The chantry map combined with the Tyria map appears to show tectonic plates. I see nothing to suggest anything to do with ley lines especially since there are no lines anywhere near the only known ley line location, the Thaumanova reactor.
The tectonic plates may be relevant to fighting Promordius.
Those beacons will probably be related to Scarlet and it seems reasonable to assume they are connected to the ley lines. Cue lots of open world events beating up things coming out of portals near beacons. The ley line research and portal technology originating from the reactor is actually one of the most believable things in the living story so far. Unfortunately it only gives another reason why Scarlet can do what we expected she could do (invent things) and doesn’t explain how she can do the unbelievable stuff (lead alliances).
Old fractals being made even more punishing and time consuming – bad
Some fixes for old fractals – good but needed much more
Infusions becoming a gear grind item – awful
Storytelling – Scarlet awful (I’ll giggle and tell you all my secrets and then run off)
Storytelling – Kiel and Tessa – much better
Reactor Fractal – some new fight mechanics but visually bland and disappointing
If they need more time they can start planning each update 12 weeks in advance instead 10 weeks in advance, or however long each update takes. These updates are not written and developed in a fortnight. Turning the living story into monthly updates isn’t going to help at all if the overall development time for each update remains the same.
The voice acting you are hearing from Scarlet and the other characters could have been recorded 3 months or even 6 months ago.
The lore fits but does she need to be a cheesy villain who tells us top secret plans each and every fortnight before escaping, each and every fortnight? It’s just bad storytelling. Would it really have taken the designers 5 minutes to put a few points into the reactor where we could press F and gather clues? That’s a pretty braindead activity too but it’s one step up from the villain telling their secrets every week.
The needle trap can be used on the dredge suit boss of the final fractal.
One higher level problem with traps is that thieves don’t need 4 traps and caltrops that all are static and in one trait line. There can be no viable traps based build. Those skills need some variety.
You can buy gems with in game money. It’s expensive, but that’s only because some people must be spending a lot of in game money on gems to push the price up.
It seems like they’ve closed off a few more ways you could run fractals that were not in the design (even if not exploits) such as dead people holding down pads in the dredge cage. I noticed one helpful bug fix but most of the annoying stuff seemed to still be there and unfixed. My group got a ridiculous amount of loot on level 20 but the diminishing returns (that don’t exist of course) will probably kick in soon.
I got a revive when down on the pads and it didn’t close the back doors, so that’s at least one thing fixed. The mining suit also has some important chat like “I’ll kill you” that I don’t remember hearing before.
Yeah my general impression is that there are still some petulant developers who are annoyed that players are not running fractals they were designed to be played, and just try to give players a harder time with each patch. It doesn’t matter if the original design was frustrating, tedious, and seriously short of fun, the design is ‘right’ and players have to suffer as long in fractals as originally intended.
“25/30/0/0/15 or 30/30/0/0/10 are the only viable pve dungeon builds for a thief.”
That’s the build for perfect dodging and evades which will not suit someone who has never seen the dungeon before. In dungeons there is quite a lot of build flexibility for thieves and you can put some points into either acrobatics or shadow arts for some survivability.
The fury buff is there to partner the might on crit trait for the greatsword. It is there to give 100% fury uptime rather than 50-75%. I doubt fury will be replaced with anything else and I doubt it will get a straight upgrade (given how greatsword warriors can mash PVE with no skill whatsoever).
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I think they were using thieves just to show ‘even thieves can do this’. Thieves are not a good fractal class once you get past stealth skips. If enemies are going to explode on death then the very first class that is going to be driven out of melee is the thief. We could use shadow return on the sword to get away from exploding melee enemies of course but .. ah no. I’m guessing the low health pool, lack of block, lack of protection, lack of stability, lack of invulnerabilty, etc is going to hit thieves hard with these fractal disturbances.
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So level 90 gives :
- new skills – could be given at 80
- new traits – could be given at 80
- new zones – could be done at 80
- new story – could be done at 80
- new cosmetics – could be done at 80
- new weapons skills – could be done at 80
- new combat mechanics – could be done at 80
- more time leveling up – not wanted, and not good for new players.
- new crafting – not needed
- new gear
The whole point is new gear. Anyone who has spent time in the new GW2 gear grind will not want to see it all become obsolete with a level increase. Nobody wants to buy more transmutations stones to take their level 80 look with them to level 90. I’m assuming legendaries would be taken up to max level but that doesn’t change the core problem. Gear treadmills are a horrible piece of game design and will alienate the player community.
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“You put the time to level up your alts, you put the time to gear up them as well.”
Wait,wait, wait. That is the awful gear grind philosophy. Players should be able to enjoy the game without endlessly gearing up characters.
This is still really bad and it isn’t just in zergs. Dungeon groups can provide enough flare that you can’t see mobs properly, neither their facing nor their animations.
A fix for the performance hit in smoke would be welcome too. Just a couple of dredge bombers can drive my game to a crawl.
I was something similar happen at Lyssa yesterday as well. Lots of people went down then unknown hit me for 23k damage a few seconds later so I guessed it was a champ plague carrier. The problem is that it is so rare to see these plague carriers anyway that it’s hard to track what they actually do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the champs always explode twice before they die.
The problem is that ascended crafting requires everything. Most players will acquire some things faster than others due to their play style and they won’t collect massive quantities of everything. This means most players will be short of dragonite, short of empyreal, or short of something else and most players will need to grind out the rest for their ascended weapons.
The theory that Scarlet is organizing alliances for a master plan seems reasonable, but her execution of that plan is questionable. You don’t build up your forces by randomly invading the countryside. You don’t strengthen your alliances by sending troops into pointless battles without delivering their goals. You risk your master plan by making enemies of every nation of Tyria. Your lose any technological advantage when you let your newly created enemies get their hands on your equipment and develop toxic antidotes.
If you want me to make a guess at why dungeons need a leader, I’d guess that the dungeon data is stored on a physical server that represents one game world. For whatever reason, the design needs the link between the opening player, the server, the game world, and the dungeon. Without the opening player the links are lost. We all take cross server play for granted but maybe it isn’t as seamless as we’d like it to be.
That’s just my guess. I suspect there is some problem in the software architecture since a massive problem like the destruction of dungeons should have been fixed by now.
Distracting the champion with a pet or fellow player are two options. Sometimes you can immobilize them in a harmless place or stealth might last long enough. Sometimes the champs just wander out of the area for long enough to get the skill (such as the one near Jofasts camp).
Coming back another day can also work. This can also help if contested temples are causing you problems with statues.
Look on the ranger boards and you’ll the rangers complaining that sic’em is useless and never works. Even though rangers are getting confused because they don’t understand revealed, I’m guessing that thieves are not bring driven out of PvP by sic pets.
In the nightmares chambers you can get Kasmeer & Marjory, Marjory & Rox, Kasmeer & Braham, and Braham & Rox. You get a bit of different character based dialogue each time but nothing to advance a story.
Do we know whether Sic’Em activates immediately or when the pet decides to follow the command?
“I really have no sympathy for people who preach this as a reason to abolish trinities. Certain people have certain duties, and those duties are rewarded accordingly. Do you want to be rewarded with immediate dungeon queues? Then it is your duty to take up the responsibility of being a tank or a healer”
I’m afraid that I utterly and completely disagree with that opinion. I can remember EQ1 and every trinity MMO I played after that where players have burnt out and quit the game because they had to play a healer class instead of a class they enjoy. I’m talking about a serious lack of enjoyment from a fun activity. The worst part is that it was the nicer people who always helped their friends out that suffered the most.
This isn’t a small issue by the way. This was a game ruining problem for many, many people. In EQ1 I’d go as far as to say it ruined the game for the majority of the healers.
One possible answer is that a group of players can easily have surplus support. If they can kill quickly then do they really need every warrior to have a revive banner slotted? This is particularly true for guardian/warrior groups where a guardian can sustain the rest of the group while the warriors all deliver damage.
Another answer is that players often take self contained builds into dungeons. They could rely on other classes for boons but if someone delivers extra damage under fury, say, that person will use skills that provide fury in their own build. This sort of selfishness is sensible.
Quality of fighting strength is not just about strength but also about weaknesses. The Pale Tree itself is a weakness. Just how many sci-fi films show a horde of overpowered aliens defeated with a single strike to the queen?
If you like the thought of a trinity then stand around in Lion’s Arch for 30 minutes pretending to wait for a healer, because that’s what you have with a trinity. If you’re not convinced, wait around for 30 minutes in Lion’s Arch the day after waiting for a tank.
“Her ranged attacks were in fact unreflectable.”
I think she used the thief dagger/pistol dual skill to shadowstep to the furthest enemy and at one time that had some dodgy reflect issues, such a shadowstepping the target to the thief. Perhaps the devs decided to clean that up by making her shots unblockable.
The chance of a player seeing a glitch from a psuedo-random sequence is far, far less than the chance of a player seeing a precursor come out of the forge. Also, each player essentially takes a random sample from the server’s pseudo-random sequence as (many) other events are taken from that sequence over the sample period, randomly interspersed amongst any one player’s sample.
Bring all weapons. Bring food. Bring sufficient AR.
Forget all the only full zerker, must use a sword despite the suicide animation, must use spotter, etc. That stuff that does work well for elite speed runners in well organized groups. It might work for you but you can use all the tools in the bag for fractals and most PUG groups will be happier if you stay alive than risk all in search of dps, especially if they struggle to stay alive themselves. Any zerker flavored build is fine to start with. PUGs will typically kick you if you don’t have experience, don’t have sufficient AR, right away when you join, or if you’re a second ranger, so anything competent is generally still ok.
A lot of the boss difficulty is essentially dodging and you can do that on any class. It’s easier to learn the dodges when you don’t have to manage the sword as well. Specific utilities come into play in different fractals and you really just need to see the fractals and work out what to do. They are all different. Traps for instance are very useful in specific fights, and only those fights. You will also need to learn some of the tactics that groups use and play to those, particularly when it comes to controlling the position and movement of mobs (where rangers can foul up badly).
Simple solutions :
- Fix the exploits so it’s impossible to skip bosses
- Put ‘puzzles’ in that needs four or five people to finish
We know the GW2 combat system lets one high skilled person perform better than five newbies. That isn’t going to change so some solo/duo dungeons will remain possible and players will sell if players will buy.
GW2 generally gives a full share of rewards with anyone who contributes so I doubt they will change that for dungeons. If a group is short of a person the game system should support their efforts to get a replacement to help out, so that means giving full rewards. Path selling should not spoil that.
- Fix the bugs in existing fractals (such as harpy invulnerability)
- Put a fixed agony resistance into ascended items and remove agony infusions
- Make fractal level account bound and restart at 30 max.
- Remove the existing fractals 31 upwards
- Add levels 31-40 in this update with the challenges
- Add a fractal update next year for levels 41-50
- Allow barter of an unwanted weapon fractal skin + pristine relics for a chosen skin
- Make fractal weapons into actual skins rather than transmutation sinks
- Stop fractal instances closing when the opening player leaves the group
- Make AR of each player visible to the group
- no leaderboard
“So what do you people suggest? Give heavy armor to Ranger? Give reflects to Necro? Remove zerker armor? Come on.”
Guardians and Warriors have utilities that are fit for purpose for a melee class. Move onto other classes and you get a variety of other stuff with fancy ideas but the core support for melee is not there. (Thieves are ok with blind until defiant leaves them cold). Ranger is the typical example of a class that can go into melee and can apply damage but the utility/trait support just isn’t as good as a warrior since the class design spreads ranger utilities/traits over a variety of roles, none of which are fully delivered.
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“if you can’t come up with an official Response were a dev actually stats that it was not intended to go to 81 before january patch I will believe you:)”
You provide the official response. I’m not the one asking for any update changes here.
As for the encouraging player to go as high as they could – well they obviously thought that sufficient agony to kill players would put a practical cap at 50. That was the design. You are never going to persuade me that they intended or encouraged players to use unique class mechanics (such as the ranger downed state) to go higher than 50.
Any class can do open world but others do it faster/easier than thief.
World events similarly.
Thieves are mid tier for dungeons, good in some and poor in others.
In general, thieves are ok while blind is an effective defense and weaker once you have to play well to dodge/evade. Warriors can steamroller most stuff regardless.
For all we know the steam creatures are sentient organic beings that created mechanical shells to protect their own weak bodies. The dwarves could have made them. Perhaps another race made them to fight the elder dragons thousands of years ago and they remained buried under the ice until recently. Who knows? I don’t think the happenings in the alternate universe of the ‘inifinity ball’ rule out alternative things happening in our universe.
“Developers never prevented us from playing scale over 50, even after numerous tweaks to it. Either they are extremely incompetent or they allowed us to play there.”
Some players specifically asked on these forums for their personal play area on fractals level 50+ to remain. This was fully in the knowledge that the official fractals ended at 50 but these players wanted to challenge themselves for their own personal satisfaction. They argued that no harm was done since these levels had no game function and the rewards did not scale. Some other people did point out that there might be a use for high level fractals later but that did not stop the voices who asked for 50+ to remain open. You might not be able to remember that but I can. You might disbelieve it but it did happen.
“All we are saying, Malafide, is that they could have implemented the new bosses, mechanics from 51 or even 81 "
We all know that putting new content at 51+ is a bad idea at the moment. It is awful for new players starting at level 1, it is awful in terms of AR requirement, and it is awful in terms of mob scaling (more dredge, one hit kills, bloated hp bosses). I have no idea why anyone is suggesting this for a living story update that already offers very little to casual players. Elite players using unique class skills to suffer through the old 50+ content doesn’t make level 50+ suitable for the general player population.
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“Fractals are important but how good does it feel to have a couple of hundreds of hours of yours to turn out to be showles?”
Time spent is important. I’m not going to say it isn’t important. However, given the choice, would you choose to justify your previous gaming time and keep level 80 or would you choose to play new fractals with a new level of 31?
Mai Trin is one of the very few named villain characters in the Living Story so she is worth a little appreciation at least, even if her story was obvious. She’s a better enemy than ‘an aetherblade captain’, ‘a toxic baroness’, ‘a molten bezerker’. Once I’d worked out her mechanics I thought she was a good boss fight and fun to play. The cannon parts were too long so hopefully that will be cut down.
Let’s suppose that 30+ players were told the fractal magitech was broken on high levels but new stable branches could be created from level 31. If you went down the branch at 31 your old rating would be wiped for the old path. If you didn’t enter a new fractal you would keep your old level however. Would anyone choose never to play fractals again and keep the old rating, or would everyone decide to play at 31?
Essentially is playing fractals important or is the number important?
It’s easy to make up a story for the reset. The asura gadgets overloaded and fried when running a high level fractal. After fixing the machines, Tessa can send you to the same old 1-30 but refuses to risk the machines again on the old 31-50. She can let you find a new path in the mists starting from 31, that won’t fry the machines, if you want to do it.
The new challenge fractals are being put in at level 31-50. This is much better game design than putting new levels in at 50+. The mobs scaling and AR requirement at 50+ would be too much and new players starting at L1 would be faced with far too many levels to grind. 50 levels total is already more than enough for casual players, who rarely repeat a dungeon 50 times. The designers should get the future design right even if they have to remodel part of the old design, so remodeling 31-50 is right.
So should players have their fractals level set back to 30 or left higher? Well the old players haven’t beaten the new content. We can assume that they would do but it hasn’t been achieved and we don’t know whether new builds and tactics are needed. So I say the level reset is fair and it actually gives players something to do. A scaled down player can still join higher groups (if someone else opens) and any loss of loot from a lower reward level is likely to be minimal.
If players want a title for reaching old level 49/50, fine.
Playing to fractal L80 was allowed by the devs as fun for players to test themselves. It was not an intended part of the game intent and became a challenge for those who wanted it. We knew at the time there was no reward other than succeeding the challenge and esteem amongst peers. Now that challenge has gone it seems as if people want a reward for it after all.
Heavy armor classes perform better in harder PVE content. Some of the living story content is harder (or without established tactics to make it easy) so the heavy armor classes have been looking better. All the content can be done with all classes but the heavy armor classes require a lot lower player skill to do it.
“Well thieves aren’t for everyone, you know. Either work harder or play another class.”
Sanduskel is up to 48 posts in this thread now with expert advice like that. Just ignore him.
It’s quite forward. As soon as content becomes more difficult the heavy classes have the tools to deal with it and the medium armor classes don’t. Medium classes can deal with it if they dodge and evade perfectly but odds on they won’t. Rangers needs pets alive to get full value from traits and utilities and as soon as the content is difficult the pet is either not pulling it’s weight or not alive. Utilities are often weak and do not form versatile builds. Missile defense is awful. The class role as a ranged damage dealer is not fully delivered but there isn’t enough utility and trait support for melee either (compare rangers to warriors).
“Plus, NPCs using boons means a lot of boon stripping skills finally become viable in PvE.”
Then they give the toxic krait some boons that you cannot strip. Go figure that one out.
Lets see what the fractals are like after the living story update. If the seals are still not resetting properly then put in a bug report (not that it would necessarily do any good). The devs have acknowledged now that this fight should reset properly.
I had a bad run just before making my last ascended weapon but since then I’ve been getting 2 or 3 dark matter each time. You are probably just getting the worst luck from random sequence and hopefully you will pick up too.
Quick check:
- do you get dark matter from salvaging items less than level 80?
- do you get the same amount of dark matter from jewelry, weapons, and armor?
When a new portal is opened the spawn is often unrelated to the number of people present, since there are often no people present. Some of these portals in stages 3 and 5 start with a champion, just to make it interesting I suppose.
The portals are meant to be group events so if they don’t break the design if they are too tough for one player to solo.