Guild Wars 2

What do you hope/wish to happen in Season 2?

This question was raised just recently in our guild’s forums. Before getting to the results, I wanted to invite everyone to respond here from your perspectives, but also to mention ours.

These are coming from a medium-small guild where our members play mostly PvE and do semi-regular RP. We don’t buy into the zerg mentality, we don’t believe that large guilds are the way of the future, and we do believe that socializing with our friends in game adds greatly to our fun. Fun is what it’s all about, in the end, right? (don’t worry I won’t post Colin’s smiling face). So without further ado, here is what we’ve said:

Syxx wrote

• New Playable Race – Tengu
• Lots of new maps to explore
• Legendary Armor
• Better PVP rankings
• Lots and Lots of Taimi!!!!

Ingu wrote

• Account wide commander
• SOME kind of announcement that relates to more story interactivity for immersion purposes
• New maps, of course
• A new race, no specific one but a new race nonetheless

Aria (guild leader) wrote
I only want one thing….

• GUILD HALLS
  though… some new maps, etc would be nice too…

Ela wrote

• at least 5 new maps
• story development in the style of our personal story that lasts longer than a few clicks
• new legendary skins and new ways to acquire precursors.
• All in all, I think I just hope this Living Story season 2 will impress me more than the first. As nice as the previous Living Stories might have been, they were lacking exactly that – story.

Ming wrote

• HOUSING
• A New Race: Hopefully at least hinted at through the story’s development
• A New Profession
• New Armor Sets that aren’t just exclusive to the gem store.
• And hopefully the death of Flax or Caudecus.

I wrote

• new PERMANENT content
• New maps. New skills. New traits. New Fractals. New bosses. More player-developer collaboration.
• Less repetitive reskinning. Less pushing of the limits of our ability. Less time requirement for meta achievements (less grind). Less deletion of content. LESS ZERG.
• Oh, and less Power Creep
• We just really need some average-friendly innovative content, like the hologram and marionette fights (with some adjustments), and less of the useless gates like Watchwork Knights that are only there to gauge whether we have “enough” players in our instance

Are you from a medium or small guild? Do you feel that Guild Wars 2 has made updates with mostly huge guilds in mind? Do you feel cheated by living story updates which force large amounts of players into one area and bog down your graphics card, forcing you to turn the settings down? Were you disappointed by something that happened in season 1? Now is the time to show it, while season 2 is under development.

Confirmed, a guildmate just mentioned this. I thought I was experiencing lag at first.

Hey thanks, that actually helped a lot, and I updated Wiki with the area that I missed:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Serpentwind

This works especially well if you use the trait Blasting Staff:

First of all, turn off “fast cast area of effect spells”, and act like you’re going to cast water #5, healing rain (the radius is even larger if you have the above trait on), but just hover the green targeting circle around and don’t cast it.

Now, put the circle just in front of your feet so that it’s nearly centered around you, and right-click-&-hold, to turn your camera while you’re going through the puzzle. Or, right click to aim your camera and press #5 just once to activate the targeting circle, continuing to hold the right click. Bingo, the ground lights up green and you can see any nearby ledges that are close enough to jump to.

I would suggest you use both this and the flames of kryta, but it would replace your weapon skills. This works much better on a profession that has a large AoE circle on a utility or elite slot (like mesmer’s Time Warp, is king of jp’s), but, alas, this isn’t the case with Ele.

As the title suggests, I am trying to finish off my Maguuma Explorer achievement (all others done already), but am stuck at 166/167.

I just finished world completion, I explored all the jumping puzzles, I saw Aurora’s Remains, Calx’s Hideout, Proxemics Lab, Cubular Fells, Dierdre’s Steps, and Magmatic Conjury, as suggested on Wiki, and somehow got stuck at 166.

Any suggestion would be appreciated, thanks

Very nice maps, thank you both for sharing.

Actually I had almost brushed this conversation off at first, as yet another gag.
However… a little later I witnessed his conversation in the refugee camp (he moves in between the camp and keep) with the healer. Apparently, he was able to analyze the miasma and find a way to neutralize it with sub-aether harmonics in a localized energy field, or something. Maybe it’s just this pesky golem’s wishful thinking… /shrug.

Or maybe he’s about to boost his power to a full-blown Miasma-shredding device

I am confirming this is a problem with the regular wintersday gifts which you did not get from the Glory vendor, also. The first day of wintersday, I opened about 1,000 Giant gifts I had saved from last year (hoping to either sell for profit, or that they’d update them with more things that could drop) and I happened to get a Light of Dwayna recipe, which I didn’t want.

I got excited, because I knew it was a rare drop, but then discovered it was account bound unlike Grenth’s version. So I held on to it and later saw the bugfix patch note where it was bound unintentionally, and I had planned to sell it once it appeared on the TP.

Now that it’s on the TP, and even though my recipe no longer says account bound, I still don’t have the option to sell. What happened, are there two versions of the recipe now?

(“Fractured” got curbstomped with no notification, that is my biggest gripe. Scarlet had over a month to come to fruition, a News release saying the day it was ending, and mere cosmetic meta-rewards. Fractured had only two weeks and ended super quietly, yet it had significant higher-level crafting material rewards? That said…)

Wintersday is my favorite. Out of all the holidays, I think that this is the most balanced in a way similar to the best GW1 holidays. Sure Halloween is good, but it’s only PvP portion, the lunatic inquisition, was not that interesting (plus mirrored now by Southsun Survival), so it was a PvE holiday. Dragonbash, similarly, had a great PvP aspect, but seemed like it’s only PvE portion was to scavenger-hunt the clickable objects (click a hologram! now click a pinata! now click an effigy! “That’s great.”). Wintersday is absolutely more interesting than any other holiday, for that reason.

I love the traditional aspects. We get to see the return of Tyria’s favorite holiday, with a few new twists. You can tell that the people who haven’t experienced them before, like those new to snowball mayhem, are enjoying it immensely.

People have their own personal take on each of the various activities, sure, but I would say there really, honestly, is something for everyone

Agreed, this lasted way too short! The reward for the meta achievement was way more substantial than the other meta rewards recently, and I find it extremely hard to forgive the removal of this meta (which I had 2/3rds done), with absolutely no mention of it!

Heck, this past weekend I was just finishing up the much harder Tower of Nightmares achievements, but leaving the easier (to me personally) Fractured achievements for this coming weekend. Normally, I am all in support of a good story.

This, after the last month of Nightmares, is just ridiculously bad communication.

Ascended items were first introduced to us through the brand new Fractals of the Mists. Slowly you eliminated half the use for Jewels (except that jewels are still necessary to build exotic trinkets).

Sigils are already on a slow decline, across the board, since they aren’t compatible with new ascended weapons, including legendaries.

Ascended armor, as far as I am aware, has been talked, or at least thought, about. I can only guess that’s more than a month away, but not more than four.

So what’s the point of adding new runes and sigils for “Those braving the dangers of the most difficult fractals” …if they’re most likely the ones already in ascended gear?
lol.

Is this some hint that we’ll actually be getting a new tier of runes and sigils that can be applied to ascended weapons and armor? It would be a wise choice to give us runes to put on ascended armor, mind you, since without the various unique rune effects, our build diversity goes down considerably. Would that be possible?
(please say yes!)

edit: shoot, I can’t believe I missed that. Sorry I didn’t realize ascended weapons had a normal upgrade slot in addition to the infusion slot O.o… my fault. I thought they worked the same way as ascended trinkets.

mas.7401:

Jon about deadly mixture. Why not add a way for Engineer to gain access to torment with this trait? Flamethrower and Elixer gun have a chance to inflict torment? Also what about that damage also affecting conditions. Lets face it Elixer gun and flamethrower are both power and condition weapons.

Very good point. With Torment being added to the engi’s skills, however, I’d be worried about the repercussions of this simultaneously with Modified Ammunition… that power-FT would be the next flavor of the month. With increasing the effectiveness of using these two kits being the goal, I think it’d be much more in line to increase condition duration far enough to give Sharpshooter another second of bleeding, in order to stack it up further. Either that or increase both damage and condition damage by the same amount.

My personal suggestions for Jon I can think of at this time:

-Packaged Stimulants: increase the pickup radius of Med Kit skills, and drop two of each (except Stimulant), instead of one. (context: while it’s certainly convenient to be able to toss your bandages to players that need them, it’s far more convenient to not have to ground-target a skill that you might actually be needing in a split second to save yourself! Doubling the effectiveness of each bandage might sound like a huge buff, and if so perhaps the numbers could be tweaked, but, suffice to say, two packages of healing are better than one if your barely-hurt comrade happens to walk over it, leaving you with nothing. The increase in pickup radius is to compensate for not being able to toss it at other people who you are intending to give it to)

-Deadly Mixture: in addition, increase the duration of Elixer Gun’s bleed, and allow the continuous use of Flame Jet, (no channeling the skill, but keep the Burn every 10th hit or so). (This would be a quality of life improvement for FT users, who constantly have to sit there waiting for the auto to channel before starting to do any damage, and have to constantly make the choice of whether or not to cancel the longest-autoattack-in-the-game and sacrifice a burn proc in order to use another skill that might have just come off cooldown)

-Power Wrench, If anything, change healing to more damage (“Turrets deal 33% more damage while Tool Kit is equipped”). The real problem with this trait I can think of is that Tool Kit doesn’t get nearly as much play as others. While it’s certainly a unique set of skills, I think that turrets are very lackluster in most mixed builds (you’d do better with another turret instead of the kit, or another kit that focuses on damage), and that healing them isn’t what’s really needed. In my opinion, slightly overhaul the Tool Kit…

-Tool Kit. Going along with my last statement, I’m going to suggest a few changes here to make Power Wrench much more enticing. First of all, Tool Kit should give you another turret (seriously, if it’s so focused on buffing turret builds, why does it force you to sacrifice a turret to slot it?). {Skill 5, “Junk Turret”: fires as fast as the rifle turret but mimics the engi’s downed skill #1.} Gear Shield, I think, would be better with a second activation like the other shield skills, so let’s throw perhaps a slightly weaker version of Magnet on that, and increase the cooldown to compensate. Lastly, when has being hit over the head with a wrench ever NOT knocked some of the sense out of a person? Box of nails, while very nice, might be better used as a wrench-skull-cracking mild CC skill (assuming massive damage is coming from other skills, and you have a block available).

-Empowering Adrenaline: Might on dodge. (Very simple suggestion, mimic the thief’s trait. Who needs extra damage when you’re dodging for your life? Who wants to sacrifice a dodge just for a short lived damage boost? Vigor actually decreases this buff’s duration?)

-Potent Elixers, nothing wrong per-Se, it’s just that each elixir needs to get a specific buff, rather than this trait’s simplified effect. Duration increase on Elixir C? R? strange.

The less experienced commanders are, naturally, lead by the more experienced. Used in splitting fashion, you can get more done, get more experience. The only problem with that is we don’t have a back history that goes far enough. . . or maybe we do, wait.

Take all of the WvW achievement tracks (you know those titles which you’ll be finishing, like, ten years from now) and add up the points on a slightly weighted scale (like, 1 point per Supply spent, 5 per dolyak kill, 15 points per keep capture), and come up with a new cumulative WvW achievement track which is used primarily for placing the commanders into these ranks, like Dinsy mentioned. It’s a good idea

(then once you left WvW it’d go back to your PvE rank status, like maybe total achievement points, etc.)

This is a slight quality-of-life suggestion for two types of players: 1) who have the checkbox “autoplay” constantly clicked on. 2) who don’t realize that reading certain news stories can significantly help their game.

Somewhere on the character select screen (Most likely the upper-left hand corner, which is currently empty) I suggest placing the most recent news headlines, which would direct you to the guildwars2 website where those stories would then be read. Just…. do it tastefully, artistically. Not a sterile scrolling box, like there is on the “logged in but not launched” screen. In League of Legends they actually have headlines on both login and launched screens.

If done nicely enough, it might even be able to take some of the load off the in-game mail system when you have a new release, which you do every two weeks already.

Why yes, yes they are. . .

Kinda funny how your WorldXP gain is exponentially proportionate with the number of people around you, rather than inversely, eh?

I’ll keep it brief, I would absolutely adore this for my staff skin!
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Peasant%27s_Solution

GreyFreeman.2516:

phletch.8497:

Heya TC dood from yer guild [REST] … good job on shoing your maturity doing the stompy stomp dance on a downded DB player, DB BL S.Hills :P

Sorry you had to see that. It’s embarrassing to see someone representing your server making us look bad like that. Just wanted you to know that most of us aren’t fans of that that kind of chest thumping. Hopefully, someone from REST will take care of it.

Thanks for the note guys, one of the [REST] officers has been made aware of this (as well as the rest of the guild), and we are reminding people that dancing on downed/defeated is in extremely poor taste in our opinion. I will personally try and remember to /salute each and every one of you I manage to defeat this week, and I hope that will make up for it

edit: I’m told that there is probably at least one other guild with the [rest] tag out there, and with little guilds like this it’d be more helpful to include a full or partial guild name along with it. Still, at least for this one the reminder went out.

I’m going to whistleblow on my own server, because I believe I just witnessed this exact thing happening somehow. I saw one of our mesmers in the back corner of the northeastern alcove of garrison (directly underneath the south part of the Citadel). I thought it strange during a hectic assault when most of us were on the wall using catapults, this lone mesmer who snuck in, so it stuck in my mind.

Moments later, one of our prominent commanders, who’s icon I had been seeing in the southern portion of Citadel, announced that their portal was about to leave, and to gather up for it. Shortly thereafter he was no longer in citadel, but at the inner garrison gate with a siege golem, smacking down the door as those of us on the wall got wiped by a counter- portal bomb.

So my question is this:
Where is one able to glitch a portal from the north part of garrison that people in Citadel could take? …because that seems to be bug-worthy. Bug with the Z-axis perhaps?

Sure I’d be willing to come back for seconds! My duels with owl and amy ended up in losing my marbles multiple times, with a solid losing streak. lol

After the third time we lost garrison today, I’m disappointed with TC’s shortsightedness, however I’m hopeful that these mistakes will cause people to learn.

How we lost our own garrison, during primetime, while there was a queue… is bordering pure absurdity. Then again I wasn’t there for the overnight nor the primetime losses, so I really don’t know the full circumstances. I’m crossing my fingers that egos get deflated and people here start being more practical.

awww can’t we just tone down the damage without completely removing them? I thought some environmental weapons already normalized your traits, can’t you just do that instead, and have them hit for a much lesser amount?

It’s not like they do anything special other than give you a ranged attack while using a transformation. It sure looked funny with the quaggans, and they were just ganging up on a lone player for lols (something easily accomplished without a consumable)

There ya go, good job Habib, and everyone who’s been working on this solution. Those Fallback models is something which I had, in a way, tried to suggest maybe about a month ago (not sure just how many other people may have made the suggestion, I’m not trying to take credit). I really think this is an enormous step in the right direction!

I absolutely agree with the sentiment to have the ability to render more players (cull less) by choosing to permanently retain the fallback models and simplified spell effects. Perhaps just make that behavior turn on whenever you’re in range of the orange crossed swords?

I wholeheartedly agree with you there Jayne. If it were possible to read people’s minds and filter them accordingly, or something like that…

The heart of my post was actually in firm agreement with what you’re saying, only from a more practical: “we can’t change THEIR behaviors but we can change OURS” …standpoint.

You know, with the fact that TC is always full (not for competitive-WvW reasons), and given the fact that there is actually an enormous Roleplaying following, apparently….

Why not just have two separate Unofficial RP servers?

With all due respect to the current TC-WvW community, I know that I’d love to see a whole lot MORE RP being done in that format, because, let’s face it, it can be hellavuh-lotta-fun! But I just don’t see that becoming a reality for people that are constantly faced with the dilemma “well, I’d like to RP in WvW, but I just wouldn’t want to ruin it for others”, because of the population limits. It’s a slower process getting players acclimated to WvW when they’re focusing on the RP side of things, but nevertheless it’s very possible to do both.

>_<
Of course I’m pretty much just joking, and I do believe this thread is in kind of poor taste given the recent rift in the community, but this would have been something cool to consider way earlier (like perhaps before launch). Hindsight is a kitten, eh?

Really, though, it would be nice to be able to see more RP inside the WvW format, no joke.

Basically just blame it on the circumstances this week. Try as hard as they might to be optimistic and loyal, the Stormbluffs who were ticked at last week’s performance… weren’t loyal. A significant portion of their WvW activity transferred over to SoR because they knew that what they were doing on the battlefield was more advanced than on TC.

If you like those advanced tactics and you are not loyal to the Tarnished Coast, by all means go ahead and bail. It’s not like TC is the only WvW community on the market, but it’s unique in that it hosts a “Welcome RP-ers!” attitude, which I personally value higher than winning.

Know this, though: what those above me have said is true, the time slot is very sparse compared to the more competitive “must win” mindset servers which did their best to recruit guilds to cover that time of night/early morning. If you’d like to learn more about WvW and perhaps get your own commander icon to lead for your preferred timeslot, I’m sure you can get in contact with plenty of helpful folks in Mumble (watch the map spam) or the TC community forums who can make that happen for you. The very fact that you took initiative to start this thread shows that you care, so don’t be afraid to get involved more

I feel your pain skullfairie, actually happened once to me in CoF by some player and his tagalong guildie that thought he was too good for the rest of us, and kicked three people to bring in other guildies during the final fight in Magg’s path, making a sad attempt to call us incompetent thinking we weren’t following his orders to take down the 4 acolytes simultaneously (which we were all actually making an effort for, though a couple of us were newish). Sickened me for awhile.

In the end I simply got over it, realizing that it’s not Anet’s fault, it’s not my fault, and it’s not something that should be happening.

It’s just a griefer player, one which is rare and hard to pin down/prove in some cases. If you’re lucky they’ll be able to get some manner of proof of their intentions, but it’s very unlikely.

So, as a player, to answer your question, there is none. Sorry.

(yeah Colin’s post about the new achievement rewards is probably to be taken with a grain of salt at the moment :p. Better put in the suggestions section, but I do agree it’d be cool. Much better than buying into that stupid “post pictures of cats 24/7 on facebook” trend.)

Holy cow Elementalist. Variety? ya. Survivability? ya. Usefulness in teams? if you learn it, ya.

Oh my god Engineer. Variety? equip a couple of kits to swap, and ya. Survivability? definitely do-able. Usefulness? yes, a plethora of control and the options to buff/heal your team.

Definitely Mesmer (reasons ought to be obvious though)

Thief! (well I’m biased, Thief is my favorite main class)

Know what? Just do them all!

Thank you Mufflo for this link: http://guildwars2hub.com/features/editorials/80-things-do-level-80 (reposting)
80 Things to Do At Level 80

1. Complete your personal story
2. Defeat Zhaitan
3. Unlock all available skills for your profession / race
4. Raise your crafting disciplines to skill level 400
5. Earn enough gold to purchase a racial armor set
6. Earn enough karma to purchase an exotic armor set
7. Play through all dungeons in story mode
8. Complete all dungeons in explorable mode
9. Complete all 33 possible explorable mode dungeon paths
10. Earn enough dungeon tokens to purchase a set of armor
11. Collect a set of armor from each dungeon in the game
12. Start a petition to make the Undead Orrian Chicken a new necro minion
13. Earn enough karma to purchase a racial weapon
14. Craft an exotic weapon for your character
15. Craft an exotic armor set for your character
16. Purchase a Dragon’s Deep weapon
17. Earn all possible PvE titles
18. Experiment with new builds for your profession
19. Discover all possible recipes for your crafting disciplines
20. Master all crafting disciplines
21. Experiment with the Mystic Forge
22. Create a Mystic weapon in the Mystic Forge
23. Craft a legendary weapon in the Mystic Forge
24. Explore all areas in the game
25. Find and use a vial of black dye
26. Find a vial of black dye and give it to a friend
27. Create or purchase a full set of 20 slot bags
28. Give Logan a wedgie
29. Participate in the Norn Keg Brawl
30. Unlock all Keg Brawl achievements
31. Create a new character to experience a different profession / race
32. Participate in structured PvP
33. Raise your sPvP rank
34. Achieve the rank of Ascendant in sPvP
35. Complete your favorite sPvP cosmetic armor set
36. Collect new cosmetic weapon skins for sPvP
37. Unlock all possible cosmetic weapon and armor skins in sPvP
38. Earn all sPvP titles
39. Find and complete all 31 jumping puzzles
40. Complete the current Monthly achievements
41. Help your guild earn influence to unlock additional perks
42. Outrun a centaur
43. Charm all possible pets as a Ranger
44. Create an all-ranger guild called Team Rocket, lose constantly in sPvP
45. Collect all 101 types of cooking materials
46. Fill every collection slot in the bank with at least one item
47. Participate in World versus World
48. Help your world win in WvW
49. Defeat enough enemy players in WvW to complete the medal
50. Complete the awesome Yakslapper achievement in WvW
51. Complete all WvW achievements
52. Build and use all siege weapon types in WvW
53. Earn all possible WvW Titles
54. Play the organ in Caledon forest, and party with the Quaggan
55. Earn enough gold to purchase a Commander Tome
56. Visit the monument to Killeen and pay your respects
57. Defeat the Shatterer
58. Defeat the Claw of Jormag
59. Defeat Tequatl the Sunless
60. Add new friends to your friend’s list
61. Organize an in-game event for your guild
62. Complete every map in the game
63. Participate in meta events
64. Discover and participate in new dynamic events
65. Collect stacks of butter and butter prank your friends
66. Learn the ins and outs of the Trading Post
67. Get rich selling Globs of Ectoplasm
68. Buy a Box o’ Fun and throw a party in Lion’s Arch
69. Complete an armor set for your character’s Order
70. Read all of the books in Divinity’s Reach
71. Read the story of how Ebonhawke was founded
72. Complete all possible weapon achievements for your character
73. Defeat the Champion of Grenth and purchase the exotic armor set
74. Write about your level 80 experience, have it published on GW2Hub
75. Purchase a set of armor from the guild armorsmith
76. Purchase a set of weapons from the guild weaponsmith
77. Complete all Slayer achievements
78. Complete the Lifetime Survivor achievement
79. Go skydiving in Arah after defeating Zhaitan
80. Have fun!

RUNO get back here and update this!

Delete all that crap about grinding you put into your “guide” and figure out what you can put in it for NEW level 80’s

This isn’t helping anyone!
(you are too hardcore a player to understand from a New 80’s perspective)

You could use screenshots of some beautiful lesser-visited areas. You could use writeups of little dynamic event chains that are funny and interesting. You could tell people something they don’t already know (anyone who’s been 80 for a week knows that ectoplasm and WvW exist already)!

@ New level 80’s: We should be hearing from you about what questions you have. What things do you consider fun?

I thought there was kind of an unlisted reset period (of 10 or maybe 30 minutes) from the last time any person uses the organ, including people that have left the vicinity before you got there.

It kind of makes sense for the purposes of programming the door’s operation, since it’s a non-static obstacle which anyone can pass once the puzzle has been solved. The door then closes after a period of time for everyone.

I can’t say for certain, but what you’re describing might be related to that reset period. Also, though, I’ve noticed on this particular organ that the bench gets in the way, and you have to jump on it or walk around before you’re close enough to use the organ (also only one person may use it at a time).

That is nothing like the icon for WvW “Outmanned.”

Zappix is correct it’s the generic “monster skill” icon, so my guess is it’s a specific skill that some boss or creature cast on you. You need to tell us exactly where this has occurred, and then we could probably tell you the special effect used. Since it does “nothing” it’s probably a legacy skill that was put in beta into an event but never utilized.

This thread badly needs to be updated.

There is so much stuff you could do at 80 that does not include grinding, it’s not even funny, but the OP barely takes “the FUN question” into consideration. This is not a guide for players who’ve just hit 80, it’s a guide for people that had 80 in their sights long before reaching it, and have just ran through the lower levels like they’re just “trash levels.”

Explore, do the same stuff you’ve been skipping over on your route to 80. Just, play. There isn’t anything holding you back anymore, and in fact now that you don’t have to worry about outleveling your gear, it becomes so much less frustrating, less time-consuming. Sooner or later there will be the desire to look upon this list of “endgame items” and realize that there’s still more that could be done. That all comes, basically, after you’re done exploring, wide-eyed, wondering at all the sights.

You’re not committing yourself to a grind simply by hitting level 80, as this thread seems to be suggesting. I suggest you update this thread to be more friendly.

HAha… hehe… ho…ohboy. . .

Achievement points being given away freely once a month, you want? What is this, a subscription-fee game?

Directly from Wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Monthly) :
" Each individual fractal adds one point of progress to the Fractal Frequenter track, no matter the level; you do not have to complete a 3-fractal cycle.
You don’t need to find 30 separate jumping puzzles for Intrepid Explorer. Rather you may revisit the same puzzles such as the Lions Arch three but in different overflows. You don’t have to complete any puzzle, you just have to find them.
The same jumping puzzle may be visited by separate characters on your account and count towards the monthly progression. "

Face it, in order for you to be completing the “flavor of the month” achievement, you need to be current and actively playing the game during that month. That’s why they put month-specific requirements into the last three. Fractals is do-able with sub-par gear and a pick-up-group, seriously. Discovering the jumping puzzle locations is. . . well let’s just say complaining about how hard that is, is childish. This is the easiest and fastest month to complete, period.

Seriously I don’t think this thread was created knowing that you only had to visit the starting point of the JP location for it to count.

Most likely just a fluke, Rogue. I mean it doesn’t even allow you to join the party of people on a server in the opposite region, if I’m not mistaken.

My best guess is that you fell victim to one of the many bouts of random disconnects, unrelated an coincidental to what you were doing at the time.

p.s. This thread is 3 months old. Doesn’t make sense to draw a parallel from the first full month of the game’s release.

Yeah movement was key for all previous realm-v-realm games, and it’s still key today (even consider a chess game! How sweet it would be to have your pieces move twice as far as normal). Warhorn, I should think, is grand for one of your weapon sets. Banner buffs and shouts with their nice large radius are epic, plus picking it up can give you another group swiftness. The warbanner which raises downed allies is extremely useful.

Yes, in a nutshell, support is a role you can play.

lol. EVERY server is a “good” place to WvW, you just need to figure out how the format works. True most players are not skilled at WvW and they need to be taught, but if everyone is telling you that FA isn’t a good choice, they’re full of it. Nevermind that it’s not heavily populated, that’s not important.

As far as your PvE concerns, just go to www.gw2lfg.com and see for yourself even if you had a low-ish population on your server, that you’ll ALWAYS be able to find a group to do stuff with, if you like.

Personal opinion: You just need to focus on learning how the game is played, first. Ask in map or team chat during your usual playtime if there is a guild recruiting. Ask whether they have voice comm, if you prefer. They won’t be the top of the ladder, true, but in my honest opinion that matters very little to you, the individual player, compared to your immediate friends.

Protip: the top 3-6 servers on the ladderboard are almost constantly full, so you most likely wouldn’t be able to join them. The previous champion servers have had their fires extinguished plenty of times, so nobody stays on top. Guilds transfer, loyalty means very little to some. One pair of players flipping supply camps can have a decent impact on the server’s success, but you don’t get that opportunity in the higher tiers, where there are too many people able to intercept or defend against you. So find a friend. In the meantime, repeat the borderlands jumping puzzles every day for gear, exp, and siege blueprints for when you’re going to use them later.

Warrior is not one of the best solo classes, so I can see where the frustration is coming from. Fireheart Rise can be difficult as well. I guess the only advice I can give you is to play around with different skills and traits in the heart of the mists to see if you can find something with a little less squish and a little more bulk. Then go to the trading post and at least pick up Fine or Masterwork trinkets (assuming you thought of armor already) that are level 55+ and give you Power or Healing as the primary stat.

Thirdly – Thief shortbow is used A LOT. In fact it’s their only ranged AoE weapon, and their best AoE weapon. I know ranger uses shortbow a lot too, but it’s basically the best weapon in WvW and most dungeons for thief, when the ranger also has longbow and axe at his disposal for range. Thieves have a pistol, which is good mainly for midrange single-target fights.

I haven’t pulled out a dagger mainhand and used it for fighting in a long time. P/D is better for DPS than backstab, and twice as survivable.

Other than that, I would echo what moirweyn said.

I play a thief as my main, but I can’t speak for warrior, as I haven’t played one much since beta. What I know is, first of all, that both warr and thief are good at range in addition to melee. Secondly, the warrior being one of the first classes revealed in the “profession reveal” sequence, is designed to be more straightforward, more simple.

I am always grateful to a warr that brings banners or shouts to buff the party in a dungeon. I’m equally satisfied, however, when a guardian brings similar shouts, and Light symbols which I can combo some area Retaliation off of. All of these tactics, though, require sacrificing a little bit of selfish glass-cannon type choices.

Thief can be the same way. I tend to be impatient so I’m usually running with signet of shadows, and I tend to run with untrained pugs so I have to use Shadow Refuge to save peoples’ butts a LOT when they get downed. Both those can be changed to venoms though. I always bring spider venom, and boost the party’s damage with Leeching venoms (armor-ignoring damage + heal) which I share along with two stacks of might, and I’ve also got a number of ways to help tank for my party or provide invisibility for a run. Yup, I play a support thief, and I’ve seen most dungeoneers doing the same.

Honestly, I get the impression from your original post that you play a support-loaded necro, so you might want to try a selfish character to get the feel for it, and both professions have builds that do just that (cookiecutter signet builds, mostly).

Signet warrior is quite common, which leads me to believe that, outside of dungeons, warriors prefer to strongarm their opposition by quickly unleashing control and spike weapon skills, and continuing to spam them on recharge the same as Late For Tea is suggesting a thief is played. A good tactic, to be sure, but a little bland. Thieves can also be played that way too, either by spamming 1,2, and 5 on the dagger skills, and 2 with the shortbow for range. For a cookiecutter signet thief that would be the typical playstyle: bland, selfish.

Might I humbly suggest starting out with playing dagger necro for a change? Or axe-spam? See first if you like the playstyle. See if you can find specific scenarios where you would want to be using just one of your weapon skills much more than the others. If yes, then thief, if no, then warrior.

The reality of the Initiative mechanic is that a thief has the choice. One does not simply spam all the skills on recharge. One might choose to spam a single skill. One’s choice of spamming a single skill might be the thing holding them back… Choosing to hold back on your trigger finger can give you the edge in battle. Do you dodge strategically, or spam it? When you fight on your own terms, and when you save your resource for the right moments, it’s almost the same as using the dodge button wisely. Take your queues, plan your attack, always be ready to retreat or to push. A competent thief is fluid in battle, from range to melee equally slippery, still contributing instead of spamming Heartseeker then getting downed.

The thing that bugs me the most, is that when Legendaries were first introduced in a TwitchTV broadcast, everybody was excited for these cool visual effects, but comforted by the fact that equipping one of these rare weapons shows a certain amount of dedication and mastery of several aspects of the game. It wasn’t just something which you could buy… because you had to show, without a doubt, that you had mastered gameplay in certain ways. You weren’t just some skill-less monkey pressing buttons.

Powertrading is one area of skill. I’ll give you that. But everybody who is wielding a legendary weapon is supposed to have mastered more than one area of the game, but you can certainly now master just one area and call it a day. I don’t call Arenanet any sort of a “pay to win” company, but I really truly think this design decision is based on something other than the Fun Question.

It’s a pretty simple tower-defense game concept. It’s well designed, In my opinion.

My pug group just completed “Toypocalypse Canceled” with four people. We hardly even coordinated at all either, just concentrated on building catapults and snowmen early, and continued the rest of the time. I don’t think the nerf is called for, honestly. Take some lessons from the forum thread about it, it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Global LFG is currently only available on your friends tab. I know that sounds insane, so let me also back you up on this:
“Looking for Group” is currently broken, in my opinion.

It’s completely non-specific, so even if you use it nobody knows what purpose you have for looking. Complete strangers in the zone see you on the LFG section of their friends/contacts tab, potentially confusing them. Pick up groups are often found both in the zone where the dungeon is located and in Lion’s Arch, but there is no chat that can reach both at the same time, resulting in sometimes massive Waypoint fees if you’re dungeon is unpopular. On top of everything else, certain dungeon doors getting contested (ex: CoE as in the original post) gives you a limited window of opportunity to start, so it’s essential that we have a better pick-up-group tool, even if it ends up getting spammed like the Party Windows of old GW1 (which by the way was brilliant). We’d rather put up with some spam to avoid the frustration of not being able to find a PUG when the time is right.

I’m very glad the development team is aware of this “suggestion.” Frankly, this is one of my pet peeves about the game at the moment, and I have seen this commented on a number of places (I also made a suggestion thread on this once, I think).

Why I put the quotations around suggestion? Because like a few others, I believe it to be quite a no-brainer. If whoever coded the in-game-Options Menu gave it but a few minutes, they would probably be able to fix this easily. Yes, fix. It’s a problem.

(with the rise of Fractals of the Mists runners, it’s clearly obvious that people can and do run dungeons multiple times hoping to profit. This is one idea I had to increase participation in running the other dungeons for profit as well, increasing overall wealth and trade amongst players for horizontal instead of vertical progression. If you like vertical progression this probably wouldn’t apply to you.)

Here’s my suggestion:
For every single dungeon, there needs to be more of these. Don’t worry too much about correlating it (like if it absolutely needs to be a Gift of Ice to make sense with this “Conjure Frost Bow -like” weapon)… What we absolutely need is more incentive to do the regular dungeons for profit, otherwise people are going to spend much less time doing them.

How it works:
Currently if you want to make loads of profit through running dungeons and creating high-end items, there are three ways to go, Ascalonian Catacombs (which is extremely popular), Honor of the Waves, and Citadel of Flame (also popular). AC and CoF are popular due to familiarity, familiarity due to previously being able to exploit certain things. The other dungeons are only being done on a regular basis by players that want either the armor/weapon skins (TA is popular for the Nightmare weapons), or a specific legendary. The others cannot possibly be done for profit in the same way, which ultimately means that players looking to turn a profit should be doing these three, and so fewer experienced players are in other dungeons to help newbies learn them.

How it should work:
Every dungeon needs to have an incentive like this. Exotic non-tradeable armor skins are not enough incentive! Yes, it’s cool, but it’s not profitable.

Let’s face certain facts for a moment:
1. Humans naturally expect to do some work to obtain any reward, so they’re used to repeating things a few times in order to get better at it.
2. More profit should come from getting better at your job, and doing it more often.
3. Contrary to popular belief, item progression does not have to be vertical to be desirable. In fact this has already been proven absolutely correct with people chasing after Legendary weapons (same stats as an exotic, but really worth the effort to obtain).
4. Volcanus, Foefire’s Essence, Wintersbite, Foefire’s Power, Aether, Azureflame, Mjolnir, Wintersbark, The Crossing, Arachnophobia, and The Mad Moon, all have a portion of the recipe as grinding dungeon tokens.
5. The last 3 on that list were the only ones to be promoted at all by Arenanet, and subsequently their prices are very low compared to what they take to create, precisely because they were promoted in such a way as to let massive amounts of players know of their existence.

What should be done:
Knowing that new weapon skins take less effort to animate than new armor sets, I believe more of these spectacular, tradeable skins like Volcanus need to be put into the game, using various other Gifts. Just throw this concept at one of your weapon artists and see what they come up with!:
1 Eldrich Scroll + 100 Mystic Coins + 1 Gift of Entertainment + 250 Ancient Rifle Stocks = ????
Really, though, the sky is the limit. The whole point of this is that currently you can, for example, grind CoF and make a vial of liquid flame, and if you are hardcore enough to have 50 skillpoints to spare for the scroll, you can turn that into a significant amount of Coin. This incentive needs to be non-exclusive of the other dungeons.

Oh, and one more thing. ADVERTISE the existence of these other high-end weapons, because it gets to be incredibly annoying when people complain about how there’s so little to do when they could easily be building up a collection of these things because of their awesomeness. Seeing a charr guardian Empower a Volcanus firsthand is pretty amazing, but seeing an Arachnophobia on your website was the game-changing move to drive that market out of the shadows.

I do actually agree with you, about the problems with the RNG system, and Anet has some sort of scavenger hunt in mind down the pipeline: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/ (read the last section). Not sure how long it’ll take for the scavenger hunt to be implemented, but we’ve definitely seen the increase in mystic forge drops as promised already (though a relatively small increase, it made an impact).

So anyways, the rest of what I wanted to say doesn’t really apply anyways. Enjoy your good news

Thank you for the responses, everyone, and keep them coming

I haven’t made a final decision yet, but wanted to say thank you for the replies and private messages. I am rather picky, but I have a few in mind to talk to privately.

First, though, let me clarify something: I’m looking for a guild that is keenly aware of the other guilds around and, in short, is really community-friendly. When I say “I want events”. . .
I’m not talking about a weekly guild-gettogether. I’m talking about BIG stuff. Stuff that takes a week to prepare, or so. Stuff that, not only the guild can enjoy, but which says “we want to be your friends” to the whole server! …without resorting to making it a “recruitment opportunity” …shudders

Are you going to host a public event soon? Planning on it down the road? I know it’s a daunting idea, from personal experience, but let me assure you it’s much easier than you may be imagining.

Mavaho.1046:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxszx60ZwGw

This deserves it’s own friggin’ thread. LOL
Good job. Great insights in that video.

Creslin.1758:

Principe I.1492:

sireuh.3870:

A guy said this on another forum

A few quotes from 3 months back about gearing:

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”
– Colin Johanson

they just told a mountain of lies.

I will not give a penny to ArenaNet

No…you don’t know if they lied yet. Read what they said:

If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game.

They only promised that items that take an unrealistic amount of time to acquire will not have statistical advantages. Now ask yourself, do you know that Ascended items will take an unrealistic time for most players to acquire? No, you don’t. For all we know, Ascended items may take around the same time to acquire as exotics.

Legendary items are clearly what they are talking about in the quote above. They actually DO take a ridiculous amount of time and dedication to acquire, and as they said, they are only differentiated by appearance.

So long as Ascended items can be acquired in a reasonable amount of time, then no promises have been broken.

Ok I have to agree with you on this point, Creslin. It makes sense to be acquiring rare loot over time as it is not an unreasonable amount of time, with the understanding that there are multiple ways of collecting them, as we have seen said about getting them through dungeons, drops, and WvW collectively. It’s not going back on their words, per-say, until you get to the point where you realize that that “old normal” doesn’t match the “new normal”, and that the “old” parts of the game are going to be increasingly easy and un-challenging compared to the “new” parts. This isn’t a proper remedy to the boringness of the game, but quite on the contrary it is creating a smaller portion of the game that is actually fun (read: challenging)

If it had just been a content update, with new harder gameplay, that would have been extremely fun. People rise to the challenge.

The problem lies in the fact that there’s any item progression at all, which is the opposite of what they did right with GW1. Highest-end items in GW1 have the same EXACT base stat as the most common of common items, and the same exact bonus stats as some of the much more commonly dropped Rare-quality items.

The fact is, GW1 players wanted to play GW1 because of that basic difference, and they weren’t inclined to go play some other MMO where gear progression was already available. GW1 died out because it was OLD, not because it didn’t work right.