Guild Wars 2

Thanks to those people who kept the proposal title/overview to one line – it makes it much easier to find suggestions along the same lines. I basically wanted to +1 this one:

JorneMormel.9850:

Game mode: PvX

Improving Player Input for Pet Control
I would suggest starting with the profession’s primary mechanic, while it being the pet, it is tied to F1-4 for player input. (With the exception of “Guard!”, which is arguably used mostly to trigger Nature’s Voice with.)

In general I think that pet behavior could do with some improvement – it’s by no means the only thing needed for the Ranger but would go a long way to help. Making the commands a little finer without adding too much complexity, like JorneMormel mentions here, is a good start.

Similar things that might help go along with guessing what the player is trying to do:

• If the pet is set to “guard” and the player starts shooting stuff with a bow, they might be pulling targets – don’t attack until they get within range 300. This is probably the whole idea with the “guard” setting: I want you to attack targets, but only when they get close. And probably one that’s attacking me, if any.
• When stowed, the pet should probably not come out, even in combat. This tends to be intentional, to avoid screwing up jumping puzzles or something.
• The AI stuff. Avoiding AoEs, and also timing the use of skills (could potentially apply to F2 if it were automatic; but making it work instantly is just fine) for best effect. I acknowledge that this is probably a pipe dream.

Yeah, I would like to see a few new ones at some point. Skelk and griffons probably top the list.

Leeching in this circumstance is not griefing – if they were actually trying to make you fail it would be (albeit incredibly hard to prove), but it helps them if you make 1200 as well. They just don’t want to work for it.

I’m guessing this doesn’t actually work against the miasma

Scarlet is clearly the enemy of both of them, so some pragmatism has to come in at some point – but I imagine Kryta is still deciding what to do about the problem. You can’t just march into Lion’s Arch in its current state and take it back.

If the Mystic Forge is a problem, you have an alternative in your home world’s WvW borderlands – the amenities there are gathered pretty close together. If your world is highly populated they might not appreciate you taking up space for that, but you’ll know if there’s a queue

kokiman.2364:

They are allies of scarlet now, I suppose.

If they were, what are they doing shooting down all the dredge that get too close to the wall? They probably kill more of them because most players don’t try twice

Also, unless I missed something they don’t have a spotter on the wall or anything. They seem to be firing blind from behind it so they probably can’t see who you are… and are likely assuming that legitimate refugees have already left (there are few if any in that area).

I’m not really sure the flood the prior century counts as “stood” – it was rebuilt, certainly, but was damaged at least as badly as it is now.

Uh… yeah. That line needs rewriting – would do it myself but I’m not totally sure what to rewrite it to. Was that chart drawn in 1326 AE or slightly before (do we know how old it is for sure)? Was she considering forging an alliance between the races, or unknown (to us) splinter factions thereof? Did she actually attempt it or just consider?

As far as I know, the answer to all of the above questions is “we don’t know”. The resulting properly-qualified statement would be so complex as to be kind of silly. Does it even belong on the wiki at all?

I am pretty sure tengu are not immune to the miasma… hence why they are behind the wall. I don’t even know how they’re spotting their artillery-arrows, might just be by sound and practice with ballistic arcs.

A side-effect of that is that you don’t really have any clue who’s on the other side of the wall, just that they’re making noise and, statistically speaking, probably not friendly.

I am a little surprised that Rubi had to point that out, but such is life

Right about at least one thing: the Mad King would find it hilarious.

Wasn’t there some thread a while back that claimed deer are OP? Well, that’s your answer

This is basically what you get in a game that has levels, but didn’t really want to have levels – just that everyone expected it – so it made them mean effectively nothing.

Except, as Konig pointed out, gating content. It does do that reasonably effectively.

dagrdagaz.4913:

To answer the topic question; Helloween and X-mas events.

Mad King Thorn being the Keeper of the Seven Keys? I guess I could go for that.

The purpose of the Elite-or-below thing was that it wouldn’t work on bosses, for much the same reason. If it counted as crowd control (which it probably should), then that would nix the original requirement – would let you use it on some champions. And no, shouldn’t work against players – the only way to get them to play ball is to switch them to AI-controlled and that would be amazingly annoying.

Basically, the main purpose is to use it on the most powerful enemy in the area (or tied for most powerful), which would presumably do some damage to the others as well as split their attention if you targeted it well. Kind of like a ranger’s pet, except you don’t care if it dies, and it probably does more damage before it drops.

It’s pretty much ambiguous what the criteria for deciding who to ally with is – probably intentionally – I don’t know if ArenaNet really knew how long it would take them to play that card, so they decided to avoid stating anything in a way that would force their hand.

I’m probably mixing metaphors horribly there. Excuse me.

Rym.1469:

Some of them joined Caromi and sailed to Kryta, some went to Elona.

I don’t think we know that, but it’s a very reasonable hypothesis. We do know that the Dominion of Winds was built well after the Canthan tribes would have had to leave Cantha.

I will be honest, at first I thought the OP was making fun of all the people speculating about this lately…

I’m not really sure. It depends what they replace it with, assuming it is going away entirely. It isn’t my favorite city by any means – out of the major hubs it came last because the repurposed ships aesthetic isn’t all that charming to me – but it is unique, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I miss it eventually.

I always wanted something like this for the mesmer:
Mind Control (Elite Manipulation): Target enemy NPC of Elite rank or below temporarily becomes an ally. Duration 30s, cooldown 240s.

True, but the vast majority of everything in GW1 attacked on sight – all the minor races I can think of that came back. It was hard to read much into this or what would happen over the time until GW2 – in some cases (centaurs come to mind) they remain mostly hostile, while in others (hylek) it depends on the tribe. Then of course there are the charr – the situation isn’t the same, obviously, but being in a permanent state of war with humanity probably isn’t more conducive to improving relations than isolationism is.

Basically, it all comes down to what ArenaNet wants to do. Tengu could still be predominantly KOS toward other races, or they could not – but it would require some story gymnastics to explain why they’re bothering to trade with the outside world if they hate it so much.

Side note – if there were tengu in Vabbi we never ran into them (didn’t even know there were any tribes in Elona until GW2), although that is completely beside the point.

Regarding the wiki: because it isn’t actually written by ArenaNet, but by other players making much the same interpretations as we are here, we cannot assume it to be correct unless more authoritative sources are given (in which case it’s better to refer directly to those sources). It’s a good place to learn the background but not for arguing details.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

I doubt that 200 plus years of isolationism has somehow moderated the views of the majority of Tengu. The vast bulk of them hated humanity and there is nothing remotely hinted that would have changed that.

It’s not really clear that was true except for the Sensali tribe (which may or may not still exist). We never learned the motivations of the Tyrian tribes except that the Caromi were possibly bandits – there was a quest that involved them stealing stuff – and never saw the Elonian tribes. Quetzal would kill trespassers of any race (even skelk, as far as I recall) on sight, but it wasn’t clear why.

Currently the wall guards are apparently mostly Caromi. So, something has clearly changed, even if it’s just that they now have territory to defend.

OK, you are definitely seeing the same stuff that I am, then. From the perspectives I gained in GW1 I am drawing somewhat different conclusions but you’re entitled to your opinion on the tengu

They didn’t head down to the water on that side previously, though – that was where the asura were camped out. And the dynamic events definitely were new.

And Jordyn and Leyah will still be running from “monsters”, but hopefully not around in circles this time.

I guess I can forgive people for not noticing, but there was a minor involvement from a few tengu in the LS. When the Tower of Nightmares went up, Ireko Trading Post (to the south) was regularly attacked by krait and Nightmare Courtiers, which their guards would fight off. There were a couple of related dynamic events where the Toxic Alliance would come steal their stuff, and in one you had to fight them off, while the other was an escort mission for a dolyak caravan to resupply the camp.

It’s definitely nothing major, but it wasn’t zero participation or changes.

E being an Elder Dragon seems an extraordinary stretch to me. I doubt they care to write you letters.

If SteamOS becomes big enough, sure, it could happen. At the moment it pretty much comes down to WINE though. As was pointed out, that’s not always a perfect solution, and unfortunately Valve isn’t going to be able to do that much better just because they’re Valve. Perfectly emulating Windows APIs is a fundamentally infeasible task, in part because those APIs are full of legacy hacks to fix old in-house applications that some Fortune 500 company or other is still relying on for some reason. If a game happens to depend on enough API quirks, it can be very difficult to get it to work successfully.

Best bet if you don’t want a separate PC running Windows would be an OnLive-style streaming service. They still have a long way to go though.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

And I don’t think Edair because of the E, but rather his personality at the end of the novel. Particularly the fact that E pays attention to both DR and LA events.

Wouldn’t he be around 100 if he’s still alive? It would also require that he had abdicated at some point.

skullmount.1758:

But can the Tengu actually fly though? I don’t think we have any kind of proof that they can (and iirc they don’t have any kind of wings).
I think they are more like penguins, birds (like creatures) that can’t fly.

We’ve actually got a couple of references that indicate they can’t (apart from the fact that their arms are not going to generate appreciable lift).
First one has a reference, it was from GW1 Factions’ manuscripts: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Tengu
Second one I can’t find one for, but if you stay a while at the Hanto Trading Post you’ll overhear one of the traders replying to a nearby sylvari something like “Yes, my ancestors could fly. No, I cannot. Now trade!”

skullmount.1758:

Galowin.6089:

The map in scarlets lair perhapse….

Has anyone checked it to see if this happens to actually be true? Anyone try talking to any of the Tengu at the wall (either in LA or Caledon Forest)?

I don’t believe their dialogue has changed. Galowin is correct that that’s where my claim comes from; seemingly all of Scarlet’s probes are indicated with pulses on that map, but there are none outside the playable map boundaries (including DoW). I agree that that’s not hard proof, but it is reasonably strong evidence.

Zaxares.5419:

Ben K.6238:

GW2 always had the five races planned for release, ever since Eye of the North in 2007. It looks as if tengu were going to be an add-on race for a Cantha expansion that has yet to materialize for a variety of reasons.

No, the Tengu were actually planned to be a 6th playable race at release (I believe it was actually mentioned in the GW2 artbook that came with the Collector’s Edition), but they got cut due to lack of time.

It was mentioned in that book, yes, but the reason wasn’t clearly explained – Aaron Coberly just said they “pulled back”. I suspect that they did that with the intention of adding them in later (otherwise they could very easily have written the Dominion out of the picture), but have no way of knowing for sure what really happened. I have a feeling there might not be a link with Cantha, though, since a fairly obvious motivation for planting the Dominion there and having Usoku exile them is to break that dependence on Cantha. But, again, nothing conclusive.

I don’t really see how this is a guarantee of anything. Similar to the Tower of Nightmares I figure a few tengu guards will pitch in if they’re in the area, but Scarlet has basically ignored them (zero probes in Dominion of Winds even), and I’m not sure that’s going to change unless she actually does start taking over the world.

Yeah, it does seem to be potentially overkill. Though the clockwork army makes a lot of sense in light of that – they are immune to it.

I’m still puzzled about why Scarlet would need to attack Lion’s Arch to achieve her goals though. Clear out the resistance so she could build on it or something? Also it causes continuity problems: she’s been building up weapons and armies since before the probes went up, and the probes went there because she was trying to find what she’s just found – she wouldn’t have known Lion’s Arch was the location or she’d never have needed them. Either she was building up her kitten nal “just in case”, or it’s not for an assault on Lion’s Arch – or it is for an assault on Lion’s Arch, but for reasons not related to the probe there lighting up.

Considering the three other red X’s on her map, I’m suspecting there is in fact no direct relation. It might be “merely” terminating any potential resistance to her goals.

P.S. Wondering if she intends to use the convergences of these leylines as dragon lures? They do feed on magic, right? That’s the other option – draw them out and blow them up. She just doesn’t much care who’s underneath them.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

The tengu were spread out in recent centuries. Nothing indicates they were so spread during the previous dragon rise. Their North house is likely referring to the three continental Tyria tribes, IMO, given that north of Tyria is the arctic seas (i.e., near the north pole). So unless there’s penguin styled tengu… Yeah.

This does recall to my mind one detail. We are told that in the distant past, the ancestors of tengu were able to fly. We don’t know how distant that was – normally changes that large could be expected to take millions of years – but it is interesting that somehow they know this. How? It could be something relatively boring like paleontology – which may well exist in the GW2 (maybe 1?) timeframe – but it does make me wonder if something a little more strange happened recently enough for traces of knowledge to survive to the present day.

If that happened after the dragon-rise, it might explain why there are tribes all over the place and they weren’t mentioned by the dwarves or jotun – they could have come from a different continent originally. It’s not a necessary explanation, though, since humans dispersed to multiple continents without the benefit of flight. There would also be the awkward question of why tengu were around to witness the last dragon-rise but waited until after it to travel further afield.

:)

I don’t suppose they can dance though?

Forum tech thought: if we’re going with this “user story” idea, we can help manageability by using that as a unit of division. Each “user story” is the opening post in its own “micro-thread”, and that makes it easier to reply to that specific one without quote-spam, and to collect all responses in one related thread.

There are quite a few things that make this complicated to implement of course. If the CDI had its own sub-forum you could, right now, get people to just start a new thread for each of those. There are a few problems though:

• How do you ensure a consistent structure?
• How do you prevent redundant threads?

In a “Reddit” style discussion topic, these user stories would probably comprise many of the top-level responses to the main CDI thread. Responses to them would consist of refinements, comments, suggestions for improvement, etc. I have to figure you’d need to allow for guidance from devs and Q/A on that guidance as well, though, so not all of the responses would start from stories.

Mephu Tahm Jr.1962:

I would be interested to know if that small splotch in the north (which I forgot to mark) is in Dominion Killing Zone. This would explain connection to the destroyers.

Other people already covered the water thing, but no, it’s in the north of the Kessex Hills area I think. There’s nothing of interest marked on the map in the killing zone.

Hmm. Is Evon just being astute, or does he know something he’s not telling us?

A lot of people still just want her gone, but it has been more fun for me, and apparently a bunch of others as well, to try to piece together what it is she’s trying to do. Now that we have the means to do that, there’s more to talk about.

Nobody ever saw this coming, but the two-week gap between releases is also just right for allowing the sleuthing to progress about as much as it can without dragging on forever. I figure ANet just needed some time to figure out how to deliver well at that cadence.

So there is hope this the beginning of things getting better.

I still maintain (from last time this thread was held ) that part of what gets in the way with the CDI is the forum format itself. It’s a completely flat structure within a thread, which means that zeroing in on discussions that I might have something to say on proves a little bit difficult. Multiple threads would fix that at the cost of not being very organic – if the topic starts to diverge, you then have to have a moderator split the thread to retain that kind of structure.

The format used by Reddit conversations seems far more suited to this kind of thing. I don’t know if forum feature additions for the sake of the CDI are realistic, but if it is within ArenaNet’s abilities, it should definitely be considered.

Until then, we can still attempt to mitigate the issue with those “TL;DR” blocks. I don’t advocate a post length limit because it isn’t going to be easy for everyone to deal with (and while editing your work to shorten it is a valuable skill for published work, it just slows things down for this). But trying to use a “summary” followed by “detailed explanation and examples” structure at least means that people can read a small block of a post to quickly gauge its topic before committing to read it or more on to the next. That way I don’t have to participate every day (or do a big chunk of heavy reading) to know whether something I am thinking has already been said.

Would like to second this – pretty much everyone who isn’t on Santa’s naughty list likes Gaile, but her responses to support queries aren’t quite what I read the Dev Tracker for.

What isn’t these days?

Also, I was thinking Kiel is pretty well written out of the picture by this point, but if Scarlet does anything with Fort Marriner, we may actually be seeing more of her soon too.

Yeah, WP has been wrong about things before, and he’s wrong about this too, unfortunately. He references the book when he claims that, but it doesn’t actually say that the DoW was fully modeled. It only says that the area had been picked out and was pretty much smack in the middle of everything else.

I had always interpreted the “tengu Zion” to be the Dominion of Winds, where they already are. Why they chose that exact location I don’t know, but they do quite clearly consider it their land, and they are at a state of peace with humanity now as well (which would fulfill the other part of the prophecy).

The “heavenly star” could still be related – if they already knew they were tied to elder dragons, the originator of the prophecy may simply have been using that term to foretell a dragon rise clearing the way for them to claim their own lands once more. How they figured that out is also a mystery, although conversely you could also say it’s not exactly rocket science that elder dragons can cause chaos, upheaval and power vacuums.

Nike.2631:

The vista at the SW Keep (green) in Eternal Battlegrounds.

Hmm. If I recall correctly, that one would be reasonable for a mid-range jumping puzzle… but that’s a jumping puzzle. Bouncing from one thin cantilever beam to the next takes a lot of practice to be able to do consistently. Thanks to that Wintersday puzzle I got better at it… but I’m pretty sure more people just raged

It’s by far easiest to solo them if any of your characters are strong enough to do that. Sometimes you get help but it’s quicker not to have to rely on it.

Yeah, I have that book – not really sure I can quote it verbatim (might come under fair use but I don’t want to mess around on ANet’s own forum ) but that interpretation is reasonable. Interestingly, we have never seen any tengu-related concept art from the GW2 era. The most recent is still the slightly-too-famous Kekai piece from EotN with the four different phenotypes.

I suspect re-using charr armor on tengu would only make the problems with that adaptation more painfully apparent. The tail ignoring armor looks bad enough already, now imagine if it were several times wider? If we eventually get a real fix to that (and plenty of people have been calling for it), we might be in business though.

Hmm. On the Destroyer of Hope, I agree it closely resembles a dryder, but note that those haven’t really returned to GW2 – what’s up with that? They are somewhat similar to devourers but not completely… and the Shiverpeaks used to have a lot of them.

The other question is how much you’d pay for one these days. The CE was limited-run and may not still be available at retailers, so you might be looking at eBay or something like that if you want to find one… and that sometimes means prices well above retail.

(Edit for clarity: this was in response to the post by Kalarchis.)

I’m not really sure that’s true… I don’t recall ArenaNet saying they’d filled out the Dominion of Winds, and the decision to reduce the number of playable races to five likely happened prior to GW2’s announcement in mid-2007. It was stated at the time that there were five races planned, and they never changed their tune on that – at least not publicly, so there is still the possibility that they were considering adding additional races during early development then decided not to. Either way I’m pretty sure that decision happened well before release.

If my guess is right, that would mean that almost all, if not all, the tengu-related content in GW2 was built within that context. The fact that their animation and some SFX are copied from charr suggests they were placeholder assets since ArenaNet didn’t have a direction nailed down and didn’t want to waste too much work on them in the meantime… which does suggest future plans in a different way, of course.

I personally don’t really believe the Scarlet saga is heading directly toward a new race though – maybe a step along the way but not the whole thing.