Guild Wars 2

Shame that I am at work. But well done, brothers and sisters!

So, I personally love the new Tequatl battle. It’s epic, it’s thematic, it’s chaotic and it encourages team effort. The multi-front nature of the battle truly makes it seem like a major conflict in a war.

That said, I feel like some of the mechanics could use some tuning.

Tequatl’s shockwaves: The hitbox for the shockwaves moves ahead of the graphical depiction for a number of reasons. Rendering speed, server latency, timing, so on. Once someone learns this fact then jumping it becomes trivial, except that there is just enough variance in when the actual force will hit you that you can jump or dodge as you expect to be able to 100% of the time and still have a 50/50 chance of failing and losing half your HP and all your mobility for a couple of seconds. In a battlefield where poison fields that can spike you down to death in a few seconds are flying around willy-nilly, this kind of unpredictability neither validates skill nor is it fair to those whose rigs meet and exceed the recommended requirements but still chug in massive conflicts like the battle with Tequatl, where framerates plunge by half or more.

Turrets: The turret mechanics are fine and the recharge rates on the skills seems about right. In fact I was glad to see the turrets receive some reason for existing on the battlefield, and it also gives players a combination of artillery and support with which to strategically attack the enemy and support frontliners. However, the turrets are known to glitch out and either start firing late or not fire at all until one exits and re-enters the turret. Again, this unpredictability can completely derail an effort in a battle so time-constrained as this one. This bug must be fixed. I also feel that the damage of the first skill needs a boost to give it some use because as of right now it is a trap for inexperienced players. Really, skill 1 is just filler between buffing allies and clearing poison clouds.

Losing conditions: The timer is basically the cheapest way to mandate a losing condition in the game. I personally think that the destruction of the megalaser is a more fitting condition for losing the encounter than a fifteen minute timer running down. That said, I feel like fifteen minutes is also much too constraining for the amount of toughness and vitality Tequatl has. I do not think that his power nor his durability should be tuned down, but rather that the timer should be extended by five to ten minutes. This I believe would give coordinated groups a fair chance at victory, and I feel that skill would still be validated, because boy, I have seen and been part of some terrible runs where an hour wouldn’t have been enough time to defeat Tequatl.

Besides those caveats, I feel this is quality content. Refine it a bit and it will be a worthy addition to the overworld.

Dear Blackgate,

You may dismiss what you see here. If you want this blithering idiot, you can have him. Crystal Desert will attend to its own dragon slaying in due time.

Keep helping those underpopulated servers. Fare thee well,

A humble nomad of the Crystal Desert.

Def looks bugged. I’ll hold off on the torches and pitchfork a bit.

I rolled a charr day one. The only reason he hasn’t gotten much play is because I’m an altoholic. But he is now getting his due—I’ve had no trouble doing jumping puzzles and engineer is quite fun. Also the charr personalities are great. Haters gonna hate.

In the past two days I have acquired thirty rares. In turn, salvaging with a mystic forge kit, I’ve obtained twenty three ectos (of twenty salvages, the other ten rares were sold as is).

Basically, rng is rng. This is a nonstory.

Anet won’t be replying because they laid all the cards on the table.

Magic Find would simply disappear from the Celestial gear. Simple as that, the end.

uh, they said they would be account bound from the time they announced the details of the incoming changes. Previously equipped items are soulbound to their original owner. Your situation is from your own negligence. :v

It’s all these people that “must has nao” that are complaining.

I have Syzygy (Celestial Ascended Amulet).

MF confirmed gone. My MF infusion is still good though.

Scarlet minion invasions now give ascended crafting materials as a reward for completion.

I personally received 5 Dragonite Orbs. There may be more for actually defeating Scarlet.

Joined the club tonight.

Necromancer
30/30/10/0/0

Armor is an exotic mix of apothecary, cleric and carrion. Runes are a full set of Superior Afflicted runes. Had a rare rampager staff and a rampager wand/dagger combo; only the wand/dagger option was used.

Utilities were Consume Conditions, Blood is Power, Plague Signet and Locust’s Signet.

My main strategy was to explode Liadri with conditions. Many attempts ended with a botched roll, a cosmic rift pull into a dangerous spot, or death by aoe due to weakness killing my stamina. In the winning bout, I turned Liadri’s conditions against her. The extremely punishing durations of her cripple and weakness worked to my advantage. Besides that I danced around in the middle and weaves in and out of the sage zones while moving in a roughly clockwise fashion around the arena. In the end Consume Conditions won the day because without it I simply would not have been able to outmaneuver the last aoe before Liadri perished. I did her in with a thousand cuts using bleed, torment and dhuumfire.

This was a very hard won fight. I don’t know if I’d like to do this kind of content often but there’s no denying that I was euphoric with the win.

Don’t get hung up on the kittenlords out there. Earlier I had the pleasure of going after Liadri with several other gauntlet enthusiasts. This being the last night the Pavilion is open for the foreseeable future, the mood was lighthearted and everyone jumped to a revive, or shared tips. A couple were just there to revive others! This is in addition to the fact that many guilds have been dropping expensive buff banners in towns and commons areas.

So yeah. Public map wide always is the channel of choice for punks but there are many selfless and helpful players out there as well.

Event reward items that you otherwise can’t get again? Legendaries aren’t the only exclusive items in the game.

It’s been like this for as long as I can remember.

Exclusive mini giveaways happen. It’s not a mistake, it’s not even a new thing.

Just look up the value of a miniature panda in GW2.

Fact is that some people can get things that 99% of the population cannot. Them’s the breaks. You can either stop crying about it or pony up what it’s currently worth if you want it that bad.

OR

you can wait and see if Anet does further giveaways. It’s a little early to tell if this is an absolute exclusive or timed.

Don’t believe the hype. Ranger has its problems like any other class but a good player can make do. Take it from a years long Ranger.

Melandha

First image is a closeup from Beta 3. Second is as she is as of this post.

My Necromancer has been the same Sylvari since the first Beta they were playable. Enter Melandha.

I’ve never believed that Necromancers had to be all black and red and pallid dreariness. Melandha personifies that belief. I took inspiration for her from generally dangerous rainforest flora and fauna, which is typically bright, lush and colorful.

She’s a bit of a mischievous scamp, too.

“Very rarely” translates to “more or less the same chance you have at an exotic.”

Which is indeed very rare.

Chill works. Just not the way people think it does.

It also does not affect Skill 1 since they do not have cooldowns.

I believe, then, that some parity should be in order. Even though I am still not a fan of footfalls, having an odd man out seems… well, odd.

Flameseeker Prophecies doesn’t need any stupid footfalls to cramp its surreal elegance. I personally think that most of the legendaries are too over the top with the particle effects and look more like gag weapons than anything “legendary.”

One of the reasons I haven’t invested any time or effort into making a legendary is that most of them look too garish or loony for my tastes. I make exceptions for a few: Bifrost, Flameseeker Prophecies, the Greatswords, and Bolt. The Flameseeker Prophecies actually looks the part of its tier and doesn’t need to make its wielder leave scorch marks or whatever with every step.

Also, I suspect that off-hand only weapons in general don’t get things like footfalls, though owners of the torch or focus are free to contradict me if this is untrue.

My money’s not on Celestial either. I do wonder what will happen to the Explorer’s insignia set. I don’t think it will be a stat change because then ANet would just do that rather than letting us pick from the other available insignias of the appropriate level. What about the crafting? Will we just cease to be able to craft Explorer’s gear? And claws, what will they be good for in a post-Explorer era?

Yeah, I was disappointed that the Fellblade didn’t have its dark coruscating effect in GW2. It just has this… vaguely misty aura.

Things I Miss About Guild Wars:

• Having more than two Elite Skills
• Elite Skills not sucking
• Replayable Story/Mission

I say just be smart about this while you can be.

Stop complaining about the non-compensation for Celestial (if you got it only for the magic find, what were you thinking?); it’s going to be easy enough to buff your magic find ACCOUNTWIDE anyway, from the sounds of it. Fine and Masterwork items drop like candy, after all.

In the meantime, craft Explorable sets to change them into more useful sets for cheap when the patch rolls around.

I actually have this coming Tuesday off from work so yes. :P

I noticed from the start that GW2 didn’t have much going for it in terms of appealing weapon skins and you were stuck with the same basic looking crap for 60+ levels. I personally love understated but elegant skins like the Krytan set, the Aureate set, and so on so forth. The problem is that there isn’t much variety that drops out there. Most of the really neat skins are locked up behind a laundry list of item hoarding and the godforsakenly stupid Mystic Forge. This does kill one’s motivation quite a bit and makes for a rather boring quest to get the thing to complete your character’s look.

Example. In Guild Wars: Factions there was this sword called the “Gothic Sword.” It was, like I mentioned, a rather elegant and understated longsword skin in the traditional cruciform style with an extended pommel. It dropped only in the Echovald Forest. To this day, weapons that drop from Tyria and Cantha in GW1 are not inscribable, so what you got is what you were stuck with (moreso back in 2006). So that made the day, the moment, that the +15% damage w/ Health > 50% version with max damage dropped from a Stonetouched Kirin all the more memorable and exciting. Back then then the sword’s value was measured in ectos, yet I gladly bound it to my Warrior and she proudly wields it still. I got it when I was least expecting it, while I was just focused on my task of exploring the world. It was unique among my peers because it was rare that a combat-worthy version of that particular sword could be found. It was fantastic for me because the skin was magnificent without being overworked flash.

That’s the kind of excitement you don’t get out of the Mystic Toilet.

A full year of playing and I never noticed…

I’ve been working on my elementalist alt and I wold have barely noticed leveling up if the corsairs and drakes attacking me weren’t sent flying back about 700 range and down for three seconds. Have I missed this, and has anyone else had a similar experience?

Honestly, I’ll probably just profiteer on the materials market until it cools down a year from now. Then I will outfit my most used characters. I too am an altoholic, with ten character slots (one currently vacant). I never dreamed of getting them all into exotic gear, much less ascended gear.

To be honest, ascended gear isn’t that big of a deal, unless you’re OCD and want all of your gear to be pink. Perhaps there will be an armor skin or two that I will deeply desire, but consider how pathetic most of the upper level armors are in regards to my taste, probably not. Furthermore, the jury is still out on what upgrades will be going on these new ascended gears, which is too much of a sacrifice in my opinion for a piece of crap infusion slot that barely does anything outside of agony resistance.

I did read it, but not as well as I ought to have; I apparently missed a key word or two, and for that I apologize. You do make a fair point. With Karma now being account wide, direct delivery seems like the reasonable step. Karma bottles are somewhat of a nuisance, taking up inventory and bank space if not immediately consumed (which will be the usual practice since boosters will have no effect).

Perhaps part of a future update, because I saw no mention of this anywhere and they have obviously planned to keep them around for a while longer.

No, and I am tired of reiterating this point but here we go.

Karma consumables were introduced earlier in the year when daily and monthly achievements began to give tangible rewards. This was because people were having a tough time getting the substantial amount of karma that they needed to buy elements necessary to the creation of legendary weapons. The effect that boosters had on the karma consumables WAS AN UNINTENDED SIDE EFFECT of the way the gain was handled. Since Anet is giving an inherent 50% boost to the consumables at the same time that they are removing this function from the game, I can hardly sympathize with anyone kvetching about the update or caterwauling about how the karma consumables are pointless without the boosters.

ANet has monetized the downed state via finisher items on the gem store.

It can be safely said that it is not going away.

7. A visual overhaul for Scarlet to make her more attractive to look at

Getting awfully progressive up here.

Update to game text:

• Every spelling error, continuity mistake, noun juxtaposition and lore fail is now fixed.

Seriously, the multitude of grammatical idiosyncrasies and downright wrong lore or background info torments me. The inconsistency in rune, skill and trait formatting makes me froth. At worst, it is godkitten ed inscrutable whether a rune’s ability activates on you landing a hit, on you getting hit, or whatever! Trait abilities are not as clear as they should be on internal cooldowns. The sentence formatting for sigils and runes especially is downright atrocious.

When one of the farmers in Queensdale tells me that he’s providing supplies to keep up the fight against the Seraph, you know that it was probably an intern keying the entry up.

In fact, ArenaNet should just give me the raw text for the entire game and I’ll have it done by next week. Jesus.

Orr used to be worse.

A lot worse.

In fact, people cry now because the changes essentially killed zerg farming (before the champion update) due to the decrease in mob density.

I’m proud to say I mapped that SOB when it was crawling with undead, but if it were in the same state today as it was then I wouldn’t do it a second time.

I like it because it gives you a chance to make a comeback.

I don’t like it because it is still somewhat glitchy, and because the downed states between classes are horribly unbalanced. The 3-skills on all of them except Rangers are next to worthless, 4-skill means nothing if you’re being directly attacked, and 1-skill is, as I said, horribly unbalanced between classes.

If it were me, I’d change the downed skills appropriately:

Elementalist: Skill 1 inflicts 1 second of blind with each attack. That lets you pin down one opponent, so if you were being group attacked you’d still get killed. In PvP, it wouldn’t matter much if the opponent is intelligent enough to fight a way around and finish you, so it wouldn’t upset the balance much. Elementalist’s downed state should be themed around avoidance and disruption, judging by Mist Form’s presence.

Engineer: While an Engineer’s downed state is very disruptive, it sits in a class akin to the guardian’s: a downed engie is a dead one.

Guardian: Skill 1 should inflict 2 seconds of burn with each attack; more damage on burning targets. Being that the Guardian fires a death ray of smiting from his fingertips, it hits more like a flashlight of smiting. Adding a conditional damage increase gives a guardian a better fighting chance when downed. As it currently stands, a downed guardian is as good as a dead guardian.

Mesmer: Actually, the inflicted confusion can be really strong. I’m not going to suggest any changes here.

Necromancer: A Necromancer in downed state can actually cause quite a bit of havoc, although you have to trait into it to do it, and who is honestly going to waste traits on buffing a semi-defeated state? This goes against the idea of building a character in the first place, which is to not get owned. If Necromancer downed skills get a little buff and the stupid downed state traits get dumped entirely, I won’t be sad.

Ranger: Likewise, rangers can stack a lot of bleeds with throw dirt, so no change, though why it causes bleeding is far beyond my ken. Also, Lick Wounds is very glitchy. I’ve had times when I’ve used this skill and my pet just sits there going “hurrrr” while I’m getting slapped around until I die.

Warrior: Warrior’s downed state is awfully weaksauce, but it needs to be because a Warrior can essentially say “no” to a downed state and have a chance to rally after fighting at FULL POWER. While this is very cool lorewise, I do not know if I agree that it is balanced.

Thief: Thief’s downed state is also very meh, but I don’t know if I have any suggestions.

For all classes, Call Aid should either heal more or not get interrupted every time one takes damage. I feel like these changes would make downed state more relevant and a part of the experience rather than an underpowered state of inevitable death.

Halfbaked garbage. The Queen Jennah mini is nice, I suppose… but why do I need 5+? Did ANet not think that mini trading WOULDN’T be big with the way it went over in GW1? (It was madness.) What makes no sense to me is the experience scroll. I have zero (0) alts out of 10 under level 20. That makes this item less than worthless to me. And the birthday booster? Nice, I guess, though I have to question the thoughtfulness of a friggin consumable as a birthday gift. A themed hat of some sort or something would’ve been much preferred. I could look at it as some sort of magical cake, I suppose.

I, too, want the old launcher back. Its design was beautifully minimalistic, and the log-in highlighted the wonderful concept artwork in cutscene format against the iconic logo in such a way that it made you anticipate just jumping in.

The current launcher is a HUGE “meh.” Just another road sign on the way to Tyria. Surely there’s a way to enter authenticator data if need be, like adding a field (like in THE FIRST GAME).

Doing the Scarlet Briar invasions nets you 2-6g per invasion (potentially more if you’re a jerk and farm the Aetherblades instead of staying on task). Occasionally you hit it big with a lucky dye drop or named exotic. I cashed in on an abyss dye and used up the gold dye I found.

Preferably like in GW1. 15k per piece and a handful of crafting mats. End.

I just want to see a return of a lot of the armor skins from GW1. Sigh It’s been a year and still all we have are the Krytan (very nice), Primeval (also nice) and Profane (freaking hideous) skins. Also, what’s up with the price disparity between these and the newer skins?

Prices have come down a whole lot from the initial panic, but the Exalted Coat recipes are holding steady at around 3g. I was able to get Emblazoned Coat recipes for a comparatively piddly 60s.

Well, ANet already stated that it intends for the Zephyr Sanctum to return regularly. I figure they’re right because I can’t see them just throwing the Labyrinthine Cliffs area away after one use in the game’s first year. I figure they’ll be available in-game then, but until then the current stock is it.

You can save your defensive attitude, ezd. What I meant was why this particular series of recipes required you to use one for each and every individual piece of equipment that fell under the eaves of the Celestial line instead of just letting one discover them from the insignia or rune instead. Like I said, it seemed unnecessary except as a waste of time.

Sometime within the past hour or two, Celestial Emblazoned Coat recipes were kitten . Now, there are 9 of them on the trading post going for 5g each.

The case is similar with Celestial Exalted Coat recipes, at 3g each.

My question is why didn’t ANet just make the sigils and runes recipe bound and not the individual pieces? That’s the most unnecessarily cantankerous thing I’ve seen from ANet regarding crafting recipes.

This puzzle frustrated me to no end at the beginning, but now… it’s not so bad. There are some days I can do it in my sleep, others where I keep failing the simplest jumps. I believe observation and dogged determination can carry anyone through a jump puzzle. If you can dodge an attack, you can do any jumping puzzle imo.