Guild Wars 2

Sure, but at the same time, there’s no way I’m actually going to complain about this.

Hoooow did I not notice this…

Thanks ANet!

I played through it on healer spec druid… pretty slow with as much HP as many of the enemies had, nothing difficult though.

Well, we did hear that the egg appeared to be fine from Taimi, but no actual developments, anyway.

Raids seem to be strictly optional – I didn’t play them and had no issues following the LS3 story – but they are chronologically in between.

The norn spirit form ability kind of got forgotten about, as far as I can tell.

One thing on this note that I am curious about; what makes Druid so popular for PvP, and staff in particular? Is it glyph condi clear, CC abilities, something like that? Or is celestial avatar useful in some way (it really doesn’t seem to mesh on a zerker build to the point I actually forget to use it – but I haven’t done PvP in a while)?
Staff is great for a healbot but I assume that’s not what’s going on in PvP, but it still sounds like it’s popular (or at least used to be). I assume you don’t actually auto-attack with it.

The flip-side is, that’s exactly what makes it great for cliffs in WvW…
(to a point; if your opponent is smart, they’ll be expecting it if they see LB Ranger anyway)

tolunart.2095:

They recently cancelled all in-progress Legendaries so starting a new project to appeal to an even smaller segment of the player base just isn’t going to happen.

Sad but true. Even the stuff that would definitely qualify as a fix – backpacks attaching to the skeleton badly so they seem to float around the back, and shoulder pieces often clearly hovering in mid-air – I’m not holding my breath for. And that’s not even getting to the dreaded ethereal tail. I’d just settle for “all new armor/outfits from this point forward will work” on that.

General Health.9678:

That’s a very narrow set of people that these trinkets would actually be important for then and so not the big deal that the OP makes it out to be?

My opinion too. “Recruit another player” is almost always a better solution in WvW than trying to min-max your gear, unless the map is full, in which case “divide your players more intelligently” becomes the better solution.

If you’re dead-set on roaming then getting the perfect stat allocation is going to make some difference, and it may even win or lose a few close fights… but you know… you’re playing WvW. You’re used to things not being fair.

Which doesn’t mean having this stuff available through playing WvW would be a bad thing – it wouldn’t, and I’d be fine with ArenaNet taking the time to do that. I just think the topic title is stretching the truth like it’s mozzarella cheese.

A software development saying I heard: anything’s possible, it just depends how much you’re willing to pay for it.

It might be a big step along the way there if they got the original personal story to be replayable… evidently there’s a non-trivial (i.e. expensive) amount of scripting rework to be done to make that happen. But then you have to roll back things that even LW S2 doesn’t have a precedent for – the choices you made along the way. Unsure how simple that is – could be easy, could be horrible. (I heard someone else say that the only people qualified to decide how difficult something is to implement in GW2 are those that have worked on it.)

Tangled Depths is generally OK if you’re there for the meta or something like that… but trying to get map completion in it was one of the lowest points of GW2 I’ve experienced. There are hero points in places that are very difficult to find a path to… and compounding it all is a horde of trash mobs that really don’t want to let you run past them. (You can still do it, it’s just not much fun.)

Thankfully you don’t actually need to max the Nuhoch mastery line (which takes quite a while) to get the chak lair POI… since there’s no requirement you get back out alive.

I don’t really care how people choose to do jumping puzzles, but at the same time, I would be interested if ANet wanted to go back and convert some of them into adventures – without the special skills the HoT ones give you, but they could and probably should disable gliding and portal use while the adventure is active. If the rewards for adventure completion were appropriate, that’d make a pretty nice branch of extra stuff to do.

I mean… there’s the situation where you have vistas/POIs that you have to do bits of jumping puzzles to get to. I understand that.

But the daily thing, I really don’t. There was basically no reason to do jumping puzzles after completing them once, except for the hell of it, after they abolished the monthly achievement for them. Now they show up in one of the groups, maximum one JP daily per day, maybe… half the time or something? And that’s still too much? Having a reason to do jumping puzzles again is too much?

I mean, seriously, I skip the fractal achievement most days it shows up because I don’t have time… I just do something else. You can do the same thing with jumping puzzles.

(P.S. On noticing that at least in the OP’s case this isn’t really about daily achievements, this post is probably not very pointful. Still, there it is.)

Investing in the real world carries risks as well… the value of commodities can and does crash on occasion. It’s not free money.

I am reading the above post as “other players will be the real villain in the second expansion”.

I have but one misgiving about this: it probably also means the Super Banana is back.

Coincidentally, a week ago was 10 years since the Factions preview event which is where the idea of tengu as a playable race was arguably first teased with the inclusion of Talon Silverwing as (at the time) the first non-human henchman.

Time flies

Leo G.4501:

Isn’t there a new MMO that is releasing that has playable centaurs? Like Camalot unleashed or whatever it’s called.

Might be Crowfall? At least, if I read it right.

Dantert.1803:

Male charr have the option to be bulkier but the main difference is the head.
Agree about the different plumage on the head and tail but I guess as I said before that the majour difference would be in the face features, the female, as an example, could lack the small fangs on the side of the beak or they could have fluffy plumage on the legs

…!
You know, there IS precedent for that in GW1 – one of the Canthan tengu models didn’t have those fangs. They never really seemed to make up their minds what the difference between male and female tengu was in GW1 though – you saw the blurb about the females being larger and more drab-colored, but Talon Silverwing and Soar Honorclaw looked basically exactly the same. We later (in BMP, forget whether WoC was the same) saw the different models used to distinguish between Angchu and Sensali instead, but some of each were used for both tribes in the original GW Factions release.

In GW2 it’s probably relatively fair to say all the tengu we’ve seen so far (which are, incidentally, also all male – as yet unexplained) are more colorful, so they might be going back to that – but that said, if they actually do become playable, I suspect having all the females being confined to boring color options would elicit a widespread “…really?” from the playerbase. Not sure whether it would actually happen. The no tusks/fangs possibility has some plausibility, but… doesn’t mean it’ll happen of course.

But hey, ArenaNet (I forget who the responsible designer was, Linsey maybe?) did an excellent job on the female charr, so I’m sure they could come through again here.

One other detail to feed speculation further – you might have noticed that the voice modulation on tengu changed a bit in HoT (including for previously-existing NPCs). That may be going somewhere… doesn’t necessarily mean “Half-Life 3 playable tengu confirmed” but still.

Well… at risk of raining on the parade, could we get the hawk wing glider fixed before adding too many more (especially if they are broken in the same way)? The backpack/glider combo thing was a neat idea, but the wobbling thing is giving me a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

Crinn.7864:

I’m willing to bet that playable Tengu is either on the “at some point in the future” shelf, or on the “we where going to do this but cut it” shelf.

We actually know (courtesy of the art book) that it was the latter, but it’s probably the former as well. Though, yeah, there are some problems with it.

I can see the personal story thing just getting in the way… a lot of re-recording of lines for old content that I’m not sure players would be that excited to play again (but I could be wrong). The armor skins is the other thing.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if, should ANet eventually add a playable race, they make some sacrifices – if it has a significantly different mesh (most HoT tengu seem to – they don’t have the charr pose anymore), they might just not get the old armor skins (“armor skin unusable by your race”), and their personal story might just be something new for the corresponding expansion – not including original GW2, LS S1/S2, or HoT.

So, there’d be some less style choice, some less content – although it’d still get the new stuff – but the race is there and playable. Personally, I don’t think I’d object to that.

The glider stuff has changed the calculus a little from last time the “next playable race” discussion was going around. It’s pretty funny that the so-called “flightless” tengu would, um, actually get wings – and it also adds a new thing to the “wouldn’t this be ridiculous for centaurs?” basket. Pegataurs?

Haha! Yeah, they work for some of the guild rushes as well. It’s funny, but probably not working as intended.

The hawk wing backpack also seems to have an issue that it will move around weirdly when running – at least on charr characters, particularly without weapons drawn, but it might not be limited to them. Unfortunately it’s really hard to capture this in screenshots – it’s just that it moves around the back slightly, and breaks the illusion that the wings are attached in one particular place.

There is something like an 8-second delay before the ranger/druid can even start pet-healing. That’s plenty of time to get a stomp off… at least for any PvP player I’ve ever faced while in downed state.

Any art fixes on the weirdness with the backpack skin in today’s release? I’m guessing it would take longer than that, but who knows

There are hints that we might see more out of that place eventually. If you have a guild hall and have talked to Kensho Arrowsoul, particularly.

Watch this space in LW season 3, maybe? No guarantees, I mean their neighboring problem dragons have yet to really stir (unless you count Zhaitan or Mordremoth… hee hee), but ANet hasn’t forgotten in any case.

They do look fairly neat, but… hm. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems to interact oddly with the charr running animation (the all-fours one anyway, weapons drawn looked fine) – almost like the wings are floating or detached somehow.

All I know is the quetzal art is pretty cool. Major props for that.
It’s also nice to see they’re moving away from the charr animation clone to something closer to what we saw in GW1.

Ooh… congrats on 15 years Gaile! The company itself couldn’t go back much further!

I wonder if they give out any mementos at ArenaNet for major anniversaries?

XDeadzX.2581:

They’ve stated that allowing revs to have racial skills ruins the idea behind the rev, and allows players to make very bad skill choices, something they wanted to avoid. I would assume the mistfire wolf falls into that category.

Well… every other class can make those “very bad” choices. But the idea thing… yeah… I can sort of see it.

I’ll probably have a more decided opinion once I’ve had the chance to play the druid this weekend – especially since I wasn’t able to watch the reveal due to work. My initial impressions based on what I have managed to see, though:

It’s interesting. Probably the most intriguing elite spec in HoT. There’s a chance it would appeal to many of my “I want to be a healer ” friends that initially dismissed GW2. I’m definitely interested in trying it. I’m not sure I’ll love it (I did play some Monk in GW1 and it was… an experience but not my favorite class) but from time to time, in the situations that need it…

However, it does not really seem too “druidy” from what I can tell so far. The visual theme doesn’t really match. The emphasis on healing is a part of a typical druid, but only a part; not that that’s necessarily a problem because if you tried to capture everything a D&D druid is within the amount of “features content” a single elite spec gives you, it probably wouldn’t be very satisfying. So maybe I can just look forward to that stuff in future elite specs?
The visual thing remains, though. Sort of would have expected more plant-y, less like the Avatar state from TLA/Korra. At least for the non-celestial state skills, anyway.

The new pets are cool, and thanks for adding them. I’m hoping that the “why isn’t this a pet?” candidates from the rest of Tyria get some love eventually as well, though – some of them are pretty cool and would be fun to play with.

As to the rest… I will find out this weekend and look for the survey in my in-box.

I don’t think Eric Flannum’s department was visual design… might be mistaken, but I haven’t heard of him having anything to do with that. But yeah he’s been around for a long time, since the GW1 days I think – it’s probably just that he wanted to do something new, which is totally understandable by this point.

I… don’t know. I mean, the new pets are cool and all, but there is one question that jumps out at me immediately – what happened to raptors? Griffons? Skelk?

There were a lot of requests for those.

OK. I don’t clearly remember doing that, but it is feasible.

Durzlla.6295:

I can’t even begin to tell you how salty I was that Humans were able to transform into an Oakheart but rangers weren’t lol.

But the joke was on them: the skill sucked.

…and you have to pay for insurance yourself and don’t get paid time off, that stuff is super fun.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

But ultimately, if the Winds of Change was just a story about how or why Cantha became closed off, I’ll be quite disappointed.

Yeah, I think that’s what they meant. At the time WoC was in progress, GW2 was still under development but we’d heard about Cantha closing its borders and so forth. I believe the stage-setting done by WoC was showing how that came to pass (or at least the early stages of it).

Cantha is one of those things I just don’t get my hopes up on It hasn’t been worth it.

You can rebind the skill keys… which is generally enough for KB/M use, but if you prefer to click skill icons (and, well, some people do) the tools are very limited, yeah. Pretty much just reordering the utility skills, and for the Revenant, not even that.

Yeah, I’m not sure entirely how much on board I am with the royalty demands considering how much less of a part voice acting is of a game than it is in, for instance, film (especially live-action film).
The rest of the demands make a lot of sense, though. When you take on a job you do deserve to know what it is and what it requires.

That said, for titles selling millions of copies, royalties for acting talent is substantially less likely to break the bank either way. It’s if they started asking that for indie titles I would be really worried. Then again they might not be able to afford SAG actors anyway.

My impression is that the tendency to favor Direct3D for PC games is mostly due to historical reasons (there is an enlightening summary here, although I can’t entirely warrant its accuracy: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055). Guild Wars 1 was developed and released at a time when OpenGL just wasn’t really happening in gaming, and GW2, if the stories are true, was built from that same codebase. So it used Direct3D.

Of course, these days – when cross-platform game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine run half of everything, and there are so many things being built for phones and consoles that… I think usually run OpenGL or some proprietary extension thereof – it’s much more likely for new built-from-scratch games to be more portable than that. So if ArenaNet decides to go build GW3 when 2020 rolls around, and they decide their current engine really can’t scale to what they plan to do (which is increasingly likely; it already has a few detrimental effects on GW2’s performance), they quite likely might build it using technologies that make it easier to port to Mac (properly) and Linux. And maybe iOS/Android if it makes sense at the time.

Until then, though, it’s likely just too expensive to build an OpenGL pipeline into the existing engine.

…wind druid?

Copyright doesn’t come into it unless it’s just that – a copy. This isn’t – it is at best a reinterpretation that looks similar, but honestly, it could even be coincidental.

Thematically it’s not very different from the D&D ranger. That had an animal companion, a set of nature-themed spells (past a certain level) and a fair bit of bow use as well. Bow wasn’t compulsory, though, there was also a dual-wielding aspect I think – which we kind of see with dual axe. Not that main-hand axe has much in common with off-hand axe in gameplay terms.

Wouldn’t be the first headgear in GW2 that looks like it needs it

I never realized doing three things out of a list of 12 was such a drama… I’ve still had days where I thought “meh, can’t be bothered with any of this”, but as it happened, the only consequence was that I didn’t get 10 achievement points that day.

I used to go down to Temple of Lyssa and roll around in a few barrage AoEs.

I’m definitely leaning toward Revenant for being the most… um… anime-like swordsman experience. When it comes out. Lots of shadow-step skills and mobility, which can be fun to use.

This reminds me, if you use the existing black/white wings – they collide with the gliders in slightly awkward ways. Maybe they should… turn into a glider skin when airborne instead?

Yeah, I pretty much gave up on the gold coin up the wire off the side of the ship. I can walk along razor-thin fences in other parts of the game, but that wire just mysteriously doesn’t co-operate. Exactly why someone thought that showing off the glitches in the GW2 engine would make a good premise for a jumping puzzle, I have no idea.

Definitely the Super Banana. Only thing in the game that makes me consider the owner a bad person, no further questions asked.