Guild Wars 2

If you do try to turn them into ecto, buy the heavy armour. It has a chance to salvage into orichalcum.

At least necros have the option of running something else (plus minion death is expected). Ranger pet deaths are a considerable DPS loss and you have no other options.

Peter Buch.8071:

ArenaNet testers are bad. Did you watch the patch preview? He didn’t even know where to find the tournament NPC.

Maybe he was a PvE player? Just because you don’t do tournaments (I suspect that’s the majority of the players) doesn’t mean you are a bad player. I actually thought he did pretty well with his thief. He was also being instructed on what to do, so maybe he didn’t understand what exactly she was talking about until she made it clearer.

My ranger used to be my “main” and my first character from the first BWE (I even played a pet ranger in GW1) but after the latest shortbow nerf I started playing my other classes more often. I have to say I am happier in the game these days. The ranger class is fun and I love having a pet, but there is so much content where it’s either a hindrance or a dead weight.

Getting maximum efficiency from your class without that nagging frustration of a dead pet is a nice break from the class. I find it hard to play the ranger now, they are a lot of work to reach the same level as other classes (pet micro, sword micro, spirit micro). Whenever you play content on another class, it’s really nice not having to worry about what’s going to massacre your pet this time.

While I don’t agree with the design, I can see a reason for the wait. Some of the bosses require you to learn their tricks. Wasting tickets on trial and error yourself isn’t a great way to go about it considering how hard the tickets can be to come by. If you watch other players doing the bosses, you can learn from the mistakes or successes.

I don’t know why they don’t res you though. It seems like they want to force you to play at a dome with other people to make it more convenient. So they introduce an inconvenience (dead on defeat, needs to WP to res if you are the only one at that dome) to force you to accept a lesser inconvenience (wait 2-4 minutes each attempt while at least 2 other people go before you in hopes one of them will res you if you die) as the solution.

I think the Crown Pavilion is incredibly beautiful. I occasionally stop and wish I had more time to enjoy the locations because they are pretty awesome. Having said that, the open world is the same and there are parts of it I haven’t been to in a long time that look just as cool.

I am glad this month gave us something to do with our swords. I really wanted to swing my sword again. Open world combat in GW2 is a lot of fun, and the Crown Pavilion is basically the open world boss events rolled into one little map. This is both good and bad in my opinion. Personally, I don’t enjoy zerging around. It’s very profitable but it ends up becoming all about tagging as many mobs as you can and trying to make sure you loot everything.

I think GW2 dynamic events break when too many people get involved. They stop being challenging or engaging content because nothing stands a chance. Sure you might die, but if you do, it’s not like in the dungeon where you know what you did wrong and you usually have to start again. It just feels like you got unlucky, but you can just WP and run back and continue until the event succeeds. In the Pavilion my personal experience was usually invisible enemies or AoEs. I never had this problem in PvE prior to this patch, but for some reason I’m having the culling issues in PvE now. Even the chests aren’t loading on my screen because of culling, which is a new problem for me specific to this content.

Having said that, I did enjoy the Pavilion. I don’t think it’s the pinnacle of open world PvE content, but for a month long distraction it’s pretty cool. The balloons in the open world are much more impressive than their predecessors (holograms and toy boxes etc) because they tell a story and feel like you would actually see them in the world during this event. I’m also enjoying that most of this content is actual PvE combat. It’s not mini games, it’s stuff that goes back to why I play this MMO. I’d love for it to be new maps to explore etc, but that’s unrealistic every month. Kill x enemies while representing each city isn’t inspired design, but it’s something I was going to do anyway (and it’s not “interact with x pumpkins” which is far worse). The Queen’s Gauntlet is also a new type of gameplay (similair to people who solo dungeons) that is actually fairly fun to do. It’s also the best story instance they’ve done so far.

I think the content has it’s flaws and a lot of it isn’t my ideal PvE content, but for a small update I think they did a fantastic job with this one.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

you posted this at 5am, and didn’t get a response for 3 hours, so you bumped your thread. It is now 8:30am… you need to give us some time to get here in the morning, lol.

I’ll alert our QA to this potential, and make sure it gets investigated. Any further information you may have will help.

Exosferatu.2961:

It’s annoying that Developers don’t respond when players point bugs in this current Living World. For example, I’ve been QQ’ing on GW2 Forums because I can’t use the Tokens in Account Wallet to craft stuff on Mystic Forge.

We don’t reply to every single bug. More often than not we’re made aware of it, and then start doing something about it. This is something we are aware of.

Sounds like you guys need to borrow some of Jennah’s robots to run things while the humans sleep. I’m sure nothing would go wrong.

I did it first try with axe/torch condi ranger (using flame and viper trap) and the jaguar. The jaguar focusing the blob made certain he was taking the most damage. I wasn’t even trying to stop my AoE skills from hitting the other mobs.

I’d put my money on Frost Spirit getting a survivability buff before pugs ever touch it.

I used to try and run all three paths of TA when I wanted a rabid set on my necro. I ran TA a lot post launch so I was very surprised to find, even with the aid of gw2lfg I was having a lot of trouble getting groups to do all of the TA paths. I ended up swapping alts to get up done multiple times because people didn’t want to do anything else.

Wethospu.6437:

Based on my observations it takes about 6 months for pugs to catch up with the meta. Whatever people say here will be valid next year.

Do you think there will be a ranger meta where most pug groups are bringing sword rangers with frost spirit even if the devs don’t make any balance changes to the sword leap-lock and spirit and pet survivability?

I don’t think there is a dungeon team. Hrouda was moved onto the Living Story team (I suspect he had a lot to do with the design of the Queen’s Gauntlet seeing as they have so much in common with dungeon encounters). If the AC redesign was the test to see if it was worth reworking the paths, it probably failed. It was very controversial, some people loved it, some people hated it. Overall less people run it now.

I think the dungeon redesign was unpopular so instead it’s leave them as is and only new dungeons from now on.

Bukkebruse.2810:

AC is clearly .5g above the others because the devs wanted to encourage us to run the new reworked dungeon that turned out to be a disaster. Tssk

They put extra work into it so they are bribing players to play it more so that their work doesn’t go to waste.

It is weird seeing AC worth more than some more difficult paths. Maybe they are basing this on their metrics for completion times and popularity?

hybrid.5027:

Inevitable.8920:

No that’s what the gold bonus is for they kittened up the tokens and its really annoying for people who want armor

I’d recommend finding a good guild that you can do all 3 paths with, or 4 in the case of Arah.

That’s still only 180 or 240 tokens each day. The nerf to alts is unecessary yet predictable. All that’s left at this point is a timer which prevents you from logging into the game if you’ve played for more than 90 minutes.

I’ve never seen a game that so aggresively targeted alts and really pushed time gating this much. People complain about it every time it’s done yet they keep going out of their way to do it with new content and change old content so it also suffers from it. God forbid players have multiple characters they want to gear up and access content on it, you still have to put in multiple times the work but now you also have to wait multiple times as long because of inane time gates.

Are you guys praising the Crown Pavillion because you enjoy the gameplay or because you like the loot?

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

Eh, it was fine until the Aetherblades made an appearance. They are an overused plot device, yet do nothing to further the plot. Time and time again living story throws them at us, we defeat them quickly, and they disappear; which is beginning to leave a very ‘Team Rocket’ feel to them. I could be wrong as this chapter has not yet concluded, but I’ll be disappointed if they don’t start taking a serious role, rather than simply being lumped in every chapter.

“Overused plot device”? They were only introduced a two months ago… their story is in the middle of unfolding.

Did you think of the Molten Alliance as an “overused plot device” two months into “Flame and Frost”, too? :P

The Molten Alliance didn’t come back after their defeat. The Aetherblades haven’t been given any real purpose in the story (who are they, who do they work for, what are their goals, where do they come from etc) and they’ve been used twice now, for seemingly unconnected events. Their first appearance was to assassinate a member of the Captain’s Council and plant one of their own on the seat. From this we assume they have an interest in politics, at least in Lion’s Arch. We ran through their dungeon and yet we learned almost nothing about them. Here they are again, causing trouble and we still don’t know why, but unlike their last appearance it would seem we might get more answers this month.

Will we have to wait two weeks for the story to develop or will they bring out more story instances before the second half of the month?

I think the plan was to encourage players to watch each other fight. This is why they aren’t instanced, they wanted you to show off your skills in front of other people. Assuming that works, revives should be easy to come by. That’s why they bothered to get a voice actor to be a kind of announcer for the spectators.

Whether or not you enjoy that is another story.

The developers specifically said it’s mesmer magic, not robot magic. They even have the mesmer shatter animations when they die. Queen Jennah does some crazy mesmer magic stuff in Edge of Destiny. Maybe they have a team of mesmers? I think it’s strange that they would go out of their way to say it’s mesmer magic if it was in fact robot magic. Does a ranger or guardian use fire elementalist magic every time they use a torch?

Why would they say it’s mesmer magic if the robots themselves generating the illusions? One would presume an actual mesmer would need to be involved for it to be mesmer magic. You don’t see every illusion the asura use being referred to as mesmer magic.

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

Shiren.9532:

Didn’t Logan say robot Rytlock said something he had said in the past, but very people knew about it? Was that part of Anise’s illusion or was that something else?

It also doesn’t make sense that Anise would maintain the illusion of Rytlock if it was shown to be hindering Logan. When it was just an exhibition match, it was fine. But when the Queen’s life is in danger it’s flat out stupid to maintain the illusion. Either Anise kittened up and endangered the Queen by hindering the leader of the Seraph or she’s up to something.

Anise was mocking him publicly… which is a pretty low blow, but what do you expect from a woman of her nature. As for putting a stop to it when the queen was in danger, she couldn’t, as she no longer had control.

The illusion is her magic, it’s not the golem. They lost control of the golem, not the illusion.

Didn’t Logan say robot Rytlock said something he had said in the past, but very people knew about it? Was that part of Anise’s illusion or was that something else?

It also doesn’t make sense that Anise would maintain the illusion of Rytlock if it was shown to be hindering Logan. When it was just an exhibition match, it was fine. But when the Queen’s life is in danger it’s flat out stupid to maintain the illusion. Either Anise kittened up and endangered the Queen by hindering the leader of the Seraph or she’s up to something.

Was it another item they gave to people for free if they purchased gems?

Yeah, Rox and Braham seem to always be present for the best Living Story content. Every time they are around it’s a home run. I actually liked the bit where you follow Rox to each of the spots and protect her so she can snipe the sylvari. It wasn’t difficult but it was more engaging than “kill the mobs until the game says its ok to stop”. It was also kind of cool to see a little team of allies form so it wasn’t just me doing all the work. Usually in instanced content it feels like I am doing everything. Here we had Braham, Rox, Logan, Faren and Anise helping out (she seemed suspicious multiple times, kind of like a red herring). I felt like I was fighting with my heroic friends in this game, which made me feel like I was more important.

The banter was hilarious. Faren is awesome, keep that guy around. Rox and Broham play off each other very well, they are very entertaining and really showcase how compatible charr and norn are. This is the reason why choosing “blacked out” for norn personal story was so entertaining and bringing back that theme is a win.

Thank Kormir that Kiel isn’t around any more. She was an anchor on the story, the Opening Ceremony showcases what entertaining characters can do. I’m looking forward to seeing how Kasmeer and Marjory fit into the mix, they seem to play off each other similair to Rox and Braham (more so if you visit them in the pub). Even Logan and Anise have their little dynamic going, although I’ll admit I’m tired of Logan’s love sick puppy with tunnel vision flaw being the cornerstone of all his interactions with the Queen. I hope they redeem this by making Anise’s decisions ultimately lead to the Queen being in greater threat and Logan was right all along. Bonus points if Canach is the returning Southsun character (although I wouldn’t be opposed to a “good” sylvari character now that it appears the villain and possibly nemesis is a sylvari similair to Faolain).

I think we need some kind of idea of where the Living Story takes place in relation to the Personal Story/Story Mode dungeons. The comments about Logan and Rytlock with the illusion are possibly telling about the identity of Scarlet. My first guess was Faolain (because her face was similair, although fitting a tree branch under that hood is silly) given her relationship with Caithe, but it could have just been Anise knew more than I though she did. Regardless, I’m beginning to be confused by what’s happened and what is yet to happen in the time line, especially now that Destiny’s Edge and major characters are crossing over.

All in all, this was probably the best story instance so far.

My one big criticism is that I can’t repeat it. I like to do story content more than once, especially if I rushed through to get to the real content later on. Please make Living Story content repeatable, at least for the month it is around.

Don’t you feel encouraged by having people watch you and your accomplishments? Isn’t it cool to have other players see how good you are at the game? No? Me either.

I thought that’s what streaming and Youtube videos were for. I’m all for adding them into the game, but not at the cost of forcing players to wait to play. Fortunately this will die down towards the end of the event.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

You can only loot the chests until you’ve completed Balloon Tower Tourist achievement.

Is that a bug or working as intended?

They really want people to watch you play so they didn’t even plan for the possibility that someone might not be watching and waiting to res you.

God that’s awful. Like 4g for a single portal. If you use this like 10 times you could probably have used the gold to level a mesmer to 80.

I don’t like them but I’m sure plenty of people will.

Culling? He’s supposed to fight a Flame Legion, then an Ogre, possibly something after that, finally it’s Rytlock. Sucks that you didn’t see it.

I thought he was talking about the great collapse in the market brought on by the insane loot drops in the new map.

You can still find items which have 0 quantity on the TP.

Shouldn’t it be searchable on the TP if that’s the case?

So I noticed Faren is duel wielding them but I can’t kill him. Has anyone found the rapier yet? It doesn’t appear to be on the TP yet.

The OP’s screen shot appears to be in Queensdale in the troll cave (my guess anyway) so it’s possible. The peson with the scepter is in the Melandru temple in Orr, near the event chest.

Maybe he logged into multiple characters and didn’t realise the wallet was pooling everyone’s money.

Most of them seem to have some particle effects.

Is the main hand sword Twin Talons new? It’s a reskin of Twin Sisters. I can’t find the rapier on the TP, maybe because Faren purchased two of them.

There is a new staff called Monsoon, similair to one of the scepters. New shortbow called stardust. It uses the Hornbow skin but it has particle effects at the curves. A new warhorn called Cutthroat Caller. It looks similair to the Orrian one. Occultist Flame is the new torch. It’s the Grawl/Godskull torch with a green flame. New rifle called exterminator, an alteration of the Lionguard one. The scythe hammer is in, it’s called the Mecha Anchor. There are some others. Looks like all/most of the weapons got a new exotic drop with a unique inventory icon.

The mace is called Shiverstone, it has an icy particle effect and it’s an ice cube on a stick. Sadly the longbow appears to be Gandariva dyed blue, it’s called Arc. The new trident is called Rockweed Spire and it’s like a sylvari weapon. I recognise pieces of it from other weapons. I think there are two axes, Truth, which is ordinary, and Phoenix Reborn, which is Phoenix Talon with flame particle effects. Anton’s Boot Blade appears to be the new dagger, it’s the same as Kenshi’s Wing.

I’m not certain all of these are new, they are just the ones I didn’t recognise from before.

I really enjoyed Braham and Rox in this. They are quickly becoming my favourite GW2 team, not just in the Living Story, but in all of the game. Faren is funny as always. Scarlet seems a lot like Faolain.

I haven’t gone through all the cut scenes, but in the Opening Ceremony they recognised me. I actually smiled during their little chat. I forgot what it was like to have characters that I actually liked in the story.

Yeah, that looks a dye job on the Krytan Speak with added particle effects.

sonicwylde.2906:

technically they did not retcon the Charr (as there are “good” charr in GW, Pyreshot and his warband)

You think the charr fighting to reclaim their homeland are the bad charr?

I thought it was strange the White Mantle weren’t on the list but then I realised they would need new models. The only way I see that happening is if they were going to be in the Living Story, which would have been a huge spoiler.

I panicked when I opened my bank to see entire tabs empty. Then I was happy and got drunk on karma.

Penguin.5197:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

More clarification:

• It’s an artificer recipe
• You can trade the output of the recipe between characters on your account
• The recipe makes a one-time use item, it does not unlock a new skill
• This is not going to replace a mesmer in your party

Why do you keep pushing new recipe outputs that we can’t tp? >.<

It uses a charged lodestone. That’s almost 3g (probably more when you consider the other items) for a single portal. I can’t think of any time in the game where I would pay 3g for a portal. When would you ever use this over simply swapping to a mesmer? You could pay a mesmer 1g to portal you wherever you might use this item for.

They are easily the best open world random feature from the Living Story chapters so far. An actual dynamic event tied into them is a lot more fun than the generic ‘press f key’ stuff we’re used to and the structure itself looks pretty cool. The chest loot isn’t bad either. It’s like a win in all areas. They help tell the story of the Emissary’s travelling to Divinity’s Reach, they sell the conflict with the Aetherblades, they involve real gameplay (I was in Caledon Forest with three other people and we fought actual veterans) and they have bonus loot in the end.

This is a huge improvement from Holograms and all the Living Story interaction objects in the open world. I was actually immersed in the story by this rather than seeing them in the world as objects which felt like they were put there to sell a festival. Good job on this one.

One of the things about TV shows is that episodic shows (shows like CSI, which have no reliance on a continuing narrative, the only plot is the one introduced and concluded by the episode’s end) tend to capture a wider audience than serial shows (shows like Lost, which will have a plot that builds on each episode and season, telling a whole story over long period of time). An episodic show can be watched in any order and you can miss an episode with little to no consequence. A serialised show like Lost has important plot details and developments that take place all the time. Understanding the 8th episode of the show requires that you have seen the 5th episode of the show. If you start missing some of it, or start watching in the second season, you will have a hard time figuring out what’s happened. Fortunately television has adapted and you watch DVDs, download on itunes, watch on Hulu/Netflix and even see them again on the channel’s own website.

It makes sense that television content is finite, the way broadcasting works, only one show can air at a time on the channel. It doesn’t make sense that an MMO would do that. There are almost no restrictions in place preventing them from leaving instanced story content in the world. The open world events would need to go, but the instances can stay (just like the entire Personal Story co-exists with the open world). ArenaNet has used an episodic style of story telling in a medium which is well suited to it, and artificially created problems to make their story less effective. The only reason I can think is to pressure players into playing now and not later, to keep them around to boost their metrics and buy them gemstore items.

So now we have players burning out because the Living Story requires they always be playing to participate, and we have people missing out because they had real life commitments, didn’t start playing until recently or were just not aware when it started so they are jumping in halfway through the story and don’t understand what happened. Fortunately(?) for them, even players who were around have trouble understanding the story due to how it’s delivered in the game.

I just hope we don’t hear developers talk about how they were surprised to discover that their exclusive story system ended up excluding players.

Living World isn’t really about PvE. So far it’s been primarily jumping challenges, mini-games and festival achievements which are nearly all summed up as “move to object x, press f”.

PvE means Player Versus Environment. The vast majority of the Living World content has nothing to do with playing against the environment. Mini games are PvP, jumping puzzles don’t fight back (they are in the environment, including PvP environments) and aside from two dungeons, pumpkins don’t fight back and the hologram spawns etc are basically no different from loot piñatas.

Colin Johanson: “I swung a sword, I swung a sword again. Hey! I swung it again, that’s great!”

ArenaNet let us know early on they didn’t want us to swing our swords again. That’s why all the content is turning into mini-games, elections, jumping puzzles and “I pressed the F key, I pressed the F key again. Hey! I pressed it again, that’s great!” “achievements”. Guild Wars 2: taking the achieve out of achievements and the combat out of the combat MMO.

This thread has nothing to do with the Jubilee, either take it to the politics sub forum where it will be buried soon (thank god) or discuss the future of the Living World in the Living World thread.

Gabby.3205:

First of all, I don’t think Jennah is a bad ruler. She is not the first (or last) ruler to throw a party in honor of herself. However, I do disagree with her priorities.
And, I’m sorry, but it is always about money.
Beggars and refugees are right under her nose. Go ahead, blame the ministers, they are as corrupt as the Arcane Council, that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t the queen who “broke” it. As a ruler and a symbol of hope and guidance to her dying people, she must fix it.
So it can’t be fixed. Alright then, since it can’t be fixed, let’s just throw a party to make people forget about how hungry they are, or how the centaurs burned their crops and the bandits poisoned their water! That’s a common strategy used by every single government ever, but just because everybody does that, it doesn’t mean I must agree with that.

The people are starving? Let them eat cake!

Yeah, the gauntlet is clearly the most likely to have some kind of exploit or “bug” which makes it easy to complete and will be removed before the event ends. Unfortunately, the lines will be the longest during the first day (guest to a low population server to minimise this).

mtpelion.4562:

To be fair, the objective is not to survive for 2 minutes in the ring, it is to defeat the foe within 2 minutes. If this means you need to respec for more DPS, then you are going to need to respec for more DPS (or use a DPS-focused alt).

Bunkering is a great tactic for survival, but this competition is not about survival so any lack of success with that tactic should be expected.

That’s not fair though, is it? Exotic gear isn’t easy to obtain let alone ascended gear. What if the build that your ascended gear is speced for is not the build that you need to complete this temporary content? Are you supposed to just play with a special 6th gambit “bad gear choice” or buy new gear? I don’t think defensive PvE necros use soldier stats, they use rabid, which has two offensive stats.

It’s too early to complain about the requirements of the content yet, we don’t know what they are, but if it strongly favours some gear stats over others, I’d be less than happy (speaking as someone who has several gear sets across multiple characters).