Guild Wars 2

Maybe there’s a lot more warping and twisting visible around the waistband with pants? Or somewhere else on the legs, IDK. Skirts and long coats create a forgiving bell-shaped bubble from the waist down.

You know what, thinking about it some more, I bet it’s the butt. Because virtually every armor set that isn’t a trenchcoat has a buttcape. There must be some bad graphical problems happening in that area that they don’t want us to notice.

I’ve never hated a suggestion more. Do Not Want.

Berserker’s everything! Runes of the Ranger because kitten Scholar. Sigils of Accuracy and whatever else is cheap and good, maybe Frailty? Whatever.

Marksmanship 2 or 3, 2, and 1 or 2 (2 esp with tiger); Beastmastery 322; Druid 333.

We Heal As One, and whatever other skills you like, but prioritize shouts. I don’t like spirits when I’m running around; too fussy.

Cat for melee or bristleback for range; electric wyvern for CC because watching it slap mobs around warms the kittenles of my heart.

Rotation: Maul (Greatsword 2). That’s it. Everything else is mobility, CC/snare, healing, or defense. Don’t forget to stow your pet out of combat, and use your pet’s F2 in combat. If you can’t get into melee range because of AoE poop then zap with staff 2 and 1.

Congratulations! You now have a selfish, degenerate Druid build for open world that moves fast, hits hard, and teaches none of the mechanics that are expected of druids in highest-level PvE. Enjoy!

I mean, you should HAVE a staff in your inventory; there’s nothing better for running. And I really love staff/greatsword for open world because you can just sprint and swoop around, snaring things and then mauling them in the face. Super fun build to play, and bursts down open world trash like nobody’s business. If I hadn’t gotten hooked on heavier fractals like a minmaxing fool, I could have happily stayed with that build forever; if I ever change mains, my druid will retire to that build.

Solo mode dungeons would require not only upscaled player/downscaled mobs, but an off switch for most of the puzzles. They were made to be group content.

I’d rather see a buff like the wvw dolyaks get, except better, to encourage groups to run together instead of stringing out and wiping for 20 minutes trying to skip 2 minutes of fighting trash. That kills dungeon fun way more than the long time commitment and lousy loot.

Question: how old are the various 50/100 MC “sub-legendary” skins, like the skins made to look like ele bundle weapons or the weapons wielded by phantasms? Were they put in at a time when demand was dropping, to keep the demand high?

People farm SW a LOT; there is almost always a RIBA squad in LFG. Join that and ride the meta train.

If you like your characters to spin and flip and do handsprings, asura is the race for you! Human, norn, and sylvari all have pretty much the same animations AFAIK, and while I play the urban battleground fractal as a charr ranger I haven’t really paid close attention to the animations there – but they do seem to roll more than a sylvari, and of course they switch back and forth between running on all fours and running on their hind legs.

There’s The Dreamer, and a Zodiac weapon skin. That’s all I know of.

Come to think of it, does anyone ride anything? The occasional war machine, including some vehicles car-like enough for drunk norn and charr to go joyriding, but that’s all that comes to mind. Animals seem to be exclusively freight.

Viper is notable for being two meta builds with one set of gear (all-out DPS and DPS/support hybrid), and then there’s all-out support with Magi, and Berserker still sees some use (I haven’t finished shopping for my Viper set so I do fractals in zerk, I’m into T3 and no one is giving me grief yet).

Although actually I feel like I see a LOT of discussion and experimentation with Mesmer? Way more than for Ranger. It may just be that frequently-recommended sigils and runes for chrono builds are UNGODLY expensive so people are always looking for ways around them, but whatever the reason there’s a ton of diversity and debate. They’re mostly support roles as far as I know but that prof seems to be where it’s at for build diversity right now.

A more popular pairing with shortbow is axe/torch. There are some ridiculously glittery, magical looking axes out there, and some very “magic wand” sorts of torches as well – especially if your budget range extends into legendaries, in which case you can definitely afford Black Lion skins. Daydreamer, Glittering, Tempest, Pact Fleet, and Timekeeper could all coordinate very nicely with The Dreamer.

I would rather see a Future Orr fractal, with the land fully returned to life, green things growing all over the lifted-up-seafloor textures we have currently. The problem could be anything: Kralk; stamping out the last, strongest, smartest Risen; squabbles over Orrian truffle farming, whatever.

Well I made an ascended breather, spear, and harpoon gun as part of gearing up for fractals initially, just to have that AR coverage. But thanks for the reality check! I’ll just leave them all zerk then.

So, all the talk about the viper meta has me shopping to try it out like the lemming I am. But I have some questions about aquatic gear. Underwater combat is part of fractals, but all the guides seem to neglect it. Crafted ascended breathers CAN be forge-swapped, but NOT to Viper’s, so you gotta farm up 500 berries and 6000 magic if you want a viper’s breather… but DO you want one? Or viper’s UW weapons, for that matter? Do they inflict enough conditions for Viper’s to make a difference, or are you in fact better off leaving them zerk to power down the jellyfish beast? Is it a niche enough case that it’s fine to leave those 3 items zerk? What about a third option, like making the weapons viper but settling for an available swap on the breather, like Sinister? I’m keen to avoid another 10 loops through the berry forest if I can help it, but I also believe in doing things right.

It’s interesting to me that the command system works as well as it does. The icons, the general respect, and the expense would seem to draw enough people just in it for the bling factor to poison it all, but instead it seems like the majority of people who take up a tag take the responsibility fairly seriously. I suppose the maximized visibility helps a lot; not many people want their name lit up while failing or looking foolish.

Also, agreed: I am always grateful to those who step up to organize the teeming MMO masses and guide them to victory.

OMG the mental image of banging shield/shield together like frying pans is going to entertain me for days :-D

Nothing you do for a legendary is by force, because legendaries are optional, and are designed from the ground up to be “extra” – time and wealth sinks for those who need a huge challenge to stay engaged and occupied. I think it’s okay for them to require a comprehensive “tour” of the game. Overt PvP can already be sidestepped by buying shards; WvW can be as PvP-intense or avoidant as you want.

I’ve completed several WvW reward tracks, including GoB in case I ever want to try for a legendary, doing exactly two things: faffing around with my guildies knocking over towers and camps in the BL, and faffing around in zerg trains in EotM. Sometimes our zerg runs afoul of another zerg; whoever has the bigger zerg wins. Skill doesn’t really factor into it, aside from the commander’s skill in deciding whether to engage, and guiding the zerg away if they decide not to.

An aside for those with anxiety: it may interest you to know the opposing players can’t see your name, just your server and WvW rank. Really dedicated WvW players make their toons as memorably garish as possible just so their opponents can recognize them and think, “Oh kitten, THIS guy.”

moonstarmac.4603:

Yeah if you want to craft the 5 ascended Caladbolg’s it is expensive…if you just want the skins it is 1k Unbound Magic.

They’re still a fair kitteneaper than standard ascended weapons.

The henchman Herta became one. Her head is available as a gobbler.

I wonder if the Mursaat are made from evil Tengu the way Exalted are made from good humans. It would explain the bird feet, and their apparent philosophies of disinterest, contempt, and overwhelming force.

Note: once you have done the DS meta, the Whispers Keeper at the beginning of the DS zone will forever after stock plated weapons for you as well.

It wouldn’t be just for 24 hours, I hope? I won’t be able to get to my computer for a couple of days.

Guild Wars 2: Fire and Ice.

Lead the forces of Tyria (comprising yourself and rotating pairs of locked-out-of-combat NPCs) in a campaign to pit Primordus and Jormag against one another!

All-new masteries for gliding in superheated and supercold air, using red and blue bouncing mushrooms, and walking across lava and super-slippery ice; unlocking the ability to apply Special Burning to icebrood and Special Chilled to destroyers; and deciphering ancient Mursaat symbols to pass gates.

Watch Braham refuse to work with or listen to anyone, fail horribly in his mission, and possibly derail the entire operation! Will he complete his descent into becoming a Son of Svanir? (Spoiler: no. He will be pulled back from the brink with the power of friendship!)

New raid, jam-packed with lore that raiders wish they could skip and lore nerds are salty about being unable to get to!

ALL THE ICE AND LAVA SKINS YOU CAN STOMACH AND THEN SOME.

There. I made the announcement for them.

They won’t add another way to get them. They’re very happy with their current state.

You’re aware that’s enough for 4 legendaries, yes?

I make very heavy use of Arcane Shield and the stability during Overloads. And I switched to scepter/warhorn from dagger/warhorn to get more ranged options – staying constantly in melee range might be fine in a party with others to share aggro with, but it’s pretty painful when you’re soloing with 12k HP.

We have a JP too! I was thinking it would be really fun to have a little chest or something at the top with a daily reset – it wouldn’t have to give out anything fancy, just something, even just a blue item or a bit of crafting material, or junk. On the level of a gobbler-bag.

Ember Bay has Destroyers altered by plant and death energy, respectively, and there’s that misbegotten icebrood in the Bitterfrost story that is both weakened by having other dragon energies mixed up in it, and vulnerable to explosions of the same. The Dragons have never died before that we know of – we’re still learning the effects of their huge magic reservoirs bursting open onto the world.

I wonder how a Dragon compares with a Bloodstone, in terms of magnitude?

I won’t shell out for Scholar runes or Force sigils, but I will pay someone to carry a piranha to the bee dog cat in SAB after failing for hours. And I am considering buying character slots just to get the Thief and Engineer cats (I would have a complete collection at that point). I think I have a problem.

I do really like the idea of Palawa Joko being a significant force in opposition to Kralk, because it would continue his role from GW1 of a guy who is clearly Bad News Bears but whom the player character has no choice but to deal with anyway (last time it was for his incredible ancient wisdom of “lure a sandworm out and smack it around some and then you can ride it”). Considering he now has an entire continent in his stranglehold, though, maybe this time we’ll be ignoble enough to double-cross him and take him down.

Glad to see your cats arrived! One other thing to note is that when I only had 3/4 frozen cats, they did not have their pot of soup; it seemed like that arrived with the 4th cat.

Amaimon: really? Palawa Joko can deadlock Kralk? Dude’s been hitting the gym since the days when my GW1 character busted him out of a wooden statue head.

So, I kind of wanted to die by the time I cleared every assassin between the fish and the cat – I know nothing of Shortcut Eagles and now do not want to know because it will just fill me with hate – and was too worn out to manage the pillars while carrying the fish, let alone the dart pagoda. I wound up paying somebody to carry the dang fish all the way to the cat, drop it, let me pick it up, and feed it to the cat. Worth every penny. I had just enough energy to continue forward to unlock zone 3 in case I decide I want to finish world 2 before the festival ends, but I’m not at all sure I’ll bother; all I wanted was the cat.

I may have some skewed priorities.

I like Taimi’s shifts from “dragon minions and energy types and blah-de-blah-de-blah” to “yes, I am keeping bug organs alive to experiment on like a little ghoul” to “I named [this bug organ] Spencer!” It’s a way to deliver complex lore theory and then summarize it without making the people who only follow the summary feel too dumb. Those cheeky conversations are actually fairly well-written.

Carighan.6758:

Ramoth.9064:

Nah, not going to happen. Too low return of investment for Arenanet.

Which is a shame. Due to downlevel (might need a bit more numerical balancing, granted), in theory adding a 1-15 map is no different than adding a lvl80 map.

Not really. If you go straight from a level-appropriate map to a starter map, the starter mobs are definitely clearly tuned to be very easy. Still capable of killing a brand new player who, say, tries to skip instead of killing but doesn’t know where to go and pulls a train into a dead end (um, hypothetically. Not that this has ever happened to me. Ahem.) But compared to even a mid-level mob they have low health and low damage.

Grow a little; be happy for their good fortune.

Interesting theory!

One aside: Faren could have the fall-damage-reduction trait. No mesmering necessary.

If nothing else, it would have been nice to get our weapon and armor piece from an NPC who talks about the spec.

If a being is not worthy of worship, is it still a god?

Nightrous.6732:

This whole issue of dps meters would be so much easier if they were built into the game. Yet none of the 3 MMO’s i have endgamed on have dps meters.

And yet they almost always have training dummies, often with a “localized DPS meter” sott of feature. That is odd.

Calling it a penalty box is really confusing to me because it implies you eventually get to leave it and rejoin the game.

Clothes for race.

They could have been warm-blooded, like dinosaurs and birds. Or, they were intensely magical – maybe they used magic to keep warm.

If you’re interested in this, you might like the Pyre Fierceshot storyline in Eye of the North in GW1. It concludes with a whole company of Charr chanting, “There are no gods! There are no gods!” I was pleased to see this theme carried forward into GW2, where staunch atheism is a cornerstone of current Charr culture.

I don’t have them, and I rarely notice the sounds of the Dreamer, and don’t even know the sounds of Quip. I think they must wear more on the wielders than on anyone else. Would it be really hard to make a toggle? Or categorize them as player instruments?

Wait, Braham’s bubble shield actually works?

I’m confused. What was the investment? Anyone can walk into Bitterfrost and fractals even if they have 0 gold.

BUILD TEMPLATES.

Improving underwater combat instead of orphaning it. Just tethers and/or rangefinder reticles would be huge.

Pie in the sky: sea dragon expansion. 90% underwater. Largos or quaggans teach us to use all our skills and weapons underwater, and to use our underwater weapons on land. (The shark spear becomes the #1 legendary, leaving Eternity in the dirt, and making the precursor so expensive it’s actually cheaper to craft it.) Maps are so open the forums cry for the good old days of being herded through three-dimensional labyrinths like Tangled Depths.

Thinking about the difficulty curve some more, part of the problem is the ramp-up to HoT is now behind a paywall. Your average free-to-play player whose first game purchase is HoT a month after they rolled their first toon ever, is not going to shell out for LS2, so they walk straight from Orr into the tender embrace of the Verdant Brink Mordrem, raptors, giant beetles, smokescales, etc.

As a dogged completionist, I bought S2 and insist on completing it on each toon before taking them into HoT, and each time, my build and playstyle is definitely tighter by the time I land in VB. S2 provides a stepping-stone.

Are Dry Top and the Silverwastes part of the S2 package or can anyone enter them? Even if they can, they might not bother to spend any time there without a story leading them around. And even if they do, those map metas are not quite the same as the challenges they’ll encounter solo.

Dodging towards and past the target, or swap to ranged and dodge outwards. I’ve gotten through the fights doing either.

I thought of one other tip: Hearts and Minds is one story instance that it is fairly easy to find a group for in LFG if you wait a few minutes. Almost everyone hates it and struggles with it; at least in a party you increase your chances of one person clearing all the bugs and hurdles to see the thing through to the end. It’s basically using other players to save your progress the way the game should. And if you don’t beat the odds you have each other for moral support.

I think you’ll see bona fide scythe before you see scythe greatsword. ANet still has access to the GW1 Dervish scythe animations, an incredibly beautiful routine of smooth, continuous arcs and twirls. Look it up on Youtube sometime. No characters except primary Dervishes were ever enabled to do them (secondary Dervishes just swung it back and forth like they were literally harvesting crops, IIRC) but just the existence of those animations means they’ll probably never downgrade to ‘greatsword that looks like a scythe’.

EDIT: I went and looked it up myself, and I think I conflated Dervish combat with the female Dervish dance. It’s still “fancy” but nowhere near the image that was in my memory.