Guild Wars 2

Unfortunately, anet decided to use the “freeze each zone in time” model for evolving the world after the LS1 outcomes. That means that when you zone, you are technically time-travelling, and DR is trapped in time when Caudicus is still that goopy minister, not the head of the white mantel.

Ashen.2907:

Ider.1276:

Ashen.2907:

Pretty cheap to buy them. Ive at least one character of each profession at level 80, outfitted in exotics, without crafting a single piece.

Good luck with buying those viper/commander exotics.

People were able to start playing the game for years before those were released. Unless people now are less competent than they were fojr and a half years ago, they probably still can.

Can one craft exotic gear, viper or commander included, at level 1?

I still find the fetishizing of the “meta” builds very hard to understand. Sure, vipers is “the best” choice for condition damage, but it’s absolutely, positively not required that you hit “theoretical peak” to be able to play.

Heck, for many players, and in much of the available content outside the absolute peak of PvP, or trying to speedrun or low-player raids, it’s not even close to needed.

I’m still reminded of how, over in WoW, people would complain that mythic raids were “impossible” without getting the full set of well rolled best-in-slot gear … while guilds cleared that on week three, when they were mostly wearing the equivalent of a mismatched set of exotics with random runes.

Perception is a powerful thing, and some people see “absolutely min/max build” as essential to doing anything. That’s … not really accurate, though.

vpy.6183:

Newbie Question : Which prof is the most sturdy while able to do nice self-healing ?

I’d suggest that necromancer is a solid choice there. It’s cloth geared, but the dual-health-bar, and the extremely large health pools, both make it pretty resilient compared to other classes.

It also has a range of fairly solid self-healing options, including being able to spec for significant healing in shroud using “gaining a boon heals you”, and “attacks in shroud grant might”, if you feel the need.

What it is not is going to be extremely robust in PvP, compared to PvE, content, for a variety of reasons that swirl around “players can smartly counter some of the healing options”.

I’m sure someone will consider 18g-per to be worth farming them.

If you have a character at max level, it’s pretty much just deciding if you want to do map completion after you get to 80, or while you get to 80.

I did my most recent character with tomes, and it’s been vaguely annoying not to have much of the world unlocked when I wanna do 80-ish things, but not really more than it was wanting to do world bosses while being under-level.

One of the most painful lack-of-QoL for necromancers is that my minions don’t heal at all, ever. For the little horrors, I completely understand that for gameplay.

It would be great if my health-stealing minion, and other “press button, get minion” things, would at least recover health out of combat. Right now I have to spend a lot of time checking if they need to be replaced, so I don’t get a surprise “start fight, minions all die” at the wrong time.

Since there isn’t a way to dismiss them, it’s also really hard to do something about that for all the utility skill minions other than heal — you can pop the healer, wait 15 seconds, and get full health, but there is no way to do that for my others.

If we could allow either (a) them to be healed during combat, or at least (b) heal like a player when out of combat, that would be a huge thing. It also seems like it wouldn’t reintroduce any huge balance problems — at least for the out-of-combat bit?

Saurrec.6402:

Why has Anet done a turnabout?

If I had to guess, I’d guess that they did this because they thought it was better for the game overall to handle it this way.

Over the next six months they will find out if they were right, and if it doesn’t achieve their goals, try something different.

Dirtyfoot McGee.1497:

Don’t ignore my bug report no matter how minor it should be addressed.

The developers read, but rarely respond, in the forums. For a personal response you should submit a support ticket.

If you think something is an exploit, though, you should actually email them privately about it. The details are in the wiki

Since HoT stats were supposed to require owning the expansion, it’s also possible that if you don’t own it, the HoT stats tab doesn’t show up?

I understand that only enemies that grant XP grant cooldown reduction; this is why the necro community consider this pretty useless in, eg, dungeons, since enemies don’t grant XP.

Could it be the same thing over in the mists? If so, it’s “working as designed”, even if I agree that the design is … not good.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

Terrorsquad.2349:

Feirlista Xv.1425:

For those of you that don’t understand how internet security works high ping and packet loss at the NCSoft servers are the servers rejecting the ping request for security reason not because The game is having an issue. It’s there Firewall, ping request are not normal game data so it gets rejected and you get high packet loss! As others have pointed out most all of you that posted ping plots have issues elsewhere!

Their servers do allow pinging otherwise we would not see the Ping in Options..
If they would reject ICMP in their Firewall, would not see any Ping ingame. Think about it.

Anet has also confirmed/acknowledged to me they are investigating this issue.

I know you’re trying to be the White Knight with basic network knowledge but from my experience in the IT for years, I kind of know (sarcasm) where the issue is located.

You my friend deserve a Standing Ovation!!!!! Spot on

For others, the heuristic for distinguishing “this node drops some, or all, ICMP” from “this node is experiencing packet loss” is: what does the next node show?

If you see the same level of packet loss on the next hop, and all subsequent hops, then it is almost certainly packet loss. If you see one hop with high packet loss, and the next one has none, it’s almost certainly just that it discards some or all ICMP.

The other solution is to use something like tcptracepath, if you have access to it, to perform the same check using TCP packets — which won’t be deprioritised like ICMP is — but that’s harder to obtain, and not available in PingPlotter, which usefully visualises the details.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

OK then why did I stop having issues (no disconnects last night) and 2 of the other 6 folks I was referring to continued having issues?

You can have your opinion just like I can but don’t quote or direct your opinion at me unless you have something you know is correct. If its an assumption don’t quote and just say something like “I feel it is Blah because of this”.

You gotta remember anyone having the issues is already a little upset no need to throw gas on the fire just because you aren’t.

The most common factor in the reports of problems has been level3, one of the large transit providers. Their network spans the continental USA, so it’s entirely possible that all three of you were hit by issues on their network — especially since the routes will tend to converge as you get closer to the game servers.

It’s also entirely possible that you stopped having issues, while your friends still do, because there were two separate problems, and one was resolved. It could be in the same company, having more than one troublesome spot or it could be separate companies.

None of this is necessarily either related to anet, or unrelated to them, but … it’s a pretty safe bet given how long this all has lasted that the anet and ncsoft staff — who are directly motivated to fix it — can’t do that easily, strongly suggesting that it’s outside their network and, thus, direct control.

Your advice on “opinion” applies just as much to your statements as others, and you might consider stepping away from the discussion as you are pretty clearly too emotional to talk about it rationally right now.

I will suggest the same to you since your “opinion” has not been validated anymore than anyone else. If you are having no issue why are you even in here posting? None of your business this is for those that “are” having issue. So please go away.

I guess you missed the posts, elsewhere, where I noted that I was having network connection issues?

Anyway, all this was from your initial comment that you were getting kicked changing maps, but that TeamSpeak worked, so it wasn’t — in your words — “the internet.”

At the end of the day, I’m fine with accepting that you don’t want to understand the way that “the internet” works, and why some-but-not-all services could be having trouble; my goal was to help you understand so you could more effectively aim to resolve issues, but it’s pretty clear that’s not gonna happen.

PS: we “know” (that is, reasonably believe) that the common factor in the USA is level3, because we have a significant number of reports and each time it’s been on their infrastructure.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

I still say with the amount of issues going on the least ArenaNet should have done was to acknowledge there was an issue but was outside of the infrastructure. They could even throw in something like “we are working with the companies with the issues at this time” to let everyone know there is an issue that is or isn’t any problem on their side.

That’s an entirely legitimate and reasonable position, and definitely something I would have supported, had you opened with that — since it is a realistic response to what we know, and can know, about what is going on.

xellink.7568:

I’m curious. What does penny traits mean?

Pronounced, it sounds like “penetrates”.

Tika bladestorm.8163:

I hope they get the Mac client rolled out sooner rather than later due to the wrapper being set to winxp and when they discontinue support for winxp and vista the Mac client will no longer work.

The important people to stop supporting WinXP or Vista there would be ANet, not Microsoft; as long as they continue to build at that compatibility level, the Cider wrapper would continue to work fine.

xellink.7568:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW: if an application can cause your OS to restart without asking you, that’s an OS bug. Sure, something the app is doing might be causing it, but … the OS is supposed to, y’know, not do that, so clearly whatever the app does is triggering some OS or kernel bug leading to this.

So, I’d suggest trying a reinstall of macOS over the top of your existing install, and/or removing any third party kexts, either of which may resolve the bug in the kernel that allows that to happen.

I disagree. A fresh install for mac will lead to the same result. The fact that the problem can be contained within a virtual window and occurs on both linux distributions and Mac shows that it is not an OS issue. The issue is also replicable on other software and hence WINE developers created the virtual desktop setting to contain such issues.

WINE is not an emulator. It is a compatibility layer that adds missing elements of a certain operating system to trick the software that it is running on windows. To do this, WINE requires access to the drivers and hardware and in full screen mode, takes control of the desktop. That is why alternate tabbing does not work very well on WINE software. If one is able to access the commandline, a lot of bug testers will tell you how important the command “wineserver -k” is when trying to terminate software that prevent you from getting out of the software. However, that is only relevant if you constantly have access to the command line, such as in Linux. Mac users do not. Setting the mac to restart in this case is the most logical solution for Apple. Hence it is not a bug, but a feature and a safeguard against unsupported software.

Also, Cider is a wrapper for WINE. Try wrapping your own software and you will understand it is the same thing. WINE is the base and for those with knowledge on how to tweak it, it allows better performance. Wineapps is a database of configuration that works for certain software. Cider extracts information from that database and creates its own wrapper. I can understand why Cider does not use virtual desktop. It takes away from the native experience and the need to state the screen resolution before loading the game.

WINE is a user mode wrapper around the windows application — it doesn’t contain, or require, any kernel mode support. (At least, it didn’t six months ago, last time I looked; if the 2.0 release and/or macOS support for 64-bit applications changes that, I’d be fairly surprised, but it’s not impossible.)

Anyway, one of the core promises of modern operating systems — Windows NT, Linux, macOS — is that a user mode application shouldn’t be able to bypass protections of the system.

That includes things like rebooting the computer, since that is a protected function. So … somehow, GW2 via cider is managing to bypass that protection that the kernel should be able to apply.

Which suggests that it is managing to trigger some sort of bug within the kernel, such as in the graphics driver or some other kext, leading to a kernel crash — or, possibly, just a crash within the WindowServer process, killing all the gui, though that usually just restarts to the login screen.

eg: you are not technically wrong about how the client, cider, etc, work, but it should not be possible to reboot the computer without, y’know, the user permitting it via any of those things.

Eeyore.5146:

OriOri.8724:

• What was the thought process behind giving Alacrity to ventari? From my understanding its the clunky mechanic of the tablet that is keeping ventari from being a viable legend, and alacrity won’t change that. It feels like putting burn cream on frostbite. You tried to help but will it actually do anything?

This. That tablet is the biggest pain to use. The whole idea behind a click and place healing totem is just ridiculous. Ventari, in its current state, is garbage for any game mode. Please just rebuild the entire legend! Giving it Alacrity is pointless!

In WoW, the monk class had a click-and-place statue for both tanking and healing, and was played quite effectively. I appreciate that this is challenging to use while you are unfamiliar with it, but it has certainly proved effective in other games.

dev tracker says it was investigated, problem found, so fix should be some time soon™

dev tracker says wing 4 is disabled right now.

dev tracker says wing 4 is disabled right now.

I’d suggest simply ignore the completion of that story phase. Come back to it some other time, or never, if you prefer. It’s not actually necessary to do it to continue on to the next story — you can trigger that in the “story journal” tab in your character sheet.

Also of note: there were several determined efforts to break the mystic coin market. They failed, literally, and the market recovered within 24 hours. That’s … what a healthy market does: raise the prices by increasing demand, and more people decide it is worth selling, compensating for that.

We can’t be certain this will always be true, but right now … this isn’t a problem.

TorsoReaper.8530:

TLDR: Anet doesn’t want our money

Sure they do. What they didn’t want is to set the rewards for that LS3 episode at a point where you, personally, feel it to be worth the money (or time, since gold => gems) to purchase it.

Which is reasonable: not everyone values those things the same way, so any point they pick is going to be below what some people would pay for the rewards, right on for others, and far too expensive for the last.

Personally, I’d buy it for the story, but obviously that’s even further from what you think is the value of the episode, so … that’s entirely legit. You can feel that way perfectly reasonably.

Amaranthe.3578:

Feirlista Xv.1425:

Welcome to the internet folk, game server are fine 99% of all lag and disconnects are internet related and maybe less then 1% are server relate if there are any server issues Anet will and has always quickly posted on these forums and elsewhere that they are aware of the issue and will fix it as soon as possible in this case it’s the internet so good luck.

right,gotta wonder though why wow always run as smooth as a babys kitten unlike gw

Well, probably because the servers for WoW are located in different data centers, connected to your ISP via different transit providers, meaning that the route — and thus the machines that could lose the packets — are dramatically different.

Lexan.5930:

Very true about so I, we shouldnt have to be forced to take it. But I have noticed that people expect you to take it. It does make me laugh when some necros pop it when there is only 1 target and nothing else

Would love to see an overall buff to necro. Gonna actually try out a power build in a raid now that dps meters are ok

To my entertainment, most of the posts of “my pug experiences with DPS meters” are now “gosh, ele doesn’t produce the theoretical DPS at all”, etc. They mostly say that necro is “performing poorly as expected, save for good players, who perform in line with average players of other classes” … but exclusively on condi builds so far.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

OK then why did I stop having issues (no disconnects last night) and 2 of the other 6 folks I was referring to continued having issues?

You can have your opinion just like I can but don’t quote or direct your opinion at me unless you have something you know is correct. If its an assumption don’t quote and just say something like “I feel it is Blah because of this”.

You gotta remember anyone having the issues is already a little upset no need to throw gas on the fire just because you aren’t.

The most common factor in the reports of problems has been level3, one of the large transit providers. Their network spans the continental USA, so it’s entirely possible that all three of you were hit by issues on their network — especially since the routes will tend to converge as you get closer to the game servers.

It’s also entirely possible that you stopped having issues, while your friends still do, because there were two separate problems, and one was resolved. It could be in the same company, having more than one troublesome spot or it could be separate companies.

None of this is necessarily either related to anet, or unrelated to them, but … it’s a pretty safe bet given how long this all has lasted that the anet and ncsoft staff — who are directly motivated to fix it — can’t do that easily, strongly suggesting that it’s outside their network and, thus, direct control.

Your advice on “opinion” applies just as much to your statements as others, and you might consider stepping away from the discussion as you are pretty clearly too emotional to talk about it rationally right now.

Yeah, report them. It’s highly unlikely a one-off mistake, or self-promotion effort, will result in any sort of issue, but if they do it frequently, it’s totally gonna wind up being remembered by the people processing the reports and eventually actioned.

Kumouta.4985:

Soul Eater. It’s useless, no matter how you look at it.

It’s a 20 percent increase in damage output on non-AA greatsword skills. That’s not “useless”, other than the fact that y’all think the greatsword on reaper isn’t good.

Nope. It’s fine. Overall event doesn’t take that long, and honestly, if it’s slow it is usually because there are (a) a lot of players at the event, and (b) not enough of them run bombs, so the gate scales up, but the damage the relatively smaller proportion of players doing explosions rather than killing mobs do takes longer to get through.

Until the boss fails to die because the timer expires, it’s not a problem.

FWIW: if an application can cause your OS to restart without asking you, that’s an OS bug. Sure, something the app is doing might be causing it, but … the OS is supposed to, y’know, not do that, so clearly whatever the app does is triggering some OS or kernel bug leading to this.

So, I’d suggest trying a reinstall of macOS over the top of your existing install, and/or removing any third party kexts, either of which may resolve the bug in the kernel that allows that to happen.

Actually, it’s possible to change an account name, but the range of circumstances are extremely small. This might qualify — but yes, your ticket will get a response from their CS people.

Necro is unloved in much of the game, right now. It is felt to offer no real party support, and relatively low DPS, so is “out of the meta”, and “out of pvp”, sadly.

Opinions vary about balance, but personally, I think it is both generally good, and generally relatively stable. The meta, however, changes dramatically as people (IMO over-) react to changes to classes.

Also, tomorrow is a balance patch, so … dice are rolled, and what is favored changes again, probably. Likely over similarly small real world performance changes as last time.

Also, GW2 is pretty much single threaded. If that is 20 percent of all cores, that’s not such a surprise. You didn’t specify, so I’m sorry if you already knew that.

FWIW, I liked the Logitech G602 fairly well, but replaced it with the G900 when the main buttons on it started to die. The smaller number of side buttons didn’t turn out to be a thing, since I rarely used them — they were awkward to hit reliably while retaining position control of the mouse.

I have had zero problems with the software. It does everything you would want, supports per-game profiles and stuff. Also macros, in places where they are permitted, such as being able to have an auto-repeat left click button.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

That’s because WoW raiding outside of the hardest mythic raids is a joke. Anyone can do it with minimal effort. A WoW raid is comparable to doing tier 3 fractals or something in GW2, just show up, don’t die, and you’ll clear.

I think you might, uh, be talking from a position biased by your own skill and experience there. If you have to get up to mythic raiding to find yourself challenged, you are in the top few percent of players in WoW.

Those skills translate to other games fairly effectively, and ultimately, to you, most things are going to be trivialised. This is not the experience of the majority of players.

CptAurellian.9537:

Yeah, those loggers are great tools, if the quality of data is sufficient. No idea what GW2 technically permits, though.

Being a curious sort, I checked. Some condition damage from other players in your squad is estimated, but all their power damage should be accurate. Ideally something like BGDM will win the fight, and use the “everyone sends data to a central server” model, allowing accurate recording of multiple concurrent players.

(or anet just cave and add logs to core. that’d be a winner.)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Is that what most companies do? I don’t know, as I’ve never purchased an expansion, except for Guild Wars which were full Campaigns and, I guess, full price. Well, there was EotN; I don’t really remember what I paid for it. I think it was 10 dollars less.

Absolutely.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

What do other no-subscription companies that offer free content updates charge for their expansions? What do subscription companies charge for their expansions?

WoW gradually increased the amount of content you got in the base game over time, so essentially you purchase “everything prior to the current xpac” and “the current xpac” to get the full current content unlocked. The former was $20, basically the equivalent of the F2P version of GW2 in the sense of “not much cost to get in, but you don’t get the full endgame”.

FFXIV is about to release what amounts to a full price second expansion pack, the same way anet charging full price for xpac two would. It’s not yet clear if they will continue to charge for the first xpac, or bundle it, but history suggests bundle it with the base game. (After all, it’s essentially superseded content, now.)

So… I think it’s entirely fair to say that what you are paying a premium for is when you get the content, not if you get it, in the world of subscribe-to-play games. If you want to wait and play it when it’s obsolete, and trivialised (often to the point of soloing) you can totally wait. Want it on launch day, pay full price every time.

Electra.7530:

Thank you all. I have finished the instance now twice on 2 of my characters. The problem with the glider was my bungling. Once I got advice and took it, it worked every time for me now.

Thank you all again.

I’m just gonna say it again: the mechanic for the glider part of this is absolutely one hundred percent the opposite of what every previous map in HoT trained you to expect.

It’s technically your fault, but … like that door that people always try and pull open, despite having to push, it’s a problem with the thing tricking you into thinking you should approach it the wrong way.

I found one map where that event had bugged out, but thankfully it was possible to jump to another map instance via a leather farming group, and complete it.

Stuck events are super-annoying though. I would <3 if anet implemented something like an auto-shutdown of map instances every 8 hours or whatever, just to prevent them hanging about for too too long.

More people complaining is unlikely to speed up the resolution process, when the issue is as obvious as this.

Loki.8034:

same here, will this be fixed in the upcoming patch?

For something this big, I’d expect it to be fixed in either the balance patch, an immediately following hotfix, or (if it turns out to be network related, and outside of ANet, as it may well be) as soon as practical.

(if it’s the last, expect a mitigation that stops you being stuck forever in some patch soon-ish, but that would just transform it into “kicked from queue”, since broken network is … well, broken.)

also, doing /stuck (or an in-game /bug report) won’t get a personal response, but it will give the ANet devs the technical details they need to help identify how you got into that darn wall, and so hopefully to patch that tiny hole in the map.

RedZebra.2345:

Feirlista, please go trolling another post. Atm i have also 30-40 ping time. If you want to comment here: do it if you have a similar problem or any kind of useful info.

Note: ping times can be quite misleading if packet loss is bursty, which “normally fine, then sudden lag” nicely encapsulates. It is entirely possible that Feirlista’s contribution was entirely valid.

The most useful thing you could do for this is either:

• contact support, and ask them for help, where they can ask you to run diagnostics useful to them

• run PingPlotter, and post a screenshot of it after you experience the problem

the later is perhaps less directly useful, but it’s pretty close to what is needed to help isolate the issue…

I’d suggest you try moving WASD to ESDF instead, and see if that helps.

Beyond that, I’d personally suggest not the G600, which was way too tall for even my giant hands. I’d also suggest that 12 buttons is, probably, more than you need, and either the Razor Hex, or something with a few less buttons is good.

maxwelgm.4315:

@Everyone: You can’t really use the LFR experience for WoW as example (either good or bad), because raiding here is another story entirely; to begin with, what the OP is proposing is nothing like LFR there, because LFR is severely downgraded as far I know. There are even cases of many mechanics being removed, to the point guild raiding is the “normal” mode whilst LFR is a mere “introduction”. This is akin to the easy vs hard mode thread and this is NOT what this one is about. This one is about setting up queues so that groups of like-minded players get filled faster, instead of waiting for that one guy to take the lead and come up with a LFG invite.

You absolutely can, especially because the difficulty and rewards of LFR changed over time to try and accommodate and satisfy the players, and the social aspects around it.

I assure you that this is not just “right now” LFR that people compare, but rather the full history, which tried various things, and eventually settled out to the milder, low challenge, low reward structure that is currently is play.

ButterPeanut.9746:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Mitch.4781:

Necro is very popular , especially in wing 2. Epi’s remain their best utility.

lol, let’s try being serious here.

Necro is the worst class to bring to a raid. Even Revenant is better. Their damage is near the bottom and they offer no utility. The only thing they can do well is clear adds but, there isn’t a single fight where clearing adds is important enough or difficult enough to justify bringing a necro. Every fight that has adds all you do is have the chrono use focus 4 to group them up, and then your eles aoe them down.

Challenge mote for mursaat overseer in wing 4. Many of the best/easiest/fastest clears I’ve seen in this fight include necro.

There really isn’t an argument here. Every class can raid. There is just this false perception that only elementalists can do damage. The damage checks are not that tough. Player skill is much more important than class in the long run. Hopefully with dps meters PUGs start to see their terrible eles do less damage than most condi warriors and will start considering other DPS classes.

What I’m really hoping for is that now that DPS meters are less verboten, we get more aggregation of raid logs, which let the community see actual numbers across large numbers of players — not just their own personal (and tending to be biased) experience.

Over in WoW land, where that has been going on for a long time, it’s actually pretty solidly possible for players to see when a class is really over- or under- performing.

In some cases this has even led to significant changes in classes despite the developers literally saying that there was a much higher DPS rotation for the class, just nobody worked it out yet. They accepted that, unless they wanted to announce that, they simply had to accept the players didn’t figure it out and change the class … and they did, to fix that perf issue, without letting someone guess that, and become wildly OP.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

TexZero.7910:

Also why Greatsword ?

It’s a joke of a weapon in PvE.

Because they look mfing amazing and the Reaper was designed with the GS in mind for fantasy. If you told a Warrior they couldn’t use their GS any more they’d tell you to suck it

I’m entirely sympathetic to this position: I’d love it to be usable in raids and other challenging PvE content much more than it is.

I personally suspect that it’s a people problem rather than a numbers problem, but … whatever the cause, I’d like to see that change. It’d be great to know if it really was that underperforming compared to other classes, and if so, see appropriate buffs.

I hope we see more aggregate performance stats coming out of raid logs, now that DPS meters are no longer forbidden. That’d be much harder for anet to argue with, if you can show how poorly they perform, rather than just asserting it.

Thesis Four: Lazarus is only mostly Lazarus. Whatever was substituted in for the final element either (a) turns out to be part of something else, or (b) let the white mantle cook a not-quite-the-original version of him.

This results in adjusted behaviour, and more niceness.

Xenon.4537:

Anet should go back and study their design of the final boss fight of season 2. IMO the Shadow of the Dragon was the best designed story boss fight they’ve ever made. It had a great arena, great balance of difficulty, great story, NPC allies actually help via mehanics, great conveyance of mechanics, etc.

There were some other good ones in season 2, but that one is the most well-designed overall IMO. Season 3 on the other hand doesn’t even come close. In fact I can’t think of any season 3 bosses that come close to season 2.

FWIW, I found the dragon attacking the pale tree much harder to complete than this fight. I also liked this one better, though perhaps that is just coincidence. The lead-in especially felt less … pasted on.

Now, I’m not saying this fight is great, or the dragon fight is bad, or anything, just … each person is different: what some people find easy, others find very hard, and vice-versa.

So, yeah. It’s definitely a thing, but we should all try and remember that what we like is not universal.

Rognik.2579:

Lysander Freeman.4186:

1) One of the “riddles” is poorly written IMHO

Which riddle? There’s three of them, and I think they all make perfect sense. The first riddle is one from the real world, and the second reflects knowledge of the game world, no matter which path you take. And do please explain why you feel the riddle is poorly written.

Well, I screwed up my first pass, because I didn’t think the second riddle would be quite so, uh, nakedly racist. I under-estimated (or over-estimated?) Caudicus on that one.

Blude.6812:

You want the EXP, open up your wallet. If you don’t buy it, you will have the restricted F2P as it now is.
Hopefully ANET gives some break on the next Exp for those that paid full price 2x’s.
HoT just wasn’t worth the price, specially if you had paid for the core already.

You are not likely to get that, because you are not paying “for the expansion”, you are paying “for the expansion now”, which is a significant difference.

I’m sure xpac 2 will go on sale after three or six months, at which point you can get your discount. You just have to be happy that you didn’t get to participate in it for those months.