Guild Wars 2

If you’re in PvE just take pistol/dagger for cripple every time.

“I see many players joining and asking about the Champion Zerg train, to get their gear grind on.

Yet pre-release you all were saying how much you hated Raid Dungeons for the same reason."

The first difference is that the champion train is open world, open access, with people free to come and go as they like. No commitment needed. Very little organization. Nobody excluded. This immediately strikes off many of the problems of raids.

Next consider that the champ trains are effectively raid sized collections of players tackling group content. They only get group quality rewards for each champ but they kill so quickly it becomes more rewarding than other content. This clearly isn’t the intent of the design and it can’t last forever in its current form.

“Actually the solution is to tweak the up scaling so that:

more people = more health for champions, NOT
more people = more champions"

We already do have health scaling and it is part of the problem. A group of two or three people can clear an aetherblade event+captain faster than a zerg with 3 commanders. Really! The hp scaling of the mobs is that bad already and it makes no sense to increase the hp any more.

“ALSO FIX, champions drop green or blue boxes instead of orange boxes when not enough people show up.”

This is a good idea. Players tackling portals in small numbers are taking much more risk but ultimately spend more time getting less reward.

It’s all about the loot. The invasions are reasonably good content in terms of fun and involvement but the rewards are more important to a portion of the player base. The first problems are the champion loot bags. This sabotages the invasions in two ways – players would rather do a champ farm elsewhere or would rather kill aetherblade champs forever. Zergs tackling group content for group rewards (in rapid time) is a reward problem across the whole game.

The second problem is that for an hour long event it really does need good rewards. It needs to promise more dragonite (and other rewards) than an Orrian temple or Jormag event if it is going to take people out of the end game zones and into the invasion zones. The success rate needs considering there as well.

“All oakheart mobs have the same animation, if you were anywhere near the MJ (so asura or sylvari), you should have known them for at least 78 levels. If you didnt go there why the bloody hell are you in the dungeon? Go finish the kittening map to 100%”

This tree has plenty of attacks that are certainly not on the other oakhearts.

When GW2 is rolled out to Asia or elsewhere the living story will be over a year old. Do we know if the game will be launched with the living story at the same stage as in the Americas/Europe, since that would leave it largely meaningless for new players? Would it even be possible for Anet to start the game in Asia with the living story starting again from scratch?

I’ve no personal interest of course, just curious.

GW2 seems to have a philosophy of showing you the current world through the game events and all the old lore is hidden away in conversations and books. I don’t think that’s so bad. All the stuff with Zaitan raising Orr and corrupting the worship of the human gods is shown in game. Any history of Orr is stuck is elsewhere. Fine.

With Scarlet and the living story we may again just be looking at current events but without any access to a back story through conversations and books. Hopefully the series of current events will form a decent history over time but at the moment I agree that it feels empty.

Let’s post yet another bug thread about the fractal harpies. It’s really easy to get out of line of sight of these harpies if you get knocked back by their attacks or dodge to evade their attacks. Once you are out of sight they go invulnerable for a long, long time. At this stage they can essentially cheat as they will
- reset their health as if they feel they are out of combat
- always keep you in combat regardless
- still attack you
- stay invulnerable

Lets have a fix for this please. This bug is far too long standing and it can really ruin people’s nights. It really penalizes any group that tries to honestly fight through these lousy monsters rather just skip and exploit.

“The only attack that does any large amount of damage is telegraphed to hell and back. "

But people get hit with it before they learn the timing of the animations and then stay away. It’s alright to say ‘learn the animations’ but if you don’t know the animations you don’t want to get into trial-and-error when error results in you getting thrown into a cog for what is effectively a one shot kill. Anyone who isn’t being told how to play by a friend or website is probably going to some take a little while to work it out, particularly if they are a squishy class.

You could repeat fractals until you get an ascended weapon but even when it drops you cannot choose the stats. I did indeed get an ascended weapon from the fractal 28 end chest but it was a cleric’s weapon.

If you want to work for an ascended then you grind and craft it. If you want to just get lucky sometime then just play as you like and the perfect ascended might appear in a chest somewhere. It probably won’t but at least you’ll have enjoyed your time.

The build isn’t so important. There are quite a lot of different builds you can use and yours should be viable, however you need to look where your defenses are. Are you getting blinds onto trash mobs? Are you dealing enough hits to heal through with signet of malice? Are you getting easy condition cures? Are you getting missile defense up every time it is needed? Are there times you can shadowstep in and out of danger? You can fix some of these things with utilities but using a pistol or sword can give some defense as well without changing your build. (and without perfect reflexes).

You could try taking 10 points out of trickery to put into shadow arts so that you get a choice of defenses when you go into stealth. That can work well with cloak and dagger.

Any of those big pets the ogres tame, particularly that rock dog in the personal story. Raptors.

As soon as you have a paid expansion, the game improvements such as LFG and the wallet no longer come free. They come in the paid expansion. That’s how marketing guys make sure you buy expansions.

The Living Story has problems but a paid expansion is not a solution we should be asking for.

It can’t be working as intended. All it does at the moment is clog up bag space until you need it. Everyone will collect enough bloodstone to craft an ascended weapon while they are getting the dragonite and empyreal (unless they collect the other stuff in an extreme way). Dust has zero cost or effort apart from using container space.

The second problem is that it drops in high quantities and is needed in high quantities. This mean it takes even more container space than it needs to. The amount required and amount dropped could be dropped by a factor of 5. I’m guessing it was set at the same quantitiy as empyreal and dragonite just to look tidy.

Now there is the in game lfg tool you can quickly check LFG after you have been booted. There might be a 4/5 entry there with the names of your former party and if it does show up then take that screenshot.

So what do you mean by Tyria? Do you mean just the land, or also include the oceans, sky, heavens, moons, stars, flora, fauna, magic, or absolutely everything? An argument of internal balance needs a definition of what is outside and inside. This might change someone’s view of whether the raising and sinking of Orr, for example, actually does anything to change balance.

There’s also a question of how the brand adds to the balance of Tyria. It does not seem very natural.

Repeated heartseekers are a bit excessive when chasing enemies or leaping in smoke. I’m guessing it will be put into a two skill chain at some stage, similar to flanking strike.

Yes the ineffectiveness of blind on champs is a balance problem. My thief can carve through veterans and then come to a halt when a champ shows up. Unfortunately with smoke and finishers a group could apply a lot of blindness if they really wanted to. I think we’re all waiting for a good solution to appear to solve this one but your idea isn’t balanced for the continual blinding of a champion by 10 or more players.

The ascended weapons require everything. The consume almost every currency. They require you to do play of the content. That’s the design. It’s almost certainly not going to change.

Scarlet doesn’t need detailed character analysis as she seems too shallow. There just seems to be a disconnect between the Scarlet we see and the results of Scarlet’s actions. For example, we see Scarlet as a spiteful, childish, sociopath yet she is meant to have forged many alliances, raised armies, and has been described as ‘silver tongued’.

The Canach mini dungeon was the third worst living world content. It was really poor and a complete design dead end. The second worst content was a scavenger hunt where the contacts kept bugging so a hundred people stood around saying “What am I mean to do here”. The karka invasion of Lion’s Arch was the worst living world content as it was a single time event and nobody could move because of the lag, so it annoyed both everyone who missed it and everyone who was there.

Tequatl is nowhere near to being the worst living world content. It needs the access sorting out or the scaling sorting out, but if either is sorted out we get a promising event.

Two player content would be a much better addition to the game than one player content.

The foreman follows you as you dodge and does not travel in a straight line. If you try to dodge through him, which usually works best if someone is coming past you, he sticks with you and it hurts a lot.

Adding more skills and weapons to existing classes would be better than adding a new class. Give spears to warriors and you can create a hoplite type class for anyone who already has a warrior. Give some demon-hunter skills to a guardian and you create a demon hunter type class for anyone who already has a guardian.

Leveling alts can be good for dailies. Try that instead of worrying about what you lose in achievements. If chasing achievements isn’t fun then don’t do it. Simple.

Those generators have a lot of movement and visual glitches. So do the little platforms above the electric floor. Those glitches should not be present in a high mobility fight.

“Now that I have 2 80s and you have 1 80. We both run AC all 3 explorable paths. Now we both have about 180 AC tokens. I have another character I could run it on, becuase I want him to have 180 AC tokens for gear as well. NOPE! Even though It would take another 1.5hrs to do the paths, I would not get the 180 AC tokens.

That’s not fair now is it?"

Fair is all relative. If a person runs the path twice why should get more benefit with two characters than one character? It’s ‘unfair’ to a person with one character if the person with two characters gets more, just as much as it is ‘unfair’ for the person with two to only get as much as the person with one character. The time spent in the dungeon is the same either way.

Karma was a broken currency. They had to fix it. One of the ways that they broke karma was giving away karma jugs so they stopped giving away as many karma jugs. Fine.

New players get less karma and will not get the broken karma pools with millions of karma. Good or bad? It’s good. Even though new players will be jealous of the old karma pools there is no point trying to balance rewards against broken currencies or the game will go to ruin.

This all might have far less breadth than we imagine. It could all be very close to the “what Scarlet saw” short story. After her supervillain inducing experiment, Scarlet immediately mentioned that she understood Caithe and Faolin, of all people, so they might be key to something. I’m guessing that something is nightmare, and Caithe has done things involving nightmare than even Faolin doesn’t know.

The story I’d like is for Caithe to know her wyld hunt is not finished even after the death of Zaitan. He was not the dragon she was looking for but she pretended that it was. I doubt that will happen though.

Originally the ascended rings and infusions were only available in fractals. They were later added also into the game as a reward for daily quests through laurels. It’s a possibility that the original intent of infusions was lost in the design change that introduced the daily grind.

“That is most likely a limitation put by ANET so ppl that havn’t done story mode gain easy access to exp mode by getting someone that has done story mode and then kicking him to get another party member and by that having a full party of ppl that havn’t done story mode but still doing exp mode”

It could be that, or perhaps dungeons being attached to the server of the opening player. Either way it is a still an internal design problem they should never have allowed to reach the game itself. Designers are meant to design these things better.

“The work it takes to get an alt should be rewarded with something. "

Oh you feel deserving of something do you? Well no. Create alts for fun rather than facilitating grind.

The aetherblade stage tracks the number of captains killed, who are champions. Reducing the champion loot from the aetherblade stage isn’t an answer in itself unless the whole event can surpass a champion train elsewhere for gold. I could suggest the problem is with the very popular champ trains but rewards have always been out of balance all across the game. Dragonite and empyreal have improved the rewards of some old content but (I’m assuming) the invasion doesn’t even promise enough dragonite for an hour event.

Plague carriers also ought to own to their damage in the combat logs instead of just being “unknown explosion hits for you 13,056 damage”.

Dreysman, if you’re happy with your elementalist then stick with it. If you play it well it will be capable of doing everything except the very top end of PvP. Whenever there is a class balancing patch the PvP heirachy moves up and down anyway. By the time you master another class at level 80 it might have problems of its own.

You might get 1000 to make it the same as warrior longbow, but Anet won’t give back 1200. The shortbow is a mobility weapon, similar to thief shortbow, and mobility fits a short/mid range weapon better. Thieves are far worse off with a 900m maximum on all their weapons and they are not going to get extra range on their shortbow either.

Yes the shield generators have a visual representation that is not correct with the logical boundaries. Both the little platforms and the generators glitch far too often. When making high mobility content the designers need to make the movement free from glitches. It’s also important to let mobility skills like shadowstep work without glitches (since it can’t break the fight any more than invulnerability already does).

The invasions I’ve seen recently have been running behind schedule with lack of people then grind to a halt on the aetherblades. I’ve done some captains with 3 or 4 people faster than the zerg with every other player in the zone, the hp bars scale that badly . Since the event never gets completed the people who want completion rewards stop showing and then the champ farmers stick to frost gorge (or wherever) too.

At least it will be healthier than Tequatl.

It is a total failure of design that this closure of the instance is even possible. It has angered players on every occasion it has ever happened and it will continue to anger players until it is fixed. It should be fixed by now. It will be inevitably be fixed in the future. It is just an embarrassment to the game while it continues.

These hidden ‘quests’ are in the original design. Nearly all the jumping puzzles are hidden. They are probably too hard to find and most players would have missed them entirely if there were no achievements and net spoilers. There are also mini dungeons that can be completed solo or with a friend. They don’t have a big alert in the top of the screen saying “Quest here! Do it now! Do not ignore this message!” but they are in the game. Some of the open world events also tell short stories and take players into little adventures that do substitute nicely for quests.

The reward for these hidden quests can’t be too big or else everyone would repeatedly do them. That leaves the loot near the level of the current open world chests which are admittedly underwhelming.

This should probably be in the bugs section but yes, mobs do respawn too fast. In fact they can respawn instantly, literally upon the instant you kill them, so they couldn’t possibly respawn any faster. I’ve seen this in numerous zones recently. This is for normal open world mobs as well as mobs related to events.

Hate alts? You can get tokens just as fast as a person with no alts. You are not penalized or given preferential treatment by the designers.

Don’t forget that many of our trait lines and utilities involve the pet. With a dead pet these become entirely useless or less powerful than other classes.

Rangers have trap and spirits and some other utilities that are static. This is of limited use in any mobile content. So with a dead pet in mobile content nearly all the ranger utilities are useless.

You answer your own question.

“So if he wasn’t there before or after Lost Shores, when did he manage to become so familiar with the island?”
“we know that he sent an expedition to scout the place”

“Thief has the best mitigation in the game, since they have the highest chance and the access to the most tools that allow them to avoid damage entirely.”

Who stole my invulnerability skill?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

At low level you probably want to keep your tactics and gear quite simple. Sword+pistol and pistol+dagger are two simple weapon sets that can be used without any traits or utilities. As a thief you don’t want to stand toe to toe with enemies without some defenses. Those weapon pairings give you smoke, dazes, and cripple for simple defense.

Yes this is bad for ranger pets. Almost every tactic in the dungeon involved floor damage, explosion damage, damaging pools, burning paths, and so on. Having said all that, I found my pets staggeringly good at tanking the tree boss.

The krait at the Tequatl event can also explode. That’s particularly bad design in my opinion since it drives squishy classes out of melee entirely. You can watch out for one or two carriers but you can’t watch every mob you ever melee with for a random explosion.

If you want lots of coin for time spent then try some of the really short dungeon paths elsewhere. Arah takes much longer for inexperienced players and the really fast players won’t want to carry you round. Fast Arah runs have a lot of skipping, some of skips possibly being exploits. Try the Arah paths out in order 3-2-1-4. Take the warrior as most groups use warrior based tactics.

It should be the same as the other dungeons, 60. Repeated runs on the same day on the same path by the same account give fewer tokens.