I’m basically with CHIPS on this one. Everybody in the story is massively stupid apart from Scarlet. It’s not just the heroes either. Did the krait, who were forced out of their ancestral home by the deep sea dragon, really want to help Scarlet unleash the jungle dragon? I can’t see the flame legion getting their cause advanced by that either and the dredge won’t be looking forward to massive worms burrowing through their caverns. The alliances are all badly explained with no characterization. The part with Scarlet building massive gadgets to blow up a city to release a dragon is fine, perfectly alright. The Watchwork and Jubilee story is ok as well. Everything else remains completely unbelievable.
If steal fails then it tends to go on a full cooldown. Most thief weapon skills are instant, which isn’t surprising for a nimble melee class, so interrupts are really on utilities.
The inquest also seem to think there are six.
A lot of fantasy stories give the villains an ‘accidental’ death so that the heroes don’t need to kill them. I was slightly surprised that Scarlet didn’t get killed by her own machinery, lasers, clockworks, toxins, explosives, portals, etc.
This troll inherited the explorable mode characteristics at the time explorable mode was revamped. He is way out of line for story mode. This was pointed out by players at the time. That time was, perhaps not coincidentally, the last time we saw much feedback upon the dungeon forums as the dungeon team was supposedly disbanded.
Around that time a number of mobs had changes made in one part of the game that were wrongly inherited in other content. I’m specifically thinking of the risen and krait in the personal story. Those mistakes are not being repeated now but plenty of the old problems were never corrected.
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“I also dont even care if I ever make it into an main there is nothing wrong with overflows. The players can be just as fun and organized there as in any other.”
If this statement was true then there wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately it isn’t. In an overflow you can be short of people to complete an event, however hard people try to organize. Meanwhile your home server is guaranteed to be full and capable of completing everything. You then get language problems on Euro servers. And so on.
Overflows are now a serious design issue. They are a game mechanic, nothing else than a game mechanic, that can immediately make players fail events. These are not quick events but once per hour major events that might be temporary over a fortnight. There’s no reason for players to defend the overflow mechanic when it is an obstruction to game play.
I think most of the implausibilities of the Scarlet story came early on and it has slowly been getting better. Despite much of the speculation, the scope of the story has been quite narrow in its fit to the in game clues. Anything we were told was relevant. Anything we inferred from the telling of the story was in fact just speculation based on the multitude of plot loopholes.
Anyway, in short summary, technology waking the dragon was a good storyline. The alliances were horribly written and still make no sense.
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My guesses -
What happened to Mai Trin? We know she escaped to EotM.
- There Aetherblades will probably not disappear entirely so there are some good story options left with her. The other alliances could completely dissolve.
Why did Tequatl get stronger? We were told it had to do with the LS.
- Unknown and probably nothing to do with Scarlet
Who is Mr.E?
- Unknown and we won’t see him again soon probably
Who made Scarlet crazy/was talking to her in her dreams?
- That dragon she woke up, almost certainly
Was that the person that wanted her to find the ley lines?
- Scarlet knew that putting a shockwave into the ley lines would wake up the dragon so she decided to do it, perhaps under the dragon’s instruction.
What did she really see when she “looked into the Eternal Alchemy”?
- She found some connection to the dragon and the dragon may have given her insight into everything else she talked about.
What does she know about Caithe?
- There are good future story options here as well. Although the dragon may have told Scarlet a bunch of lies, it is more likely that the dragon gave her knowledge about dream and nightmare and also the roles of people like Caithe and Faolin therein.
“We spend 14 months trying to prevent a sylvari from awakening her master, an elder dragon. With all the heroes of Tyria, we failed in that task and yet I’m being told that there is no proof that sylvari can be corrupted. If the last season of the LS isn’t proof that a sylvari was a dragon champion, then there is no such thing as proof.”
Scarlet could be the GW2 equivalent of a mage in basement who is summoning a demon or a necromancer in a crypt who is summoning a lich. Using that analogy there’s no reason why she needs to be anything other than talented and mad.
I don’t see any reason to think of her as corrupted. She might be the GW2 equivalent of the mad mage who summons demons in the basement to bargain for power. It’s still possible that she wanted to challenge this new dragon rather than serve it, which doesn’t seem like her character anyway. We may yet recover the marionette later in the story and use it against the dragon.
Also, if she was became a dragon minion through the deprivation tank then why didn’t she kidnap more sylvari and make them into minions too through the same process? That would actually be simple compared to everything she’s done in this story.
There are plenty of clues in game to there being six elder dragons.
I agree with the OP. I think all the explanations you were waiting for have already come and gone at the Dead End. Scarlet has an army of aetherblades at her disposal since she is super nasty and bullies them. There you go. We’re never going to know anything else.
At the moment we’ve got both sides of the problem.
(a) You cannot do anything storywise unless Trahearne, Kiel, Rox, Jory, or someone else drives the story for you.
(b) You get all the credit anyway even though you’re always just doing what someone else tells you to do.
This is mainly because the story is linear.
Agree. The hp bar specifically gives me trouble when watching the grawl shaman in fractals. My screen has is full of graphic flare like that too. How long do players have to complain about graphic flare?
My guess is that these footprints have come early and the cause of them will be shown in the next release.
Scarlet has broken whatever limitations they were on asura portals so it’s likely that new villains will break the current limitations whenever they need to as well. I wouldn’t expect a full explanation of how the airships can pass through Scarlet’s portals into specific locations and then teleport pirates to the ground, or any reason why that fantastic technology isn’t used elsewhere or any reason why nobody can reverse engineer it. Our allies will be stuck with the same old portals or else things would be too easy.
As usual the elite speedrunners have said that a class is fine because they are in the current speedrunning meta. For PUG groups, thieves are mid tier. Thief utility and dps is appreciated but heavies provide more for less effort. Poorly played thieves are near the bottom of the pile as they die early and obviously.
Fractals are not the same speed and difficulty. Some effort should be made to balance that. The dredge fractal is specifically awful and needs half its mobs removing.
Camera angles. The poor GW2 cameras angles are exposed in fractals, for example trying to get all of the lava shaman on screen while also watching the burning floor. Fix this throughout the game and specifically for fractals.
Graphics flare. Fractal mobs have animations that need watching but the screen can often dissolve into graphics flare from spell effects. Fix this throughout the game.
‘Rerolling’ fractals. I don’t care much about this but it shows poor design that players are resetting the dungeon constantly until they get the random first fractal they like. Suggested solutions could be to have the specific first fractal for every run that day, or have a shortish standard entry fractal that players won’t want to repeat.
Continuity – I would put the molten end boss always after the molten test facility and Mai Trin always after the aetherblade lair.
Fractal weapons are a horrible reward. They are random so you never get the right one, they are not real usable weapons, but they’re not skins either and still need transmutation stones. So make them into skins and let people have some barter options in the Dessa’s Hub to trade (pristine) relics + a skin for the specific skin they want.
Bottom out the long standing bugs in fractals. They are well documented and already on the forums. They should be fixed by now. They can really ruin your day and make you resent logging on to totally waste hours of your time in an MMO.
Let some of the original fractal design go. Some previous fixes to fractals have seemed like a petulant response by the designers to punish players who use class skills to solve problems, particularly when the design intent is monotonous and lacking fun. Instead the designers should see why the content is unpopular and make it both more enjoyable and challenging at the same time. Example, dredge fractal.
The gear grind on infusions was really bad. I’ve taken a few weeks away from GW2 because I cannot bear the prospect of gearing up characters for this. It will also prohibit me from having two characters capable of top fractals as gear grind is bad for alts.
Otherwise fractals an excellent design concept, good dungeons, and I’d like to see them made even better.
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I’d quite like to see a small team of skritt doing smash and grab raids with stolen dredge machinery. Smart enough to stay alive but stupid enough to take on trouble. The perfect people for Braham and Rox to go to when they need to break into Scarlet’s labs.
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The NPCs in the game have a set history and that provides the hooks for the story events. This is because the players can purposely come into the living story with no history at no disadvantage. The stories can therefore look as if they are driven by the NPCs with the players just acting as hired muscle. Player actions determine when/if the players sees the events rather than determining what/how events take place in the wider game world.
Stacking exists in many MMOs. All combat games reward players for grouping up enemies in their area damage. Players have the crowd control skills to put enemies into small groups but stacking and cornering takes advantage of movement AI to do it without using skills. If the OP is saying that this tactic works too well in GW2 then yes, I’d agree, and the designers need to come up with something that requires better tactics.
Tanking remains different from stacking. In some MMOs you do tank and stack at the same time, however tanking can group up enemies without all players stacking. In GW2 all classes can supposedly sit in the stack, use active defense to prevent damage, and kill the mobs with maximum dps before the defenses expire. Classes using active defenses still does not equal tanking.
If the villain’s ships had been named then we would have seen more named ships than named villains, honestly.
The personal story is locked down but the living story has a timeline and is kept up to date. If the OP is concerned worried about running into aetherblades in a years time then that will only happen because they still exist in the world rather than any ambiguity about Scarlet’s timeline.
There are more enough solutions for this in game. There are merchants all over the place in the open world and way points let you make fast trips to the shops. You can summon extra merchants with the black lion gizmos that you get free from chests and whatever. You can salvage everything down. You can instantly deposit collectables into the bank. You can instantly put stuff onto the trading post.
My guess is that you need to stop carrying boosters and stuff that you never use, sell anything that is not irreplaceable from your bank, cut any stacks of 250 resources in your collection slots down to 150 by selling the excess, and clear out cosmetics that will never be worn.
I wouldn’t worry too much. Let’s paraphrase him again and say “there is a nasty corrupt monster at the top of the tower”.
Ellen’s actions in game are smart, at least compared to the other characters. She gets things done. The voice acting and animations don’t reflect that though.
How about some different thinking:
- Perhaps the Elder Dragons can bring fellow dragons into the world in the same way that the human Gods brought the humans.
- If the Elder Dragons came from somewhere perhaps they can go back there. Perhaps dragons in general can go back there. If not, are they exiled or are other forces at work?
- Is there anything to stop the Elder Dragons laying eggs and creating offspring after they arrive in Tyria?
I’m guessing that Mr E will get a mysterious appearance in game before he is revealed. Too much of his story is inconsequential and web based at the moment. In that case we’re speculating too early.
If his character is written properly then we should expect Mr E to be well informed but not powerful. If Evon Gnashblade wanted Scarlet dead he could just put out a very big bounty on her for pirate activity. The Order of Whispers wouldn’t go to Marjory for detective work. And so on. Can we rule out Canach based on his jail time, or does that rule him in?
Try running some of the more popular dungeons to learn common tactics, build up your AP, and get some rewards. If you’re getting kicked from groups it could be low AP as well as your class and gear. As you get more experienced you’ll see more ways to get round LFG problems generally.
If you want TA stuff then run TA path 1 and ask the good groups if they want to run the aetherblade path as well once you’ve finished. That might get you going.
“What Scarlet Saw seems to be holding all sorts of little details and foreshadowing we’re only seeing now.”
I always though this was going to properly retold in game. There could have been quite a neat little instance where we fight into Omadd’s deserted lab, force the golems to replay the research journals, and so on. It turns out however that the Living Story has far less breadth than the speculation about it and we should probably take more things at face value, so since Scarlet saw Caithe, Faolin, the Pale Tree, and the Nightmare Court in the web story then that’s it. That’s what we’ve been told in the web story and that’s all we supposedly need to know.
From level 10 onwards you can get an ascended ring as a random part of the final rewards. The pristine relics help you buy a ring if you have been unlucky or help you get the specific ring you want. You will get a lot of these pristine relics if you run fractals often so don’t be afraid to spend them. Ascended rings have an infusion slot that will take the infusions bought with barter currency.
From level 20 onwards you can get an infused ascended ring as part of the final reward. This has an extra infusion slot that can take an agony resist infusion crafted from all +1 resist infusions that are dropped during the runs. You can use the magic forge to infuse an ascended ring but this is an expensive recipe.
As a beginner, you should try to have your AR match or exceed your fractal level. Groups tend to want more AR past level 40. If you find fractals easy with the AR you currently have then keep going upwards until you hit a wall but please don’t expect groups to carry you if your AR is well below the fractal level. They will kick you.
Don’t get scared away by the forum talk. The gap in competency between an experienced player and a new player is massive in GW2, more than in an other MMO I’ve seen. You needn’t be ashamed of being inexperienced because everyone was there once. If you’re playing a squishy class like a thief or elementalist you need to learn where your defenses are and what they’re good for because you do need active defense. You can’t just soak the hits and heal through, particularly when there are multiple enemies.
Once you have got the play style sorted out though you can carve through enemies. Most events can be done solo and the group events often attract at least one other player, even if there’s almost nobody else in the zone.
Nothing is going on with fractals. That’s part of the problem. Fixes are stopping players using tactics or exploits that circumvent the design so really everything is just going back to the original intent. This should be fine apart from players don’t like the design of the dredge fractal, amongst others.
The mining and drilling suggest Primordius. The whispers from the forest and the nightmares suggest the jungle dragon. Take your pick.
The first we see of Scarlet’s plan are the weapon test facilities and everything else she did may have been just more weapon testing with the aim of finding weapons to battle with/for/against her entity. We can apply the testing idea to the toxin as well and consider the whole nightmare tower to be another test facility with live subjects. This supports Marjory’s conclusion that Scarlet will have left the tower with even more potent venom weapons.
I think it is worth remembering that the toxins were hallucinogens. I don’t see that being the sort of weapon you’d want to use on a dragon, especially one that was interfering with your own mind. Again, we might as well stick to the Dead End script since if we question the conclusions we can tear most of it to shreds, to be honest.
I see the Dead End investigations as an attempt by the story writers to draw a line under the earlier story chapters. Everything Scarlet has been doing was explained away and if we don’t know something now then we probably never will. Under that assumption, we’ll probably not get any more information about the steam creatures beyond Scarlet’s excuse for controlling them. There’s so much information missing, such as who copied the steam mechanics to invent watchknights and what they’re doing now, that it seems unlikely to be at the center of anything new.
Everything in the personal story is stuck at an ambiguous time, as any player can do the current living story section before, during, or after any section of the personal story. This means that Logan, Ryltock, & co can’t leave the stations they have when new players meet them at level 2. The designers have sensibly written new characters that can be anywhere and do anything as the story goes on.
“Aside from the potential problems coming up with messing up LA, couldn’t Anet just tack on Zhaitan’s 2nd coming as additional PS?”
Because it makes no sense for anyone who hasn’t completed the personal story if Zaitan comes a second time. Everything in the personal story is Zaitan. Everything that is Zaitan is in the personal story. The Living Story is deliberately excludes Orr and Zaitan so that the timeline remains ambiguous for each player.
Shortbow 3 can repeat and think this is well a known bug. It generally happens when you press it twice quickly and it gives three shots.
No, I would not pay a subscription for GW2.
Feedback regarding fractals has been ignored anyway so there’s no point creating a whole forum for ignored posts.
Yeah I think it is a bad plot. Whatever warbands are about, they are not about sending soldiers out on solo missions to qualify for elite units. Even though the storyline is eventually going to show Rox realizing that this new adventuring team means more to her than a strange warband, she should already see that she’s not integrating into any warband this way.
Anet is not destroying the game by balancing classes. Sorry. They might destroy the game by producing the wrong end game content, creating treadmills, relying too much or too little upon the gem store, etc, but that all remains to be seen.
In the detective sequence I think each of Scarlet’s alliance partners were explained apart from the nightmare court. Even though the reasons were implausible, like wanting guns and getting bullied, I guess there’s nothing more to be said about them. So that leaves the nightmare court and although Scarlet might have promised them a mechanical nightmare tree, I’m guessing they should have more into the bargain. Do you think they might be the one group who actually wants Scarlet to find her entity?
For PvE you need the blind on stealth trait to get as much out of the offhand dagger as the offhand pistol. It should then feel more mobile and damaging than the pistol but you are using a trait to do that.
If Scarlet was to launch a sensible attack, which she won’t, she would deliver her refined toxins into LA, drive out the civilians, then send in her mechanical troops to mop up the Lionguard. After she’s destroyed the Asura gates she can use the krait and aetherblades to keep out pirate reinforcements. She doesn’t need to hold the city for long if she only wants to drill in the harbor, so she can destroy whatever she wants and not worry about rebuilding.
My guess is that the aftermath will see localized destruction but the personal story areas (orders, market, plaza) will be mainly in tact. The Tengu could come in. The fractal gate could be gone and rebuilt elsewhere. So could the mist war gates. Whatever is below the harbor will fly off elsewhere after it has dealt with the marionette.
She is unforgivable in many ways but in story terms she created bitter enemies all across Tyria so she will always be unforgiven no matter how she redeems herself.
The dragon in the personal story tutorial is almost certainly Zaitan. The personal story is, essentially, you vs Zaitan and it will remain that way after the jungle dragon has come and gone.
Someone asked how Mai Trin would be needed in the future. Well there are lots of possibilities here but an obvious one would be the the governor of a conquered Lion’s Arch.