Guild Wars 2

I think AngryJoe brought this up in his interview with Colin Johanson. The answer, if I recall, was that while nothing has been announced/decided, this is something they’ll probably look at.

Maybe I should take my turn at invalidating half the items on my “potential security question” list…

• 28 years old, male, single (not very interesting but it answers some omissions!)
• I was born and raised in New Zealand, but have lived in the US for the last few years.
• I work as a software engineer for Microsoft. This sometimes makes reading the internet, um, interesting.
• Due to the above I also live in the Bellevue area. I’ve never visited ArenaNet though – Sadi says I should, but… I don’t know, maybe one day.
• I started my online gaming thing in late August 1997 (which I remember so well because the Princess Diana crash anchors it, of all things) on Kali. I was something like 10, which seems awfully young to me now.
• Spent many many years just playing Descent. Actually still do, and am one of the top 10 players in the world now; sadly that doesn’t mean so much when only a few hundred people play the game at most.
• I started playing Guild Wars on release day, after watching my brother play beta; the reason was that it looked like a good spiritual successor to Diablo 2, which I was a big fan of at the time, and I didn’t have to pay a subscription to do so, which was a big plus for a teenager without a job or credit card. This was back in the time when a lot of pessimists were saying Diablo 3 would never exist; though in a twist of fate I never really got back into it once it did.
• I’ve also played D&D for a while (15 years on and off I think); kind of got stuck on 3.5e, but may consider 5e if the opportunity presents itself. Actually never played it in person until a one-hour demo session at a recent PAX; it was always over the internet using chat rooms and virtual tabletops. These days I mostly DM, since few of my acquaintances have the time/personality type to make it happen. Though I would really like to get back to playing one day
• I am what would be considered in the US as a Christian liberal, which is also apparently not very common in the US.
• I used to look down on gridiron/American football until I joined an office fantasy football league, and now I find it fun to watch. I feel like I kind of cheated with the local team winning a Superbowl so soon after I moved in though.
• I also do casual short- to mid-distance running – mainly 5k but have started working up to longer distances.
• I would like to read more than I do, but never seem to find the time. This also applies to playing music, learning foreign languages, watching movies that everyone else has already seen, and even playing video games that everyone else has already played.
• Speaking of music, I seem to gravitate towards power/prog metal but am the sort of doesn’t-get-it dweeb who listens to things like Dream Theater for the power ballads. Wee. Also, pianos are nice and make just about anything better if used well.
• I feel that the internet would be a better place if people were a little quicker to listen (and make a genuine effort to understand), and a little slower to talk (and judge). That probably goes for the rest of society too, actually…
• My most-anticipated HoT feature at the moment is the adventure thingy that reportedly involves jumping puzzles. I like to race them for time, but until now there’s never been a point other than just being able to say I did it.
• Or… okay, maybe the druid spec. I always have to play a druid in any game I play that has them. I don’t know why, it’s just compulsory.

There’s one other factor – like it or not, pets are part of the Ranger profession. All professions are getting a little expansion; it wouldn’t be unfair if in the Ranger’s case that meant access to new pets.

The mists is an entirely different ball-game – all bets are off there. I’m not sure they’ll explain exactly why whichever critters that show up do so – but the explanations of things like Fractals gives me the impression that it’s kind of like dreams. They may draw on reality, but there may not be that much of a resemblance.

And regarding the interest in tengu and skritt – I believe the GW1 segment of tengu fans were mostly won over by Factions and particularly Talon Silverwing. I think there were a few people who didn’t play that but just thought a bird-race was a neat and relatively uncommon idea – or they just saw That Concept Art from Kekai – but I’m not sure what the proportions are, exactly.
Skritt I’m a little less certain about – they can be pretty funny though and I think that has a lot to do with it.
I wouldn’t characterize tengu as “tiny” though – they’re about as big as norn, but just don’t stand as straight. Skritt are, of course, and uh… you’d have to shrink equipment a lot for them. The asura aren’t much (if any) taller, but they aren’t so thin either.

Actually, the charr tail thing confuses me. Why would you add the spikes but not even mitigate the Ethereal Tail Syndrome?

Candidate for a feature patch, maybe?

Hornet’s Sting I mainly find useful as a “leap” skill for crossing gaps that normally wouldn’t be passable (e.g. if you’re trying to break out of the map’s intended playable area). It isn’t very easy to use for that purpose but does work.

For its intended purpose, um… unfortunately it’s not a great dodge since it’s very hard to time well – especially since it doesn’t cancel the combat animation for the sword’s 1-chain. If there’s something I really have to dodge I typically have to either use stamina or weapon swap to something else.

Carlin Sanders.3587:

maybe a ‘misc’ collection tab is in order? for any crafting/forge materials that really don’t fit anywhere else.

Well, they managed to find space for watchwork sprockets, so really, they could just go in the same place.

There ought to be a slot for these though. I’m not really sure why it hasn’t already happened.

They’ll vary, yeah. But I have played with a few in past and they did know what they were doing (probably better than me, too ).

You wouldn’t actually use a LB ranger for serious PvP, though, would you? I haven’t played that mode in a long time, but in WvW I mainly run fire support with it – it didn’t look terribly effective in 1v1 against anyone who can actually play…

I’m still just happy we got over the weird GW1 models that, for instance, had wolves looking like this.

Should we call this hypothetical modification to the rules Dragon Ball Abridged?

Yeah, DOG is an SBI guild so my guess is this was an actual screenshot. How they got the time to set up that much siege in NN camp I have no idea… wasn’t there anymore when I was running around an hour or so back though. (Probably because YB is doing regular rinse cycles on most of the maps.)

Impossible Odds couldn’t possibly (ha ha) be as OP as in Factions to make it into the game, but the nod to that battle would still be a great thing to see.

Though I do have to concur on the Factions storyline; it was an abysmal mess and easily the worst out of the GW franchise. The Abaddon factor added later only served to make it somewhat plausible, but it doesn’t excuse the poor storytelling. There are ways to make him more convincing without resorting to spoilers, and from what evidence I have I don’t believe Abaddon was planned at the time the Factions cutscenes were made anyway.

Luckily, the passage of time (read: nostalgia glasses) kind of blurs those aspects; from a visual design perspective Shiro was still memorable for the right reasons, and the final boss battle was one of the best challenging-but-not-in-a-lazy-way fights in GW1.

Yeah, this isn’t really a subject I think much about, mostly since I prefer to run the JPs myself – more fun that way. Not that I haven’t taken ports, it was just usually during community mass-porting events so it was no big deal.

But it’s a little different when I feel like someone went out of their way to help me. That did happen once (NSS dive spot, last one I had to get) and there was no way I wasn’t going to tip for that.

timmyf.1490:

shdwxx.8623:

Clearly you were not spamming “1” hard enough – spam faster next time!

Ctrl-Mouse2: set this skill to autoattack.

When someone pops the whirlwind skill this is going to hurt you – so if you don’t really care (totally a valid response to this game mode), by all means, but if you’re really trying to win, it’s best just to press 1 repeatedly so you can at least stop it if you need to.

On the broader subject, I think I had something like 10 losses in a row for a while, even while I was on the top 2 performers for the team after a while. Then it flipped and I got the five wins in 6-7 games. It’s a weird game mode – don’t really know how to explain it.

The only thing I can suggest, strategy-wise, is that it helps immeasurably to travel in groups. It feels like an FPS, but it really isn’t one.

tyler.2569:

And it is worth considering, as SorionHex mentioned, that animal shape shifting is a big part of being a Norn.

As a PC, it isn’t particularly big. Though don’t get me wrong, it would be great if those skills would get fixed, but so far they look like nothing more than an afterthought.

If the status quo remains – which I expect it will – I would have no problem with the druid spec “stealing the lunch” of the norn, so to speak, since they seemingly don’t really want it anyway.

That said, I don’t really expect shapeshifting to become part of the druid specialization – I figure you get the staff, maybe a different set of weapon skills across the other weapons, and a handful of extra utilities – but by and large it remains mostly a ranger. We already saw in the video that the pet is still there – maybe it could still be subject to change, of course, but as of right now they’re not replacing it.

Improved graphics in the trailer? Could you be more specific?

I have an inkling this is just going to annoy people, but hey, maybe he’s a descendant of Koss.
Voiceover in the personal story was hilariously wrong, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Interesting ideas. This also recalls to mind the idea ArenaNet had talked about of a ranger elite skill that let you use all your pets at once. It may not be practical to do exactly that, but a mechanic that gives a druid multiple pets (perhaps the secondary ones are weaker and cannot be controlled by the standard commands) would be intriguing.

Ranger pets are at their weakest versus area bosses or WvW zergs – if it’s a problem, use a ranged pet that doesn’t have to get close. After all, you wouldn’t last long if you just rushed up to point-blank and stayed there either, even if you’re a warrior with eviscerate.

The flipside is – ranger pets are able to tank quite a few champions, which buys you plenty of time to hammer them with DPS and beat them even if you’re solo. I wouldn’t characterize that as “useless”.

Rangers do have their weaknesses, but they’re a lot more complicated than just “pets are bad” – and they have their strengths, too. There are plenty of people who play a ranger and can pull their weight.

Darkness.9732:

Ranger F skills are useless too : if our pet dies LOL no more F skills anymore. ( ehhh compare our F skills with warriors one like eviscerate and cry with me )

Then keep your pet alive. It’s not that hard.

It seems some people like outfits, while some don’t and prefer new armor skins. So… I propose ArenaNet make some of both options.

…

The one thing that we know for sure is that before release, Divinity’s Reach used to have a Canthan district (there were even screenshots); by release, this had been replaced with the Great Collapse, and subsequently retconned into having previously been an arts-and-crafts district (maybe not technically a retcon since the Cantha bit never made the game and hence was never canon, but I digress). And that forum post about NCSoft having concerns about the district, but no official statement. It’s probable that cultural sensitivities had something to do with the change they made, but we have no idea about the details of the decision-making process that led to it.

From there, it’s started to cross the line into urban legend, and now half the community seems to believe that NCSoft has expressly forbidden ArenaNet from including Cantha in the game ever again (which is a bit weird, since they already did it in GW1 and NCSoft published that, too…).

I think the GW1 skin I’d most like back at the moment is http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Draconic_Aegis
Fan design, incidentally, but the in-game rendition was awesome.

I wouldn’t get too carried away with assuming this is going to be heavily like Metroid Prime or something. It’s probably just referring to the mechanic used in the Metroid games where you get suit upgrades that allow you to get through areas that were previously impossible (or at least extremely difficult – some of the Super Metroid runs get pretty crazy).

This mechanic will be used in places, but it’s too early to say exactly what it’ll look like, especially once it’s thrown into an MMO where players who have an upgrade are playing in the same space as players who don’t. If you’re expecting Metroid Prime Tyria you may be setting yourself up for disappointment.

You may also not, but… just saying, we’ve been here before with the dynamic events hype before GW2 was released.

Xenon.4537:

I still have to level a ranger, and I don’t have enough tomes even for that. I don’t get to play as much these days so I won’t be insta-80 anything. Besides I mostly want to try the new mesmer spec since mesmer is my main.

If you don’t want to level the “normal” way you could try joining an EotM XP train. During the double experience weekend I got a warrior character from level 25 up to 80 in roughly 4-5 hours of that. It may not be quite as quick anymore (though consumables help – birthday booster especially), but still takes a lot less time than stockpiling tomes.

Baktwerel.9108:

Please A-Net, give rangers the opportunity to tame some dinosaurs (even if just raptors first)!!

Wouldn’t say no… ferothrax might be OP though.

With the updraft deal I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of staying airborne indefinitely, but would probably be the exception rather than the norm. A Sanctum Sprint-style activity that used gliders could be interesting.

The healing/DoT focus is probably mostly from WoW. I’m more used to druids from D&D, where their major themes are animal companions, wildshape (basically shapeshifting into animals) and lots of summon nature’s ally spells. Incidentally they were also closer to that in another popular game – Diablo 2 – except with a heavier focus on wind/volcanic spells.

The only thing “druid” has to mean in typical fantasy is that the special powers are nature-themed. There aren’t very many domains that can’t be fit into that somehow or other.

My running theory is that Trahearne was corrupted too, and unconsciously-intentionally sabotaged the mission. Probably wrong, but it would explain a lot

I’ve noticed occasionally NPCs will, well, duel, usually as a way to practice their skills (“sparring”, charr seem to particularly like it). And then we already have costume brawls, which are effectively impromptu PvP free-for-alls with… joke skills, I guess, but still. They’re in open-world too – not used that much unless there’s a daily, but still used. So I’m not sure this is totally out-of-place anymore.

Maybe dueling could be based on that. You want to duel somebody, you purchase or craft an item… specifically, a pair of items. You consume one, you mail the other to the other person and when they consume it, you’re in your own private duel – you’re the only players in the instance who can damage each other. Requires consent, obviously, and if you have to pay a few silver to initiate a duel you’re probably going to be a little selective about who you invite. And it’s lightweight, doesn’t require more UI, etc…

Hey, Valentine’s Day is coming up, maybe the item could be halves of a chocolate heart?

Dawdler.8521:

The only ones that has been holding back 64 bit and crippling PC memory allocation is Microsoft with their refusal to scrap the 32 bit/64 bit division of Windows. If Windows installed itself as 64 bit on a 64 bit CPU and 32 bit on a 32 bit CPU… No one would have 32 bit.

It wasn’t totally free. The memory requirements for 64-bit Windows have always been higher than 32-bit – I don’t know exactly why this is, although at least some of it might derive from needing double the memory space for pointers. Also, 64-bit versions of Windows can’t run 16-bit applications except in a virtual machine, which may have prevented some of those fabled “enterprises” from adopting it for a while, since neither getting those old 1990s applications modernized nor setting up VDI is likely to be cheap.

Of course, even if the computing world had moved over to 64-bit faster, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the number of 64-bit applications coming out – the vast majority of new PCs are running a 64-bit OS these days, and almost all Windows applications are still 32-bit and only 32-bit. Presumably because compiling for 64-bit is additional work and they try not to use more than 2-3 GB of memory anyway.
But then there’s Firefox, which I could really use the additional memory capacity on, and that’s still 32-bit only (save for unofficial builds). From what I hear Chrome is the same way, but it at least uses sandboxing that splits it into multiple processes, which each have a separate virtual address space…

That would be this site: https://soundcloud.com/arenanet/

Usually they’ve only released new clips there after they’ve debuted in-game though.

I figure this sort of thing is what they have QA testing to pick up on (which I know ArenaNet does do, and probably more so on recent Living Story episodes than at release). Depending on the game, it can be okay to have stages that are difficult to complete, but developers these days generally try to avoid situations where players don’t even know what to do – hence all of those rings – but some things can be more subtle than others, and I can only guess that “not everyone will notice what’s going on with the divine fire” was something that didn’t happen to their testers.

That’s fine, but if you don’t have cash to burn, I would still join in with a few of the above posters in saying: ascended gear isn’t really worth it. I’m starting to work towards it personally because I do have a decent pile of gold now, but I ran dungeons, WvW, and pretty much everything else with nothing but exotics (which still cost a bit, but they were at least within your price range). The power difference totally does not justify how much more ascended costs – except maybe in high-level fractals, which I’ve never gotten to personally…

The above advice on how to accumulate gold and materials in GW2 still holds, of course, but I would have to add – you might as well have fun while you’re doing it – it’s a game after all

Yeah, playing a ranger with berserker gear and greatsword and/or sword is going to punish you pretty heavily if you play dumb, but on the flip-side the DPS is pretty awesome.

I went guardian as first character too, ranger as second – I have ended up playing ranger a lot more these days because it just blows things up, but I do see what everyone else is getting at. Guardian doesn’t give you an option to be really lazy – it can take some punishment, but not all that much unless you make good use of your abilities. On ranger it seems most enemies (less so in level 80 areas) can be beaten by pressing F1 and going AFK.

Yes, this is what SSDs are good at. The bump to SATA 3 might make some difference if your mechanical drive is fast enough, but nowhere near as much as an SSD would be expected to in the average case.

They started development of GW2 in roughly 2007, at which point 64-bit systems were quite rare; you had XP 64-bit edition which almost nobody used because hardware drivers hardly existed, and Vista 64-bit which was a little more popular (about 30-40% of Vista users)… but had only been out for a few months and I’m sure you remember what its overall uptake was like.

So… it would be maybe 5-10% 64-bit total. Which would explain why they concentrated on 32-bit, yes. It’s still quite common for new software not to have a 64-bit version; most of the time, it isn’t really needed. Even games only occasionally ship with 64-bit binaries – GW2 is far from alone there – even though they often could use the extra memory.

narwhalsbend.7059:

For the most part, often times when you meet these creatures in the wilderness they’re neutral. My point is that you never have a “pet minotaur”, “pet skelk”, or “pet raptor”. Ranger pets are mostly unimportant animals.

Often, yes, but not always. Except for low-level areas, when you see bears, wolves, or big cats, they are usually hostile. Wayfarer Foothills is one of the major exceptions, but there are non-hostile (yellow) griffons there too. Only about two or three, but hey

The other thing is, I’m not sure how much difference this really makes. “Importance” isn’t a well-defined measure, and it’s hard to see why it would be used as a criterion for determining whether something is suitable as a ranger pet. Some things that are less difficult to argue is that a ranger pet should not be overpowered, it should not be corrupted (e.g. branded), and it should be possible to give it four abilities with respectable animations for them. It also makes more sense if it isn’t something highly exotic (e.g. there are only a handful in Tyria) or too big.

I don’t believe any of the above apply to griffons. They would make one of the larger pets, but I believe drakes are bigger? I’m not even sure how “important” I would consider them since they are… pretty much all over the place and don’t seem to be a Big Bad or beasts of particularly great power.

It is worth remembering, though, that there is still value in the superficial; they rake in quite a bit from essentially just that in the gem store. Considering that, it wouldn’t shock me to see any new races being added that way rather than bundled into an expansion – though I’m not sure which of the two would be better for ArenaNet’s business interests (it depends just how many people would buy it, versus how many you’d lose by bumping the price of a bundle a little).

It’ll be fixed up, if any changes need to happen (signs point to no, it’ll work as-is), by the time you need to worry about it. I wouldn’t recommend running pre-release builds of Windows 10 on your main gaming machine right now; they are not very stable.

I main a ranger at the moment. I’m not really disappointed in DPS terms. Part of it is that I melee a lot, but still…

Totally on board with adding griffons as pet options though, have been hoping for that since day 1. Owl/Hawkeye/whatever the mail carrier one is would make for a nice trio, doubly so if aerial pets become relevant. (I have my doubts on that – I’m not sure HoT will allow attacking from the air – but if it did, rangers would need their pets to join in to keep up. )

Did you ask the dragon’s permission first? He might be a bit unhappy if you didn’t.

It pretty much goes back to Guild Wars: Factions. (There were a few tengu in Tyria prior to that, but not really much to draw on from a lore perspective.) There was a long history there of oppression at the hands of the Canthan empire, which had recently been “settled” with a peace agreement – but there were still tensions, and a weaker faction (Sensali) that didn’t agree to it. At the time Factions came out it seemed like they were very much a viable candidate for a playable race when the time might come that ArenaNet chose to introduce non-human playable races – more so than the charr, believe it or not, because they had still only ever appeared as hostiles up to that point.

That was… coming up to nine years ago. Many things have changed. From the perspective of a GW1 player it was nice to see tengu finally gain control of their destiny, but yes, the way they chose to do it means new players understand very little about them.

What appeared to be happening for the underwater deal was that if you have a pet in that slot, then even if you remove it from the land slot, it keeps that name. If you remove it from both, it does not.

Obviously, not all pets can be assigned to the underwater slots – including wolves (for who-knows-what reason, they can swim after all) and ravens. These ones cannot make use of the “feature”.

My first time through this battle I do recall being a little flustered by the divine fire mechanic. First I didn’t notice it (too many red/etc circles distracting me), then I had trouble getting from there to the gears without either taking a wrong path and getting slowed/downed or going to one that didn’t need it (I wasn’t watching the minimap). I was with a party, though, so that didn’t end up mattering all that much.

It cleared up after that – the battle got to the “relatively easy” point once going for achievements, it was just doing it perfectly which was not – but I still recall the only reason I (and the rest of my party I think) realized that the shadows could be killed off so easily was either the wiki or a forum post. That could have done with some extra hinting.

The divine fire blob itself, I’m not sure. It seems most people eventually realize where it is, but some still have to be told. All I can really suggest is “ask someone”…

P.S. Oh yeah, the trailer. Trahearne ordering the fleet to fly so low they were within easy reach of Mordremoth’s innumerable tentacles: incompetence or intentional sabotage?

I would be surprised if Cantha would be revisited within the expected lifetime of the game. Even if we start dealing with Elder Dragons a little faster than currently, it’s looking like we may still need another couple of expansions to do it, which should be done by around… 2018-20? If Cantha were the very next thing on the plate, that would pretty much line it up for GW2’s 10th anniversary… which even GW1 has not yet reached (though will in a few months).

If the franchise is still strong enough – which is a possibility for sure – Cantha may be more of a GW3 candidate.

You have the year numbers off a bit Gaile
GW1 was 2005; Factions, 2006; Nightfall was indeed 2006; but EotN was 2007.

Some good choices here, but for me it’d have to be Glint.