Guild Wars 2

Control skills are decidedly not superfluous on him. A single thief dropping Black Powder at his feet to inflict ticking Blind ailments will stop all of his stomping attacks that should be messing up people in melee range, while simultaneously protecting people who might be standing out in front of him for some reason in danger of being hit by the breath weapon.

At some point, the Great Jungle Wurm in Caledon Forest was adjusted so that even though it didn’t gain Unshakable, it became immune to Blind. The same really should happen to Shatterer as well.

You’re not supposed to go through the Personal Story quests uninterrupted from the beginning to the end. If you’re not high enough level for them, go out into the world and do some events/hearts/exploration instead, then come back when you’re high enough level for your Personal Story.

There have still been new skins added with each Living Story release in Season 2, they’ve just been added into the new open world content. You can get the Adventurer’s Scarf/Spectacles and materials to craft Ambrite weapons from the chests in Dry Top. The achievements actually help nudge you towards those by rewarding you with Lockpicks/Geodes to put towards getting the skins.

I imagine it won’t continue like this all the way through Season 2, mainly because the whole thing won’t be taking place in Dry Top. But while the focus is there, there’s nothing wrong with the rewards being like they are now, since there are still new skins to get.

All of Destiny’s Edge, save Zojja, showed up at various times in the first season of Living Story. Three weeks into the second season, it’s a bit soon to be complaining that they’ve been abandoned, is it not?

Cameirus.8407:

That being the case, care to explain why the asura female costume is exactly like the male’s and yet the human female one looks totally different>?

Because Asura gear tends to be the same for both genders. There’s only a handful of outfits where the Asura and Charr look different based on genders, and this apparently isn’t one of them.

The visible physical differences between male and female Asura and Charr tend to be in the ears for Asura, and the horns/tail for Charr. Neither of those differences are places you can reliably build different armour sets around. The difference between male and female Humans/Norn/Sylvari are a bit more noticeable for armour sets.

The male costume is that of a stereotypical male ninja, such as Ryu Hayabusa or Hattori Hanzo. The female costume, in turn, is that of a stereotypical female ninja.

Go look up the character Ibuki from the Street Fighter series. The female version of the outfit in GW2 is pretty much identical to her costume, save for the bow/obi, which in turn appears on costumes for other Japanese characters Akuma, Gouken and E. Honda.

You might miss some ambiance and flavour. Like.. only people who logged in during the Gates of Maguuma release got to see Prosperity in Dry Top before it was destroyed by vines.

That said, the story instances from Gates of Maguuma are still doable, and the NPC conversations in them were already altered a bit to account for the changed landscape in Entanglement. Going forward you might miss a bit of open world flavour like that, but it’s far from the end of the world.

(unless Mordremoth brings about the end of the world)

PopeUrban.2578:

True, however the tradable rewards are in no way unique (aside from ambrite, which is an example of a better design specifically because it is tradable) and in order to leverage geodes you’re_ forcing_ players in to a content loop of geodes>keys>chests rather than encouraging that loop because it’s cheaper than buying the geodes or keys from others.

Actually, there are unique tradable rewards from the buried chests in Dry Top. The Adventurer’s Scarf and Adventurer’s Spectacles are new armour skins that are only available in those chests, and can be traded if you get them.

Crixler.2857:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Mordrem_Wolf.jpg
That is a dead dog that has had plants attached to its nervous system. The dog itself is not corrupted, however, and is merely being used as a puppet by the plants on its back, so it’s kind of a gray area, really.

Pretty sure it’s still a fern hound, rather than a normal wolf. It fits in with the Husks, keeping Mordremoth’s minions as being similar-yet-different to Nightmare Court critters.

One thing that I don’t think I’ve seen referenced yet is that Scarlet tinkered with Omadd’s machine at some point afterwards. As such, while the things that our character saw are similar to what Scarlet had seen, the effects of the machine might not wind up being the same. Did Scarlet add a mechanism to protect future users of the machine? If she was under the control of Mordremoth that doesn’t seem like a sensible thing for her to do, but she didn’t always do sensible things.

Further to that, it’s likely that Mordremoth can only corrupt plants, all the minions of his that we’ve seen have been some kind of plant creature, be it husk or flower or fern hound. For PCs who aren’t Sylvari, it’s pretty safe to say they weren’t corrupted. For Sylvari PCs, well..

Another reason that Braham isn’t feeling too boastful at the moment is because of what happened on the Breachmaker. When the climactic final confrontation occurred, and it was time to finish Scarlet off, her explosives flung him away and broke his leg, leaving him unable to get back into the fight. He’s taken that very personally, viewing it as a sign of weakness that he wasn’t able to deal with Scarlet while the player and Kasmeer, of all people, did.

He wants nothing more than to prove himself, but it’s hard for him to take pride in what he’s done when what should have been his crowning glory instead became him unable to stand and being tended to by Rox while a flighty Mesmer and a Whatever Your PC Is did the heavy lifting.

Shatterer casts the Crystal Prison every fight. It affects the players closest to him, so if you sit on the rocks to his side and shoot arrows at him the entire fight, you’ll probably never even see the prisons because you’re too far away. It’s always his opening move once the battle starts.

Well, if that’s the case, you might just want to get a Hairstyle/Makeover Kit from the gem store now, since from the sounds of it even if the current batch of new styles winds up not appealing to you, chances are a subsequent one will. And hey, the gold to gems rate won’t be getting any better as time goes on!

This might not be much help, but with each 5000 point Achievement Chest you earn, you’ll find a Total Makeover Kit inside. I stashed one of those free kits away and use it to preview the new faces/hairstyles as they’re released.

I’ll ask again, how long ago was this?

darkace.8925:

Since melee auto attacks cleave, ranged auto attacks should pierce. I mean, fair’s fair, right?

Some do, like Engineer Rifle.

Of course, not all melee auto attacks cleave. Thief and Necromancer Dagger say hello.

Embrace The Bold.7619:

melee skills (i.e 100b , autoattack) were unlimited on how many they could hit.

How long have you been out of the game? The 3/5 target cap for melee cleaving has been around for as long as I can remember, and I jumped in on launch weekend. I believe AoE skills did get nerfed down to 5 targets at some point mainly due to WvW concerns, but I don’t think melee abilities were ever that high.

Um. What attack were you using before that cleaved more than three targets?

Skills on cooldown can often cleave up to 5, but auto-attacks on cleaving weapons have always only hit three.

TylerWolff.7186:

The meta is berserker DPS and when it comes to that formula warriors do it best. Anything else and you’re sub par and gimping yourself.

And that’s where you’re wrong. Warriors don’t do it best. They just do it the simplest. In DPS the berserker Warrior loses to a berserker Elementalist. In groups for dungeon speedruns as well, multiple Warriors wind up being redundant, with other classes adding more than a second/third Warrior would.

Yes, even a Ranger.

My last attempt to post got eaten somehow, lets try this again.

Jerus.4350:

Then last is the stomp big circle attack, that’s the doozy. Blurred Frenzy through the first, dodge the second and third, stability from the mantra isn’t a bad idea if you can’t dodge/blurred for whatever reason. Between those 3 things you should be set.

The stomp attack is actually like the Molten Brawler/Berserker’s stomp attack from past Living Stories. You can avoid it by jumping, so you don’t need to find a way to have three dodges. The timing is pretty forgiving on it too.

You can only stun Tootsie when Take Off is being used. Fear can never stun Tootsie as Tootsie is immune to movement-based skills, and Fear makes the target run away. If people could Fear Tootsie, the whole group fighting would hate it anyway because she’d be out of agro range after it wore off.

So Fear doesn’t work, but dazes, stuns, knockback, pulls, and other such abilities work fine. A Thief with off-hand pistol should be able to ensure that she never gets away simply by holding a Headshot in reserve.

Question: Do you already have the other four Skritt Burglar transformation achievements in the game?

If your answer to that is no, then why are you so hung up on this one? Is it because it’s in a different tab than the other ones?

I got the achievement after killing it, after it had been shocked by the mini-golems. It was rewarded at the same time as I got No More Shocks.

Grax.9204:

I let the mini golems get hit by those static thingys, pulled them into the big golems shield thingy and he got a buff stacked and at some point seemd to get damaged by it.

The big golem died and yet I didn’t get any achievement. This is weird, I don’t get it.

Were you going through the first time, or replaying it? To get the special achievements you need to be replaying the story after completing it the first time.

No, it doesn’t apply to the locked chests or the Lair of the Beast’s chest.

Just like every other Skritt Burglar event in the normal zones, there will occasionally be a chest that spawns in an area where there normally isn’t a chest. If you try to interact with that chest, the Skritt Burglar will pop out of it and start to run away, triggering the event. While it flees, it’ll throw things at people chasing it, which might inflict Chill or Cripple to slow you down, or it might polymorph you into an animal. In the case of Dry Top, the animal you become is the Llama.

The Explorer tab of achievements has four other Skritt Burglar achievements for being polymorphed into other critters, one for each region type (except Orr, which is Skritt-free). If you’ve done any of them, the exact same principles apply to this new one.

There are three that involve combat, one purely story instance that comes after the three combat instances, and some running around in between.

Just like all the other Skritt Burglar achievements, the chest that spawns the Burglar can appear in multiple random locations. Hold down Ctrl a lot and explore off the beaten path a bit!

That’s the “No More Shocks” Achievement, actually.

To get “A Shocking Development”, you need to use the golem’s two attacks against it. When it does the Static Discharge spin, maneuver it so that the mini-golems get hit by the bolts, that will give them an electric charge. Then, when the golem puts down its force field and removes conditions from its mini-golems, it’ll take the electric charge from them as well. As such, you want to lure the golems into that force field. When it gets too many stacks of that electric charge (at least 7, maybe 10) it’ll be electrocuted and lose a lot of health, losing its defensive buffs and becoming vulnerable. That will give you the achievement.

The green text will go away once you complete the story missions added in the patch. That should only take you a few hours at most if you focus on it, then it goes away.

(for two weeks)

That one’s not it. It’s the same theme that plays in the fight against the Risen Priest of Melandru, if that helps. I’m doing a bit of looking on Youtube, but I haven’t found it so far..

You can, but it will only get the Legendary appearance/effects, it won’t automatically get Ascended stats or the ability to swap statsets on the fly like your actual Legendary.

In Scarlet’s Journal we could hear Scarlet talking more normally, as she tried to rationalize things and occasionally argued with Mordremoth taking control of her (and taking credit for what she felt were her ideas). When those scenes first appeared, there were a lot of people complimenting the voice actress, saying that Scarlet sounded a lot different and much more serious. That would be what Tara is referring to.

Vesuvius.9874:

Oh snap! Maybe it’s just me but sometimes it’s hard to understand what to take seriously and what not to. There have been random NPC dialogues in game that I thought were “ah they’re just rambling on about random stuff that has no impact on anything whatsoever”, but turns out it’s an important part of the GW2 lore (can’t remember any specific dialogues atm).

At other times, like Rox mentioning Destiny’s Orphans, I thought “naah, maybe I should stop thinking like that. This is their name now.” but turns out it isn’t.

The main reason that’s not their name is because that line was never actually used in-game. It was data-mined and talked about on Reddit, but the in-game conversation that was actually used in the Dead End didn’t include that line.

Travis the Terrible.4739:

Everything ellen did she didn’t do. The players did and she just showed up and well claimed it all for herself like treehorn did in the personal story.

And the reason Ellen and Trahearne are like that is because this is an MMORPG. It’s hard to try to write the game specifically for the players without any intermediaries, because the writers can’t know who the players are.

Lets say you’re a brand new player. Would you like to be told that you’re the hero who entered the Aetherblade Retreat and routed their forces, when you just started playing two weeks ago and have no idea what an Aetherblade is? I don’t think that’s really immersive. Enter Ellen Kiel. She went with the players into the Aetherblade Retreat. Players who did that event can now say “I was there, I helped her”, while players who weren’t there can say “okay, this NPC did it”. That’s why all these NPCs are there, from Destiny’s Edge to the Order mentors to Trahearne and Ellen and the B-Iconics. The story is delivered to you through them, because crafting dialogue to deal with five races and two genders of player characters simply isn’t feasible. They cram a lot of dialogue into the game already, but imagine if they had to do ten times as much of it because it’s your character doing the talking in the cutscenes rather than Braham. We already saw the effects that can have from the Personal Story, where your distinct racial quirks displayed in the cutscenes go by the wayside once you hit the Order portion of the story that overlaps between races. The Charr discipline and Asura sarcasm and Norn boastfulness and Sylvari wonder all goes away.

The player is still the hero at the end of the day. People who were there to kill Scarlet get credited as her killer. Kiel calls you the ‘leader’ of the adventuring group in the story cutscene for this release. Trahearne doesn’t get to kill a dragon like you do, he just gets to sit on his rear end for however many years now trying to cleanse a rotting continent. But he’s not the Pact Marshal because they want to belittle the players, he’s the Pact Marshal because it’s easier to script that part of the game around one character rather than potentially ten different ones. You still wind up making all the important decisions, doing all the fighting, and in the end getting all the credit as Hero of Tyria.

After Magnus lost his eye, Kiel came in with her airship to rescue him and take him to safety. Without her arrival, Magnus, Lawson Marriner and a bunch of the Lionguard would have been killed by the miasma in Fort Marriner. She then took to the front lines in the subsequent Battle of Lion’s Arch, dealing with one of the Assault Knights (flanked by Heal-o-Tron) while Braham, Rox, Marjory and Kasmeer fought the others. If you were at that southern fight, then she would also follow you into the battle with Scarlet and her Prime Hologram upon the Breachmaker, going so far as to have special dialogue after that fight is won where she promises to do her part to help pardon Heal-o-Tron, saying that he can be considered a hero of Lion’s Arch.

People are grumbling about her, but that’s not a sign that she’s a secret villain. She just isn’t a politician. Evon Gnashblade is finding a way to turn things to his advantage, as he always does, and for all her heroic tendencies (tendencies that Gnashblade completely lacks) she just doesn’t see that she’s giving him an economic advantage in the resettling of the city.

And Taimi’s complaints are just Taimi’s complaints. She thinks an Asura would’ve done a better job. Put any other Asura in her position and that Asura will say the same thing.

Is your server locked into its position, perchance? Will it finish 7th no matter what the results of this week’s matchup is?

If you’re a warrior, team up with a thief and coordinate a bit. Use your Longbow Burst for a fire field and have the thief Cluster Bomb at his feet into it repeatedly. You should be able to get to 18 stacks just from that, more if you have your own blast finishers to contribute.

Cluster Bomb is the best blast finisher in the game, but thieves have no way to generate their own fire fields.

The zerg area wasn’t combat against Scarlet’s agents in the Pavilion, at least, not at first. It was the Queen’s new Watchknights being put into action and tested, under Mesmer magic to make them look like enemies of humanity for the heroes to fight in controlled conditions. It wasn’t until later that Scarlet exercised control over the Watchknights to transform them into her Twisted Watchwork enemies.

With Scarlet dead, Queen Jennah should be able to safely deploy her Watchknights again without the fear of someone taking control of them, meaning that the controlled arena fights can resume.

More specifically, Bountiful Theft (not Sleight of Hand, that’s the trait that makes Steal Daze) will prioritize first Stability, and then Aegis, when stealing two boons from the target. This ensures that the Steal’s Daze via Sleight of Hand will always connect, unless evaded.

The Thief’s other boon stealing skill, Larcenous Strike, does not similarly prioritize Stability. It seems to target the oldest boon on the target first.

Sakri.7234:

Anet could easily influence the price by adding more gems to the supply everytime gem price went higher than e.g. 15 gems per gold, which was the last time that they were reasonably affordable.

Why should they? What do they gain from that?

If you’re not willing to put in the effort to learn the Tequatl event, then you just have to accept that you’re not going to beat it, and not bother to show up. There’s still twenty other world boss/temple events where you can go and win without needing to put much effort in.

Just accept that this particular dragon isn’t for you, resign yourself to not getting that pool of achievement points it offers, and go smack the Shatterer around.

brannigan.9831:

Maybe I was unlucky but that was probably 40-50 hours of doing nothing but team arena and winning at a decent clip and my reward was 20 gold and a couple cruddy skins.

Are you factoring in the straight-up cash rewards for each game? Beyond the reward tracks, you’re also getting 30 silver for each team arena win, and 15 silver for each team arena loss.

Lets say you’re getting one game in each 15 minutes, which might be a conservative estimate. Over 50 hours, that’s 200 games. Lets say you win half of those games, now. 100 wins in and of itself is 30 gold, while you’d get another 15 gold from your 100 losses. There’s 45 gold of straight-up cash being given to you before factoring in the items the reward tracks give.

Is it as good as spending 50 hours running dungeons? No, it’s not, not even close. But it’s a lot better than just saying you got 20 gold from 50 hours. And, presumably, you enjoyed yourself more playing these team arena matches, right?

The Ascended materials exist to take coin out of the game, not to inject coin into it. For each of those 140 Bloodstone Bricks you’ve created, you’ve spent 16 silver on the vendor item needed to forge them.

Being able to turn them into coins goes against what they were created for. It will never happen.

Shadow of Azrael.1205:

There is no need for walking and porting, you can simply relog.

There’s no need for relogging, you can simply open the World vs. World menu again and click the “Leave the Mists” door icon at the bottom-right.

Kigera.9584:

Lol, got me having flashbacks of my freshman year in high school. Picked up Dynasty Warriors for the first time and got sucked into the Three Kingdoms era for years. Too bad most English history forums on that subject have died off.

My forum on it will start up again in earnest sometime. Honest! Then we can have angry arguments over double-teams in that game too.

Sol.8341:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms

Liu Bei joined forces with Sun Quan to fight against the stronger Cao Cao in romance of the three kingdoms.

But in the end, the cowardly Sun Quan betrayed Liu Bei by attacking his province of Jing while Liu Bei’s general Guan Yu was on the march against Cao Cao. Guan Yu wound up captured by Sun Quan’s forces when he tried to withdraw and was executed. That betrayal sealed the fate of Liu Bei and Sun Quan’s kingdoms, as Cao Cao’s kingdom was never again challenged by either outside force, though it wound up collapsing to an internal coup with the resulting Jin Dynasty re-uniting China.

So the moral of the story is that TC and JQ had better not betray each other until Blackgate is destroyed! Right?

Just buy the + 5 AR Simple Infusion from the vendor in the Fractals lobby, and use that for your AR for level 10-19. Worry about infusing your rings further after you’re at 20+.

The champ bags can be obtained repeatedly, but the big treasure chests would only be once per day. I’m not sure that it would be an effective ‘farm’ once the big treasure chests are removed, particularly because the champ boxes would have a chance of being lower-tier ones (which means, while you might get lucky with something like Linen, that there’d be no chance of T6 materials in them).

It doesn’t seem like it’d be as cost-effective as doing, say, Edge of the Mists. But factoring in the 50 silver bonus and the big chests, it might be worth doing once a day.

Some of the custom arenas people set up disable certain rules, and are marked with a “No Progression” logo as a result. Check to make sure that doesn’t exist on an arena before you join it.

Rentapest.6503:

However, now you can only get one chest per day in dungeons? What a load of rubbish!

Um, it’s one chest per path/boss per day in the dungeons.

There’s 25 different dungeon paths in the game to choose from, not counting the fractals. Rather than repeating the same dungeon path five times, go do five different dungeon paths. That’s better for money anyway, since the bonus gold reward is already once per path per day.