Bunkering isn’t really the right term. Thieves are generally just using different skills to negate damage. High dps builds can use skills based defense too but also make sure everything is dead before the skills expire. For PvE you’ve got
- area blinds- can be done a number of ways but black powder is the easiest
- evade based attacks – usually relies on dps rather than bunkering
- kiting – dancing daggers can cripple multiple targets
Signet of malice lets you heal up through multiple attacks and can be combined with caltrops or daggerstorm. Again this isn’t really bunkering as it relies on a multitude of of attacks and it is weak against single targets.
The same skills will not work on all mobs. A hard hitting ranged champion with defiant will invalidate kiting, blind, and signet healing and you have to take it all on the dodge.
At the end of the personal story they should have resigned the hero from the Pact and that would have made some of the Living Story dialogue more believable. We are permanently left wondering why, as Commander of the Pact, we are unable to do anything about Scarlet apart from chat to stray adventurers in bars.
I agree that character deaths are likely and one is due in this finale perhaps. It could be Marjory though, sacrificing herself to save the lovely Kasmeer. Kasmeer has been given some history that’s likely to come into the story later, probably with her alive rather than dead.
Perhaps players can set up their own election campaign right now before the next release. Wear black to save Marjory and wear nothing to save Kasmeer. You know you want to!
Alternative explanations could be that :
- Scarlet’s entity has no direct control of the Dream of Dreams or the Sylvari. It just has an indirect link through the dream and this allows it to create nightmares.
- The Nightmare Court may not be under the control of whatever is providing the nightmare. The Court may in fact have another method of controlling the nightmares that is stark in contrast to but as effective as the Ventari teaching. This might explain why Scarlet, who rejects both the Court and the Pale Tree, has succumbed to this entity.
It’s completely full of holes isn’kitten There’s a chance for some spectacular looking content over the next few updates though so perhaps we just have to write off the story and see whether we can enjoy the game.
I was extremely disappointed by the Dead End investigation actually because most of the implausible stuff Scarlet has done was just skirted over and remains just something a nemesis can do. Plot holes remain. The interesting stuff that might interest lore people would be :
- Vorpp doesn't know the origins of the steam creatures but you can deduce that the makers of the watchknight copied some of their mechanics. This somehow lets Scarlet use them interchangeably.
- Vorpp suggests that Omadd's experiment was a mind isolation chamber rather than a mind expanding chamber so her communication with the entity comes from within herself. There was an extra hint that this was likely to be through the Dream of Dreams. I suppose the deduction is that the entity giving her whispers from the forest is indeed the jungle dragon and it can cause nightmare through the dream.
It is Lion’s Arch. They wouldn't have created plot loophole where Scarlet tries to weaken the Lion's Arch defenses, long before she builds a probe to find out she needs to attack Lion's Arch, unless she is actually going to attack Lion's Arch.
A good fight in Lion’s Arch with a gigantic drill, and the Marionette returning, a big nemesis at the bottom, that could look great. It will probably be fun. The story is completely full of holes though. I mean it is utterly unconvincing. Everyone in the world looks like an utter idiot for not bothering to work any of it out earlier. Scarlet has been able to do everything she is doing because … she’s just such a nemesis she can do anything, seemingly.
I can see why they are not adding new dungeons in the old format. For people to run them more than a couple of times the new paths would have to be amongst the most rewarding and fastest yet, and the designers will not do that. New dungeons are going to be longer like the living story dungeons and they would eventually be as deserted as TA aetherblade. There’s isn’t any need for a new way to get exotic gear and the new paths are not going to give ascended. No story needs telling with a new permanent dungeon.
We could also think about the marionette as something that could be lowered on chains to fight down a deep hole. It’s crazy yes, since the marionette is so big and can’t move beyond the hole, but it is possible that the marionette will fight what the probes are looking for.
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Other speculative energy sources underground could be
- abandoned asura city
- ancient dwarf city
- steam creature city
- a naturally occurring energy well – perhaps a source of the ley lines
“This causes her Arm to become thorny and it starts to rot. Now THIS is what Mordremoths corruption probably looks like.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. You could draw a parallel with Zaitan’s corruption that is like necromancy but it something different. Perhaps the jungle dragon can animate dead plant matter (such as husks) and so can the nightmare court, but they are not the same thing.
“Do you seriously think that (outside of the bloody prince thing) anyone is stupid/bored/crazy enough to go dive into old LA?”
Quaggan is stupid enough.
Next question – Why would the molten and toxic alliances support the return of former human god of death, or any human gods at all? Let’s have a better answer please than Scarlet being so super that she can get anyone to do anything.
Everyone complains about exploits in this game but one exploit you don’t see very often is bosses being killed without being able to hit people at all. This is because the mobs reset if they feel they are being exploited. These triggers probably do need to be in the game, yes there are probably false positives when the bosses reset at wrong times, and yes you will be seeing more than most because you are pushing the boundaries of solo play. Yes the reset rules could be better and no it will not be fixed as it affects so few players.
I don’t think this is a boy-girl thing. Friends can get jealous or feel rejected whatever the gender. I also don’t mind Braham acting immature since he is young and inexperienced.
“I don’t think people get the tactic wrong as much as they are focusing on staying alive.”
Sorry, that having running around without tactics. If you know the tactic you can be confident that it will keep you alive and you know the boss will die without a dps race. That is why people use tactics and why there is usually someone calling out the tactics, even in overflows.
“What are you saying, it’s an underestimated skill or should initiative be spend anyway on it because it would be a great skill in othet MMO’s?”
Pistol/dagger in PvE is entirely a kiting weapon set and it relies on dancing daggers to handle multiple targets. This separates it from pistol/pistol that has only single target damage and there’s no need to have two single target ranged weapon dps sets as one will be redundant. If dancing dancers is not fit for purpose as a multi-target snare in SPvP then suggest the changes that do make it fit that purpose. If a multi-target snare is never going to be useful in SPvP then it’s a straight case of “don’t break my PvE game just to fix your SPvP please!”
If dancing daggers + pistol auto shots do not do enough damage then I suggest the first thing to look at is, as usual, the awful pistol auto shot damage.
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If we consider at Scarlet’s minions, do we think they will align with this entity? Should we be thinking of something that could give these alliances a new future, giving some reason to why the alliances still follow Scarlet. You’d imagine that the krait and pirates would have nothing to do with the elder dragons, for example, so perhaps the entity is something completely different.
“What awful advice, and if the mob/boss suddenly aggro’d onto you and broke the stack then you’ve potentially neutered your team’s DPS by 90% and risk wiping.”
No you’re just not getting it. If you break from the stack but stand close enough, round the side, the mobs won’t leave the dps field if they turn towards you. You can’t leave the stack too early, you can’t do it for mobs like the spider queen, but experience can help you pick the right times. Of course many players have no experience because they only know stacking.
“Take the marionette event, you have to have a lot of people to do it because every step is dps race against a timer. Step 2 where you have to drag the guy back into the mines before u can try and dps him down is a good example of what im talking about.”
That is the prime example of something that is not a dps event. If players get the tactics wrong and lead the boss in a circle then no amount of dps will work. If players get the boss onto the mines quickly then he should die fast and the players will be safe. It’s only a dps ‘race’ if the players get into problems with lack of numbers or players going down.
Delete the rubbish. Most of the stuff can be collected again if it is needed later and you might even enjoy redoing the content. If a seasonal event comes back then so will all the tokens for it. If you don’t want to wear the 25 limited release cosmetics in your bank then you’re only causing yourself problems by keeping them until you might want to wear them.
In most other MMOs a multi target repeatable snare would be an excellent skill and thieves shouldn’t discard it so readily just to suit the current status of SPvP.
It looks like you’ve run into the typical dungeon tactics created by heavy classes for heavy classes. It makes everyone else look rubbish so even more people take heavies.
My tip for boss stacking would be to make sure the mobs are in place and then drift off the stack to a safer spot, perhaps round the rear of them or just out of melee (with your bombs). If you’re still sharing buffs, dishing out the aoe damage, etc then it can be a lot better but your team mates might not be understanding if you go down. The more exploitative the stacking less the freedom you have to move off, typically.
Nobody in this game owns any mobs, resources, or events. Anyone who contributes gets the reward. Extra people participating do not lower any of the rewards for anyone else. That’s the game design. It encourages players to work together.
If an elder dragon was sleeping underground it is not unreasonable for it to be disturbing nearby ley lines in a measurable way, even if it unaware it is doing so.
“Most individuals are gonna stay away from that place to begin with, and those that don’t wouldn’t be snooping around for very long, would be much better than hiding the place in a populated area…”
Ok the reasons I’d say it was a stupid place
- It would take a long time to get there by foot, which is presumably how she gets there. She’s meant to be a busy woman who is pioneering every branch of science.
- The Priory are the one group people who will be measuring random things just for the sake of it so it is the worst place to do experiments without being noticed.
- Ditto for communications and portals.
- A whole load of researchers, archaeologists, and the last living dwarf are exactly the people who might do something unpredictable to discover a secret cave of gizmos.
- She can’t command three alliances and a robotic army and workshops from within a cave. She can’t delegate as she has no named deputies or generals at all.
- She has no escape route or access to airships, but gateless teleports rule of course.
- She has access to any number of secret lairs through her alliances.
- Trolls and grawl are bad neighbours.
So saying she is there just because one cave is just as good as another is just making excuses for the sake of it, as far as I am concerned.
“And in all honesty, ArenaNet probably chose that place not due to its proximity to the Priory, but the lack of hostility+”in a cave" for their little cave painting."
If that’s the case then they have yet again shown a supposedly clever person doing a very stupid thing. The have now also made her a charismatic alliance leader, great weaponsmith, ufo designer, mad anarchist, and now a reclusive hermit as well. All at the same time!
I’m trying to reconcile the diaries, which are miserably short and unlike a diary, and her experience in Omadd’s experiment. It would make sense for her to have met her nightmare entity inside the experiment, yet the diary describes a slower descent into madness when she still had contact with the menders. If she was slowly going mad before the tank and the flipped when inside the experiment, then surely that would have been in the diary. If the experiment is unconnected to the entity then the experiment is still more important as that’s when Scarlet mentally replaces Caera. Whatever, the diary should have records of the experiment if Omadd is important enough to be her password.
Anyway, has anyone asked why her base was under the Priory yet? It was presumably so that she could access ancient records within the Priory or confer with a Priory member. As usual in GW2 we’re not going to find out until our allies drive the story and tell us to investigate the obvious.
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The mists show representations of past events. Kiel and Dessa tried to use the mists as a historical record so we presumably have to take it as that, although we can’t rule out parts of the fractal being representations of other events (so maybe the blob was in another inquest facility but the mists show it in the reactor, say). There’s no reason to think that Scarlet is traveling into that fractal just to lecture players each time.
The inquest workers in the fractal say that things stated to go wrong when the sylvari special advisor turned up. So it is likely that Scarlet’s interference was part of the cause of the explosion. Scarlet says that chaos energy is a misnomer but that only means wrongly named, it doesn’t mean she warned them not to research it. Also, when it comes to the ley lines she says ‘we live and learn’, suggesting that she was party to everything that happened. That’s the case for Scarlet being largely responsible for the explosion, or at least the thought that it would never have happened if she’d never been involved.
The monster husks that we see are likely to be husks (remnants) of some other living matter, so they could be husks of sylvari, husks of trees, husks of pods, husks of druids, husks of trolls, whatever. We don’t really know how husks are made but I see no reason to worry about how the worms do it.
“oh and scarlet hates the nightmare court just as much as she hates the dreamers. she made a deal with them for a share of twilight arbor, nothing more, nothing less. she is not a nightmare courtier.”
But as usual that’s what we’re told in story but it’s not what we see in the game world. Scarlet seems deeper into nightmares than the nightmare court and her psychology fits the court quite well (enjoying the surrender to nightmare, sadism, tyrannical rule, nightmare creations) so what is the difference? She is just such a nemesis that she’s unique, is that it?
If the nightmare court can see a vicious sadist struggling with personal nightmares then surely they would do everything in their power to induct her into their ranks? If they have a reason not to, why doesn’t that reason prevent them from allying with her?
I personally suspect the ‘obvious’ conclusions are the correct ones. Mordremoth has been manipulating Scarlet and she is trying to find him using these probes. She will be drilling to find him. She is aware of the orders and will probably attack them soon.
I would add the following thoughts
- Perhaps Scarlet is just imagining her dragon because she is mad. Nobody except the mad person has any evidence for this.
- The orders were supposedly big enemies of the dragons before the Pact was formed so Scarlet could be attacking the orders on that basis, keeping uncertainty with the personal story timeline.
- I don’t understand how Scarlet sits outside the Nightmare Court, or inside, or anywhere else to do with nightmare. With Mordremoth involved it just gets too confusing as to how the dragon is involved with nightmare too.
- As usual the writing tells us one thing but shows another. Her book is written in very logical manner but tells us she is mad. Her cave shows cartoon horror designs when she’s meant to be a genius inventor. Trying to meet a dragon doesn’t explain any of her actions whatsoever. It’s as if her plot had a rewrite in November.
The OP shows one problem with everyone following common knowledge tactics like stacking all the time. Nobody ever sees what happens when it goes wrong so the community forgets why they’re doing it!
There could be a long answer to the OP but instead I’ll just say
- Heavy classes give more for less. Class balance does not exist in dungeons.
- Common knowledge tactics rely on heavies. Kickers won’t change tactics.
- Experienced PUG players eventually use heavies to make it easier for themselves.
- Perceptions make it seem worse than it is.
- Forum readers pick up on elite tactics and expect them in PUGs (yeah right!).
A friend was playing GW2 a while back who always fell asleep literally at the keyboard as he liked to drink beers and stay up playing as long as he could. A kick system was perfect for dealing with him since we could start any content and replace him easily if needed. In previous MMOs we needed to either reform the group or carry on with him missing since there wasn’t a kick facility. That sort of example shows that kicks are not necessarily abusive even if they are repeated.
I did the Marionette event tonight with a guild mate and putting our numbers together, we have succeeded 4/4 times when doing it on our home sever and succeeded 0/10 times in overflows. If I only turn up half an hour before the event I find myself in an overflow, so there must be whole zone full of people willing to wait at least that long to do the event. Presumably all those players see overflows as an even bigger waste of time.
Anyone else have similar stats?
It’s the nature of forums that long rambling posts cause a long of disagreement, get a lot of responses, and have a high profile. Please don’t ignore the accurate posts that get little attention because nobody argues with them. These accurate posts are actually the best feedback you could get and the process should not lose them amongst the noise.
I actually read very little of the CDI threads because they are so long and full of noise.
Hey Zoija, I met these really cool people in Lion’s Arch and I’m going to form an adventuring group with them. I know they’ll really look after me as there’s this big Norn who takes after his mother, a couple who really love each other, and people like Rytlock and Logan are giving them lots of advice. If we follow Scarlet we might be able to see the genius in her mind and …. Zoija, Zoija, tell Mr Sparkles not to lock me in the cupboard please Zoija please?
“From all the characters, Braham has the least reason to mess with Scarlett from a character point of view.”
Molten troops raided his homestead and killed his friends. That seems like the most motivation of any of the characters to me.
I’m rather neutral on that story instance. Some bits were good and some were bad. I find Marjory to be rather predatory with Kasmeer and if it was an elder male chasing a younger woman that way it would be creepy. I also don’t believe in Rytlock setting solo tests for Rox before she can join his warband. That’s exactly not what a warband should be about.
Yes the overflows are a problem. They are a purely technical limitation that is ruining game play for some players and continually eating into the play time of others. Players and guilds have to invest a lot of time and effort to work around these problems. If that technical limitation cannot be solved then content should be designed in a way that avoids the issues and delivers enjoyable gaming to everyone.
They would do far better adding new skills/weapons to existing classes so that existing characters can be customized to feel like something new. Most players would prefer that to buying a character slot to level up and get gear for a new character class.
Maybe not six metas but there’s usually someone who posts something with shadow arts, and someone who posts something with acrobatics. Speed runners can post up pure dps builds all day long but it doesn’t help the casual players who are running PUG dungeons, don’t know tactics, and haven’t the skill to make every dodge.
Thief skills underwater are broken. They are usually brokenly bad but they are also sometimes brokenly good so try to find those situations.
Whenever someone asks for the thief meta there are usually six different answers, even six different long detailed answers. You can make most sensible builds work.
“The reason few go to Orr, outside of temple events and ore runs is because it had the crud nerfed out of it. And the invasions are at this point, naff.”
Crud, nerfed, naff. Let me rephrase those descriptions. Changes were made to Orr to give serious scaling on the events for the number of players. This makes them seem naff compared to the trivial champion trains that have no scaling at all even for a raid sized group of players. Even after the scaling changes there were players in Orr doing the events. It was the reward changes to world bosses (guaranteed rare), dungeons (guaranteed coin), and champions (guaranteed purse) that pulled players elsewhere with each patch. If the rewards for scaled up Orrian events and non-scaling Queensdale champions were properly balanced then players would go back to Orr and Orr wouldn’t be seen as naff.
“No it doesn’t take away from other content, at all.”
The evidence shows that the champ train does take people away from Orr and the Scarlet invasions. These were designed to be repeatable end game content but there is nobody there except for yet more champion farming. You could argue that there should be more rewards for completed invasions but actually the rewards that are out of balance, the champ trains, should fixed first rather than the game rebalanced around the broken rewards.
The champ train isn’t “fine” in a design sense. It provides enjoyable play for some people, people who like mindlessly following a rotation, but it takes people away from the intended end game content and those premium open world events suffer from lack of numbers.
The core problem is that a raid sized group of people are taking on mobs intended for small groups. The lack of scaling of difficulty and reward means they can be mindlessly repeated for high rewards for time taken. Nobody would think it was fine to take 25 people through all the dungeons at rapid speed to collect maximum loot in the shortest time, so I’m not sure why people think it is good game play to do the same in the open world.