not very appealing.

softblackcarbon.1537:

do a fractals instance

Done plenty of those.

softblackcarbon.1537:

hang out in LA

What? Why?

softblackcarbon.1537:

level crafting

Finished that ages ago.

softblackcarbon.1537:

chat with your guild

That’s what I do while playing.

softblackcarbon.1537:

do some sPvP

No.

softblackcarbon.1537:

head over to the EOTM

No.

softblackcarbon.1537:

do some world bosses

Yeah, when I’m disgusted with the itinerary play of the new HoT zones, I’ll go do some itinerary play I’ve been disgusted with for years. That makes sense.

softblackcarbon.1537:

complete Orr event chains (lot’s of people there now – it’s really good exp for central Tyria masteries)

Finished all those masteries a week ago. With no XP bar progress at all anymore, events feel more pointless than ever.

softblackcarbon.1537:

work on your legendary precursor collections, do jumping puzzles, find a random achievement and complete it.

Don’t want precursors, did all jumping puzzles, completed all non HoT achievements that I ever plan to do ages ago.

softblackcarbon.1537:

There is tons to do in this game that’s not on a timer.

I get the impression when you’re talking about this game, you’re talking about GW2. I’m done with GW2. I want to do stuff in HoT.

softblackcarbon.1537:

And if you want to do content that is on a timer, then maybe that’s going to take a little bit of extra planing that you’ll have to do on the weekend.

Planning to play a game? Not a chance.

softblackcarbon.1537:

When I play, I never look at the timers. I just occasionally open up LFG: Open World and see what’s going on while I’m doing other content. Seems like there’s always someone advertising a “tarir taxi” or “VB tier 4”.

When I log on to play HoT, I want to play something new. When I need to wait for hours for a meta cycle to come round so I can play what I want, I log off.

softblackcarbon.1537:

(Not to mention that now you get incrementally rewarded for completing events on maps in addition to a larger reward for meta-event completion. Meaning you can just spend 15 minutes on a map and see rewards for that which is something we never had in central Tyria. It just seems to me like HoT is actually in some ways more casual-friendly than Tyria ever was.)

I don’t care about rewards. Ugly new weapons and ugly new armor can just rust and go away for all I care. I just want to do, for example, the outpost event chains from start to finish. Haven’t been able to do a single one yet.

tl;dr: “I don’t want to do that”.

So… why do you stay trying to play a game that apparently has no content you want to do? The story… uh-huh, but if you can’t do that because it’s so heavily gated behind a few trivial masteries that you don’t want to have to complete the content to earn what else is there for you here? Do you have to justify the money you spent on HoT to someone other than yourself?

I’m going to have to sound blunt…but you don’t really seem to like anything about this game – so why stick around?

If I only had an hour every night to shoe-horn in some entertainment, and Guild Wars wasn’t delivering, I’d find something else. Happily for me, Guild Wars delivers.

Sarie.1630:

Sarie.1630:

There is no difference at all.

GW2 1-80: ENTIRELY SOLOABLE NO NEED FOR ANYONE TO HELP
GW2-HOT: NEED OTHERS TO TACKLE THE CONTENT TO UNLOCK MASTERIES

Entirely different!!!

/shrug

I’ve done plenty of HoT events solo for XP. Back when HoT was very new, the Ordnance Corps area of VB was very rarely populated, so I often used to go to that corner of the map and progress all of the events solo, until some others would occasionally join in by the time I got to escorting Baroosh.

There is solo-able content out there. Some people are just so angry about the expansion that they refuse to see it.

Scaling hero points.

1-2 people are around it spawns a Veteran
2-10 people it spawns a champion
10+ people it spawns a legendary.

There, everyone’s happy.

Klangy.8293:

I think if u call yourself casual u will not get legendary anyway.

I work 8:30-5:00 on weekdays, so I play a few hours each day and maybe a bit more on a weekend. I’d consider myself casual right now based on the hours I put in. Two days ago I looked at my bank and realised I probably had enough to craft one. So yesterday I did.

My point is, it’s a bit misleading to suggest that people who only have a few hours to put into the game each day “will not get a legendary anyway”. I think it’s even more true of the new legendaries. Whilst there may be more work in them there’s less you can straight-up pay for, meaning that everyone can put a little effort toward them over time.

Legendary armour, however, is a completely different matter.

The lesson is to gather stuff you don’t currently need because one day you likely will.

I just made a full ascended set of Keeper’s armour. 3000 Watchwork Sprockets. Daily gathering of the home instance node meant I had double what I needed sitting in my bank. My decision for paying even more for an Ascended set was that at least I could transfer the set onto either of my other medium armour professions should the opportunity arise.

My point is ArenaNet have always been good at making redundant items suddenly worthwhile (not that Sprockets were completely redundant before), so it’s often worth your time to be gathering stuff through the course of play that you might ordinarily overlook.

Manasa Devi.7958:

I don’t plan the time I spend playing games. I’m not a freak.

I knew you’d respond like that.

But if you wont help yourself… ciao!

Manasa Devi.7958:

Sarie.1630:

There is no difference at all.

There is a huge difference.

You can play vanilla GW on your own time. Got a spare hour? Great! You can do an hour’s worth of content and make some progress.

HoT? Not so much. Everything is on a timer. If you only have an hour to play, tough luck. Not a chance in hell that you’ll log on to a map that’s got anything going on, so you start off finding a better one. Minutes wasted. Chances are the meta-events are at a point that you won’t see any pay-off anyway before your hour is up.

And that’s every map.

Every

kitten

map.

I’ve never been on a map where there have been no events on and nothing to do with the exception of:

1. The small reset windows…and they are small.
2. Dragon’s Stand maps you enter after the first 5-minute rush to get ferried onto a good map.

If you are that tight on playtime, which I can sympathise with, might I suggest this little tool and plan your hour around that?

Kraggy.4169:

GW2’s origianl story had no artificial gates, only level, which you could get by questing without the need to ‘group up’ for endless meta events.

I think it not unreasonable I expected HOT to be an extension of GW2 not turn it into GW3, nothing in the pre-launch hype indicated a huge departure from the gameplay of GW2 which HOT is.

There is no difference at all.

You need to earn levels (up to L80) to play chunks of the story in the core game.
You need to earn the expansion’s equivalent of levels in order to play chunks of the story in HoT.

It’s much, much faster to earn the few mastery points you need to play the story in HoT than it is to level up without tomes in the core game.

/shrug

Coyote.7031:

I actually agree with you. GW2 was never very casual. You could play it casually, but things like legendaries or ascended crafting come with a very hefty price tag or materials list.

This is always how I remember the game being set up – throughout GW1 as well as GW2. If you wanted the flashy armour in GW1, you farmed smite crawlers for their juicy pink bits. It didn’t make you compete any better. GW2 blurs the line slightly with Ascended being about 5% more powerful than Exotic, but it has been done in such a way that Exotic is still, for the most part, perfectly acceptable.

The thing I just can not understand is why players think that because they bought the game they are somehow “owed” grind-free aesthetics.

Kraggy.4169:

I simply want to play the story, I can’t, it’s gated by masteries. :p

If you want to play a game where you’re allowed to set your own rules, perhaps a board game? Monopoly? Screw the rules…you can make Mayfair cost the same as Old Kent Road if you want. Maybe go around the board in the wrong direction so that it wasn’t as grindy to get the higher value properties.

This game has to try to cater to so many types of individuals. I don’t like Raids, so other than an occasional trip in with my Guild, I can’t see myself grinding them out each night. This’ll mean I likely never get Legendary Armour. That’s fine. PvPers hate it in PvE. WvWers are bitter about every other game mode. …and everyone, everyone complains when they “have to” go into game modes they don’t enjoy to get rewards they want feel they are owed “because they paid money for the game”.

zaw.6741:

Kulvar.1239:

I got Leyline Sparks from Noxious Pods, so we can.

can we really? i did mouth 20+ times. i always get tons of oil/dust. now more crystaline. dont remember getting a SINGLE spark ;/

I’m in your camp. Not done DS that much, maybe 8 times, but don’t ever recall getting a Spark from a Pod.

zaw.6741:

also sparks are needed for infused tools for guild hall, cant recall oil/dust being used for sth similar

…yet!

Presumably no one guild has finished the Guild Hall yet so there could be something further down the line.

And I thought it was going to be a thread about how most enemies in HoT keep moving around and don’t just stay still do you can just stand in front of them pressing 1.

AWACS.6537:

Don’t stand still either.

I think this is the biggest lesson to learn. When I melee I tend to circle around foes constantly, dodge through them, and therefore try to keep them turning around to face me. That’s when they’re not leaping or rolling away like most of them seem to do constantly.

Oopsxd.5481:

Hey do you guys like Tony the Tiger? He’s cool.

I was wondering if there are any tiger quests in this game

thx

Not a tiger, but the Snow Leopard transformation heart is still at the start of Wayfarer Foothills.

I don’t have too much of an issue with the map as it is now. I’m slowly farming up my Crystalline Ore. But as the Skritt says: “Some is good but more is better”.

Perhaps when the mouth dies it could, for lore’s sake, release a blast of ley energy that infuses creatures in the map such that all creatures have a very small chance to drop Crystalline Ore. On top, and I think far more importantly, they could make the champion events give guaranteed Crystalline Ore for completion, thereby encouraging players to join together to kill them during the pod run.

Devildoc.6721:

or those champ/legendaries need to give crystalline ore for killing them,

I completely support this. Crystalline Ore is fairly hard to come by… like Empyreal Fragments and Dragonite Ore always should have been. Adding them as a reward for killing these foes would be a good incentive. Perhaps ArenaNet doesn’t want players to be running an Event/Pod train after completing the meta though… for some completely legit reason.

Actually, I’m surprised there aren’t arbitrary achievements for killing these foes.

Urosh Uchiha.9732:

Bugged or not, as it stands now it does goes alphabetically. I killed it enough times to get the item for every available class in game. And it always went alphabetically.

My spores began by unlocking Wild Abandon, then Bo, then Ydalir.

Basically the three I wanted least. I think the game knew.

Unless this was fixed in a patch I didn’t notice then you just got lucky with the alphabetical unlocking.

To the OP: If you ignore the Dragon’s Stand Treasure Mushroom, it’s three days to unlock all the spores across all collections. It’s not that bad, but sure, it’s irritating when it unlocks your least wanted weapons first.

Exodius.3087:

• The lack of background information / story about the Revenant.

If I had to guess, this will be one of those “mysteries” that ArenaNet promises will be explained “really soon” but never actually is.

Keegan.1295:

GragorR.9768:

Well there’s a 15k cap on daily/old monthly ap, so given time you’ll eventually catch up.

If they separated the two then there wouldn’t be a need to cap “loyalty” achievements. The reason the cap is there is so that people can “catch up” but I don’t think that is needed you just need to keep the two types separate then there would be a loyalty leader someone who has never missed a day since launch.

Oh I’m glad there’s a “loyalty” cap! I recently hit the 15k daily APs, and am rather glad it’s one thing I don’t need to worry about any more. HoT brings in a LOT more stuff you can do on a daily basis that is far more fun and meaningful than dailys.

I’ll go ahead and say it though: I’m not a fan of splitting daily achievements with permanent achievements. I like my big number.

jedles.2908:

It can not be so hard… i saw a lots of people over 100 and there arepeople who unlocked over 120 mistery points already. (I DO NOT KNOW HOW bit there are!)

I’m on 118 currently.

Dragon’s Stand with a bunch of XP boosts nets me about 1.5mil XP each run. In DS downtime I’ve been completing world completion on my Revenant.

This is the most enjoyable way I’ve found to spend my time, so far. There’s no need to grind the same mobs over and over again, there’s no need to farm CoF path 1. The OP is just over-reacting.

Fluffball.8307:

Why would bonus XP and base XP grow over time, that doesn’t make any sense.

It’s very easy to test though, go to an out of the way location, like Timberline Falls and find two monsters of the same species. Kill one, then kill it again. Kill the other. You’ll see nothing changes except for the bonus XP. You get zero bonus XP and a consistent base XP on the one you killed twice, and a consistent base XP and a huge bonus on the one you killed once. I know because I enjoy farming out of the way mobs.

It doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s what I thought I observed in the week after launch.

I will certainly be paying more attention over the next week as it’s interesting to note.

I don’t think the base XP would change if you kill the same mob twice on respawn, I would expect if base XP changed at all it would take more than one player killing it a couple of times.

As I said, I may well be wrong, and I’m going on what I thought I noticed.

Fluffball, I understand how Bonus XP works.

That attachment does not state beyond doubt that base XP does not change over time.

Fluffball.8307:

Base experience is never affected by how long something’s been alive, it’s the bonus experience you see below that.

Can you back that up? I admit there’s a good chance I may be remembering wrong, but I’m almost certain that the base XP I received from mobs in the week after launch was higher than what I receive now.

Electro.4173:

Rukiichan.4315:

I met someone with 100+ a week ago and asked him where he farmed for the HoT masteries. He wouldn’t tell because apparently his friends were still farming that spot and he didn’t want people crowding it. So its probably a place like cof p1 but in open world?

I’m seeing an awful lot of LFG requests for “VB spider mastery farm” lately. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Dunno what exactly it is, but if I had to guess, perhaps all the veteran spiders in the treetops near the Jaka Itzel?

I stumbled upon this spider farm yesterday. I wondered what the hell people were doing but when I saw the XP coming off the spiders I quickly figured it out.

The key early on would have been to find a quiet spot and farm it like mad before the mobs got killed by other people so much it brought down the bonus XP. As I was running through the Ogre lane a day or so after HoT’s release I realised I was getting about 2k XP + 6k Bonus XP off the Chak there. I had better things to do than spend time farming it up, after getting my first 80 mastery points I don’t see any need to rush more right now. Most of the mobs in HoT now see much lower XP gain because they’ve been killed so much…for some reason these spiders don’t.

I guess the player in question will have found a spot where the mobs have been barely touched by other players and still give good bonus XP. It’s a mechanic a lot of people forget about, but something Colin spoke about at launch. The Bonus XP is there to encourage you to spread out to quieter areas of the game to play so that the whole game continues to feel alive…it’s just up to now no-one has cared about that bonus XP. Mastery points making XP matter again is a very welcome change.

Like the way crits are shown with a red-splat background, perhaps pet damage should be shown with a ranger-green paw background.