With all the thorn monsters aiding Aerin, he surely has to be involved with the Jungle Dragon. My reading of it would be that the Jungle Dragon can talk to and coerce plants, including the Sylvari. The dream protects against this and maybe nightmare does too. Neither Aerin nor Scarlet fall into nightmare, and that seems significant to me. If the Nightmare Court are going to become the servants of the dragon then why didn’t these other servants join their ranks?
A lot of other questions follow on from this. If it is the dream that protects the Sylvari then can other creatures be protected by the dream as well? Can another parent tree be protected in the same way as the Pale Tree, and if not are the offsping all going to be vulnerable to the dragon? Malyck’s tree is likely to be dangerous as well as Malyck himself.
Have we been told in game whether all Sylvari are immune to dragon corruption, including the nightmare court, including the soundless?
The main problem with Destiny’s Edge is that they are there all through the personal story and the dungeons. There’s no point having a plot line where Rytlock gets killed as a big shock in the living story when you can start a new character and say hello to him tomorrow. Even if a lot of work is put into having two versions of reality for players, one with Rytlock and one with another legion commander, the story dungeons will still have a glaring continuity error. If Rox dies then Rox dies. Nothing else needs to change in the game world. It’s easier to just do it all with the new guys and to be honest, they have actually been better characters so far.
Have you guys actually tried and failed these jumps? They’re not hard really. Don’t close your mind to them without trying. If you can use class skills like rush and shadowstep then you can use aspects. I’m a moderately poor jumper and I’m getting through the living story without any problem at all. I’m guessing some buried treasure will be needing aspects but that’s fair enough.
Magic find were replaced so if you had those items you can choose new stats for them.
Crit damage stat was replaced with ferocity and this generally results in lower crit %.
You’ll need to reassign your traits.
Some items, maybe celestial, have been rebalanced.
Runes and sigils have been rebalanced.
You may need to assign stats to a legendary weapon.
So yes your stats will have changed.
Who is suggesting that the game should be balanced for the low end skill and not high end skill? The game should be balanced for all.
I think the story implies that Taimi is irresponsible and impressionable. With the wrong guidance she could grow up like Scarlet mark II. We’re meant to appreciate the care shown by Braham and the others that’ll stop her being a serial killer or anything else. I’m guessing that she will have a big story somewhere in LS2 where her irresponsible science gets her in trouble.
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The game is balanced around PvP where players cleanse conditions and use stun breakers. This can drastically reduce the impact of conditions and effects. PvE mobs do not have the same mechanics for cleansing so need something to stop conditions from being dominant in PvE and therefore we have the condition limit and unshakable/defiant. Both of these are unpopular but no other solutions are obvious.
When another thread came up recently I had a dig around. I don’t think the facts are conclusive but we have …
- Grenth was the first god born of Tyria, his mother was Dwayna, and his father was a mortal sculptor. This rules out some of the more exotic theories of his origins.
- It’s unlikely that Dwayna was so obsessed with sculpture that she would hold affection for two mortal sculptors.
- The history scrolls and Malchor’s ghost seem to suggest a chaste relationship with Dwayna. It’s quite believable however that the scrolls are hiding the truth about the sexual affairs of the gods.
- It’s possible that Dwayna conceived Grenth in a way that’s impossible for human reproduction. She is the goddess of life after all.
- Malchor was asked by the six gods to create statues of them. Since Grenth replaced Dhuum as a god, we don’t know if that six includes Grenth or Dhuum.
- “Standing before his immortal mother, Grenth claimed his place among the gods. Where his father had fallen, Grenth would rise.” This is an ideal fit for Malchor’s Leap at the Temple of Dwayna.
Why do you think class balance should be based around pug misconceptions? You take heavy classes because they’re just easy mode, not because they’re efficient.
Class balance in dungeons is fine, people are just dumb and think warriors are overpowered because apparently we’re still in 2012.
You’re still taking the balance on the elite speed runner view of June 2014. Elites think the classes are balanced because with max dps everything dies so fast it poses no threat. Rangers and Elementalists have a handful of high dps skills/traits so they are completely fine, really? What happens when high performing skills are shaved down on the next class balancing update? PUGs actually see a more rounded view of the game as they see all the problems that dungeons can pose, not perfect runs with best builds and well tried tactics.
This thread has as usual turned into elite speed runners giving their view on PUG runs. I’m sorry to disappoint you forum hounds but there is no class balance in PUGs. Guardian and warrior are still the best classes in pugland. Five heavies will set off to do anything whilst five mediums will give up before they start. Then again, you never see a group with five medium classes because most people have given up on them and bring heavies. Elementalists, mesmers, and thieves are ok although most PUGs still want some heavies so that someone will lead the line. Nobody ever sees engineers so that leaves rangers and necros at the bottom of the pile.
It doesn’t matter that spotter in elite groups gives rangers blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter than any class can solo the whole dungeon. There’s no point telling the OP that classes are equally desired in PUG dungeons because he can see for his own eyes that they are not. I’m guessing that nobody has given the OP useful advice because the only useful advice is to start a warrior.
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Whilst it would please players to get a nice new cosmetic for running through events there are a couple of other things to consider -
1) You’re asking for full reward for playing the game exactly like you play it. That sort of post occurs often on the forums. This is particularly true for cosmetics where players want the cosmetic for themselves but don’t want it to be so common that everyone else wears it too.
2) The story events are designed to be completed by everyone, absolutely everyone. Giving rewards for that will be like giving rewards for logging on.
Having said that, it would make sense for an armor set to be available through LS2, one piece at a time. That would encourage players to get every chapter.
I suspect that thieves are intended to bring more condition effects against enemies as support (rather than boons for the group). In that respect, venoms and traps are a pretty much failing and need sorting out. Utilities with knockdowns, cripples, freeze, weakness, poison, immobilize etc are currently just not worth a slot. Traps need a total rethink and venoms need to be worth a slot even without venom sharing.
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“In GW1 enemies used the same skills available to players. "
So do the GW2 mobs. I’m guessing you haven’t noticed. Most humanoid mobs have about 5 skills that are the same as class skills, or in many cases slight improvements. Most mobs will not cleanse conditions but conditions are not a problem in PvE at all.
Now that the living story comes after the personal story, there is no continuity loss if the personal story characters (like Malyck, Demmi, Sayeh al’Rajihd) get updated. Characters that appear in dungeons, such as Caudacus, Jennah, Faolin, and Destiny’s Edge, will probably appear in LS2 but might have no real update to their status. There’s no need for the writers to create continuity problems when there are plenty of other characters to use.
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If you’re coming into fractals as a single target pure dps you’re probably getting carried by other classes (past lvl 30). Get blind on the trash. Swap your weapon sets round to get the best skills for each fight.
For the fire shaman you need two things: firstly dodge his bow attack with the fire field, secondly find a tactic when the shaman goes into the healing bubble. There’s a few slightly different ways to deal with the bubble but daggerstorm seems like the best starting point. Don’t stand under the shaman when the bubble bursts. Remember you can shoot cluster bombs in all directions while running.
“All the while making us understand why letting them live on a daily basis decreases our chances of successfully eliminating them for good. The threat should be ever evolving as time lingers on. It’s not about: “we kill one and the other fall like dominoes.””
That’s all meant to be in the personal story chapters. You are certainly shown that the minor races will be corrupted or driven out if nobody can kill an elder dragon that’s far away behind a veritable horde of minions. The stories are shown in the open world events too, with the Kodan for example, and I don’t think it needs you to look for it to see it.
The solution has always been to make the aqua breathers cosmetic so the stats and rune come from the helmet. Asking players to make more ascended items with more runes is just asking for time and money loss for no benefit.
Fractals are actually a good place to learn your skills, and you’ve got 30 levels of fractals before it gets serious, so you I’d recommend working it out as you go. Go back to the guides if you get stuck. There’s usually more than one way to tackle most encounters and lots of advantages from switching round the weapons and utilities.
Charr says “We don’t need no stinking dragons! We kill our dragons and if magic’s gonna be a problem then we’ll fix that too.”
The chicken song
I’m guessing that somewhere in LS2 in the new zones there will be somewhere where you can barter/buy new armor. It might be new stats, it might be new cosmetics, there will almost certainly be new runes and sigils.
Braham has mentioned that they’re forming a guild. Tiami will force her way in. The player character perhaps even leads the guild which might be news for many players, particularly those that skipped LS1.
My guess is that this guild will have someone from each class although they might not all be there all the time.
The “Great and Gorgeous Mesmer Collective” is almost certainly going to contain Anise and Jennah. Add one or two other friends from court or the Shining Blade and you’ve already got enough for Marjory’s humorous description. There doesn’t need to be a hidden organization.
The mesmers at Jennah’s court are probably not taught their skills at school like the Asura. It is more likely to be personal instruction from elders. Put a few students and tutors together and you begins to have a collection of people with secret skills, but it isn’t a secret organization as such.
Players should be able to learn to play a class through playing the game. Kicking people for making mistakes while learning is not friendly.
In well written stories you care about the damage done by the villains. You feel the hurt of the characters. If that can be done in GW2 with the Zephyrites then lets give the writers some credit. (I expect that the Zephyrites will be back in the air by the end of LS2 though).
Nope. Kiel’s a goodie. She was there from virtually day one of the living story and as soon as we followed her round Southsun, killing the Karka Queen, we should have worked out she wasn’t a baddie. She was such a goodie two shoes that nobody even really noticed she was a main character at the time.
GW2 events tend to show the current game world, skritt are stealing from harpies, the dredge fighting the Priory, and so on. In some ways this is the lore of GW2. You don’t have pages of text telling you the history of the minor races, you just get shown how the dragon minions are creating havoc for the minor races all across Tyria.
Orr has many events that give additional lore beyond the personal story. Other than that there seems to be bits of lore scattered all over each zone.
Where are people getting Aetherblades from?
The Aetherblades raided the Zephyrites at the previous festival of the four winds. It would actually be pretty strange for the Zephyrites, with their flimsy ships and valuable cargo, not to be the prime targets of hi-tech pirates with airships and big weapons.
Then again, it would be a sudden change for the Aetherblades to actually act like real pirates.
Let’s do some speculative guesswork. Someone is going to attack the Zephyrites and probably go after the glinting cargo. The events might start in Brisban before going somewhere new in Maguuma. It looks like an Inquest/asura golem is involved and past allies of the Inquest have been the Aetherblades and the bandits. The bandits are in Brisban but the Aetherblades are previous enemies of the Zephyrites so either could be connected.
We see destroyers in the video and the destroyers in Brisban are mostly in the skritt city? It would make sense for the skritt to steal anything shiny that lands on their doorstep and if they move it underground then that could lead to destroyers.
The game needs to show the nature of the races within the game. People who play the game a lot might want some variation, but the people who play just a little need to be shown the racial characteristics by the main characters.
Festival currencies can usually be deleted after the season has ended, once you’ve bartered out the bulk of them for basic items. You normally have enough time when the festival returns to get whatever currency you need for new cosmetics. There is no problem here that needs solving.
I’m not sure why people need to consider everything in their inventories to be valuable. I’m sure that’s not the design intent. If you’ve got more of something than you need then just delete the excess (if it has no sale value). It’s a better solution than posting on forums for game change.
There should be better incentives for players to way point and return. The game is probably best in a simpler state without any changes however. Adding hidden complexity to fix minor problems will usually just penalize honest players somehow at a later date. It would be good if karma was meaningful and players fought for gold event rewards but fixing a broken currency like karma is a bigger problem still.
GW2 has a principal of open access with shared rewards. You have accept that this allows idiots to have access to open events. You have to accept that GW2 shares rewards with those who contribute very little.
You now have a speed advantage over fellow players. Instead of clicking 50 times on a big stack of luck to use it, you can click just once to delete it.
I’d like a cross between an open world PvE zone and a dungeon, so you can go where you want to start event chains but everything is group based.
Body size is important for camera position, animation spotting, and blocking vision. If you’re a little guy you can’t see past the big guys when stacking. If a group all play big guys they obscure stuff, like enemy animations.
I think they may have changed one of the corners slightly but you wouldn’t notice unless you tried to stack there. Path 3 looks like it had bigger changes.
Are you really going to argue that a class should need utilities to make a weapon set work, just for 5-10 seconds?
“The problem is the enemies that willfully stay in black powder or that willfully keep using projectiles on WoR.”
Thieves have only two off hand weapons and they can throw one of them away if AI mobs don’t stand in black powder, really! Combo finishers might as well not be there once enemies are not in the fields. There are also going to be other problems with players using aoe fields just to make enemies run around until they die. It isn’t a simple fix to mend the AI.
Immobilize, cripple, knockdown. You should need to make enemies stay in fields, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Heck, it’d actually make cripple and immob more useful in PvE, which is brilliant.
If enemies get trolled like that, then you could make the AI better. Add in conditions in the code like only moving from certain AoEs.
You’ve clearly never played a thief since the offhand pistol field is so small it’s there’s no point spending 0.5 seconds on a utility skill to cripple an enemy just to give extra 0.5 seconds moving away (even if we forget that weapon sets should be functionally complete without utilities). Thieves are also clearly not going to use tripwire traps to knockdown enemies just so they are blinded while knocked down!
This is just one example that the PVE game doesn’t just change slightly when mobs run out of fields, it completely unbalances the design of many skills.
“The problem is the enemies that willfully stay in black powder or that willfully keep using projectiles on WoR.”
Thieves have only two off hand weapons and they can throw one of them away if AI mobs don’t stand in black powder, really! Combo finishers might as well not be there once enemies are not in the fields. There are also going to be other problems with players using aoe fields just to make enemies run around until they die. It isn’t a simple fix to mend the AI.
If players fight close together they get
- good sharing of group boons and missile defense (intended)
- good proximity for heals, revives, and cures (intended)
- good use of fields and finishers (intended)
- grouping of enemies for aoe attacks and condition fields (intended)
- sharing of summoned weapons and banners (intended)
That’s all fine. The worse game elements all come from stacking in corners.
- better defense from ranged enemies than through use of skills
- better control of enemy location than is possible through crowd control skills
- awful camera control and visibility
- bad graphics performance and visibility
A lot of the more recent dungeons do not have corners. The chambers in the Nightmare Tower were utterly grey and dull but they did prevent stacking in corners. Until the game mechanics change you are really just going to annoy a lot of your fellow players by objecting to valid and effective tactics such as stacking (or skipping).
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It would have made sense for Trahearne to stay in Orr to complete his Wyld Hunt but the writers took the story in another direction. Trahearne specifically says in game that the Wyld Hunt is over and for the first time in his life he can choose his own future (or words to that effect). If he stays in Orr it is his own decision.
Fractal rings are only a problem if you make them a problem. Sell them, just like you’d sell a worthless sigil from a dungeon run, and they stop being any problem whatsoever.
Let’s assume it is Malyck’s first memory. Why would Ronan be mentioned?
“That would have to make u adapt u’r skills/weapons/build to a certain confrontation… This would do something about the mindless spamming of “Everything u got””
The problem starts with SPvP. A boon like Protection is fair against all enemies whilst a defense such as fire immunity will be immediately be unbalanced, devastating against some weapons/traits/classes and absolutely ineffective against others.
PvE enemies already do have a variety of immunities but they are not always common. Destroyers are immune to fire, dredge are immune to blind, etc.
If you are putting new skills into the game, are there any benefits to restricting their use? Is it really better if players have to be level 80 to get them? Is it really better if players have to be in a sub-class to use them? Is it really better for players to lose access to some skills just to gain others? If you are putting new quest/mission content into the game shouldn’t it be available to everyone and not just the characters of one class (who want to change class)?
I think it would be easier to create a group of associated utilities/elite/traits for a class and only let them be equipped as a package (so some traits might be marked as ‘reaver’ traits and you can only use reaver skills if you have at least two reaver traits). I’m sure it would be possible to make major changes to weapon skills and play style this way.
For dungeons you’ll probably find blind useful for trash. It’s easy to get from either an off hand pistol or the blind of stealth trait with the offhand dagger. Depending how you play, lack of blind may stop your build being viable.
Even if you don’t just want to pick up a popular dps build, you can still probably get more dps with the critical strikes traits than trying to maximize daggers in deadly strikes. As soon as you are not tied to daggers you can change weapons as needed, such as a main hand sword for area damage and shadow steps. You can also swap your utilities around for each fight and I’m guessing you’ll always want something more appropriate than the signet and shadowstep.
The models and voices could have been tidied up for the Queen’s Pavilion.
I think you are tackling raiding from the wrong angle. We can see the sorts of open access events that are now being put into the game instead of raids. We now need the game interface to support those events fully. This means better communications, organization, and command. Lets take all events forward for everyone rather than take a step backwards to recreate raids for a minority.
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I imagine they will create something from the pieces of season 1 and put it into the gem store. Enough players will buy it to make it worthwhile. I’m sure some people will complain that it costs gems but if they don’t want it they needn’t buy it and they will be no worse off than they are right now.