Guild Wars 2

I’ve pretty much observed that as well. People do start to work together, but it’s not always enough. And when it’s not, the usual suspects start their usual ad-hominem attacks against other players, though thankfully they tend to go ignored.

Having too few players (overflows, yay) is usually the cause of having problems with the event, but some of the platform events are just somewhat difficult and first-timers aren’t necessarily going to be able to manage. You can usually recover from those, but only so many times – and overflows just fail them too much (usually > 50% of the time) to be able to handle it.

Not for lack of trying though, so there’s that.

Actually, my one complaint with this LS scene was that, again, we have Rytlock and Logan having no apparent familiarity with our characters even after completing the Zhaitan dungeon. It doesn’t really make sense, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t avoided. Didn’t GW2’s scripting system allow dialogue to differ according to things your character has done? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it do that before.

Tengu are most likely going to resemble samurai. That’s what they were closest to in GW1.

Also, I’m pretty sure this whole thing is just coincidence – but yeah, it does seem to line up nicely. Although the strength thing could apply to norn just as well as charr, and there are a few other not-quite-parallels.

Would make more sense to improve the skills than to shift them over to the utility bracket. A few of them do too many (too strong) things for utility I suspect.

That doesn’t mean they’re good as they stand, though – nobody uses any of them except snow leopard, and that one only for stealth/evasion.

I have to wonder more about Scarlet’s experiences with the “eternal alchemy” – what really was it that drove her crazy? “Information overload”, or did she come into contact with a malevolent entity that overtook her mind? And if so, who was it?

I’m guessing that’s where the story is leading, and possibly Scarlet’s plans are ultimately an attempt to physically release that entity into Tyria – but not terribly sure where the signs would point if so. Primordus doesn’t do mind control, and its minions don’t either. Some mursaat individual would be a little surprising, considering the means involved. I couldn’t discount Mordremoth. It would, um… kind of fit Abaddon’s M.O., but he’s supposed to be dead.

Not interested in this personally, but I think Shanks has the most likely methodology… it wouldn’t be the simplest thing to implement, but rolling back the story to the beginning (i.e. the intro stage normally reserved for level 1 – possibly downscaling you this time) would be most of the puzzle, plus with cultural armor marked as unusable. You’d also have to drop racial skills (could replace them but if you only acquired some, you’d have to arbitrarily choose what you’re replacing them with), and… I think that’s about it? Profession doesn’t change so the weapons, other skills, and traits would be unaffected. Most armor would also be unaffected, same with experience and skill point count… cultural armor probably just needs to be unequipped so it doesn’t cause bugs, and still leaves it there for you to transmute with another skin if need be.

Since there are so many people asking for this, and most of them at pretty decent gem prices, it may actually be worth ANet’s time

It’s very clear now that they’re Scarlet-related, and I’m all the more perplexed that the Order of Whispers / Durmand Priory and others aren’t doing anything about them. Not that they necessarily know that Scarlet is involved, but they should know that they’re suspicious.

Ugh, this is why I want to save/load trait profiles. I know that my PvE guardian build (greatsword blindbot) is kind of bad for WvW compared to going support, but it’s annoying to have to retrait/swap items all the time

I’m guessing they probably already do? It does bring to mind something that worked well for GW1 though – where they had those design-a-weapon (or piece of armor) contests. Some of the best skins in the game (draconic aegis I miss you so much ) came from that.

You may get lucky with the champions next time there’s a living story release – first few days of that there are usually champions everywhere because of a massive zerg running around. Make sure you get some hits in on each and it should make that one much easier, at least.

Not that I’m really sure when the next one will be given the holiday break…

Well. GPU only bottlenecks to a point. I have a GTX 670 and turning down the graphics settings barely does anything at all – but overclocking my i7 920 increased framerate in nearly direct proportion to clock speed…

I’m not really seeing that sort of thing happening before late into 2014, to be honest – at least not all of it. An “expansion in phases” would be acceptable, though, at least if there’s a way to make it work. And as long as there’s a way to fund its development without getting obnoxious with the gem store (considering LS updates have so far been free) – but if something is already in the works I suppose that question is already answered.

LoneBaron.1284:

So a player in full legendary gear wouldn’t have to worry about repairing their armor.

With the amount of money full legendary would require, I doubt it’d be an issue anyway – but sure, that sounds like a fair deal.

I’m a little concerned about that tale of getting kicked out of a group for not having ascended, though – hopefully it doesn’t catch on, because I’m pretty sure < 1% of players can actually afford to field that sort of equipment.

Yeah, I have a big stack of them as well since I earn them faster than I have use for them (rarely, as I worry about gear/kitting characters out more at max level). Once I get all level 80s, oh boy.

I’d like to see a way to “merge” these into the level 80 transmutation stones – gets rid of one pile, adds to the one that is looking suspiciously like I’m going to be needing a lot more of it…

NinjaChris.9340:

- I have never heard of a norn that transformed into multiple spirits. Every norn favours one animal spirit and the ability to transform relies on the connection between the two.

I have, but only once; Eir in Edge of Destiny took on two forms (in different parts of the book).

Roughly 110 gold I think which is my high-water mark. I also have materials/item stores probably worth 200-300 gold though. I haven’t done item flipping for a very long time or any meaningful commodity speculation, which probably holds me back – but the rest comes down to just not playing very much. It’s enough to hit monthly achievements now and then, that’s about it (probably more regularly over the last couple months though).

Harvesting materials seems to earn pretty decent cash, though. Obviously T6 is the highest return, but T2-4 pays much better than T5 after that, because people seem to spend so much more time in T5 maps. And then there are explorable dungeons… but I pretty much dread the thought of playing those.

It’s still playable, but with the smaller population some things are going to be much more difficult to complete than others (high-end dungeons, mostly – this might apply to some PvP modes by now as well). Fortunately none of them are required to “complete” the game.

It does have a very different combat style from GW2 though – agreed that a demo would be the best way to determine if it works for you. Since you’ll probably have to roll with AI-controlled henchmen a lot, you can expect to need to spend a lot longer figuring out how to build your party, which isn’t something that GW2 will give real preparation for.

It did turn out to be more fun for me than it probably should be… couldn’t figure out how to get the timing right at first, basically because you can’t just try to match the beat unless the other two people are dead on as well – and you have to compensate for lag anyway. After getting a feel for it it’s fairly easy to complete, but still really hard to get perfect scores – especially track 5 (because it’s comparatively quite fast). Latency jitter/lag bursts hit this minigame pretty hard though – thankfully scoring 600 doesn’t do anything anyway.

What could make it even better though:

• Enter in teams of three (through the party system) if you want to make sure you’re all in the same instance – presumably it should group you at the same stage if you do that
• A second “game type” where the songs are longer – e.g. playing through the whole thing rather than just a 50-note clip. Because the number of notes are probably different for each third, you’d be scored by your entire team’s performance. Number of correct notes would actually matter and improve the reward your team gets, although I don’t think your performance relative to other teams should matter.
• Break out free play into its own “game type” – most people just wait for the time to expire currently. I get that some people might use it just to experiment or have a little fun, which is OK, but I don’t think it should be part of the main sequence.

Makes me wonder, if Scarlet planted these, why hasn’t anyone, you know, touched them? Or at least blown them up?

I mean, they likely wouldn’t know exactly who’s responsible, but they’re suspicious enough to warrant investigation. Considering what’s gone on lately they’re probably not good.

Kiayin.3427:

2. Access to the makeover tab all the time.

The only way to preview the changes is purchasing a kit. If said preview was available for anyone to mess with, as it was in GW – people sitting on the fence could toy with it, save templates! – eventually buy a kit or create a new character/buy a character slot.

Seconded, I really like this.

Other things along the same vein: for alt-friendliness, maybe look at returning dyes to account-wide? If there’s a cash shop reason, what about some kind of upgrade (that isn’t exorbitantly expensive, please) that does this?

Horizontal progression via different builds for the same character: would be nice, I had several in GW1, but in GW2 it’s too expensive to do this. Plus the game seems to be designed so that you can just Berserker everything and it’s fine. More obvious effects from alternative builds would help with this – I realize it’s a difficult thing to balance though.

Responding to Chris’s questions more recently:

• I would actually like to be “done” with the more time-consuming parts of vertical progression (getting expensive equipment). As long as it doesn’t break the earlier parts of the game or make it unfair for others somehow, I’m not against vertical progression in other areas.
• e.g. if you raised the level cap to 100 through e.g. an expansion, the game is already set up to handle that
• Extra stuff in Fractals wouldn’t bother me either though I should note that I don’t currently play fractals.

Skill progression:

• Obsoleting skills in favor of new ones seems like a waste of the work you sunk into designing the old skills though. Would prefer that be a horizontal thing.
• “Specializing” classes like in some of those old JRPGs (anyone remember Seiken Densetsu 3?) sounds interesting though – sort of like what we do with builds currently but a more visible impact. It might lock you into those choices though, so the specializations would all need to be viable in any part of the game? Some careful thinking required there, we only have so many character slots.
• Skills that synergize with each other is probably a good way to create the same effect without locking you into stuff. Just need to be careful they don’t break balance.
  Anyone going to let me customize norn elites?

Yeah, I have hated few things in the game more than the “exploding presents” section. It’s quite tolerable if you manage to time your jump to miss the blue presents (knife-edge though), but it kind of feels like glitching that stage. Which is fair enough, that’s pretty much what it deserves.

Wouldn’t be so bad if the “respawn me here if I misstep” option were infinite. Considering how long it takes to figure that segment out, it really should be.

Hmm… true, I can’t see the present model working indefinitely without doing something big. There are other options than opening the Dominion for that, though – the most obvious involving some dragons I hear are still out there

I am not sure they should cost so many skill points each time though

I guess you could also partially address the “whoops my ascended item has a bad stat combo for my build” problem by having some ability to replace the insignia at lower cost, perhaps by throwing the armor/weapon into the Mystic Forge in combination with the new insignia.

That only works if insignias are reasonably priced though; I have a suspicion they aren’t.

I got there with a lot of patience and some opportunism, but I agree, it is a little strange to push people through this gauntlet. Would make more sense for WvW not to count towards map completion for those purposes.

Was that ever actually stated? In their interviews over the years I can’t recall ArenaNet ruling out additional races – they even indicated they’d consider them a few times. I just know nothing will happen anytime very soon.

Either way, anything DoW-related would probably have to wait until Miss Scarlet has had her day… I’d probably be happier if they worked on it behind the scenes for a while before actually releasing anything so it could be done justice. It needs a new architectural style, probably a whole bunch more armor/weapon skins, not to mention they’re going to need a lot more than one character model, one voice, and two skins to make tengu seem like a real race rather than the world’s biggest copypasta job. Oh, which reminds me, the animations would also need to not be pretty much copied from charr.

Honestly though, I’d rather wait another three years and get something playable than one and wind up with just NPCs again. We already got that in GW1

Only one part of this has been on my mind that much lately – I’ll have to think about the others more. That’s the ascended crafting stuff (of course).

It mostly just confuses me; how much time/money is supposed to go into them? Not all GW2 players are filthy rich – I suspect I’d have to blow half my bank just to finish levelling one of the professions to 500. For something that actually gives a gameplay advantage that’s not what I expected – it reminds me of trying to kit out characters in Diablo 2, which was really quite a chore.

GW1 took the “skill over time” approach and made sure you didn’t need to spend that much time in game to be on a level playing field (materially at least, player skill is always a different matter, that’s OK). I figured this was carrying over into GW2 and it generally appears to be true – which is why Ascended items are hard to reconcile with that. They actually do take a LOT of playing to earn.

Is that where they’re supposed to be?

I have a feeling that the format/structure of this forum gets in the way of what CDI threads could be. Something more like Reddit has some advantages there – you can turn major points into top-level “roots” of discussion trees, and that way players have a better shot at following and contributing to conversation topics they’re interested in without having to trawl the entire thread. Only works if the people posting are co-operating, of course.

Probably not feasible to modify the forum to do this in a hurry, though, and moving discussion to Reddit is unlikely to be on the agenda – but who knows, maybe there’s some way to get a little bit of that model going.

Guidance to keep posts concise would help in both scenarios, though. It’s not always an easy thing for me to do either, but after seeing the Great Wall of Text that the LW CDI thread became, I really don’t want to make the problem any worse.

Sort of true in that it lets norn do something that other races can’t, albeit at a cost. Kind of hate to call for a nerf on it, though, because there’s nothing else about the norn elites (any of them, not just snow leopard) that makes them worth using.

Yeah, I agree – find a way to separate the Personal Story timeline so you have more creative freedom. It’ll be worth it.

How do you stop this becoming a free bonus?
To be more specific, any system like this, you’re trying to walk a wire between either having things too easy – you never lose that fort, and the bonuses always apply, and so it’s basically free stuff – and frustrating players by making it too much work to maintain it. I’m not really sure I have a solution for this. I know we’ve got a similar system with towers, keeps and fortresses in WvW, but I suspect a lower turnover rate would be preferable in a PvE environment.
I think as long as you made sure it was fun to deal with having to defend a fort every so often, it might not be too bad, but I’m just not really sure. People tend to give up on things in GW2 after a while – not so many visitors to Orr anymore, and even the Mad Realm, which is only temporarily available, is nearly empty now. Would this be any different? Again, you’d have to make it worth their while to maintain.
And I guess if WvW is any indication, there’s at least a decent chance of it. The motivations for participating in WvW might be different, though, and if they weren’t, there’s a risk of cannibalizing it for an ongoing PvE element like this. On the other hand, WvW is against real players, and there’s a bit more satisfaction to be gained from beating them – so maybe it’ll be OK? I don’t really know!

The idea of building your own fort/settlement/etc and trying to hold that ground is something I’d thought would be really cool for a long time – but in practice it’s not going to be as great as it seems in concept. That said, there are probably ways to mitigate it and make it interesting enough to try – I have no guarantee it’ll work though.

Some major problems:
1) This game isn’t designed for player-built content
2) People cannot be on all the time to defend their stuff
3) People probably really hate losing that fort – they usually want to build it and have it stay there as long as they want. But…
4) There is only so much space in the world to put these things down.
5) If you don’t get to keep it, what’s the point of building it?

Potential solutions to some of these…
How do you handle building things in an MMO?
Short of going the EQNext route, anyway – which is cool, don’t get me wrong, but not plausible in GW2. Well, there are some things you probably can do that will be “good enough”.

• Make the construction out of “building blocks” which are pre-fabricated by ArenaNet. Obviously the quantity is going to be somewhat limited because of this.
• Limit construction of forts to certain terrain spots that support them reasonably well. It’s not necessarily going to be perfectly flat, so those “building blocks” will require some leeway.
• Because placing building blocks arbitrarily is probably going to lead to bad things, some degree of the game doing it for you will be required. If anyone’s played the Skyrim DLC “Hearthstone”, this is basically that concept taken to its most restrictive. I’m not sure GW2 would need to go quite that far though.

That’s great, but don’t we now have a turf rush for a very limited number of sites?
Probably. It might not need to be extremely limited, but we may still be able to find a few hundred across all the maps out there. Considering how empty some are these days, and since it’s still a per-server thing, that may not be terrible. But if we had a fort to every player, it would be. So…

• It takes a certain amount of money to found a fort – but multiple players can pitch in. You can also do this after the fort is already started by “investing” in it, so to speak.
• By “investing” in an existing fort, you get to put resources towards building useful things for that fort – maybe you want crafting stations, or a merchant, or you want to hire NPC guards. You know, like WvW, except you’re not using them against other players.
• The guild who invested the most gets naming rights. Assuming that doesn’t make this too much of a rich folks’ club.

How do you handle defense in a sane manner?
Now presumably, if we’re building a fort, it’s going to be under attack from something. Whatever that is would probably depend on the location we built it in. (Or maybe it’s Scarlet’s minions, considering they attack EVERYWHERE.) But people have time limitations – and there are “off-peak” hours where not many people are on.

• Simply the fact that you don’t own the fort solely by yourself should help with defense a little.
• However, it doesn’t fix the off-peak issue. I’ve been told that EVE Online had an interesting approach to this though; capital ships couldn’t be destroyed in less than 24 hours or so due to a “shield”. Adapting this idea, perhaps the town can have its gates shut against marauding enemies, and takes at least a full day to completely fall.
• To avoid this being total ezmode, it can’t be quite that easy to drive them off once your people come back. While that could be achieved by making their numbers build up and throwing in dozens of champion mobs, alternatively the siege could just have dealt damage to the fort that takes either a lot of gold, or a lot of time for NPCs to repair it – and you have to guard them while they’re doing it.
• Dynamic events should probably be tied in as well. Maybe you have to help the farmers under your protection with bandits who are stealing their crops (and thus diminishing your +gold bonus) for instance. Attempted invasions might partly consist of repeatedly failing these events, which decreases the overall strength of the fort, and eventually makes it possible to destroy. Likewise, after breaking a siege, you might need to complete a number of dynamic events to build its strength back up again (or just invest more gold!).

So why would you bother making one of these in the first place?
I’m thinking there would need to be some kind of benefit. Maybe if you’ve invested in a fort, then you get certain gameplay bonuses, something like all those guild banner bonuses people put up in Lion’s Arch. It would need to be substantial enough to be worth the effort – and potentially cost.

(continued)

Shahrizai.7683:

That’s the PS4, Xbone is a different case that I dont know much about. If it runs Windows, then maybe there is a chance. I wouldnt get my hopes up here either though.

It does, but from the looks of things, not in a way that will actually matter. The “3-in-1” OS (which is really more like two in one, with the third being a layer underneath them) includes one “OS” specifically for games, with the other one being Windows – but I suspect it’ll be a locked-down variant of it, rather than letting you run desktop games as well (because how would you control desktop applications anyway, with what you get in the box?). That would rule out GW2.

If, on the other hand, the XBox One does allow you a desktop, and one that runs third-party software, then sure thing. Would need a special controller, but it has USB ports, so…

OK. It looks vaguely like a mistake, just wasn’t sure if it was recent or not.

So, since I don’t have too many better places to post this. While doing an escort mission along the road on the south side of the Kessex Hills map I noticed a vacant tent (appears to be the same style as tengu trading tents) next to the Dominion wall southwest of Overlake Haven. I don’t remember seeing that before – is it new or is my memory just shot?

I’d be all for Jeff Grubb as a playable race.

Pretty sure any future development I’m interested in could be built on top of GW2. They extended GW1 quite a way – there’s really no need to waltz into another five-year development cycle, considering the capabilities of the GW2 engine.

Well, except that WvW is always going to be much smaller than I’d dream of, and much more stale because the number of things you can do is pretty limited, and that’s extremely unlikely to change because you have to design a game for that sort of thing from the start; but since the tech for that kind of thing might not really be there yet anyway, it’s still too soon to be thinking about another new game.

Would go for an expansion though. At the rate things are going, by the time we get expansion-style stuff in the game, it’ll be older than GW1 was when it had its final big release (EotN)

chemiclord.3978:

Players burning out is entirely a player-side problem. You don’t HAVE to complete EVERY meta event, ya know? You CAN get the thrust of the living story in a handful of hours.

There’s definitely some truth in that but I think there are some things ArenaNet could do from their end as well. I have no problem with the “grindy” content being out there so people can go killing 20 champion mobs for special event-related loot if they want it – it’d be pretty selfish to deny them that if it weren’t hurting anyone. I just think that it should be clearer that this is an optional part of the story – and sometimes this means actually making it be optional.

If I have to run around swatting Toxic Offshoots for a couple hours to get stuff to Marjory to progress to the next phase of the story, that’s actually kind of grindy. Farming achievements to get a candy corn elemental in Blood and Madness? Even more grindy. (That was, sadly, a case where you did have to finish the meta-event for the story. Either that or I’m reading the guide wrong.) Getting to the dungeon in Clockwork Madness? Not so bad but took a lot of time since you needed to wait for invasions. I’m not sure the main thread of an event’s storyline should be gated on time-consuming activities like that.

This particular aspect was working fine earlier in the year – I would prefer to see a return to that. It doesn’t have to be tied to the longer release cadence. (Not that I would mind monthly releases either, but the real kicker in the two-week format has been the filler. I don’t really want to spend my time on that.)

ColinJohanson.2394:

So a fun question to ask to help direct the conversation a bit: What aspects of your favorite television shows would you think would be cool to see reflected in a game medium?

A serial plot is a nice part of that, and that’s what GW2 has been delivering so far. Some parts have left a bit to be desired – especially lately, e.g. I don’t really get why the krait would start working with any sylvari willingly – but it’s been interesting to follow when I could. It’d make more sense if the information I needed to understand what was going on was more readily available in game, though I’m sure that’s well understood by now.

There is an aspect from less favorite shows I wouldn’t like to see too much of though: filler. A lot of the special event achievements are just that, and I’m still having trouble getting it through my head that I don’t have to get the special event rewards if they’re not fun… that 5,000 point chest is taunting me

The most insidious kind is filler that forces you to watch it to keep up, of course (a few minutes of exposition buried inside an hour of flashbacks for instance). We haven’t been too far down that path – the closest I can think of would be the dungeons – many of which were pretty tricky to complete – that had story events within them once you reached the end. Personally I haven’t played any of the Scarlet dungeons, more due to lack of time than anything else though, so I’ve had to keep up by reading the wiki. I did manage to defeat Mai Trin (took quite a few attempts mind you), and had I not, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the interrogation scenes that closed out that story arc.

Going “casual mode” isn’t ultimately necessary, though; any issues raised by the above could be solved just by allowing some nice way to find out what’s been going on lately after the event is over. Getting context within the context of GW2 is currently rather difficult – I feel the Heralds could be better-used here. Spill a bit of backstory for the last few months, not just the very most current event.

The hardest part about skritt would be translating stuff like… um… this: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/A_Sad_Duty#Dialogues
…to skritt-ese. How do you take them seriously there?

1) Ascended items. I don’t have a clear understanding what role ArenaNet wants them to have.

2) Living World. Recent updates have burned me out because there’s so much to do in so little time, but I don’t really feel very interested in it.

3) Racial skills. Much less important but there are things that irk me.

fuyuko.3705:

So, All in all I want to see others opinions about them. I would also like to ask anyone who is willing to answer – >Why are Tengu more anticipated than Largo?< Cause quite honestly, the fact people like the eagles more saddens me.

I imagine this depends on the individual. For me it’s history; they had a saga going during the GW1 days where they were trying to stake out a place in the midst of a Canthan regime that more or less would rather they not have existed. They were greatly overdue for a change in fortune; the situation in GW2 at present is a big step forward, but emerging as a major power/playable race would be an ultimate vindication.

Though yes, they also have an interesting culture and can be pretty (sometimes. I’ll be the first to admit that the art across GW1/2 has been more often miss than hit). And their GW1 BMP weapons were very cool – would love to see that aesthetic come back.

Largos? They’re an intriguing and pretty cool race, but they really just haven’t had as much time to get attached to. Fifteen or so months is a lot shorter than seven and a half years (one more if you count Prophecies, but tengu were really just a minor NPC race then, even if the Avicara tribe did make very formidable opponents).

Diovid.9506:

About clockwork, I understand that what the Charr use is similar. However my question/idea was more based around the prospect of cooperation between charr and humans. Would the Iron Legion be willing to cooperate with other races and copy other races or would pride stand in their way?

I imagine this would vary from one individual to another, but am not positive what the most common sentiment would be. I recall a quote from individuals in the Black Citadel that implied they were demonstrating their technology to some asura, though – so they are at least not averse to sharing technology in that direction.
Practically speaking, though, I think individual charr inventors would take inspiration from anything they knew of; whether or not they’d be willing to admit it would be the only question.

Wouldn’t really surprise me if ArenaNet has been working on a larger project in secret behind all the “Living Story” stuff – but I sort of expect an Elder Dragon or two ahead of Cantha in the queue. I guess this thread could have helped convince them to reorder their plans a bit though

Opportunity cost is one way of looking at it, but the materials themselves have (virtual) value – so things don’t become free just because you didn’t sink one particular store of value (gold) into it when the reason was that you used another (materials).

Whether or not the statement is logically accurate has no bearing on whether the person who makes it has made an optimal decision regarding the use of their resources, though. If they really want that thing that they just crafted, then they should still get it. I’m just telling them that it’s perfectly acceptable to trade for the materials if they’ve got sufficient cash reserves instead of collecting the materials themselves.

I don’t believe I’ve ever had to group for a personal story stage that the game didn’t explicitly force (namely, Arah… thanks for that). I have seen a few ridiculous and/or annoying stages in it, but have yet to find one I can’t get past somehow.

In general, for a personal story stage that you can’t figure out how to beat, might want to check the wiki – they sometimes have tips on how to deal with these sorts of problems. Sometimes these forums also have a thread buried somewhere that you might be able to dig up with a search.

Also, some standard tricks – if the game gives you the option to avoid taking on an entire overly tough mob of enemies at once, you should do it – pull one out at a time and kill them that way. Slow and boring, but better than the alternative.
Melee-only enemies also have pathing that can be… umm… exploited If you’ve just got one to deal with but they suck, and you can find a sufficiently wide obstacle you can jump over but they’ll just walk around… yep.
There’s also the option to respawn and take a second attempt at whatever killed you last time, usually. I hate using this because it’s basically saying “my personal story involves me dying and coming back again”, but on the off-chance you’re more pragmatic than me…

Also, the GW2 crew does retune personal story stages from time to time. If you’ve got a problem with a specific one that hasn’t been addressed on these forums already, you might want to post about it to let them know that you can’t handle it with your class. Perhaps even phrase it as a question, since there are probably other people who have beaten that stage that can tell you how

I wouldn’t be surprised if “Zhed” simply happens to be a common centaur name, and they used it as a placeholder for the letter “Z” in that context – similar to “Oscar” and “Romeo” in the NATO radio alphabet.

Quite a large number of the people asking for tengu are from GW1, not GW2. While not a central focus of the storyline then, the tengu (mostly Angchu, as noted before) did play a substantial part.

And, for the GW1 veterans who are anything like me, the suggestion that the newcomer kodan and largos races are better options doesn’t sit very well.

I agree, though, that we’re not seeing any new races in the near (< 6 months) future. ArenaNet are presumably (considering this year’s PAX panel) thinking about how to advance the storyline regarding the Elder Dragons; but there’s no indication when that will happen, and major developments like that is when I’d expect to see new map areas opened up.

I’d like to see racial skills get looked at at some point – currently I rarely use them (and only occasionally see anyone else use them either). I know they’re not supposed to overshadow profession skills, but I presume they’re at least supposed to have a point…

The difference between being a day before expiry and a day after is minute, but the intention is to reduce the ability of a third-party to exploit stolen certificates.

Either way, having that sort of message pop up visiting a support site surely doesn’t inspire confidence