Guild Wars 2

Ayrilana.1396:

AP doesn’t signify skill. All it does is show that you likely have an understanding of basic mechanics.

Players with high AP are either:
- hunting achievements (i.e living world completionist and regular completionist)
- Playing all aspects of the game on a regular basis
- Play much more than they should one single aspect of the game (grind AP though one single activity)

As far as I can see, nobody can conclude ANYTHING about dungeon running skill from the level of AP. AP is earned everwhere in this game, so high level of AP means you play a lot. That’s it.

It’s a bad habit of elite wannabe who want to ape recordmen speed clearers and try to feel good by imposing AP requirements on the LFG. They are just too lazy to teach people how to do dungeons so they are filtering.

It was an emergency procedure from Anet to limit the amount of griefing and name calling after the introduction of megaserver in Europe, among which :

- calling any person who spoke german in the chat a nazzi (forum filter)
- asking any person who spoke french in the chat where was the white flag.
- calling any person who spoke spanish in the chat a gay.
etc….

Side effect of this decision : commanders couldn’t organize megabosses anymore since half the map could not hear them. It was a pain to tell everyone to turn off the filter so we could talk to each other.

As time passed, childish behaviour started to disappear, so now is a good time to allow players to talk to each other like in a normal MMO.

Rouven.7409:

Sorry, bad idea. Better option would be to allow people to have their own instance, which if not filled by the group within X minutes will then be filled just like other maps.

For the one 1000000000000th time : NO

World bosses like tequatl and the triple wurm are NOT WoW raids. They should NOT be instanced. Instancing is a way to cut people without guild and newbies from elite content. Truth is, most of the people I did tequatl with are pug and a few of them are newbies each time.

I know it’s a pain to organize however people still manage to pull things off. There are more important issues elsewhere than AFKing for tequatl.

Hello everyone,

there have been a lot of appreciation threads about this chapter of the living story. This thread is going to be a bit different : I’d like to have a place to centralize and speculate about the ending cutscene. link to the cutscene

WARNING! A WALL OF TEXT IS INCOMING

As it turns out, the final cutscene is full of info and lore about the world:

1) The magic and the ley lines are descibed as a “current” that circulate through tyria. Surprize, when viewing the eternal alchemy, the PC is swimming. This confirms what we already know.

2) The video features 3 major actors of the world :
=> The dragons (6 colored spheres)
=> The pale tree
=> The “central eye” (The central sphere in the image attached) that pulses with energy and that is merging with one colored sphere.

3) About the dragons : Notice that the spheres are “activated” by the central eye (the beam of energy comes from the eye towards a colored sphere). The order of activation is as follows :
- Primordius (red)
- Bubbles (blue)
- Jormag (white)
- Zaithan OR Mordremoth (light green) <- This is the ball that merges with the central eye!
- Kralkatorrik (purple)
- Mordremoth OR Zaithan (dark green)

What I can conclude for sure from this : bubbles is the second elder dragon to awake following primordius (this contradicts the wiki).

Now let’s speculate:
Theory #1: Let us presume the order of activation of the spheres corresponds to the true order of awakening of the elder dragons.

Even though we slew him 2 years ago, Zaithan (or at least his power source) is not gone. He has merged with the central eye and this has an influence over the world (screen turning green at the end of the video).

Theory #2: The light green sphere is the one representing Mordremoth.

Mordremoth has started to awaken long ago (and is probably the reason why the maguuma jungle became the maguuma wastes) but the intervention of Scarlet was the final straw that turned him fully active. After all he has been influencing Scarlet for a while as Jormag influenced the norn, long before he fully emerged. Notice that if this theory is true, all the dragons on the right of the screen create their minions by corrupting sentient beings (icebrood, undead, branded) while the dragons on the left create their minion from non sentient beings (lava ; plant and water ?)

It would also mean that Mordremoth is trying to mess up with the central eye more than the other dragon. Why ? To catch up with the power of other dragons ?

Theory #3: The order of activation has nothing to do with the order of awakening.
I guess I’m gonna ask for suggestions on this one.

4) The pale tree:
In the inital part of the video one can hear voices. The only one I have recognised starts at 0:15 : the pale tree says : “Do not question the dream, we must all do our part”.

I take it as an evidence of the major role the pale tree has in the world. A role that is as important as the dragon since they are both shown in this video. Is this a confirmation that the pale tree is an arch nemesis of the dragon as a whole ? I don’t think so.
They are other “sylvari spawning tree” in the world. Yet, only the pale tree is shown. What makes this tree so special that it is an important part of the eternal alchemy ? What is “the part” the pale tree has to play ? Did ronan and ventari influenced the tree so much that it became more powerful that what it was supposed to be ?

5) The central eye: IMO, this is a symbolic representation of the magic potential of tyria. Mordremoth is probably trying to extend his reach by following the ley lines closely. Even though he is in the maguuma wastes, he can reach places as far as the shiverpeaks. Kralkatorrikk can go back home.

Anyway I’ve talked way too much. What have YOU learned from this video ? Which theory do you prefer ? Discuss!

This also bugged my mind. I don’t remember ANY instance in the game where my PC actually learns that there is a jungle dragon named mordremoth.

However, since all players following the living world seriously actually know about mordremoth well….. let’s say I can live with it.

I’d like to be proven wrong though. This plothole is disturbing.

To OP: in case you have not noticed this yet.

Anet is trying to damper the over-dominance of berserker gear in PvE and confine it to optimized dungeon speed clear.

Why was berserker the “only stat set worth taking” in PvE ? ’Cause mobs had few highly telegraphed attacks and were hp bags that did not move a lot. So you just LoS them in a corner and beat the crap outta them before they had the time to move. Problem is, this taught you VERY BAD GAMEPLAY HABITS.

Now what do I see? I see pesky inquest that spams cc on you and move all over the place. I can’t Los them either.
What do I do ? I adapted : now I take more condition removal and I switched from berserker to knight or celestial depending on the toon.
You know what ? It works and I do more damage because I spend less time trying to survive and more time attacking stuff.

Don’t expect the dev to stand around eating popcorn while the PvE meta falls in pieces. They are taking steps to (hopefully) correct it :
What do you mean correct? -> berserker gear was intended for the top 1% (not the top 99%) of players who can dodge everything and for warriors who are still resilient with this type of stats. The rest of us can pick up mixed gear (knight, valk, celestial) to be able to resist incoming damage and ditch it back. Also, note the increasing number of condition vulnerable ennemies.

About the NPCs : they are here to tank mobs while you hack them in pieces, and provide some water fields as well. That is not much but still better than nothing.

Shadowmoon.7986:

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the point of the defence teams at teq is to distract the mobs so they don’t kill turrets. My guild even runs only 4 people per defence teams because they don’t even have to kill the all the mobs, just kite them around. The only mob that needs to be killed is the hypnoss because he spawns more mobs. They don’t respawn as long as the event doesn’t scale up, and anything you do kill respawns at the 1:30 marks. Nomad sound ok for this job, and probably best for a turret position.

As you pointed out, the job of the defense team is to keep turrets alive. Some do it by kiting mobs, some do it by killing said mobs. As long as the turrets are kept functionnal, I call this a job well done.

If it’s the way you wanna play, and it serves the greater strategy, who I am to criticize you ?

Azhure.1857:

Embrace The Bold.7619:

Azhure.1857:

First off – players are allowed to play how they wish to in this game, regardless if you disagree with them. If that is a problem for you or anyone else, perhaps a single player or co-op game would be better for you.

Secondly I foresee this thread going down the negative nancy toilet extremely fast – just like the last TVH thread did. What happened to that thread? After deleting over half of the posts, they then decided to just trash the entire thread.

Playing how you want doesn’t give you the right to ruin other peoples in-game experience. Also if he wanted to use that gear he would be better off in the main zerg anyway. I don’t care for the people who force their play styles that can potentially ruin my fun. If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

Yes, that does make you an elitist.

This….. “Playing how you want doesn’t give you the right to ruin other peoples in-game experience.” And this…. “I don’t care for the people who force their play styles that can potentially ruin my fun.” ….. They make you hypocrite.

Before this turns completely offtopic and gets moderated like mad, allow me to recall some basic things :

1) An MMO shares similarities with the real world society : it is made of various people that live/play together and try to be happy.

2) Thus when people are doing their thing in their own corner, they should not be told what they should do.

3) However, when people come together and try to achieve something greater (slaying tequatl/ building a bridge), a minimum set of rule has to be maintained to ensure coherency and success of the project.

4) The set of rule changes depending on what is to be achieved. If the goal is to beat a world record, it is rather strict. If it is for a regular run, one should not expect much. The key is “What rules are reasonable to impose on others, in regards of what we are trying to do?”

5) Success in a regular world boss run (even the post patch wurm) depends mostly on everyone doing the right ACTION. It does require people to bring specific weapons and SKILLS into the fray. It does NOT depends on GEAR and STATS.

Conclusion : trying to impose PVT armour on somebody for a regular tequatl farm is NOT REASONABLE. Calling somebody a noob or a griefer for a regular tequatl because he has nomad armour is elitism.
Ofc, PVT is the best in slot for this specific fight. It is NOT the only viable alternative . Confusing these two notions is elitism.

What we call meta builds are “speed clear meta builds”. We should not confuse both.

The speed clear meta is a proof of the lack of experience the dev had when they first designed dungeons, since most mobs can be los’ed and bosses killed before they can do anything interesting (spider in AC).

Things are starting to change however: I noticed woodenpotatoes stated that mobs during LS2 are “convincing” him to move away from berserker, just for extra survivability since mobs are much less forgiving in dry top.

Blix.8021:

If you’re teaching noobs to do teq, tell them to wear ptv gear since you can’t crit him anyway. Nomad gear is pointless

That’s exactly what I’ve done and what I’ll continue to do.

However, I won’t mind if someone brings nomad armour. I realized that the most important thing one has to bring for teq is brain and not armour, since you can do teq while naked.

innocens.1582:

The amount of dead and downed people at the zerg group with teq is huge sometimes
If you factor in the time it takes to revive a downed player, and during this time the downed player and his rezzers dont do damage, i realy dont think it makes much difference in the end damage wise at these big events.

As somebody who did tequatl quite few times and spends lots of time teaching noobs how to deal with him, I cannot but agree with you.

Lots of players are amazed when I tell them that zerker is a bad choice for tequatl/wurm. They try to lecture me pretending berserker gear is the ONLY viable gear for the ENTIRE PvE section of the game.

However I’m not surprized anymore : I just browsed dulfy’s website. Members of [rT] are posting excellent quides for Speed Clearing dungeons and fractals. What is the only HUGE downside of these guides ?
=> They advertize it as PvE quide when it’s clearly speed clear in an organized group.

No wonder why elite wannabe are screwed up when they try larger event. They are truly misguided by this kind of stuff.

Back on topic : Nomad gear is made for those who want unkillable elementalist or necromancer commander. The goal of the commander is to…. command (duh!) and thus to stay alive. The zerg is supposed to dish out damage.

Of course in PvE where the goal is mostly to kill stuff quickly, going full tank does not make much sense. Power has always some use.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

1- Ruined guild events. Near impossible to get into the same shard as the rest of the guild and guild missions like rushes are clogged with other guilds waiting to do them.

2- Caused severe performance issues. So much lag. Worse than a T1 WvW three way battle.

3- World boss trains were killed. The timers became all messed up and the events were way too overpopulated. It became hard to even get ‘credit’ for participating in events.

4- Too many strange faces on maps. The maps became cluttered with TOO many people for my liking, and their faces were unfamiliar. No longer had that feeling of a community when I did run into others.

5- Temple runs were ruined. Pretty much the same reasons as the world boss train.

I kept playing and I worked out solutions to avoid most of the problems you present :

1- Nothing to say here : usually you cannot avoid a queue. If the guild is large enough, you can set up a collective jump to force the megaserver to create a new shard.

2- These issues were already here in the first place : an overcrowded tequatl even before megaserver caused massive framerate drop. This isn’t because of megaserver, it’s because of abundance of players in the same place. You don’t want to do the megaboss with too many people ? Wait a bit after the train moved to a new location then jump. You’ll end up in a partially filled shard and will be able to play normally.

3- This is a giant fallacy, everything is now streamlined thanks to the universal timer : no need for an API. More on this at #5. The hundreds of people that do world boss train everyday are the counter-argument.

4- Very true. Now I can end up playing with people from sfr instead of augury rock at certain times. I do not care personnaly, I just consider this as an opportunity to make new friends.

5- You cannot do temples while you boss train. The way to do temple has now changed. Nowadays I complete temples while I do a T6 spot farm with my characters. This is how I unlocked traits #13 on most of my toons. Sure it’s different from how I did temples before, but it works.

To OP:

I can understand that getting into an overcorwded event/map become boring quickly.

As other persons said, you cannot avoid the megaserver. However, even with the megaserver, there are places in the world that are not overcrowded :

- some maps are never overpopulated : Lornar’s pass, the south of blazeridge steppes, timberline falls, gendarran fields, snowden drifts among other maps are very nice places to roam.
- follow the world boss train during its travel from one location to an other. Once the train has dealt with the boss, simply stay on the same map.
eg. train finish the fire elemental and goes to the inquest golem MkII. Wait a little bit at the fire elemental then join mount maelstrom. You’ll end up in a shard generated to handle the train. Once the golem is dead, the train will move on to an other area and you’ll have a shard for yourself.
- afk at some place for a few hours (does not work in orr). Eventually the place will empty itself because of the megaserver optimizing population management.

Xenon.4537:

Yinello.7068:

I want to become scared stiff of those vines. Like suddenly coming out of the ground with sinister music and my character barely escaping :o

They should do an animation of a vine grabbing an killing a player whenever they get banned. They had that in GW1 where Dhuum would come and kill someone if they got banned while being logged in. Would be funny to see bots get vined!

I second this.
Seeing gold selling bot dying this way would be an endless source of satisfaction for me.

Agree with the op. Having specific mobs giving no xp to prevent farming is important.

However, in this case we are talking about a level 80 instance with non easy to kill ennemies. They should yield xp. Besides, what is the point of farming xp at level 80 ?

On a side note :

Farmers actually bring the prices down on everything. The more supply, the cheaper the products. Just compare prices, during the first month of GW2’s release, and today. Everything was cheaper and most items ended up being vendored or salvaged.

This reasoning is a giant fallacy : farmers concentrate the wealth of the game, making casuals relatively poorer in the process. That is the reson why games that care about their economy try to limit farming.

Stooperdale.3560:

Underwater combat has a lot of problems and is only suited for skirmishes with a small number of enemies. I don’t expect there will be any new major content (underwater bosses or underwater capture points in PvP) until these problems are fixed with a radical overhaul of skills, traits, weapons, utilities, surface state, and camera. There’s no point adding extra skills/traits until the overhaul takes places.

Quoted for truth.

They should start a CDI about this. I have many things to say/suggest about underwater combat.

Nick.6972:

iStoked.4018:

bump

Y’all noticing there’s been a slight increase in Canthan related items recently? The Assassin outfit.. DEFINITELY the Ancestral outfit.. Belinda’s katana.. and the violins in the new soundtrack sound eerily similar to some of the music from Factions (the low strung violins, almost hum-like). You can hear it towards the beginning of the Dry Top song. Maybe it’s just an odd coincidence as violins are obviously very frequently used in a lot of songs unrelated to Cantha, but it’s definitely a familiar style of sound that was used a lot in Factions. There’s still hope! :P

It’s because Arena Net knows people want Cantha, and instead of actually making it, they’re releasing “Cantha” looking gem store items.

This is common business sense : your audience wants something you cannot/do not want to do.
Solution : give them a substitute and charge for it.

You do not like this attitude ? Hold your wallet friend!

Back on topic, I’d like to see the aspect cristals in kaineng city : think of all the jumping possibilities.

EdwinLi.1284:

VodCom.6924:

[SPOILER AHEAD]

The notes we’ve found in the crash site make me think Aerin became soundless (and used a total makeover kit btw) while INSIDE the ship when it began travelling.

He clearly wasn’t a soundless during the festival. Something changed him along the way.

The injured NPCs in the medic tent in Dry Top actually revealed what happened to Aerin. It seems the Master of Peace tried to put some strange energy into Aerin when they were traveling but the result was Aerin going mad and some kind of strange energy being released from Aerin that the Master of Peace could not control.

Do we actually know how the zephyrites master the aspects ? Maybe they are implemented with such energy. Aerin could be an “unforseen consequance” of these rites of initiation.

Or all this is just a giant plot twist where it will be revealed that the master of peace/pieces is a mustache twirling vilain, but that would be extra lame.

I guess, for now we’ll have to focus on what scarlet discovered in the copper mine (ley line to mordy maybe ?)

DeWolfe.2174:

Eggman.1405:

the cliffhanger trope still works well

Nope, it’s still one of the most annoying devices used in serialized content. For all those whom think it energizes and adds interests, it also aggravates and pushes away. There’s far too much competition for our attention today to use such gimmicks.

The ending was fine, it was supposed to leave you pondering.

Recall : everything with moderation, including moderation.

Cliffhangers are fine when used at the right time. You don’t use this tye of ending in the middle of a kitten ed investigation. How lame would it be.

Sounds like ennemies are less and less hp meatbags that stand still while we FGS them on a wall.

This is good news.

I think the way the games teaches us what to dodge is starting to shift :

red circle = hostile aoe (like in pvp) -> won’t kill you but will damage/debuff you
orange discs = avoid at all costs

So expect more of these circles to come. It is a good thing imo : devs are actively trying to discourage brainless auto-attack spamming while standing still.

Naevius.3185:

Note also the font in which ‘Dry Top’ appears, which indicates it is only a region name, not a map name.

I suspect we’ll pursue the MoP through at least one map, and possibly multiple – remember the other gates in Brisbane.

You’ll notice that the name of the map does not show up when you discover a vista.

So yeah the name of the map has to be revealed. I bet the name will be spoilerific.

If the price was too low, players who grinded during the festival would scream out of frustration.

So no the price is fair.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Perhaps Soundlessness was forced upon him simply due to distance from the Pale Tree? It would be interesting to know if there is a range to her ability to influence / communicate with her offspring. Lot of potential theories…

That’s interesting : I am sure that the sanctum got closer to the pale tree at the beginning of the jouney : if you draw a straight line between the cliffs and dry top you get close to the pale tree.

So distance does not seem likely.

I have two theories :
- he got corrupted by something the zephyrites were transporting (“curious reading from the crates”).
- he acted as a normal sylvari during the festival but he was already a soundless during the festival (unlikely explanation but possible). He was faking enthusiasm to infiltrate the sanctum.

[SPOILER AHEAD]

The notes we’ve found in the crash site make me think Aerin became soundless (and used a total makeover kit btw) while INSIDE the ship when it began travelling.

He clearly wasn’t a soundless during the festival. Something changed him along the way.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

Target him, line up, charge, done.

Having him selected as a target helps a lot as well. You can line up like mad and press just a single time and still have the bug.

Doing the same but with [SPOIL] as a target solves the bug.

AnAspieKitten.5732:

Anyways, if Gauntlet is farmable then we should be able to play it instanced. Maybe one arena instanced or I don’t know, let the debuffs from the gambits stay for next try and add a way to queue up faster, it’s all simple and much better. Let it open for the rest that want to do it with random people.

An enormous amount of content in this game is farmable, even though the dev never imagined that it could be farmed. This is not enough to justify that it should be tweaked to make life easier for the farmers.

Eotm is the best example of how we (the player base) have managed to transform the overflow of the wvw in a giant karma train for PvE players.

Tell me : Should the pvp aspect of eotm removed so that the zergs could go from one special objective to the other undisturbed ? Do you really think this would improve the game ? Of course no! Part of the charm of eotm is seeing a commando of 10 players stop an entire farming crowd in a few seconds.

Long story short, because you farm some content does not grant you priority over people who use said content the way it was intended. In fact, it should be the opposite. Anet could make gauntlet instanced, but it would destroy its primary social function and make it very boring for everyone (farming this gauntlet is already boring btw, I tried it for 15 min then I coudn’t take it anymore).

Seera.5916:

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

EoTM if you want to farm, sPvP reward tracks if you don’t enjoy farming like me :P

also, you probably already have, but in the process of map completion you get 200+ skill points, so if you haven’t done that, there’s no worry

And you need map completion for your legendary so doing it would not be a waste of time.

Don’t forget that the WvW maps are needed for 100% map completion. I highly suggest not putting that off to last just due to the nature of WvW.

Rule of thumb for grinding a legendary :
Complete first the components that yields indirect progression for other parts of the legendary.
- 100% exploration is what you should do first => badges + karma + skill points + mats
- clovers => 66% of the time, you do not get a clover but a T6 mat that can be of use for gifts
(optionnal)
- farming ectos (eg : world boss train) => more T6 mats from recycling yellow items + T6 dust from recycling the ectos

Once you have all these, you can focus on grinding what you are missing.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

Where is this thing anyways?

Go in labyrinthe cliffs, skydock waypoint, there is an npc that will lead you to the aspect arena.

Not sure I understand the request formulated :S

However I’m not against splitting the effect of consumables/boosts/misc items and the conditions/boons bar.

Everything gets hidden behind the minimap very quickly if you cast “save yourself” under the effects of a magic find boost, a peach pie and a sharpening stone. Having the stone, pie and boost icon at the top of my screen would help me see what conditions I am afflicted.

Hydroclasm.8572:

Also, Sun is actually pretty good at fighting from what I’ve experienced. As long as you stand on top of the person you’re fighting the autoattack does rather high damage, the blind is useful (especially vs the lightning charge up attack) and the stability allows you to cross the lightning cages and not get knocked around by wind adepts. The black hole ability is a bit tricky to use effectively – most of it’s damage comes before detonating the star, but then you can use the pull effect with your aoe.

Maybe we should add this info on the wiki page ^^

My experience with the arena is that I usually win duels when I’m lightning and my opponent is sun. Why ? Maybe they’re all bad ? Maybe, I’m very lucky ? Maybe.

I noticed that sun players are easily lured out of their bastion (since they need to be close to do damage, note that even in the best case scenario, their auto-attack damage is inferior to lightning) which open them up to a stun with the shock aura followed up by the charged lightning attack.

Very few people are actually able to use their nova. The ones who did use it correctly owned me more than once.

That’s my personnal experience anyway.

Spinal back piece is the cheapest provided 2 VERY IMPORTANT POINTS :
- you purchase the recipe using the elonian leather (5 gold at Miyani) and you are leatherworker 500.
- you have enough blade shards to craft the entire thing (these things are hard to come by nowadays).

General advice :

explore the map in groups : a roaming team of 5 people can scare of annoying roamers, and protect each other. Ask in the chat or use the lfg to set up such a group.

Avoid doing the exploration during the beginning of a match. Friday evening (UTC+2), saturday and sunday are the moments where the battle are intense and every person should help commanders instead of exploring.

Be opportunistic : you BL might be dominated by an other server, don’t hesitate to explore all borderlands and grab whatever you can. Monitor the states of all borderlands so you can quickly switch should a fort change of allegiance.

I think this would go against the principles of the agony as a game mechanic.

As of now, agony is a way to generate some gear grind. It was since the very beginning a bone thrown at the hardcore players who wanted something more challenging than arah to grind.

So it is not meant to be used in an open world area. in fact, I believe it will NOT be used in any open world PvE.

However, a new dungeon with agony in it (white mantle citadel, who knows ?) is absolutely possible.

Sun is good for sneaky grabbing but is very poor for fighting.

Using aspect of lightning you can intercept the crystal carriers with their storm ability and kill then rather easily. Alternatively, you can camp a choke point ambush them there.

Also don’t underestimate the power of lightning pull which allows to make shortcuts that the light rush cannot.

@Aidan : the definition in the wiki is valid gameplay wise : achivements that say “maguuma” are done in the zones from brisban to Mount Maelstrom.

Lore wise, what is called maguuma does not constitute a coherent area. On the west side of the sea we have the true maguuma area (maguuma jungle+maguuma wastes+tarnished coast).

On the east, we have sparkfly/Mount Maelstrom that are the steamspur mountains and were formally known in GW1 as the southern shiverpeaks where droknar’s forge was located.

Since EOTN, the definition and area delimitations got blurred to accomodate the fact that anet released jungle themed maps all over tyria and to justify the existence of asuran bonuses there.

The big rectangle effect that plagues the world map is the direct consequence of implementing jumping in the game. To impose limits on maps you have to “wall” it with giant mountains that one can see from far away. There comes your rectangles.

The same effect is at work in GW1, but since a small gap/wall/lake can block the party (no jump, no swimming) and the maps have a smaller superficy, rectangles are hard to notice

scerevisiae.1972:

This game is a slim shadow of the customisability/uniqueness the previous game had to the point that this game will always feel half-kittened by comparison.

In do not share this opinion filled with nostalgia. This whoping amount of customisability had a cost, namely :
- Newbies using their beginning skills for endgame content (ele spamming flare >_> )
- Balance hell for devs : Having scytes assassins that are balanced compared to dagger assassins (without destroying the dervish) proved complicated.
- The uniqueness you tend to support was present in the game, but not in the way you claim it : in general PvE, you have very few meta builds. A large number of the skills we were given were simply unused. I mean… who takes final thrust when you have sun and moon slash that is much better ? Tell me, when is the last time you used Icy Shackles on a character in PvE ?

However you are right for one thing : the end-game speed clear builds were varied. You cannot speed clear the DoA and the UW using the same brainded strategies and nothing is trivialized in the process. This is the real flaw of GW2 although they made steps in the right direction.

Back on topic : I’m not sure about the concept of arcane echo for GW2. Since we don’t have mana/energy, it will be difficult to implement it without screwing around the balance.

Ben K.6238:

Wonder if the temple of Balthazar is still there?

The temple of grenth is still there in Lornar’s pass. However it is a bit underwhelming right now, the atmosphere of the place in GW1 is missing in GW2.

Hope they rectify this for Balth temple in the falls.

ricky markham.8173:

they have white mantle in one of the personal stories for human so they are still up and going maybe we will se more of them in ls2

I hope so, as long as they have decent npc model with armours that look like white mantle and not the terrible place holders one can see in the remains of aurora.

Anet I beg you, give them capes with the white mantle emblem on it. That will make them more credible at least.

Frankly the faction system in GW1 left me unimpressed and was troublesome to say the least. Look at the actual state of the game :

You get imperial faction points that you can convert to your specific faction point. You can freely join both sides regardless of the faction of your guild. Does joining the Kurzicks mean anything nowadays ?

The only visible impact of faction battles is the shift of the frontier. What are the effects ? Some ppl can use merchant npc in certain outposts and others cannot. Not really a big deal right ?

In the end it is a lot of work and fuss for something not very important or interesting gameplay wize.

Anet could implement similar PvP modes without using the faction system.

Lamir.6702:

Nobody likes spending half an hour trying to find a good arena only to have it taken by people who don’t listen or don’t care. Trying to find a different empty map is near impossible with megaservers, and even if you do find another one people tend to pop up and queue in your arena anyway. It’s insulting that for all the feedback anet received last year about gauntlet, one of the biggest issues (queue for gauntlet, absolutely ridiculous wait times) was ignored. Is it really so hard to give players the option to farm the gauntlet alone, in peace, without people constantly queueing with you and wasting your time even when you tell them to please leave and find an empty one on their own?

Your story boils down to “I don’t have the patience to look for an arena with less people queuing so I can farm faster”.

The thing is : gauntlet arenas are not instanced so other players (like me) can watch fellow guildies or pug fighting and teach them tips and underline the errors they made during the fights.

It is a feature of the gauntlet and they should NOT remove it. Remember that you are in the minority of players that farm gauntlet chances (and thus want an empty arena to maximize rate of return).

There is a majority of people who simply want to beat liadri. Why should you have priority over them ? Don’t they have the right to have fun ?

Shinoobi.1259:

But I’m running zerk in WvW again, because big numbers are also fun. =p

It bugged me when I realized that in GW2, you can be a good healer (for what healers are worth in PvE) while wearing zerk.

I approve the OP’s initiative : It’s about time the EMO bonder comes back to GW2 >_<

FINY.4710:

What also makes me wonder is that the elementalist forum is full of PvP threads where threads about other classes are much more mixed. I guess ele shines more in PvP than in PvE?

Eles are according to forum mongers, in a much better state in PvP than 6 months ago.

In PvE, since the speed clearers discovered the FGS field stacking, we are essential to any speed clear group. PvE is the area where ele shine the most. You don’t see this in the forums a lot because it’s not a subject of complains, so it is has low exposition time.

PvP is more problatic for us and the meta is not completely written in stone as in PvE hence more threads on the forums. IMO, this is where we shine the least.

WvW : eles are part of the GWEN meta, so it’s not a problem either. The topic I see coming up in the forum on a regular basis is a roaming ele build specced for condition damage. (And the eternal debate on whether or not this is efficient/viable/yolo etc…)

ThaSlayer.8573:

Also maybe Mordy has some affiliation with the remaining Mursaat and their nation.

How so ? As far as I know, the mursaat ran away and phased out their cities instead of fighting agains (or for) the elder dragons.

I am sure they’ll happily run away again now.

I don’t know who’s gonna blow up the zephyrites, but those dudes are in trouble.

THIS is becoming personnal.

On the side note : Now taimi can finally figure out what’s in the crates.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The only place it still exists is PvE, and they will probably be slowly removing it with the introduction of the living world content.

They surely will try to add as little UW combat as possible, but removing what already exists in PvE will take too much effort for them. They won’t be removing what exists anytime soon from PvE.

I can understand the move though, the UW combat is hard to learn and to teach, balance is kinda wonky here (engi and ele are insanely strong, guard are a living joke…) and the readability of combat is non existent (where the hell is the risen megalodon hitbox ?).

Don’t get me wrong, UW combat is a mile away from any other mmo combat, but it’s still not up to par with land based combat and improving it would take colossal effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Don’t give up friend you’re almost there. There are many possible ways of dealing with liadri.

I beated her with a condi/hybrid necromancer (S/D and Staff).
Heal : consume condis
My utils were the locust signet (important so you can outrun the clones) the signet of spite and the well of power
elite : not important but plague can help by blinding the clones.

To spare your dodged you want to stay at the middle between the edge of the arena and its center, the closer you are from the center, the less distance you have to cover to escape shadowfall.

Scepter as a main is awesome because you have a reliable cripple with it. The staff brings additionnal cc for both the clones and liadri.

With direct damage spec, you are forced to face liadri to deal her damage (thus moving slower). Some people deal with this very well. I don’t so I had to improvise:
With condi, just apply a few bleeds and you have spare time to focus on evading the clones/rifts. RInce and repeat. If you complete P1 quickly enough, you should have time to complete P2 with bleeding.

Note: Dagger #4 sends the cripple and weakness back to her. Same for staff #4. With all this, you shouldn’t run out of dodges.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Xenon.4537:

- Grenth’s Balance
Elite Skill. If target foe has more Health than you, transfer half the difference from that foe to yourself and nearby allies (divided equally). Cooldown 210 sec.

No. You honestly have no idea just how broken this skill is capable of being. I mean, REAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLY no idea. You ever go fight Tequatl, THW, or any of the other “mega” bosses? That’s the last thing we need, bunch of necros sitting on 1-5% health popping this skill on bosses and eating away millions or tens of millions of hp in a single skill.

QFT. The reason why we have few new skills or traits is because of external balancing and internal balancing are insanely difficult in this game.

Grenth’s balance is an example of broken external balance : since lots of monsters are hp bags, this skill will deal insane amounts of damage in PvE.

Fragility is broken internally : it is a much more reliable way of dealing damage in a hybrid build : all you have to do is spam short duration conditions that keep being applied and wear off. No need to shatter, no need to build for condition duration, you just have to launch chaos storm and auto-attack with the staff and you wreck somebody in pieces.

eekzie.5640:

Point being is that they don’t want healing power to play a dominant role.
So that’s why I made this topic, as I don’t see why they would make a high end reward focussed on healing power.

I think the issue is more complicated. Making healing power a “dominant stat” is a huge risk of bringing trinity in the game (no reasonable person wants this in GW2).

I do however hope that some very specific (or niche) dungeons/megabosses will need a healing power oriented build to be completed (think of the husks with the 3 headed wurm).

An idead would be a rework of the claw of jormag, where the golems take damage from the blue snow and you have to heal them to bomb the dragon.