The nightmare tree needs its own forum.
The graphics for the steam portal are interesting but they may simply indicate a new type of portal that is not bolted onto the floor at either end. It may be a clue that the steam creatures will be part of the next story installment but we’ll have to see. All sorts of angry creatures seem to materialize in the balloon ambushes so perhaps they are being unwillingly picked up and dumped, maybe with portals? They could also just be typical unexplained monster fodder.
My take on the personal story is that all the possible events in the personal story arcs did happen and the player may have been present or not. For example, a stupid pair of sylvari did find an Orrian mirror and take it to Trahearne and the player character may have been there or not. This would mean that an asura used the infinity ball to find an alternate future with steam creatures, even if it wasn’t the player character. However the living story works by all players seeing the same events happen at the same time. Mixing that with the personal story where different players may see different events at different times would be a recipe for disaster. So far the living story has not relied on any part of the personal story (or any story dungeons) being completed and I don’t think it ever will. This would explain why the Ministry is conspicuously absent from the Jubilee.
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I think the OP and people like him need to look at the big picture. You can play an alt of any level in WvW. Getting top level gear for an alt isn’t too difficult and gear still isn’t needed at all in sPvP. Karma, gold, and barter tokens collected on one character can be spent by another. Item drops are never soul bound. Crafting resources are shared and crafted items are never soul bound There’s a shared bank and now shared wallet.
To say that GW2 is not friendly to players with alts is a bit silly. If it now takes just as long for a player with 3 characters to collect dungeon tokens as it does for a player with 1 character, what exactly is so wrong with that?
That might work for a 1v1 thief but a PVE thief says no thank you.
Making a weapon might be a waste of a good bone. Why not make a minion and tell the minion to hit your enemy rather than doing it yourself?
I named my Charr Engineer Flashtail for no particular reason (probably because the first 20 names I wanted were taken). Half way through the personal story I was introduced to my father, Clement Forktail. That’s a coincidence I wasn’t expecting!
To expand the topic slightly: Spirits have low health and are static so fail on high mobility content. Traps are less useful in high mobility content if a ranger cannot stand near the trap and control the enemies within it. This leaves the ranger with 2 near redundant utility lines.
I’d like to thank ANet for delivering the wallet free to all players and not keeping as it a store bought add-on. Many other games have put additions like this into a store to extract real world money from players to solve game created storage problems.
The problem with improving 1x Basilisk venom is that 10x basilisk venom has to still be balanced. A thief can get up to 10 applications with shared venoms. I’m guessing this limits the design of all venoms since they all underwhelm without trait benefits.
If the whole point of the secret event is that it is possible to miss the event, then that will make anyone who does miss it furious. If the secret event is not very secret and everyone will eventually find it then why make it a secret at all? Also, any content that drives players to look for spoilers on the internet is poor by design.
I’m guessing that you’re struggling to cure conditions and this ties up your utilities and heals. You’re then struggling for enough smoke and blind to control mobs and this pushes you into dodges and evades that leave you frustrated and dead. This is happening because you’re running a very glassy build.
The first thing to try is an offhand pistol for smoke and use that on your safe dungeon trash. Use a shortbow on the dungeon trash that are not safe to melee. If that doesn’t suit you then try the shadow arts trait lines. If you trait for a blind on stealth and condition cures in stealth then yes you lose some dps but it frees up your utility slots and makes your offhand dagger much stronger.
You are right about the continual addition of extra content when the end game is not yet balanced. Loot rewards are driving players out of some areas and into other areas as each patch creates a new loot imbalance. This really needs to be bottomed out across all zones and content.
In terms of grind though you are making the same mistake as many others. You are mistaking the lack of gear progression for grind. It is the exact opposite. If you are doing something repetitive and unfun then just stop. No game mechanic is forcing you do to that.
The pets don’t need advanced AI. They need 70-80% of what enemy mobs have. A basic enemy mob will walk up to you, turn to face you, and start an attack skill. A ranger pet will walk up to where an enemy was 2 seconds ago, not bother to change facing, and do an F2 attack into thin air. It’s awful and that at least should be fixed.
If you enjoy your thief you can make it work in fractals.
The election hasn’t failed. It’s given players something to do, something to talk about, something to have fun with. It doesn’t matter if the election manifestos are unimportant. It doesn’t matter if the characters are stereotyped. It doesn’t matter too much that people didn’t like the mini games. That’ll all small stuff. The big picture was that something was happening that players could participate in and talk about.
They are still better than fractal weapons that have no stats.
I’m not sure why you need so many people? Camp Karka is the hardest camp to clear so do that first. You can then send two people to each of the other camps to clear them simultaneously. I’m guessing the queen would then spawn before any of the camps are attacked again. This means you only really need the minimum number of people to take the queen down.
I’ve been in many groups over many months that have had big problems with this tree. All I did was tell them when to dodge the attack from the Nightmare Tree and the spiders stopped spawning. Unless the tree has changed recently, and I’m guessing it hasn’t, all the current problems are due to players not watching the boss, learning his animations, and finding the right time to dodge. This makes the Nightmare Tree exactly the same as many other GW2 bosses, easy with a well timed dodge and impossible without.
PUGs have probably used guardians with walls of reflection to cover up their lack of boss knowledge, to the point that genuine tactics for this boss have been lost from the common knowledge shared between PUGs.
You are essentially right however there is an introduction to the Elder Dragons in the personal story. It should come when you are around level 20-30 along with the pact?
Zaitan himself doesn’t actually need to be shown before Arah. The eyes and mouths are good enough for the personal story. Everyone knows the Arah finish isn’t good enough and Zaitan himself should have been a multi stage fight. We could have fought him once on the ground in Arah and driven him off, used airships to chase, then had a (better) finish on the airships.
Safe Mode for thief open world PvE is sword/pistol for melee using black powder, pistol/dagger with dancing dagger for kiting, and shortbow for events. Revisit dagger/dagger at higher levels, maybe 60+, as it doesn’t have the right sort of defense for newcomers.
Daggerstorm is indeed whirl finisher. That whirl finisher sends off some poison bolts if you trigger it in a poison field, for example. The OP can test daggerstorm on the traget dummies in Lion’s Arch to see direction and frequency of the daggers.
Daggerstorm seems to have a lot of projectiles since you can hit multiple targets. It isn’t particularly helpful to think about one target at a set distance since since you nearly always use against multiple mobile enemies while you are moving too. You get more daggers when you are close to enemies, so spinning just outside their melee range seems best (safest).
A projectile finisher is a type of finisher for a combo field. If you use a projectile finisher in a poison field it becomes a poisoned dagger, and so on. Daggerstorm will always be a projectile finisher. A skill like unload has multiple shots and each one of those shots has a 20% chance of being a projectile finisher. The combo finisher for daggerstorm seems to trigger when the skill starts and not if you move into a field during the daggerstorm.
CoF3 isn’t PUG friendly. It needs some coordination to light the torches (open the doors) and some weak players can make the whole group struggle. You then get lots of waves of mobs to kill and this ok. There’s a running past exploding beacons puzzle and although common knowledge of how to do it would eventually spread, PUG players would get furious as one mistake can drop fatal explosions onto everyone else nearby. The final boss is a quite funny at first but you quickly realize he has some of clumsiest boss mechanics in the game.
I wouldn’t actually fix much on this path except making the last boss less clunky. The time taken to run path 3 isn’t so bad, it’s just that other paths can be run so quickly that they wreck the balance of everything else.
Film with hopping vampires.
If tier 4 was always meant to be so difficult, which seems hard to believe, then the achievements for tier 3 and tier 4 should have been split. At the moment casual players essentially get no reward for tier 3 other than the chance to get their butts kicked on tier 4 until their patience wears out.
Pistol shot 2 is a 100% finisher so blinds when fired through a smoke field. It can be mistaken for an auto-attack.
A sword thief can attack from stealth, either blinding from the front or dazing from behind.
Smokescreens, signet of shadows, and blinding powder can also all blind.
Channelled attacks or multi-shot attacks are good when blinded as the first shot will clear the blindness and the rest have a chance to hit.
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Thief utility is from conditions like blind, cripple, daze. The OP is thinking about support as boons since boons do seem to be better. If stacking might allows you to mash enemy trash in five seconds then you don’t need weakness or blind. Champions have defiant and boons scale incredibly well against big hitting mobs.that are largely unaffected by cc. So for trash the thieves have reasonable utility (blind etc) that nobody needs. For bosses the thief hasn’t much utility at all.
As other people have pointed out, there shouldn’t be professions created and then left to find a role. Instead if there is a gap in the game roles then the dev’s should firstly see if a existing class can fit that role. That would empower all the existing players of that class to play the new role or in previous roles, as their choice. Only if the role cannot be added to existing classes would there need to be a new class for the role, with all the new traits, skills, equipment, class vendors, story lines, artwork, voice acting, game balancing, etc that goes with it.
Isn’t it patently obvious that the game is designed so that nobody owns open world events or mobs. Anyone can start an event, anyone can finish an event, anyone can join into an event for a share of the reward. Anyone who wants to kill a mob can do so and gets a share of that reward.
The farmers are wrong on so many counts here. Firstly they should never ever claim to own an open world mob or event in a game where nobody ever owns a mob or event. Secondly they shouldn’t make themselves look like jerks and idiots by abusing people who want to play the game properly. That’s just vile. Finally they shouldn’t feel self pity that they are too poor, using it as an excuse to spoil other player’s gaming.
Dredge are the classic enemies for SoM. You can’t use blind to reduce incoming damage so a boatload of passive healing from a dredge army marching over your caltrops is very welcome. It does work and it doesn’t need any boost in PvE.
Living story is something new to do in game every month. There’s a variety of things to do. It should all be fun to do. Not everyone likes to do everything. The temporary content has varying quality. Achievements are a way of presenting the things to do so that players are more inclined to do them. If you don’t want to do them then an achievement shouldn’t change your mind really.
If you have objections to the way the new content is packaged within the living story then that might be fair comment. The living story still seems worth trying as a new MMO idea to give regular content to players, as long as it eventually provides as much scope as a conventional release cycle.
You are essentially making a case that there are no evil creatures in the world since there could be an unknown reason for any evil seeming action. You are saying this is true even if there is no evidence to suggest any unknown reasons. This however this is essentially a worthless argument since we must be able to define evil to have this discussion at all. As soon as we accept that evil could be applied to Elder Dragons if they fit description, then the evidence shows that they are evil.
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“Anet has stated from the start than this game was not going to be a grinder or pay to win. and it has to turned out to be both for us, ether you grind it or pay anet to get what you need for the best items, unless your luck is just the best in the land.”
The best items are exotic and ascended. They are readily available for a modest time investment. It is up to players whether they want to invest time in cosmetic items that look nice while playing the game. Players seem to want the rarest cosmetic items because they are the most difficult to obtain. Players then complain that the items they want are too difficult to obtain. See how that happens?
And no, you are not entitled to a Legendary item no matter how much you think you are.
Their worst enemies are themselves.
“Until MMORPGs became popular, the level cap in RPGs was not a goal, it was something people didn’t even bother to reach. "
Actually, getting to maximum level was the initial goal of the earlier MMOs and the designers were unprepared for players wanting limitless endgame content at max level. This led to raiding, frequent level upgrades, expansion sales, regearing, and a lot of the other treadmills. (I’m guessing early text MMOs were excluded for not being popular).
“MMORPGs have fooled players into believing that time sinks are good.”
Players wanted ways to spend time online as an endgame, as opposed to logging off forever with nothing to do. The early designers came up with raids and other time sinks and although it was good for it’s time it isn’t good enough for modern MMOs.
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For dungeons you need to start with smoke/blind on trash and dodge/evade on bosses. You can get blind from lots of places such as offhand pistol, smokescreen, stealth traits. Cripple is another major defense and again there are a number of sources for that. Always consider smokescreen for ranged mobs. Shortbow is always available if you don’t have a better plan.
Sword is a really good utility weapon in dungeons and although people always post on the forums that dps is the only important thing, dps is less important than utility for a thief that can’t stay upright in a group.
If I remember back to the last time this was asked, there is no popular answer. For groups it’s a big risk to go condition as it is too easy to hit the condition limits. That puts some sort of beserker build in the frame.
Since you can change traits/gear/utilities/weapons before each fight you have some flexibility that you don’t have in PvP so instead of looking for one optimal build you can adapt your play style for specific encounters.
All the people who claim that farming has always been there, and is good for the game, is what people want to do, etc, are really not looking at the bigger picture. Farming by players is always contentious if it interferes with game play or anyone else’s farming. Farming by companies for real world profit undermines the trading post economy of gems for gold. Farming feeds into all the negative attitudes for online gaming that put excess importance on virtual success at the expense of a real world life. Let farming go and I promise you won’t miss it.
Dancing dagger is an excellent PvE kiting skill. It’s a just a question of how patient you are waiting for the pistol auto-attacks to kill all the mobs you are kiting.
Boons are far superior to conditions. Boons scale well for the number of enemies and provide full effect when fighting champions. As long as the is game is balanced for SPvP the PvE imbalance of boons vs conditions will persist.
A good thief is better than a mediocre player in another class. In dungeons you need to learn a new play style but it can certainly be done and a good thief shouldn’t struggle to get groups (any more than a necro, ranger, engineer).
The most annoying game mechanic for me is revive, talk, loot, grab bundles, and utilize objects all activated through the same keypress/click with a target decided by the game. The player knows what they want to do. The game doesn’t let them do it for internal game reasons and offers one other thing to do instead. This is clearly a sign of a failing game mechanic. Even if you’re offered a chance to revive, say, you can’t tell who you are reviving.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this yet but if you salvage everything then you lose a substantial amount of money compared to selling to vendors/trading post.The mystic forge can lose you substantial amounts of money too. I think you have a low amount of money for the time played and this might explain it.
The original post isn’t what I expected from the title however. The high price of cosmetic items from vendors isn’t particularly game breaking. The tier 3 racial sets are meant to have some prestige even this long after release and that comes through rarity and that comes through cost in this case. Legendary weapons also only have prestige because of the difficulty in obtaining them. Achieving top line stat gear is quite possible on a low budget and as long as that’s achievable then the game is working and cosmetics can have any rarity or cost.
People might like Kiel because she was a minor character who kept coming back until she was major character. People might like Kiel because she kept getting the dirty jobs cleaning up other people’s problems, just like player characters always do.
Blind is the way to fight veteran and normal enemies. An offhand pistol gives you smoke and you can get blind on stealth from shadow arts. Smokescreen works similarly to the pistol and when placed well it will blind melee enemies and screen out the ranged enemies. There are plenty of other skills that blind as well. If you are set up for high melee damage you can kill things fast enough that the short duration of smoke/blind isn’t so important.
If you are patient you can kite a few enemies using pistol/dagger with the cripple from skill 4. Ambush traps and thieves guild can also help you out when outnumbered.
The guard looks a bit nightmare court but the background looks like Divinity’s Reach. Maybe a centaur and nightmare court alliance?
There seem to be mini games everywhere else. Divinity’s Reach may be next.
I’m guessing most good thieves will know how to play against a stealthy ranger. It’ll be funny to see the bad rangers trying to sneak around with a big bear following behind them.
Conan was a thief with a greatsword. I don’t think my thief looks much like Conan though.