The main problem with an MMO storyline is that there isn’t much threat and danger. Players don’t really mind if a city gets destroyed as there will still be a trading post, repair anvil, and bank somewhere else. You can repeat the story again tomorrow.
The LOTR trilogy puts the characters under a lot of genuine threat, even if most survive. I haven’t read GoT but I imagine the threat is there and frequently realized. MMOs need to go for excitement instead, a bit like a B movie blockbuster with flashy effects where you know nobody will die but it’s fun anyway.
Given that the way the story is delivered, GW2 could even draft the LS as a comic book or manga and see if it stands on its own merit. The comic could then be used by new players to catch up on previous living story chapters. Maybe they could even use screenshots as the images for that.
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As time passes there will probably be more event chasers and less achievement hunters. This will give a good farming period for a few weeks until the numbers in the zone drop below critical mass, possibly.
“As a Thief I can stay underwater and fight pretty much anything with a Spear.”
Any one opponent. If you want to cleave multiple opponents you have to surrender your defense and risk getting hit through the block response. So the spear is a essentially a broken weapon as it either too good or too bad and never balanced.
They should probably just give up explaining how Scarlet formed these alliances. It was completely unbelievable and best forgotten. Reading how to become the greatest negotiator of your generation from a book, that just happened to be in your possession, during your spare time when you’re not being the worlds greatest scientist, is no more believable.
At the moment when you talk to a repair vendor they say “Do you want to repair your armor?”. Well of course I do! I cannot think of any time I would not want to repair my armor for free after clicking on a repair symbol. So please remove that wasted line of conversation and make the game a little bit better.
Underwater combat is sort of ok for fighting a small number of enemies but it is not fit for PvE bosses or major PvP fights. Future content can be released on that basis but it would mean we’re not going to see any major new underwater battles.
It would take a lot of work to bring underwater combat up to scratch. The land combat system looks 3D but is mostly 2D, the prime example being combo fields. Water combat needs to be 3D and immediately there are problems with traps, fields, walls, area targeting, etc. This means that weapon skills are limited (boring), classes are gutted of their utilities, traits fail as utilities are not viable, and so on. That’s just the start of the problems so I’m guessing nothing will be done until water combat really is needed for the Deep Sea Dragon.
The players decided they wanted something else more than the Abaddon fractal. Does this encourage the designers to create the Abaddon fractal after all? Probably not, not if they can put the time into a dungeon relevant to LS2 instead.
Players will complain if it does come (our votes were irrelevant), doesn’t come (lots of us voted for it), or appears in another vote (we want something new) and so on.
Entirely within character. She was always going to cause trouble somewhere and somehow with Scarlet’s junk. It just happened sooner than later.
I’m mainly with the OP here on the hammer being useful, however, if your group can work on full dps then it should work on full dps. Things should die fast enough in dungeons that nothing else matters. However, PUG groups are full of poor dps players who are flimsy and cannot defend themselves. If you’re in a group with them and keep on playing dps while everyone dies then you are as bad a player as they are. The best solution is usually the hammer.
Not every trait is fantastic for everyone. Some players will use the time given by endure pain to prevent their doom, even if you can’t. The master traits are good enough to compensate even if you don’t like the grandmasters.
“My friend had a very god theory on this, do you remember when we voted for either Evon Gnashblade or Ellen Kiel, notice E or E. He suggested that Anet had the idea of E for a long time and whichever character lost/won would become E of the two”
Nice spot but in terms of the story, but Evon and Kiel can just get things done without sending secret messages to private investigators in the hope that something may happen. This is true of both the LA Murder and the Dry Top exploration. Evon can just hire some lackeys to look round Dry Top and report back any trade opportunities. Ellen can fly over with her airship and rescue the Zephyrites (shame our characters haven’t realized that yet!).
In terms of story telling, they could kill Rox tomorrow and Rox would be dead, gone, nowhere in the world. Rytlock is in charge of a Legion, you can see him in story dungeons, and so on, so it is much more difficult to kill him off and keep continuity. Using a new set of characters allows much more freedom and we really don’t know what the future holds for them.
“I used to be really into the lore but since they named Mordremoth way out of context, and no explanation for it, why worry so much about lore and theories? "
Season 1 was completely unbelievable in parts so if you managed to get through that then you shouldn’t be worried by your characters revealing something that should have been common knowledge (but surprisingly wasn’t).
The head of the Pirate council and Kiel are both standing at the fort, overseeing the reconstruction. During the last festival there were a couple of guards who you could follow on patrol and by listening to their conversations you could hear what was happening in LA. I bet it is still all there in game if you want to look for it.
We’ve just got get used to NPCs being out of date with Living Story events. Half of the NPCs in Kryta should have said something about Scarlet’s invasions but they never did. As much as we’d like every NPC to have fully updated speech about every event we do know it is unlikely to happen.
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I don’t think there have been any clues since then. However a web story mentions Scarlet gaining some understanding of Pale Tree, Caithe, Faolin, and Malyck as part of her vision in Omadd’s machine. Caithe’s secret could just be Malyck, a Sylvari born from another tree, and Malyck could be introduced in the next update. This would lead the story in search of his tree beyond Dry Top. On the other hand the secret could be almost anything.
Braham started out with his home at Cragstead threatened by molten troops. He asked for help from Holbroek, didn’t get any, and took away an “Whatever happens, I’m going to look after my friends” attitude. He was a young punk, not impressed by famous people like his mother who had responsibilities elsewhere. He then teamed up with Rox to strike back at the molten facilities, turned up at Queen’s Jubilee for no real reason, and continued on the Scarlet trail after that.
It seems really straightforward technically. The names can be stored on local files. When you log on, and whenever you select a new pet, the client would send the name(s) to the server where they would be validated and then stored in the database. No more server side storage than now. Not much extra processing compared to now. It doesn’t matter if the local file is broken since the data gets validated before use. Easy obvious solution. If that would only work for PvE then it should be done just for PvE.
IMHO there is no excuse for not having pet names stored. Almost every new ranger player expects permanent names and is disappointed they are not there.
If Dry Top ever gets too quiet then guilds could step in and bring enough people to make it happen.
It’s certainly strange but you are going to get an inconsistency in some way. Either the fort is inconsistent with how you see it in the open world or the fort is inconsistent with how you see it in the story. Players have to take a reality hit somewhere. It could be that the fort is going to change again before the end of LS2, so there’s no point keeping an old version that nobody is going to see anywhere else. They probably made this design decision based on Lion’s Arch.
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As mentioned in other places https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FeFuKw9G.jpg. The story journal suggests the orbs do represent the six elder dragons.
Not the ‘worst pet system ever made’. The old EQ1 pets were aggro magnets are would regularly bring unwanted enemies to your door, usually in large numbers.
My guess is that Mr E. is a thief/elementalist who will join our adventuring guild.
There are almost no named villains in the living story, so no.
I like the jumping element and I think it is for the right rewards.
I have noticed however that base speed and movement utilities are useful in the jumping for coins. This makes it easier on some classes than others, even disregarding portals. A ranger for example has a low speed boost on the signet and has no movement utilities.
You’re really asking for an MMO nirvana here. It has been desired in all MMOs from day one and has until recently been impossible to deliver. Instances have been the way of showing different players different things. I think it will be almost impossible for GW2 to be retrofitted to do this for wide areas of the open world though they can probably hide some objects and NPCs. Elder Scrolls had this sort of mixed timeline and although I thought it looked ok (in beta), lots of others have complained that it didn’t really work and looked confusing. Just imagine some people walking along the high vines in Concordia and others being unable to see the vines!
I agree, she died too fast, and she had put on the Star Trek red security suit as soon as we met her in the Dead End, but there might be a bit more going on behind the scenes. I suspect there’s some story line brewing with the rest of Marjory’s family, specifically why she doesn’t want them to meet Kasmeer. This might be part of a long running plot line and it needs to start early, albeit too early.
“Humanity gets looked over even in their greatest nation (Orr) where they could have had the biggest lore impact”
To be fair, Orr is the setting for the fight against Zaitan with the temples to the human gods at the heart of many endgame event chains. Orrian lore was crucial to the personal story.
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It might be worth remembering the Jotun telescope in Arah that showed stars being created with the coming of elder dragons. Perhaps Omadd’s machine is less abstract than it first appears and it actually shows these stars/satellites circling the world. It might then be plausible for these satellites to influence the ley lines and other magical forces in the same way that gravity influences waves.
The tree diagram seems to show the Pale tree and the six elder dragons, or energies related to the dragons. We don’t seem to have many clues what the connections and circle around the tree mean. Does it show some sort of balance? Does it show a shield?
It might explain things if we’re just seeing a replay of Scarlet’s vision, rather than creating our own interpretation. My Norn would surely envisage magic with spirits rather than geometry.
It could also be the case that we’re not seeing the eternal alchemy but something else related to ley lines, dragonic energy, or something completely different.
Destiny’s Edge don’t much like commanders and captains either, with one obvious exception. I guess that’s just the way the game world works.
I’m guessing we will get some nightmares and ‘whispers from the forest’ in future story episodes.
In terms of storytelling , the Pact was always likely to dissolve so that fighting the remaining dragons becomes an adventures challenge, rather than just Pact with megalasers vs Dragon II, Pact with megabombs vs Dragon III, and so on. Trahearne was always going to be the person most likely to go to make the Pact dissolve.
A lot of players would be severely hacked off after ‘finishing’ her personally as part of the game mechanics.
You can see the time sink. You have control of your gaming time. You can choose to put time into the game to get a specific weapon or you can choose to buy a weapon with similar stats from the trading post. Your choice. Nobody if forcing you to do anything.
It’s there so that people who don’t want the geodes can cash them in, just like there are vendors who will give you tools for unwanted karma.
Giving pets an improvement process will either mean that rangers are underpowered compared to other classes when they just reach 80, overpowered once they improve all their pets, or the process makes no difference and is a waste of time.
An interesting idea, beaten as usual by players choosing the path of least resistance.
I’d agree with the OP that the clues are there but at the moment it still doesn’t add up. Some of the season 1 stuff that seemed like nonsense is finally getting some explanation in season 2, so maybe Scarlet’s motives will be made more realistic too. I’m worried that this sort of ‘Scarlet is a hero’ story line will be forced upon us though and still be utterly unconvincing.
The big problem with waking up Elder Dragons just to defeat them is that you’re not likely to defeat them. When you lose to them you lose everything. Everything gets corrupted whether it is your identity, your home, your people, your land, your magic, everything. It seems just such a bad plan when you could leave the dragon where it is and it might sleep through all of your lifetime. Also if you’re in mental contact with the Elder Dragon then it is probably going to win all the mind games, and my best guess is that the Dragon goaded Scarlet into doing exactly what it wanted.
All Scarlet’s paraphernalia will come back into the story I’m sure: the marionette, the probes, the watch works and steam creatures, aetherblades. Once our allies stop being stupid and start investigating this stuff they’ll probably be able to use some of it against the Elder Dragons somehow.
“Look at it from the other side. Removing the root and the timed dodge would just make this weapon op. "
Well no. Players still wouldn’t be able to get more than the current maximum from this weapon. There would just be less handicap on players who don’t want to invest effort in micro managing this sword.
You also seem to be making a strange argument that the weapon is best with the leap but if the leap is removed the weapon would be even better. That seems like nonsense.
“A lot of you who hate this weapon hate a lot of other things about the class.”
Please don’t tell us what we like or don’t like. Please don’t try to characterize us as fools and bad players.
What do you from ascended professions? New skills, weapons? Ok. Lets put those into the game. Now why should you restrict the use of those new skills to ascended characters instead of letting everyone earn them in the regular way? Are skills going to be better just because they come with a fancy title or class quest to unlock them?
This is a PVE ‘endgame meta’ guide not a PvE guide. It ignores a few useful features features of the thief class simply because they are not part of high dps dungeon speed clearance, but does have tips for soloing dungeons for example. A more accurate name is all that’s required.
My father was in a wheelchair from before I was born and had less mobility than Tiami, particularly as he got older. I’m sure however he’d like to be remembered for all the things he could do rather than the things he could not do. This is generally how I view Tiami. Her disability does not define her. She is an over excitable scientific whiz kid. Her disability is there, yes, but she tries to find a way to mange it.
I know full well that disability is not the same for everyone, and that some disabilities cannot be managed with mechanics and technology. However I don’t see a problem in showing a young kid who can find ways to manage and find her own identity.
This is all about PvP players wanting their weapon skill to chase down PvP enemies for them because they want to be skilful with their clicks instead of skilful with their movement. How about the PvP rangers actually master their movement, like every other class, and let everyone have a reliable #1 skill, like every other class.
No it should not be here to stay. Particle effects are an utter hindrance for players who need to watch for animations but can only see a haze of glowing spell effects. They should be fixing that, and the bad camera, as a courtesy to paying customers who have to peer through the blaze of effects to play their game. It shouldn’t have to wait for the eventually tweaking of the graphics engine to suit newer graphic cards.
GW2 is pretty much absent of any clues for the Mursaat doing anything. If they were going to be main protagonists in the story then there would be more clues seeded into the Living Story right now. For example, Mr E. has effectively done nothing of interest but he is being introduced already as a character. Even if the Mursaat are notionally extinct we would be shown some ruins, artifacts, poetry, or anything else to introduce them to GW2 players.
Scorpion wire will also interrupt. With a thief you can use blind to negate skills without always needing an interrupt You can apply pressure with a combination of blinds and dazes.
All religious groups seem silly if you don’t agree with their views.
I think the Kodan body shapes share too much with male Norns and this makes them look too mundane.
“to be honest, one of the biggest problems with AI, is how you can basically “taunt” aka completely control what the AI does by having everyone in the same place.”
There is no problems with stacking in one place to fight to share boons, use combo fields, apply conditions, apply damage, etc. That’s fine. Mobs also find it easier to apply their aoe and conditions too against a stack. The problem is that movement of enemies can be controlled too easily without using skills. A corner typically controls the fight as well as any utility skill.