Not necessarily, most likely just ANet deciding that reusing models is easier than creating new ones.
If you play sylvari, the Pale Tree says you know this powerful Mordrem from your Dream (just before the Shadow of the Dragon spawns). Afterwards, Trahearne will ask if you remember the Shadow from your Dream which you confirm, and then your PC says that you feel the call of your Wyld Hunt again, and after asking Trahearne if it was a new one (why would he know, exactly?) Trahearne says that it’s the same, just a new stage of it – meaning that apparently your Wyld Hunt was only put on hold with Zhaitan’s defeat, not completed as the PC said during Victory or Defeat’s celebration. Finally, if you talk to Braham at the end, you’ll tell him you fought the Shadow of the Dragon before in your Dream – mentioning it as the same one.
It’s not just “new enemy, same model/name” it’s the same enemy.
I hope this isn’t explained away with just a few lines of dialogue. The Wyld Hunt should be the fateful ambition of a Sylvari, not something going on in the background while you chase after progenys and go to fancy parties.
The breadth of the story is so wide that the writing is thinly stretched and offers no depth. When we are in Dry Top however the story is compact. If Tiami does something there then we have to follow, there’s nothing else we want to do and nowhere else to go. Fine. As soon as we start being a world dignitary and stopping off at Anise’s party, finding gifts from the gods for Rytlock as we pass by, and so on, it all becomes ridiculous. We could be doing a million different things, we want to be doing a million different things, but instead we just follow the script.
If our character did not have so much power and respect we would not have so many things that we’re not doing (even though we should be). We would not have so many people that should be telling us things but currently are not.
I was a bit surprised by this fight actually, particularly the floor. You might be able to jump but it isn’t ‘obvious’ by any stretch of the imagination. Only a handful of attacks in the game can be avoided by jumping and it wouldn’t come naturally to players who haven’t seen the molten fractals. I didn’t really understand what the graphics represented and couldn’t see any color changes mentioned by posters above as hints to timing.
This meant the floor required a timed jump which I think is fine for dungeon runners, who need to time dodges, but is isn’t ok for casuals who may do nothing other than play personal story and living story. The two second timing on most dodges isn’t hidden in the game but it’s not described anywhere either and to my mind it is an exact knowledge of game mechanics that casuals shouldn’t need to know (and from my experiences in CoE I’m guessing they don’t know).
For me personally the difficulty is fine but I can see why some people are having a lot of trouble. Players can always bring a friend along to help them though.
I think Minster Anton crops up in a low level personal story mission and seems crooked, but isn’t. Here he is doing it again and even getting worried about the White Mantle.
As I said in the other thread about this, various fighters leave the chamber when their Mordrem foes are killed. I’m guessing that Caithe was fighting around the Avatar of the Pale Tree, so that Caithe leaves when you kill the mordrem around the avatar. Of course this is bad story telling since I can’t imagine any Sylvari wanting to leave the Pale Tree in any danger, regardless of what’s happening to Jennah or any asura bigwig, so I’m guessing it just sets up the final solo battle.
To my mind, Mordremoth’s vines and minions seem to have a lot in common with all Sylvari art/models, rather rather just the Nightmare Court. The Sylvari wardens use enlarged thorn branches to build their forts, for example.
As a completely fanciful theory, wouldn’t it be interesting if Mordremoth could pull creatures from Nightmare and put them into reality?
As various mordrem die the characters leave the chamber. Some people may kill Caithe’s mordrem sooner than others do, so she may leave the chamber sooner for some people too.
Clearly Caithe should have stayed with the Pale Tree to the death but I’m assuming that solo game play was put over storytelling.
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It was just intelligent conversation. Can’t men and women have a conversation without it being flirting?
You can run the dungeons again and again with different characters in the same day. You’re just not getting any extra reward. So should you get extra reward for using different characters compared to someone who has only one character? Not necessarily. The game could give you that but there’s no particular reason why it should or it shouldn’t. There’s a perfectly reasonable argument that someone with one character should have the same rewards as someone with lots of characters. If you think that you deserve something for leveling up and gearing lots of characters then that’s only your expectation and you might be disappointed.
The game also works better if players spread their attention to different activities rather than maximizing loot from a single repeated activity, even if players don’t realize that.
What should we call Glint’s baby? Baubles?
There was another very strange line from Anise when said she would be very sad (or something similar) if Jennah died, when you’d have thought she would be utterly devastated and distraught.
If we were looking for plots within plots, I suppose there is a possibility that Anise was seen meeting Scarlet in DR after all and she’s using us to silence the witnesses. I assume she’d never be clumsy enough to let herself be seen doing that though, given her disguises in this chapter.
It’s also strange that she’s getting information from Mr E. How can Mr E be more secretive and more knowledgeable about DR than super spymaster Anise? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr E was actually at that party so that would narrow the candidates down quite a lot.
The party instance was the weakest part, with no consequences if you fail, and it will be tedious to repeat on alts. It did at least have some interesting dialog with Canach though and we can’t expect much more from GW2 in conversation sequences. The game engine simply doesn’t offer enough complexity to give them better gameplay.
“If the Avatar of the Pale tree dies, but the Pale Tree itself lives, there could be an interesting plot continuation where the Sylvari still have the dream but are leaderless, in a way. That would make the ridiculous conversation the player had with the Pale Tree in the last episode even more annoying though.”
So I got that nearly right! We didn’t get any useful information from the Pale Tree last visit and this time she’s put out of commission and barely has time to give us a cryptic vision.
Is their any class beside mesmer that has problems leveling???
I’m just playing a mesmer now and have no problems whatsoever. No classes should have problems in open world PvE if you can play them right.
At lot of new thieves have trouble finding the simple tactics and want to mash all the buttons instead. The weapon sets do give you everything you need right from level 1 though. Black powder isn’t as strong when you get more troublesome enemies that move, put down aoe damage, come in mixed groups of ranged and melee, have their own evade patterns, and so on. They tend to turn up past level 40.
“I know something that helped me a lot when getting used to Mai Trin at first was putting my graphics on absolute minimum settings. "
For many players the graphics flare over everything even on lowest settings.
If you want to experiment with condition damage then you might as well do it in the open world at low-mid levels, with swords. Power/ferocity/precision gear will be better later but mid level armor only has two stats.
You’ve also got as candidates -
The pact commander (player character)
Mai Trin (other leaders of Scarlet’s forces are possible but nameless)
Other unknown leaders in Maguuma. There could easily be another sylvari tree or centaur tribe that Mordremoth wants to control
The leader of the consortium (maybe they were supplying Scarlet all along)
All the Elder Dragons should be wanting to disassemble the Pact now so their leaders should be the targets. We got no answers from the Pale Tree about Mordremoth in the last episode (because our character was annoying stupid) so since the trailer suggests something bad happening at the summit (predictably) the Pale Tree might be the target. Aerin should call her mother rather than leader though.
If the Avatar of the Pale tree dies, but the Pale Tree itself lives, there could be an interesting plot continuation where the Sylvari still have the dream but are leaderless, in a way. That would make the ridiculous conversation the player had with the Pale Tree in the last episode even more annoying though.
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The writing wasn’t as good as it should have been, essentially. Trahearne is introduced badly and then a lot of the story does revolve about his wyld hunt (even thought the commander is still the main actor). That’s only half of the story the player sees though, as other half is told through the dungeons as the story of Destiny’s Edge.
If Trahearne had been introduced properly then the personal story would seem a lot better. For example, we find out about Zaitan’s scouts in Lion’s Arch through the orders. The mentor should take us to see the Trahearne for his unique knowledge as the Orrian scholar so that we can deduce the attack on Claw Island together. We should then persuade Trahearne to travel there with us and the story continues on. He then wouldn’t have to spend all his time at Claw Island following us like a stray dog and explaining the plot.
Traps as a trait line needs to be removed. The concept of a thief standing behind a row of traps to kill things is dull game play, doesn’t fit thief mobility, and doesn’t fit GW2 gameplay. Therefore thieves shouldn’t be cramming traps onto their toolbar so traits for traps are never going to be worthwhile, so the category should be split. At least one of the traps can just be thrown into the trashcan and replaced by a new skill, a sensible stun breaker.
There a lot of small differences in animations so game experience is really your best friend here. There are solutions to a number of problems though -
Ranger sword – turn of auto-attack or use greatsword or accept the risk
Reviving – be watchful when reviving and give yourself time to break off then dodge (get busy when the enemy is casting rather than when the red circle is on you)
Movement skills and weapon skills (like block) can interrupt some animations. Switch to the right weapon before you start your troublesome animation.
Slot utilities like lightning reflexes for extra freedom.
Once you know the times when the animation problem is going to happen you can generally manage it. I don’t think this is any worse than any of the other visual/ control/camera/interface problems since you can manage it to some degree.
Loot rewards can’t fit every style of play. If top loot is crafted then the non-crafters are unhappy. If the crafters have no top loot to craft then they’re unhappy (jewellers) and ask for stuff to craft even though it servers no game purpose.
At the moment, crafting seems like chosen way for the designers to add gold sinks and time sinks into the game.
It’s unfortunate that the continual changes to larcenous strike (and flanking strike) ever since it was introduced give no confidence that the balance passes are actually finding solutions to anything. Let’s not even even start talking about venoms either.
It’s there in the game if you look for it. Through the personal story you were shown how the minor races were facing extinction from the dragon. The world maps are full of the same as well, as are dungeons like HoTW. Zaitan nearly destroyed a major city and fills most of the personal story. At the start of LS1, everyone was asking for something other than more dragon minions, and we got something different. Now we’re in LS2 and an Elder Dragon is beginning to show some threat so you’ll just have to keep watching.
“How could you possibly design a venom good enough to be taken on its own merit without it being ridiculously OP if spread to 5 targets?”
In fact for Basilisk venom it is x10 when you include residual aura. Leeching venoms are caught up in this ridiculous scaling as well.
Yes venomous aura is the problem not the solution. As every thief knows -
1) Make all venoms worth a slot on the utility bar without considering traits
2) Create venom traits for interesting benefits while keeping balance
If you look at the warrior class, the class that is ‘in a good place’, almost all the utilities are fit for purpose on their own merit.
Anyone who posts on these forums saying “Raids are good, why can’t we have raids?” is going to get some fierce answers eventually, so I’ll just try to clear it up first. No, instanced raids are not good. One of the design goals of the original GW2 design was to create open access events and that goal still stands. Every reason why raids are good actually has a downside to go with it.
- Raids need players to organize, great! No this organization made players in MMOs pull their hair out. Players needed to give time commitments that cut across family time. It was awful. Organization also excludes casual players.
- You get great content with more players! No. It’s in fact harder to make each player’s contribution seem vital without letting each player fail the event for everyone else.
- You get roles and purpose within the team! What happens when you a raid together and people can’t fill those roles? Everyone’s time is wasted, lots of people’s time is wasted.
- You can get great loot! It will only be different skins in GW2. No top tier items will be restricted to content that most players cannot access.
The more regularly that you run fractals the more workarounds you find. Many players also copy tactics that bypass glitches without even realizing it. So, yes, fractal groups lose hammers but most get it back by falling to death together so the hammer resets. The person who is new to fractals or doesn’t know the latest tactics is always going to get more frustrated by the glitches.
If a new standard dungeon is added it is likely to be like the TA aetherblade path: perfectly reasonable dungeon but too much effort for the same reward as the other paths. The speed running of the old dungeons make it hard to envisage a new dungeon that can compete for time vs reward (unless it has similar design mistakes to the older dungeons).
If new dungeons come in I think they will need to offer new game play, new challenges, new rewards, and not be a direct alternative to the existing dungeons.
The problem is not with scaling. The problem comes from currency failures within the game. Event completion is rewarded with valueless currency. Killing mobs is rewarded with valued currency. Full loot is effectively awarded for failed events and this need not be the case.
It could always be the case that the Sylvari exist as humanoid plant creatures, Mordremoth holds some dominion over plants, so Mordremoth sees the Sylvari within his dominion. This could however be similar to Zaitan favoring corrupted humanoids over corrupted sharks, just because they are more capable and adaptable.
I’m still wondering how many attempts they are going to make to fix venoms before going back to square one:- make every venom worth a slot on its own merit and then tone down any overpowered venom traits.
At the moment all the characters are holding the idiot ball again, when they should be asking “how do the Nightmare Court relate to Scarlet and Mordremoth?”. I’m guessing it’s something that will come as a big reveal later in the story but will just leave the players wondering why nobody bothered to think about it sooner.
I’ve started a new character, my first in a long while, and this new traits system is just a big obstacle to everything I want to do. I’ve got a whole 3 traits unlocked by level 50 doing normal leveling, going through the story, fully completing maps, running events. It’s the very minimum number of traits and forces me into specific builds.
So I’m not experimenting with builds as I’d like to do. I’m not experimenting with skills and traits as I’d like to do. Stumping up a whole load of coins and skills to get traits is annoying. Going round the world to unlock traits is annoying. For a new player it may seem ok but for experienced players who looked forward to playing with traits (you know, this is meant to be a game to play with for fun) this trait system is just a big step backwards.
As usual, this comes down to an “I’m entitled to a legendary for what I’ve done” argument. However players are not competing against the game to buy a precursor from the trading post, they are competing against other players. It is other players that drive the price up. The players who feel they have put enough into the game have actually put less into the game than the players who have bought their precursors.
Nobody needs a precursor so if anyone doesn’t want to compete against hardcore farmers on the TP then don’t bother, it will obviously take a lot of grind. The issue only gets solved by account bound precursors, which leaves it up to random chance, or when every player gets a legendary and then legendaries are not legendary at all.
He was mentioned in one of the Season 1 web stories so he is likely to feature somewhere. He didn’t need to be mentioned in that story if he wasn’t relevant.
“I find the “you’re just ants” portrayal of dragons to be really boring, so I’d like them to be more calculating, but so far I don’t think we’ve seen them portrayed as master planners or big thinkers.”
Actually Zaitan was reasonably smart (barring the final instance) and you’ve got to assume that without heroic intervention he would have completed the surprise attack on Claw Island followed by the capture of Lion’s Arch. Similarly, only heroic intervention prevented the capture of Fort Trinity through sabotage, which would have put the Pact back onto the defensive with no threat against Orr.
Part of the attitude problem comes from the massive time difference between a successful dungeon run and a poor one. We are literally comparing ten minutes against a failing run of over an hour. Nobody wants to see their fractal run dissolve after two hours of stress.
The reason for the big time differentials are the high capabilities of high skill players with best builds and best tactics. This is part of the game design, specifically for SPvP, and is generally a good thing for GW2 even though it causes problems for PvE.
Kill the cheerleader. Destroy the World.
Not too hard. Am I right in thinking that even the most casual player has a very simple solution – bring friends?
The philosophical implications of an orphaned race, neutered, without a home or purpose, are very large. Hopefully the designers realize they could never get to grips with it and never go down that story line.
If you don’t know the common knowledge tactics and are trying to complete a dungeon as a challenge then all builds are fine. They all work. Finding groups of players who just want the challenge is rare though, very rare. Most players are running dungeons for loot nowadays and they want to do it as quickly as possible. They are also using very well honed tactics shared by the player base across a very large number of dungeon runs. The tactics are good enough for dps builds to survive, therefore players use dps builds.
So should dungeons be designed so that the best players with the best tactics struggle and have to use very defensive builds? Where would that leave new players with no tactics and home made builds? Dead presumably. I think there has to be some acceptance that repeat content will be run with high dps. That doesn’t mean that some technical changes couldn’t be made to make skills more useful than pure dps. Corners and walls work better than skills for controlling enemies at the moment so that’s one possible area for improvement.
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There is also an option to use shadow arts for heal on stealth, cleanse on stealth, and blind on stealth. This can give a lot of sustainability with all those three effects triggering on hide in shadows, cloak and dagger, shadow refuge, and so on.
" I think it would be a very interesting discovery if proven correct; the gods’ level of magitechnology being so advanced as to allow the construction of an artificial ley line system."
They could always have been so advanced that they had no need for any ley line system and could enable magic without one.
If we take a hint from the “fall in line” then it is someone who would naturally serve but is being led astray. The best fit for this would be the Pale Tree perhaps but Aerin would call her mother rather than leader. The Zephyrites might have made sense, given their respect for dragons, but the story suggested Aerin really wanted something from the Master of Peace instead. None of other major races would fall in line. The Pact wouldn’t fall in line. I can’t see any one leader changing how the Nightmare Court fall in line. It could refer to the remnants of Scarlet’s alliances but the only leader we know is Mai Trin and there’s no reason to think she’s pivotal. Someone in Maguuma that we don’t yet know could fit the line quite well, such as a centaur leader, a grawl leader, or a sylvari leader from a different tree.
“But the Living Story has decided that they are the focal point of the entire game, shackling our main characters to these five strangers and declaring them to be the protagonists of the franchise. This is flawed. It does not make sense from a narrative perspective, and it won’t do the series any favors in presenting interesting and compelling stories in the days to come.”
The flaw is actually to have these guys doing the adventuring thing and then throwing international events into the mix as well. The scope of the writing cannot handle all the different national responses to events. The international scope brings in too many characters and they are not given enough depth. Far too much is omitted (because it is too much work) so realism is lost.
I suspect that some of the problems will get solved soon. I’m guessing the group will expand and an extra person this season, and also next season. I’m guessing the Pact will dissolve. I’m guessing Destiny’s Edge will be otherwise occupied and leave business to the new adventurers. As soon it becomes “Us vs the world”, all the questions about the purpose of these characters will vanish.
Most of dungeons are run using standard (common knowledge) tactics. These involve high dps and melee. The principle is simple enough: a group doesn’t need control if the damage is high enough. Enemies die before skills, such as missile defense, run out. Corners and walls provide enough control without using skills.
By going into a dungeon and using ranged weapon you are breaking the commonly used tactics, not bringing mobs into corners/walls, not sharing buffs/defenses, not providing the highest dps, and extending the fights long enough for them to become dangerous. In reality, a lot of that isn’t relevant all the time to every group, but PUG players like to see optimum tactics being used correctly. If you can go ranged and deliver all the benefits of a melee stack then go for it, but you probably can’t get all the benefits at range.
On top of that, consider how dungeons are mostly run for loot rather than challenge. Dungeon runners appreciate speed and efficiency.
Elitists exclude others. The excluded people don’t like it. End of story.
The elites like to say “play with your type of player” but only the elitists see different types of players. The causal runner just wants to play with everyone and doesn’t differentiate between players. Everyone is their type.
I believe the Aesir and Vanir were the two families/tribes that were the Norse Gods.
As with the Arthurian legends, modern portrayals of the Norse legends always make changes that obscure the original source, but this has been going on for a thousand years so what we consider to be an early source will itself be an interpretation.