Guild Wars 2

The tower could be an open world instance itself. Think of the tower as the Crown Pavilion and the private instances as some kind of Queen’s Gauntlet.

I was thinking some kind of Queen’s Gauntlet variation. Maybe a group version of random boss encounters or mob encounters.

Alukah.2063:

>The arc is about Scarlet.
>People get surprised that she’s involved.

I think it would be easier to swallow if the arc was about Scarlet, her Aetherblades and her clockwork horrors. The arc pseudo includes other factions (dredge, Flame Legion, Nightmare Court and krait) but only on a superficial level. None of those factions have an engaging end-game because they turn out to be working for Scarlet, who doesn’t have a known end-game either (stuff keeps happening and we never find out why). If the story had followed Scarlet for a year and had been building up to something and progressing a linked story month after month it might have been entertaining. Instead it sort of feels like we are on “It’s a Small World (Tyria edition)” the adventure ride, where Scarlet takes us on superficial pit stops through Tyria just for a change of scenery and not because there is depth to any of those stories.

Scarlet’s involvement in the story seems to have come at the cost of the story’s integrity. It feels like we are on Scarlet’s Tiki-Tour of evil and not foiling some master plan threatening Tyria.

Some of them are random but at least half of them are found in krait dense areas of the game.

I do agree that in future, if they make scavenger hunts it would be better to have clues and other tools that lead players to other locations.

This is the case for most of their contests. I think there are laws and regulations they have to follow with certain contests and prizes and some countries are more difficult than others to include in the contests.

I like that the medium armour chest isn’t a tench coat and it isn’t a mini skirt either. I don’t like how the pants fall into the trap of most other pants and they turn into tights on a charr. The one-sided sleave is also not to my personal taste. If I needed another armour set for my ranger I would probably buy it simply because it’s not a tench coat.

skullmount.1758:

Aidan.4602:

Ladies and gentlemen!
It seems that we’re getting the gasmask next patch as a reward for completing meta within the new dungeon! That’s pretty good news, now I’m waiting for the patch to strike so I can get it for my charr engineer

Not really good news, because we can still only get ONE of them. Some of us would probably like to use it on multiple characters.

This is why I’m not in favour of the meta achievement rewards being the exclusive ways to obtain skins. I wish you could still get back item skins from Southsun Survival and Sanctum Sprint. It would be great if you could trade Karka shells for the Sclerite back piece or passion flowers for the Fervid Censer. I wish more of the item rewards remained in the game.

Maybe make it easier to obtain them during the event but still allow them to be obtained after the event.

I thought that was the best part of the hallucinations. I have no idea why you’d be hearing cats – it would make more sense to hear terrifying howls or spider clicking or something (they chose to go comical instead of terrifying) but it was a nice touch from the audio department.

Azure Prower.8701:

Acidicore.3264:

What people don’t realize is the insidious enemy is the child of Scarlet and Trahearne.

FLEE, FLEE TO THE HILLS!

Good thing Sylvari can’t breed.

Would they jump the shark if the writers gave Scarlet the ability to breed? Maybe she uses her engineering powers to become her own Pale Tree.

I think that’s refering to her new creation. At the end of the Molten Facility there was the fusion of dredge technology and flame legion magic, at the end of the Aether path there was the fusion of engineering and the oakheart. I think Scarlet’s agents refers to the krait, Nightmare Court and the clockwork horrors and the more insidious enemy is her latest brilliant creation that cleverly and unexpectedly fuses something about the krait with something about the sylvari.

Sarision.6347:

Am I the only one who wants to see that evade on GS gone? If you want burst then stop using the GS as a DEFENSIVE weapon. It is just another passive mechanic that has no place in game. I would gladly trade that evade for damage boost.

I suspect if the evade was removed the base DPS wouldn’t be increased (or Jon’s suggested “whirl” finisher would be the only addition and it would be a moot point for a lot of rangers). If it was a trade between the passive evade and having the ranger’s greatsword be similair to the warrior greatsword’s DPS I suspect a lot of rangers would make the trade. I personally doubt that would be the case and this change would adjust the defensive edge of this weapon (frequent passive evades) and give less evades overall but a controlled evade instead without a DPS increase. Note the warrior already has this on their greatsword yet Swoop doesn’t function like that.

It’s also ironic they want to move away from passive evades and give control of them to the ranger but are willing to leave passive leaps on the main hand sword instead of moving them off of the auto-attack and forcing players to work for their snares and target positioning. The former isn’t complained about, the latter is somewhat controversial.

Jaken.6801:

It might be because i am playing the new batman right now, however…
What if Kashmeer dies at the hand of Scarlet (Bobby mentioned the possibility of failure) and Majory vows to pledge her life to become a force to hunt her down and bring her to justice…
She allready is an detective as far as i am concerned.

Nah, just some random thoughts haha

That’s what I’m hoping for atm (or have Marjory go down – seeing Kasmeer drop her cheerful persona to turn into a vengeful dark force could be interesting). I agree with Konig that they haven’t been around long enough for some heavy attachment to take place (it also seems strange to design armour for her only to kill her off first) but Scarlet has moved into Team Rocket territory when it comes to inconsequential villain. People dislike her because they think she’s a bad character, not because she does evil things. Killing a character we like would give this shark back its teeth. Currently we all expect Scarlet to fail at doing anything meaningful or be threatening at all, if her arc is to end any time soon (or if it’s going to be entertaining as a villain) she needs to have a win somewhere. Braham and Rox are back too, so it could be one of them. Their friendship seems similair to Marjory and Kasmeer and one of their deaths would likely motivate the other (and would likely ripple onto Eir and Rytlock).

I wonder if Braham has immunity because of Eir’s involvement in the Personal Story. Losing her son would be one of the most notable moments of her life, I don’t think they could pretend it happened during the personal story without recognising it.The Queen’s Speech was a let down. It was Scarlet’s chance to make an impact and live up to her backstory and she failed to deliver. Every appearance since then has been getting worse.

Scarlet needs a win to be a threat, something the players care about. If they can’t kill personal story characters (like the Queen, Logan or Farren) and her one big world changing appearance was when Divinity’s Reach got even more beautiful, their options are limited.

Think of the alternative. We climb the tower, defeat the Toxic alliance and wait for the next appearance of Scarlet’s lucky dip of evil factions and the random motivations they give to Living Story cast to participate this month. Does that sound particularly interesting to you?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Nike and All Those that have been discussing Failure Consequences,

Internally for a while we now we have been talking about positive and negative consequences of completion or failure of activities and challenges within the game and more specifically around events. For example Jon Peters one of our Design Leads was putting forward the idea of the above rules/paradigms around TQ. So for example if the players are fail to take down TQ then this would cause a ‘Darkness’ to fall across the zone, perhaps where he would fly around attacking locations and creating new events. A second chance on TQ would therefore be to complete these events and then perhaps rally the NPC forces in the zone to help you take him down. A positive modifier could bring ‘Light’ to the land for example and lower cost on NPC traders, give greater rewards from events and perhaps even create new events. Of course this is all brainstorming but it is the natural evolution of our current platform.

One of my concerns with failure consequences is the effect it has on server morale and the possibility of an even becoming a dead event. Tequatl is like this right now, on some servers the event is perpetually dead. If too much weight is given to success or failure, players would feel punished for being on a server that did not complete it. It would favour guesting (or transfers to already populated servers) and increase population issues on less populated servers. Orr has a lot of DEs across the map that tell a story and try to sell the war plot through gameplay. For all the things it does well, it can be a very unenjoyable place if your server doesn’t have enough people and you don’t have a guild backing you up. For all the cool things you give for event success, they become bad things for players with event failure. I’m concerned about the impact that success/failure will have on less populated servers. We see players transferring to T1 servers for WvW season rewards, we saw guesting for Tequatl, it will be worse if more weight is put on this area without caring for population issues first.

Back to story telling through DEs. I like that the Living Story now has Braham and Rox popping up in random DEs. This creates more screen time for the characters and makes them feel like they are actually involved in the conflict (and not just waiting to steal the credit during a cut scene). One flaw to this kind of story telling was the Ellen Kiel appearances during the Secret of Southsun. She made an important story appearance at the end of a DE. If players never did that DE or they missed it, they missed a part of the story. Her role at the time was to track down Canach, I think this would be better communicated if she had the DE icon to indicate she could begin an event which caused her to begin the patrol and scout for clues about Canach’s location. Some degree of control would exist on when to begin the event (instead of a hidden spawn window) and the event would show her actually looking for clues instead of sitting at camp all the time. Appearances in events strengthens characters in my mind and helps to sell their involvement, but the RNG nature of events is a hindrance if the event contains important story information.

I liked the use of the Balloon events during the Queen’s Jubilee to tell the story of the racial delegates attending the event. It helped sell the conflict with the Aetherblades and it gave an in-game presence to show that the queen had invited all these people to attend (instead of just telling us they attended). It was a lot better than the holograms/present boxes from past events, I do wish some of the delegates (or even the Aetherblades) had more dialogue or character.

Personally I think a lot of the gameplay is there but the story is missing from it. Maybe it’s an issue of voice acting budgets, but I don’t feel like it’s communicated well during the events why we need to take down the towers in the current content. If I ignore them they don’t do anything (like Scarlet’s invasions). The biggest threat in Kessex hills still feels like the centaurs because they will move along their event chain to attack towns and outposts, even if they only do it in a linear path (I think there is a Toxic alliance event that captures an outpost, but most of them are static). When I destroy the towers I am doing it for the meta event credit and the harvest node, not because I feel like I am contributing to the war effort.

I personally think the zerker set up is bad because it makes build variety shallow. If you look at speed clear builds they usually focus on might and vulnerability stacking, unique class buffs (ranger’s Spotter for 170 precision, warrior’s Empower Allies for 170 power) and flat DPS increase traits (15% more damage when adrenaline is full, 10% more damage when flanking the target, 10% more damage when endurance is full, 10% damage from Frost Spirit, 15% more crit damage from warrior’s banner). The only thing that begins to matter is DPS.

Then you see videos like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGJylZBKmos

That’s a level 80 dungeon. That ranger is using a glass build. That is a boss encounter that has a unique mechanic that is intended to give unique gameplay (rather than just DPS you are supposed to shoot the lasers and usually that means having to jump back up mid fight because the shield recharges). The doesn’t use his evasion skills on the weapon (sword 2 and 3), he doesn’t dodge once, he doesn’t reposition his character and he doesn’t even go down. Guild Wars 2 is a game built around active combat. You aren’t supposed to stand in one place, yet that’s exactly what is happening thanks to the zerker meta. Conversely other builds are working much harder and utilising the full breadth of the game’s combat mechanics to complete content because they can’t auto attack in melee range to a win in less than 30 seconds. The most efficient builds for most content are so efficient, they make the content easier.

It’s two problems.

1. Zerker builds are so powerful they trivialise content. Being powerful is fine, rewarding glass is fine, but no cap was put on crit damage and the devs underestimated what % damage stacking could accomplish so now we see static gameplay. Crit damage needs a hard cap.

1. Alternate builds are too weak. Condition damage is a weak stat and has players compete with each other. Unlike power builds, condition builds don’t have equal access to three DPS options (power builds have power precision and crit damage, condition builds have condition damage, precision to trigger condition procs and the third option is condition duration but there is no gear that hands out condition duration like you can get crit damage). The game is very lopsided in favour of berserker builds. If you are going to offer a variety of build types, it can’t be your intention to have one of them be dramatically better than the others.

JonPeters.5630:

Natural Vigor

I thought the power level was to differentiate the class from other classes. Unlike the warrior and guardian, the ranger represents the agility of a rogue-like class (similair to a thief) and to offset their lower armour (and less tanky utilities) they were expected to evade more often.

JonPeters.5630:

Spirits Unbound and Nature’s Voice

Why is anyone bringing guard other than its low cooldown to trigger Nature’s Voice? In sPvP I’m sceptical of how useful the protection, stealth and clunky pet control are worth the slot. Do you really want players bringing skills, not because the skill is good, but because it triggers a trait? That’s not good for the people who don’t use that skill and it’s not good for people who want that trait to work well with other shouts. Spirits don’t feel good in PvE and I don’t think this will change that.

JonPeters.5630:

Power Rangers

You talked a lot about signets needing a trait similair to Nature’s Voice and then jumped straight to greatsword without giving us anything about signet traits. Signets feel all or nothing. They have good passives but their actives are almost worthless unless you’re traited 30 points into them (or you run Signet of Renewal). If you’re looking at anything, look at their actives when not traiting into Signet of the Beastmaster. I don’t think many rangers would care about a whirl finisher. The greatsword needs more DPS (especially if you remove the auto attack’s evade). Whirl finishers are just weak and a power ranger build will have to rely on allies for a decent combo field (because without traps or torch off hand – from condition builds, Healing Spring’s water field and the spider’s poison field are about all the ranger will produce on their own)

JonPeters.5630:

Main-hand sword

If you want a unique playstyle for a mainhand melee weapon you should give it to a class that has at least two mainhand melee weapons. We don’t know how long it will be before rangers get a high DPS and equal control melee weapon (let alone a main hand). The current dungeon meta requires high DPS melee weapons and rangers are being pigeon-holed into one that has significant issues. There are always players who like something that gets changed, that’s not a reason not to change it (especially if there is strong support to change it). You aren’t giving rangers a choice here, the greatsword doesn’t have the DPS of the mainhand sword and it doesn’t have an off hand. At the very least could you alter how it works depending on the range from the target? If the player is within range of hitting the target no leap takes place (also note this isn’t a leap finisher, so it has the drawback of being a leap without on of the primary advantages of a leap). Leaping to a target you are already in range of is nothing but a hindrance in PvE. People want to play the ranger class in PvE today and on the same level as a warrior, guardian or thief. It’s not a very good situation for them to be in when they have to wait for some far off possibility of a viable melee main hand DPS weapon.

I’m also concerned about how limited balance goals appear to be when it comes to PvE. Can you give us some idea of how you think the class is doing in PvE and what you expect your balance decisions are going to do for the class in PvE? It would go a long way to alleviating the idea that the game is balanced almost exclusively for sPvP.

As much as I like Marjory and Kasmeer, making Scarlet an actual villain by allowing her to kill one of them would probably the best thing to happen to the Living Story.

BobbyStein.2315:

nopoet.2960:

I think it is important to write failure into the living story itself. It’s kind of there now but in a half kitten way. We didn’t get Scarlet but we didn’t really lose anything either. Let’s say she was successful in her assassination attempt of the queen. Immediately you have a power vacuum needing to be filed. We already have powerful human actors on the edges that would love to either cease control or toss it off. Second, the player would want revenge. Third how would the char react… some would definitely see it as an opportunity. Fourth, with the human nation distracted centaurs and bandits will have greater freedom to take land so they have to be fought back… and so on and so forth.

That’s among the many things we discussed doing, but we currently have technical limitations preventing us from making such a drastic change because it would break Personal Story dependencies. Until we have a system in place that separates the timelines of the Personal Story and Living World stories we are limited in the kinds of changes we can show in the open world.

I don’t understand this stance at all (Queen Jennah exists solely in instances, several of which take place in the past – every time you do an explorable instance of a dungeon, the Story Mode has completed) but he’s said they can’t kill Jennah because she’s in the Personal Story (I disagree, to do it that way would freeze almost the entire world and never advance most of the biggest plots in Tyria – an incredibly ironic decision in a game with a “Living Story”). Having said that, Marjory and Kasmeer are immune to this, as Konig pointed out, because they are Living Story exclusives. They haven’t been around long enough for their deaths to have the impact that Jennah’s would but it would give some real consequence to Scarlet’s actions.

@Konig I only bring up the other relationships in Tyria not because I want them to develop, but because I wanted to point out that they had reasons for being in the story. This is a fantasy MMO, not Gossip Girl.

BobbyStein.2315:

That’s one of the challenges of threading a story through a huge game where each update takes you to a completely different place, often touching content that was never designed to carry the load of a linear story.

Now I’ve made a kittenumption here, but doesn’t it make most sense that when planning out the Living Story a year in advance, the story dictates the content? I might have misunderstood, but if the story is to go to to Southsun or to Divinity’s Reach, shouldn’t it be because the story team said that’s the next place the story they wrote takes place? Designers can create dungeons, zerg events or rewards for any area in the game, forcing a story into content seems backwards to me.

I keep seeing the TV show example being used so I will talk about that. I currently see the Living Story as an episode each month. Dragon Bash and Sky Pirates are two parts of the same episode. Queen’s Jubilee and Clockwork Chaos are two parts of the same episode (or, if nothing else, a two parter). I personally don’t like stand alone episodic TV shows for the most part (like most procedural dramas) because they aren’t satisfying in the long run. I like shows with a season long story arc that progresses and evolves as we go on. Maybe it’s a pacing issue, but I don’t feel like the Living Story does this very well.

I have been following it since the beginning and I think it’s a mistake that the story feels disconnected now. Even if there is something that brings it all together later, for the discussions, speculation and diligent engagement to be meaningful now, things have to be advancing now. Why was Scarlet involved with the Molten Alliance? What was her goal? Why did she want someone on the Captain’s Council? Why did she disrupt the Queen’s Jubilee? We keep getting questions and no answers. I find it hard to be engaged by her actions because from my perspective they are aimless, I don’t feel like my attention is rewarded because things keep moving along without tieing anything up or progressing anything. I would prefer it if the story developed each month so that something hinted at last month became relevant this month or the events of last month lead to the events of this month or something this month made something from last month make more sense. A lot of these plot points could be interesting if a pattern or a link began to form as the story progressed. I want to see stories lead into each other but I also want revelations that explain past events.

Sometimes the story feels shallow. The Molten Alliance reduced the two factions to their superficial elements and ignored their depth. I don’t think the story did a good job of portraying the dredge or the Flame Legion (there were no characters telling either of their stories) or explaining why these two factions would form an alliance, it just felt like an artificial army that existed to give us something to fight. The world today barely recognises that it ever happened. The Toxic Alliance is slightly better – the krait seem to have more depth, although it’s annoyingly convenient Scarlet possesses something they want. The Nightmare Court don’t seem to have much reason to be involved at all.

Sometimes the story feels too convenient. Scarlet has the obelisk shards the krait want, Kasmeer is suddenly a master mesmer when a veil needs to go down, her partner has the other skill required to counter this month’s specific threat. It’s just too convenient it doesn’t seem believable (certainly not the first two) and it begins to feel like these characters are just placed in the world because you want them in the world, not because they make sense in the story. This kind of writing is part of why so many “Mary Sue” threads are popping up.

It’s Marjory and Kasmeer’s home instance just like Cragstead and the Hatchery are Braham’s and Rox’s respective home instances. If you go there between Living Story chapters you can find little bits of dialogue that flesh out their stories (they are few and far between though).

Fortus.6175:

Personally I dont understand why some people dont like her, I can assure you they are very few compared to the amount of people that do like her.

Give us something that would show that is even remotely true. I am bias and I hold the position that Scarlet is a bad character that is making the story bad but I believe the criticism of Scarlet is well founded and many intelligent discussions (as well as a wealth of nonsense) have explored why people dislike Scarlet and why she is bad for the story. I haven’t seen much in the way of intelligent praise (well reasoned, thoughtful posts expressing why she’s a good character and why she enriches the story or Tyria) of her nor have I seen anything which would indicate she is popular.

Fortus.6175:

Sure, the plot of the game is deviating from the dragons a bit, and sure I would like to see more dragon stuff, but what they fail to see is this;

the game has only been out for a year, thats a fairly young game, many people are still buying the game, some are starting the story, I havent even finished mine (and I have dungeon master already) so imagine if people bought the game and suddenly the entire story changes all of the sudden. I actually like all these LS, it would be better is they were spaced out for a month but oh well. I like the Scarlet character, Im also very glad it is a sylvari, a race that barely gets any action or story coverage (all sylvaris in LS have been bad guys, and only 2 of them).

I like sylvari too, but I like sylvari for more than their appearance (although I’m tired of the firstborn/secondborn plots). Scarlet doesn’t tell much of a sylvari story. Maybe you can write off her child-like attitude as sylvari (she’s very different from Trahearne, Faolain or Caithe – admittedly they are all first born, but not even Canach was as immature as Scarlet) and the short story briefly deals with her initial birth and then later conflict with the Pale Tree. Aside from that Scarlet is cosmetically a sylvari but she doesn’t do much to expand sylvari lore.

Fortus.6175:

Personally I would like if the dragon saga wasnt touched until the game’s 3rd year or so, I actually enjoy the entire dragon minion fights and speculation, the mystery, the struggles. For The Pale Tree’s sake, these are giant mounstrous dragons, responsible for wiping entire civilizations in endless cycles and being undestructable, I would definitely would not enjoy if suddenly a zerg of people waltzed into their lair and killed them in one swing.

Guild Wars decided to wrap up just over two years after launch. They released EotN and then put the game on life support (and in that time they put out a lot of content, more than GW2 has put out). World of Warcraft had its first expansion two years after launch and that game had a lot more end game (and captured a bigger audience) than GW2. There was a bigger grind built into the leveling system and there was raid progression and substantial patches to keep that game going without an expansion. Players who completed PvE in Guild Wars 2 a year ago are running out of things to do. There are only so many times you can run AC, CoF or Orr temples before you’ve truly run out of anything worth doing again.

I don’t have exact numbers but the last figure they gave out for copies sold indicated a dramatic decline in people buying the game. I would guess the majority of people who are going to buy and play the story have already done so. At some point the story needs to advance and the next Elder Dragon needs to come into it. There are six of them. Three years between kills would last 18 years! Who is going to want to play 18 years from now? That’s assuming there are only six dragons (in our part of the world, Tyria is bigger than us and there’s always other worlds like the place humans originally came from – the story doesn’t stop at the Elder Dragons) and that we actually kill them. What’s stopping them from using the Living Story as a year long (or six month long) lead into an expansion dealing with the next Elder Dragon?

As far as the argument that players need a formidable opponent, we have that in the form of an Elder Dragon. They overshadow the players dramatically. We don’t need a random character given convenient plot devices forced into the story every month to feel challenged. The elder dragons (or even dragon champions) are formidable enough. Of course the player character is the hero, that’s by design. It’s a consequence of game with an on the rails story. It wouldn’t be a very interesting game if the player didn’t get to do much.

rizzo.1079:

I love that there’s solo content but I wish they would figure out a way to scale things from 1-5 so that everyone can be happy:(

This is one the first times they’ve done it. Prior to this most of the instances were either group instances or at least doable with a group.

I think the only reason they did it this way was to set up the story in Kessex Hills before you see the new map. It wouldn’t make sense to rescue Marjory and Kasmeer after you’ve seen them at their camp and you’ve seen the veil lifted already.

The sequence of events meant that you had to do the instance before seeing the new map. Maybe they don’t have the technology to transport an entire party to an instance when someone zones into a map? It’s a little different from how a dungeon instance is created.

I think they are looking for close-to-benign additions to the home instance. Instead of adding something incredibly valuable (in general, I think a daily skill point is OP) they keep them relatively worthless so as not to give out too much and have players miss out on too much if they don’t get it. It makes players feel like there is some kind of reward without making it too powerful. A place of power in a home instance has a lot of synergy with the Quartz node as well. A free skill point for every character will be very useful for alts.

What potential though?

Jennah and Logan’s relationship is relevant to the story because she’s the Queen. Any suitor of hers is a potential ruler of Kryta (and for as long as she is single with no heir, Kryta’s leadership passes onto someone else). There are major political ramifications to her relationship status. They’ve also played off of Logan’s relationship and how it conflicts with his job.

Braham’s relationship was a throw away motivation to have him involved with Flame and Frost (and it wasn’t necessary either – he could have easily justified it as save his fellow villagers). Rescue the captured partner? Done. Caithe and Faolain also have the whole non-traditional couple story covered. Despite that, it rarely feels important to the world of Tyria, mostly just as a reason to explore the sylvari culture and concept of love.

For the most part, there isn’t a lot of room for relationships in the story unless they are central to the plot or a story that needs to be told. The only reason I could think of Marjory and Kasmeer’s “relationship” (so far they are pulling a Xena) being relevant to the plot without recycling what has been done before is if one of them were killed by Scarlet (or another) creating a personal vendetta for that character and a real reason for being involved in future Living Story chapters.

I wish they’d stop making the daily required for the meta. It’s great if it counts towards it but wasn’t required (allowing people to skip achievements if they don’t like them), but the game already has too many time gates. It also sucks to reach the end of an event only to discover you didn’t do enough dailies and even with a whole day left you can’t catch up.

The infected achievement in general is pretty weak. As stated by others, players shouldn’t have competing goals. I also don’t enjoy champion trains. It was just tedious running around looking to simply tag a mob to get this done.

I thought there was a story behind the disappearances in Divinity’s Reach that these two were going to uncover.

Kasmeer: This festival reminds me of when I was little, and my father and I used to go to the carnival in Divinity’s Reach.
Player: Does your father still live in Divinity’s Reach?
Kasmeer: No. He’s…He’s gone. My mother died when I was young, and my father…He was taken earlier this year.
Player: You must miss him.
Kasmeer: I miss the man who used to hold my hand at the carnival, yes. But, let’s not talk about that. It’s too nice a day!

Marjory’s reason for leaving the Ministry Guard was the boy that was murdered and the cover up.

Somehow there was some other story happening at the time (or so little story happening at the time) that made me think there was trend of missing people going on in Divinty’s Reach. I thought Kasmeer’s father was tied up in that and the two were going to be relevant in the story as we exposed that. Looking at it again it looks like I’ve minsterpreted vague back story as hints of a future story.

It sounds more like Kasmeer’s father was not taken by kidnappers or an evil faction but rather taken as in killed. She doesn’t sound too upset that he’s gone, with some sort of implication that he was a less than lovable man towards the end of his days and (reading into and and speculating a lot) Kasmeer may have even had a hand in his death.

I was excited by Kasmeer when I had mistakenly imagined she was was investigating some big mystery. Turns out I misread her vague backstory instead and her purpose for being in the story is non-existent up until now.

I don’t want to see more characters wedged into the story through some kind of convenient plot device. Suddenly out of nowhere Kasmeer is a master mesmer. Why? Because a giant veil appeared in the middle of Kryta and Anise – who is known to be a powerful mesmer and was active beyond her role as the Queen’s Bodyguard in the personal story – decided to ignore it. They decided Kasmeer is now a notable mesmer simply to shoehorn her into this story. Why didn’t Anise or even someone from Divinity’s Reach get involved in the situation?

Something that Destiny’s Edge does better than the Living Story cast is their characters have reasons for having a thumb in every pie. Rytlock is a Tribune, Logan is captain of the Seraph, Caithe is a firstborn, Zojja is the apprentice of a genius inventor and Eir’s legend is one of the most impressive of the current generation of norn (and was before GW2 began if we go off of Braham’s story). That is all in addition to their status as Destiny’s Edge – the first to kill an elder dragon champion in 250 years (since it was done in GW1). When kitten goes down, they will often be involved simply because of their positions in their respective races, but we also want them around because they are Destiny’s freaking Edge.

Why do we want Kasmeer around? She’s a master mesmer. Is she going to become a master of something else next time she’s in the story? How many times are we going to need a detective or master of poisons before they create another thing for Marjory to be good at? Rox is a lackey for Rytlock. She had a weak reason for being involved with Tequatl (and it has no story depth to it which is partially why her involvement with the Tequatl Rising patch wasn’t very interesting). Braham is unusual in that he’s a norn and norn can honestly be wherever they want to be (although why we’d care is another story). Kiel is the only one who has moved to the level of Destiny’s Edge and to be honest, when were the Captain’s Council ever relevant prior to the assassination attempt? I guess she has an air ship now (too bad she doesn’t have an interesting bone in her body).

I want characters to be relevant to the story because it makes sense, not because of magic plot developments (Scarlet acquires the obelisk shards out of nowhere, Kasmeer is suddenly a powerful mesmer). I don’t think the current Living Story cast are prominent enough in Tyria to make sense as people who keep turning up without lots of convenient plot devices which weaken the overall story.

Aerlen.5326:

Gene Archer.8560:

lordkrall.7241:

Incorrect.
People have beaten him with about 7 minutes left, which would imply that a group with less than lvl 80 exotic would be very much able to kill him in 15.

So go beat Teq with a group in nothing but fine gear. I wanna see this.

I wanna see this too. Let’s get a challenge run of only “Fine” equipped people.

Any requirement for Tequatl other than “turn up and listen” is flat out unrealistic. Getting 80+ people to turn up for Tequatl is a huge endevour now, even the guilds that do it don’t do it 24/7 and a lot of the times that they do it they only have a single overflow.

I’m confident that in controlled conditions Tequatl can be beaten by a group of people entirely in blues. I would expect them to use specific builds tailored towards the content, all the right consumables and have skill turret operators and defenders. If everyone used the right classes, builds and consumables, I suspect an all blue group could do better than a mostly exotic group. Lots of the exotic groups are running precision and condition builds. These are organisers and leaders I’m talking about. Tequatl isn’t about the right build or the right skill level. It’s about strategy. Once you’ve got the incredibly basic strategy down, the only thing you need is enough people to follow it.

It was almost certainly either:
a) Scarlet. She used her engineering “genius” to create a device to cloak the tower.
or
b) The Toxic alliance has a mesmer or mesmers that cast the illusion.

I seriously doubt it would be Faoilain.

Phrixscreoth.6895:

Shiren.9532:

(first she’s some kind of Ghost Whispering detective, now she’s a poison expert).

Undead and Poison are two things necros are known for…

It’s just a case of the conveniences lining up in favour of the cast. Scarlet conveniently has the obelisk shards the krait wants. No-one else had the shards but her. Somehow everyone else in Tyria is accomplishing very little yet Scarlet found time to master a bunch of disciplines training under their masters, go to all the asura colleges, engineer the Molten Alliance, subdue the Aetherblades and scheme against the Captain’s Council, be the first person to see the Eternal Alchemy, corrupt humanity’s greatest engineering achievement, align with the Nightmare Court and corrupt the Clockheart. Somehow, in all of that, Scarlet obtained the obelisk shards that the krait wanted so badly (yet the krait, who are doing nothing of importance lately, were unable to obtain them themselves).

Marjory is partnered with Kasmeer. It turns out the two skills needed to take on this new threat conveniently fall into both their wheel houses. A master mesmer (so much so that the mesmer council contacted her specifically – I don’t even think we knew she was a mesmer prior to this) to take down the illusion, and a master of toxins, to figure out how to deal with the new alliance’s toxins.

The story is full of conveniences. They have a small cast of characters, it’s inevitable.

Redenaz.8631:

Parlourbeatflex.5970:

They believe other, lesser races have nothing to offer them, so the krait never bother to communicate with them. Never beaten, they are convinced that they are blessed and elevated: the superior species in the world.

The living story explains that whoever is pulling the strings (Scarlet, probably,) found something to offer them: Krait obelisk shards. The Krait might not like working with the Nightmare Court in return for them, but they do have a reasonably explained motive.

Add to that another NPC talking about how the Krait used to be top dogs out in the ocean, but are on the decline since moving to shallower waters, and it’s easy to see how they’d jump on any chance to hasten the return of their prophets, to return the Krait to supremacy. If they have to work with others to bring themselves the power to step (slither over?) everyone else, so be it.

I do hope we get more development on this alliance, more than with the other shallow alliances we’ve seen, but at least this one is set up with a lore-based motive. It’s not enough to say “Krait are xenophobes, ends of story.” They’re allowed to be cunning as well as stubborn.

My primary concern here is the writers seem to have fabricated the obelisks and given them to Scarlet simply to magic a motive for the krait to do what Scarlet wanted them to do. That kind of writing is lazy. How would that be different from creating a magical artifact treasured by any other race and giving it to Scarlet so she can trade it to them for their allegiance? Maybe something the centaurs want and combining it with the Inquest for example. It’s a pretty weak route to take.

The only reason I like the obelisk story is because it’s interesting regardless of the alliance. Krait prophets would have been a good Living Story all on its own, it doesn’t need Scarlet as a gimmick, bringing in the Nightmare Court because she “likes unusual pairings”.

None of these factions were working with each other a year ago, suddenly in a year we’ve had three magical alliances and Scarlet keeps conveniently having something to offer everyone.

I agree that the krait can’t just be xenophobes and never evolve from that, but an alliance like this one hasn’t been earned by the story. They can’t just keep on conjuring obelisks to act as motives. It’s transparent they just wanted to force an unusual pairing into the story and fabricated a reason for it to happen.

Thobek.1730:

Shiren.9532:

I dislike the way alliances have been done so far simply because they reduce the two allied factions into their superificial elements (dredge have machines, Flame Legion have fire magic) and they haven’t respected the depth that the different factions have.

well said!!

I hadn’t even thought to why I dislike these alliances but this is a really good reason. Instead of giving depth to races they are watering them down. Maybe the writers don’t know how to?

I’ve been looking into this update a little bit and they seem to be doing an OK job with the krait. The story behind the obelisks and their prophets seems to be intact and interesting enough. The Nightmare Court truly do seem like space fillers though. This update probably would have been stronger without them from a lore perspective. The pollen is obviously their doing, but aside from that I haven’t seen too much depth to explain why they are involved.

I think there will be a second update to this one so hopefully the krait prophets and obelisk plot goes somewhere really cool and Scarlet doesn’t disrupt too much of it. They’ve definitely put in the effort to explore the krait a little bit more and that was a big concern of mine when it comes to Scarlet’s alliances, that they take away from the individual factions too much. At this point it depends on how they can grow that story.

silvermember.8941:

Shiren.9532:

John Corpening.9847:

Team Based Rewards
The second big reason for this change is that we have seen that certain builds are much more effective at scoring points than other builds. For example, we see that typical bunker builds score lower than all other types of builds because they serve a vital role of point defense. All members of a team should share in the rewards equally. Again, this lays the foundation for new game modes. We don’t want to limit ideas for new modes because it creates one role that is potentially more or less lucrative than another role.

Hopefully you can apply this to the daily. Currently the daily is all about capping points and getting kills. Generally it’s easiest to do that by zergin from point to point and actual defending is pointless. You will usually take longer to bunker your way to a daily than if you just zerg points and kills.

I’m not a big fan of the changes to solo and team arena getting more rewards. They already have the tournament chests, this feels like another case of game design focusing on the carrot and not the experience. If players don’t want to do either of those arenas for whatever reason, why use carrots to herd them there?

Except that a lot of players want the carrot and that is one of the quickest fixes there is without having to dedicate too much time. In any case solo and tournament should have been giving significantly higher rewards. Hot join was meant to be casual.

It’s not a fix, it’s a cynical design decision only focused on numbers. One thing I’ve learned from watching GW2 this last year is that players will do things they find boring and hate just for the carrot. The developers have also learned this and are using carrots to get players to do content and not “fun”.

Rouven.7409:

One could almost think the 25 skill point price is not supposed to be available yet?
Or is this supposed to be the discounted price before this chapter is over?

I think it’s the “expensive” version that will remain once the other content is removed seeing as it just sits there in the hero panel and the other version is sold from a vendor in the world.

It’s a really bad condition removal skill. I’ve been using it and every time I use it I regret replacing my other heal. It feels like it should have a 15 or 20 second cool down considering how weak it is and how limited the range of conditions it removes are.

This was a disappointing skill. I can only see myself using this if there is some upcoming content forcing us to remove toxin.

It’s a sub 80 zone. It shouldn’t have complex combat mechanics that challenge the most experienced players. Save that for (hopefully) the instance.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I think you guys are over exaggerating the situation of this one armor set. It isn’t that stripped down…

Though I do agree it is weird the female version doesn’t look much like the male version in this one set.

Compare the Phoenix armour on females and males. Compare Trickster’s armour on males a females. It’s a trend that some of the armours don’t match up. I think it’s a case of some of the armours being representative of a character’s armour (Phoenix is Kasmeer and Trixter is Marjory) and thus they aren’t created as a set but rather as armour for a specific character then having a second armour created later on so they can sell it in the store.

It’s kind of nice that we have different armours rather than having homogenised sets all the time. I really liked the new weapon skins added with the champion loot bags a while back. They really freed up creativity and allowed the designers to make a variety of different aesthetic weapons without being restricted to certain aesthetic sets. The weapons feel a lot more unique and flavourful as a result. If we can have that happening with armour I don’t have a problem with it.

John Corpening.9847:

Team Based Rewards
The second big reason for this change is that we have seen that certain builds are much more effective at scoring points than other builds. For example, we see that typical bunker builds score lower than all other types of builds because they serve a vital role of point defense. All members of a team should share in the rewards equally. Again, this lays the foundation for new game modes. We don’t want to limit ideas for new modes because it creates one role that is potentially more or less lucrative than another role.

Hopefully you can apply this to the daily. Currently the daily is all about capping points and getting kills. Generally it’s easiest to do that by zergin from point to point and actual defending is pointless. You will usually take longer to bunker your way to a daily than if you just zerg points and kills.

The daily is particularly important because it’s one of the first PvP objectives most players experience other than winning. If you are teaching players the wrong things via daily design, they are starting in the wrong place.

I’m not a big fan of the changes to solo and team arena getting more rewards. They already have the tournament chests, this feels like another case of game design focusing on the carrot and not the experience. If players don’t want to do either of those arenas for whatever reason, why use carrots to herd them there?

I have a tonne of skill points floating around. It’s much easier to get it that way than with spores.

azurrei.5691:

Yeah staff looks good…for my elementalist I guess? Who uses staff on a Mesmer? Pretty sure I don’t even have the staff skills unlocked on mine.

I think it’s a meta weapon in WvW.

jweez.7214:

Yea def scarlet. The hair is a dead giveaway. But anybody else thinking that the guy behind her are the Kraits “Prophets”?

Nope. That’s another attempt to showcase her ‘genius’ by fusing together two separate things in Tyria because “fusions are cool”. I think we skipped the whole super saiyan arc. It’s probably some kind of krait/Nightmare Court fusion because it wouldn’t be a Scarlet gimmick without the Molten Berserker/Clockheart creation. Scarlet is so quirky and different, look at how creative she can be.

Overkillengine.6084:

Shiren.9532:

Helicity.3416:

Shiren.9532:

Human females are for people who want to play dress up.

Yes? and?

We want to dress up as a chick in badkitten armor.

so what exactly was your point?

You can play a chick in battle armour. Play a female charr or asura. They can wear all the male armour.

If you want full body armour on a human female, there are several options available. Just look at Primeval. The skimpy female armours are generally more popular than the full bodied ones. It makes sense that they would offer more of them as it likely caters to more people, that doesn’t mean they didn’t make something for everyone.

It’s not the case that the fully body armours don’t exist for human females. There are less of them, but there’s also likely less people who want them.

Most of the full body heavy armors currently available for human/norn/sylvari females suffer from one of two flaws:

a) Lowbie armor that looks like crap.

b) Overly specific theme that makes it near impossible to mix and match to personal satisfaction.

So no, they didn’t make something for everyone.

Edit: The part that is so disappointing is they made a kitten armor that isn’t stupidly ornate and has a elegant yet general purpose look…..for male models only.

Sounds like you need L’Oréal for those hairs you are splitting.

I had a look through the heavy female armour and I can’t understand what people are talking about.

http://www.gw2armor.com/human/female/heavy_list.php

Most of those seem to be fully covering the body. The balance of full body coverage to armour showing skin seems to be in favour of the full body coverage. This new set seems to be offering some much needed variety.

I don’t think it will have the same rewards as existing dungeons. They put three new armour sets into the store and the new faction themed weapon set was put into the BLC. If the dungeon had new armour and weapons, that would be a lot of new sets.

I am expecting it will be a dungeon, but probably only with one path and the new trophies are the primary rewards.

I think that’s the inevitable with open world content, especially at launch. It’s always going to be filled with massive zergs but this time they’ve done an excellent job of creating a variety of events to do and some of the events scale really well.

Come back towards the end of the month to see less people doing it once they’ve got their achievements.

I strongly support how “easy” they are. Without a zerg (and there will be people doing this later on without the aid of the launch day zerg) the events can be very challenging and move along slowly. The achievements are in the Living World category so they are temporary. A lot of people will be relieved it’s not a massive grind to get this stuff done. So far I think they did a good job of creating some fun open world content. The zerg is inevitable.

I seriously doubt the tower is just for show. I’m confident it will be opened in a later patch.

MadDemon.7548:

You all seem to be ignoring the most important question about the armor:

How does it look on Charrs?

Good imo. The medium armour has the best attempt to deal with butt capes I have seen (other than simply not have them like the T3 racial chest). The reason I think charr look so terrible in most armor is because their body proportions are different from top to bottom and their legs and posture is so different. The new medium set splits the mini skirt look so that the tale is recognised instead of just clipping through and the overall appearance looks less like someone tried to dress their cat up in baby clothes.

I still wish they’d utilise the commando pants model more often. The bike shorts look that medium armour has on charr is not a good look imo.

Her staff looks like a 250 lodestone exotic from the MF but more thank likely it will be an 800 gem purchase in the gem store in the next month or two, similair to when Rox and Braham’s weapons were made available.

Chat codes:
[&AgF1vwAA] Marjory’s Axe
[&AgF4vwAA] Marjory’s Dagger
[&AgF7vwAA] Kasmeer’s Staff

The whole instance was awesome. It’s one of the best implementations of story in a Living World patch we’ve seen.

• The gameplay was better than what we had in Flame and Frost instances. Mini events communicated what needed to be done, karma was a nice reward. The encounters weren’t tedious.
• The player character was the hero the entire time. I wasn’t following Kiel around, I was asked to help and I was the only one able to go on. When I arrived even the main NPCs thanked me for coming and recognised I am the hero of the game.
• Right off the bat I know what this whole new area is all about.
• We were introduced to the new factions, new characters, a new conflict and new mechanics – all in a short instance.
• The reward was decent. Event credit during the instance, bonus reward at the end.
• It can be done again on another character. One of my biggest issues with instances for Living World is that they haven’t been repeatable most of the time.
• The cut scene was probably the best thing we’ve seen in the Living World. I liked it better than Marjory’s original introduction because it was part of the world.

Helicity.3416:

Shiren.9532:

Human females are for people who want to play dress up.

Yes? and?

We want to dress up as a chick in badkitten armor.

so what exactly was your point?

You can play a chick in battle armour. Play a female charr or asura. They can wear all the male armour.

If you want full body armour on a human female, there are several options available. Just look at Primeval. The skimpy female armours are generally more popular than the full bodied ones. It makes sense that they would offer more of them as it likely caters to more people, that doesn’t mean they didn’t make something for everyone.

It’s not the case that the fully body armours don’t exist for human females. There are less of them, but there’s also likely less people who want them.

I misunderstood. I didn’t realise she was taking them and progressing the achievement. All I saw was her accepting the items, giving nothing in return and her dialogue was the same. I was worried it was bugged and I was throwing my samples away.

Turns out Scarlet conveniently came into possession of a magic rock that the krait wanted. She offered it to them and the rock’s magic wiped away all of their prior characteristics so they could become tools for Scarlet.

The players need a magic rock to remove Scarlet from the story.

Play a female charr. You get to wear male armour all the time.

Human females are for people who want to play dress up.

Hey! They aren’t just plant weapons, they are glowing blue plant weapons. Twice as much reason to hate them according to the Twilight Assault topics.

I dislike the way alliances have been done so far simply because they reduce the two allied factions into their superificial elements (dredge have machines, Flame Legion have fire magic) and they haven’t respected the depth that the different factions have. If you are going to add something to the game and it’s going to deal with existing factions, it should expand those factions, respect the stories told already and bring them forward while using their existing characteristics to tell a story. It seemed like the Molten Alliance just ignored who the Flame Legion and the dredge were beyond their the surface, and that makes the story feel shallow.

Compare the Molten Alliance to the peace treaty between the humans and the charr. It’s not a fair comparison (the former are two enemy factions, the later are playable factions that have more weight in the world). The human/charr treaty has huge importance in the world. It’s history and current reality are woven into the world of Tyria today. All over Ascalon you see different characters and villages express different opinions about the treaty. In personal story it’s mentioned, in Ebonhawke it’s one of the most emotive stories in the game. The road to peace between humans are charr is not an easy one. The Molten Alliance doesn’t (and shouldn’t) compare to this, but it should be closer. There should be a story to these alliances instead of having them pop up when Scarlet needs something to do and players need something to fight.

I haven’t played the new content yet. Hopefully the Seaweed alliance is different.