Guild Wars 2

If I’m not mistaken, those are the medium crafted Ascended boots.

Brisban Wildlands and Fields of Ruin are both currently Megaservered as well.

The quickest way to check, besides looking for contested waypoints when not in the zone, is to check your location in the guild interface when in a zone, or check the location of someone else in said zone. If it doesn’t list a server name (or Overflow) after the zone, if it just says “Fields of Ruin” for example, then it’s a Megaserver zone.

The developers do nothing to determine the price that gets set. It’s based entirely on how many gems players are getting by spending gold, and on the flip side, how many gems (either bought with gold in the past, or obtained via credit card) are being converted back into gold.

The only way ArenaNet influences the gem rates is by introducing or removing items from the gem store. If a desirable item is added, then more people will convert gold to gems, and the rate will change based off of that.

I wonder what a bobblehead King Toad would look like…

Maybe we’ll find out later today!

The only new track I noticed is a flute piece that plays in Maguuma zones. It definitely jumped out as a theme that I hadn’t heard before.

I’ve never left a guild, but I know there’s no confirmation for the “Kick From Guild” button, much to my dismay. Why it has to be so close to the “Invite to Party” prompt, I don’t know!

You should be able to store gold in a Guild Bank, so make a private guild if you just can’t keep yourself from spending money on hand.

Just bear in mind that if you ever click the “Leave guild” button instead of the “Stand down” button, all that money is going to go poof.

Bonus chests are already account bound, and have been for quite some time.

Typing /deaths brings up the number of times you’ve died in-game with that character.

The six cities would be the fastest zones to complete. You could create a series of characters assuming you have a spare slot to map them out in sequence, though you might have to be a bit careful running from Vigil Keep to Lion’s Arch now.

Alternately, if you want more rewards than just the transmutation stones, mapping out Mount Maelstrom, Fireheart Rise, Orr zones or Frostgorge Sound will reward you with two exotics in the end along with the stones/Black Lion Key reward.

Flytrap.8075:

Wow, that’s almost 3g in repair costs.

14.68 gold, assuming all the deaths were at level 80, but who’s counting?

No, cultural armour will still be race-restricted.

Wanze.8410:

If you buy the 4 specific endless quaggan tonics, you pay 4g instead of 12g for the mystery quaggan tonic. Granted, the mystery tonic saves you 3 inventory slots but if you want only 1 specific transformation, you are better off buying a specific one.

Just a note for this, there is a bonus fifth Quaggan form available only by the Mystery Quaggan Tonic. It can transform you into Kookoochoo the Incredulous, the performing Quaggan from the Bazaar of the Four Winds. Kookoochoo even has an extra costume brawl skill, fire breath that hits four times.

The greyed out event times mean that the event cannot trigger again until that time elapses. A yellow event time with a ticking down clock means that the event is ‘in window’, so it could start at any time during that countdown.

Sometimes other events might interfere and cause the countdown to go longer than it should. Fire Elemental with the various ‘displaced creatures’ events in the reactor is the main culprit of that, now that they’ve fixed their display on Shadow Behemoth for the monastery events.

Meanwhile, on Tarnished Coast, a call that the giant is up usually brings 10-20 players, at least, running to fight it. There’s no chance it would ever control the city for ten minutes, let alone days on end!

The Great Jungle Wurm is a good example to bring up. It’s a huge, threatening-looking boss, but it has all of three attacks, each with a distinctive tell. If it coils low, it’s going to use a condition-inflicting attack. If it stretches high and circles, it’s going to use a knockback push attack. If it flails around, it’s going to use a fear attack.

All three can be dodged.

It just so happens that ranged attackers only need to worry about the fear (and possibly the conditions, I always melee so I don’t know if that attack goes after them too). Once you’ve figured out what the animations for the wurm’s attacks look like, it becomes easy to dodge them all, and to get through a fight entirely in melee range without taking so much as a scratch. Depending on your class, you might need Vigour to dodge enough, or you might need to use a block or two, but it’s far from punishing to melee, especially considering that you’re doing more damage than the ranged attackers and are often able to hit two of the wurm’kittenboxes at the same time up close with cleaving attacks to double your damage beyond that.

It’s the same with Golem Mark II. The electricity does a lot of damage, yes. But the golem’s one knockback attack is its excessively telegraphed ground pounds, the first two of which can be avoided with simple positioning while meleeing (the first is on the golem’s right, the second on the left) or even by inflicting Blind on it because the Golem’s doesn’t have Defiant, while the third hit is a large AoE that hits twice and thus ignores Blind, but is given away by the two ground pounds leading up to it and thus gives meleeing characters ample opportunity to dodge. And there’s less need for Vigour here because of the gun attack phases and the “I’m futilely covering my face for ten seconds” phases, where melee characters won’t need to dodge at all, just move out of electricity. And those melee characters with cleaving weapons are often able to hit three hitboxes of the Golem at once, particularly when it’s covering itself up, giving them an even more massive damage advantage over the ranged characters camping outside the electricity radius (who are still vulnerable to the ground pound AoE there).

Hell, I even still melee the Fire Elemental in Metrica sometimes. There’s a part of its hitbox that extends out of the lava far enough to melee it. It’s just risky because the fire pulse attacks that move along the ground can originate from that spot giving you no time to dodge them, and the AoE from the sky might knock you into the lava, at which point it sucks to be you. But it can still be done!

In short, there’s nothing punishing here for melee. You get rewarded with massive damage, but you take on extra risk in the process. You’ll definitely notice when fighting Golem Mark II when you have people in melee or not. Does the fight take 5 minutes, or 10?

Equinox.4968:

Yes, the core game has shout-outs and references, but the Living Story has absolutely minimal ties to GW1. The only thing I can think of is the reference to the Zephyrites taking care of Glint’s remains, but that’s about it.

Scarlet’s Marionette could be seen on a tapestry on the wall of the Eye of the North in the original Guild Wars. Is that not a good enough tie for you?

sorudo.9054:

firstly, EotN was added in response of GW2, no GW2 and you would’ve never seen the 3 other races.

So, um. Charr didn’t exist until Eye of the North?

To say nothing of Ascalon City and Droknar’s Forge still being in the game. Along with Piken Square, Yak’s Bend..

Try going out to explore sometime, you might be surprised!

khani.4786:

Oh you mean that bag that keeps giving me a Sentinel’s weapon/armor that’s blue?

You’re not guaranteed a rare in that thing either. If you are, then I’ve been gypped.

I get the blue Sentinel’s weapon sometimes, too. But in addition to that one “previous LS reward” slot from the Ultimate bag that’s usually a Sentinel’s weapon or Dragon Coffer/Quartz/etc., you also get 3 greens or better and one yellow or better in normal equipment as well. That’s what I’m referring to when I say a guaranteed rare.

Going back to Escape From LA, I’ve never opened an Ultimate bag that didn’t have those 3 greens and 1 rare in addition to the other stuff. In fact, yesterday I opened my first Ultimate bag that had 2 greens and 2 rares instead.

Right now the game has some statistical anomalies in it, due to how Crit Damage boosts work. Lets use traits as an example. For traits, 1% Crit Damage is equivalent to 10 of a stat, like say Precision. If you invest 10 points into the thief Critical Strikes trait line, you get 100 Precision and 10% Critical Damage. The problem is, the ratio of stat points to Critical Damage doesn’t carry over evenly everywhere.

Take the Superior Rune of Divinity, for example. It gives +10 to all stats, but then +2% to Critical Damage instead of the +1% that you’d think it would get, from how it’s balanced in traits. Take an Exquisite Ruby Jewel. It gives +25 Power, +15 Precision and +3% Critical Damage. As Critical Damage is a minor stat on the jewel, it should be a +1.5% boost to keep with Precision, but instead somehow gets bumped up all the way to 3%. Trinkets display the same issue, where the Critical Damage boost winds up higher than what a stat would actually give.

Even if all Arenanet does with Ferocity is turn it into a flat number, and then have 10 points of Ferocity give a 1% boost to Critical Damage, things will still be brought into line a bit because now the stat will be evenly applied. The Exquisite Ruby Jewel will become +25/15/15 like other jewels, the Superior Rune of Divinity will give 10 Ferocity instead of ‘20’, and so on. Depending on whether they meant “Berserker builds will lose 10% damage” or “lose 10% critical damage”, that simple stat balancing would certainly account for 10% critical damage for most builds. But whatever the case, we’d see the numbers be brought back into line and be less confusing.

It’s pretty safe to say that the other races view it as acceptable. Remember when Rox asked Marjory and Kasmeer if they were ‘a mated pair’? There was no disgust in the question, it was just something matter-of-fact for her.

Tyria has more important things to worry about than same-sex relationships. Technically, Earth does too, but unfortunately that doesn’t stop a lot of people…

Just to remember, even if you only get greens in the chest, you still get the Ultimate Citizen bag which always has at least one rare piece of equipment in it. So it’s not quite as bad as most people are making it out. The guaranteed rare is there.

It’s not a bug for Renewed Focus to go on full cooldown in a case like that. If it didn’t, then you could activate it to get invulnerability, dodge or weapon swap before the animation finishes, and then be able to use it again in 3.5 seconds for more invulnerability, and so on.

Because of the skill’s nature, how it gives invulnerability during its casting, it needs to go on full cooldown if it’s interrupted or cancelled.

To access Personal Story in Lion’s Arch, you would need to go to new NPCs outside what used to be the eastern entrance to the city in Gendarran Fields, who will smuggle you inside. The story instances are the same as they were before, except that they’re taking place in the burned out city.

World vs. World still counts towards world completion, yes. That said, there’s now a degree of randomness to matchups, so there’s more colour variance in the way the weekly teams are set up. As such, if all you’re missing is a few keeps, you should just need to wait for a matchup week where you’re the proper colour and you’ll be able to get them.

Can’t comment on elementalists, but whatever answers do come, there’s going to be another balance patch reasonably soon so it’s liable to change again.

For the people who aren’t getting loot… are you standing in the coloured circles around the Assault Knights as they appear? You need to step in one of those circles to attune yourself and be able to deal damage. Stepping in the circle grants you the ability to inflict damage for a minute afterwards. If you don’t step in the circle you cannot deal meaningful damage to the Assault Knight, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that then leaves you unable to receive loot even if your number of attacks landed gives you gold event credit.

I’ve had no issue getting my 5 champ boxes/assault cores from the enemies even unpartied with the pathetic damage of Thief shortbow autoattack (can’t use Cluster Bomb when it reflects conditions), so if you’re having issues, make sure you’re using the circle attunement.

Cheezeman.3296:

I am also stuck on 14/15. Last one I need is the group miasma event or a daily, but since there was no daily today, I’m screwed. Unless these achievements are still attainable after tomorrow. :/ ANET, please. You need to tell us how long these events last.

They did tell us, in the patch notes for Escape From Lion’s Arch. They went so far as to say exactly how many dailies would be available for this update, and that you’d need to complete 15 of the 28 achievements (counting dailies) to earn the reward.

Now, the reward in this case is just 100 bags, so it’s not the end of the world to miss out on. The 25 AP missed might hurt a bit more, but you could just devote a day to Keg Brawl or another activity to catch up on that and then some.

The yelling of the god’s name should coincide with you using the racial skill named after that god. Just like Charr have special cries (like “Charr need no gods!”) for their racial skills like Battle Roar.

Wanze.8410:

Its the end of a 1-2-3 attack chain and has a telegraph from Ebonhawke to DR.

You are not supposed to tank that damage.

Battle Standard isn’t part of an auto-attack chain, it’s the Warrior Elite skill, dropping the Warbanner from the sky. There is still a lengthy telegraph on it, complete with a special sound effect, so it shouldn’t be taking players by surprise.

The only issue here is that the thug is level 84, and in the zerg these players are running with they can’t keep track of the distinctive animation and sound effect. The moral of this story is “don’t zerg in Lion’s Arch”. The upscaled armies of Scarlet are no laughing matter, and if you insist on forming overly large groups, then you have to be prepared to be downed if you’re unable to spot telegraphed attacks like Battle Standard coming.

This has been an issue since the Edge of the Mists patch, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed yet. Surely it’s been reported, right?

Since Edge of the Mists, the bonuses that servers earn for their World vs. World scores are no longer being applied. This includes the bonus HP, increased endurance regen, crafting bonus, the chance to gain extra harvesting node uses, everything.

Does this have something to do with the change that lets you see your WvW standings even on overflow servers? I’d hoped that implementing that change would allow my bonuses to carry over to those overflows where normally they’d go away. Instead, the bonuses just seem to have vanished entirely, even on my home server!

The Lion’s Arch event every hour does count as a dungeon, yes. I’m not sure if that was intentional, but it is rewarding people for their monthly progress.

Many world bosses can still be done with small numbers of people. Golem Mark II in Mount Maelstrom is likely soloable, and I’ve done it with only one other person before without any issues, and it rewards 20-25 Dragonite.

Distaste.4801:

I could be wrong but the Champion Aetherblade thug didn’t seem to do nearly the same amount of damage as the elite. When I face the elite version I just swap to hammer and stun lock as much as possible and then tactically retreat if I take a big hit. The worst is when they just spawn and all do their knockdowns, if you don’t see them right away it’s game over.

It’s rare for Champions to actually scale up past 80, now. They were doing that for a while after Orr events were reworked last year, and it was causing an awful lot of screwy things. Now you’ll notice in most places that even in upscaled events the Champions stay at level 80, while the Vets/Elites can go up to 84.

A level 84 Elite doing more damage than a level 80 Champion isn’t too surprising, and it’s actually balanced out by the fact that the Elite can be crowd-controlled freely.

The Battle Standard of a level 80 Veteran Aetherblade Thug deals around 4000 damage to my squishy thief character when it gets a critical hit. It’s nothing unmanageable.

The issue here is with an upscaled level 84 Elite Aetherblade Thug. The solution to avoid being one-shot by that Battle Standard is to not run in a big enough zerg to force them to spawn at that high level.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

I like the idéa, everything to fight the farmers

But…
Well I don’t get it…? Do you get ONE rescued citicen for speaking with one with a fist? And do you get some for escorting children? The information is so vague…

I am not one of those who farms or whatever, I run around doing events for fun and I save those I see. If there where an achievement for it, I would like to know more.

Just to answer this, since no one else did…

Speaking to a citizen with a fist is the start of the rescue. It starts them moving. When they start moving, they’ll head towards an escape point, which might be one of the three exits from the city but will more likely be a Whispers Agent NPC standing stealthed somewhere. When the citizen reaches the Whispers Agent, they’ll escape the city and add to the counter.

So just interacting with the fist NPC isn’t enough, usually, you need to lead them to the exit. All the defeated NPCs you’ll see scattered around waiting to be revived were once fist NPCs who someone interacted with to make them run, and then got taken down by enemies before they made it away safely. Once an NPC actually escapes, new ones will spawn in the same area to be rescued once more, so leaving a bunch of them defeated will really slow down the rescue counter.

The bubble on the house is due to a Priory personal story. The Asura inventor who lives there has numerous defense mechanisms set up that you need to get through to talk to her before the Battle of Claw Island. It makes sense that the same defenses would trigger when Lion’s Arch is attacked.

You can’t rob the bank because nothing is actually stored there, banks operate as extradimensional spaces, which is why you can access things inside it from any bank in the world. When the bankers were killed in Scarlet’s initial attack, the ability to access said extradimensional spaces in Lion’s Arch was lost.

Vigil Mega-Lasers are hard to transport. And do you really want Tequatl to roam free? Can you imagine the complaints on the forums if we were unable to complete Tequatl for a few weeks because the Mega-Laser was being lugged north through Sparkfly Fen?

The Tengu are sniping people to protect their home. They see hostile Charr (Flame Legion), Sylvari (Nightmare Court), Asura (Inquest), Humans and Norn (Aetherblades) causing havoc and destroying things right on their doorstep. How are they going to tell the good guys from the bad guys, when they’re all the same race? Don’t they all look alike to a Tengu? So they all die.

lordkrall.7241:

Where have they stated this?

I don’t know where they stated it out of game, but in the game when reviewing evidence in Edge of the Mists, Marjory talked about the Molten Alliance beginning their attacks a year ago, which matches up pretty much exactly with the beginning of Flame and Frost in real life.

Sigh.

lazarus.1639:

Holy crap, I see i need to be 100% accurate in order to communicate with you. Okay, let me try again, ahem: when i was talking about the Great Northern Wall being destroyed, i was referring to the actual ruins of the Great Northern Wall being reduced to tiny microscopic tiny bits inside of a giant crater created by some random giant spacecraft driven by some random crazy sylvari, so nothing would remain of the original wall.
There, i think that was precise enough.

I think you missed the point I was making, rather than being unclear yourself. Yes, there are still ruins of the Great Northern Wall. It doesn’t really matter if they’re just smashed further in the coming year in GW2, or if they’re atomized, or whatever. My point remains that breaking things and changing the world has been a part of Guild Wars since, well, the prologue of Guild Wars: Prophecies. It’s what the series is built on. The game could have started in war-torn Ascalon with the Charr siege already underway, but instead they introduced you to a pristine, idyllic world and then tore it away from you, letting you find the ruined doll of the child who skipped along with you later as a loot drop to drive home just how horrible the events were.

The Searing was part of the main story of the campaign. It had a lot of background and was a major part of the plot. Charr using a powerful old magic given to them by the Titans (who had also a lot of background behind them) to retake their lands, for they were there before the humans arrive. That was awesome! and that’s only the beginning.

However, the destruction of this ruins with a godkitten giant flying drill is just pure vandalism. What freaking purpose does it serve? and please don’t tell me that we will have to wait for the next update to see that purpose… it’s been 1 year since Flame and Frost (or 6 months since Queen’s Jubilee) and we still have no clue on why the hell She does what She does (except the I’M CRAZY LALALALA part).

Alright, next point. When you started playing Prophecies, when the wall came smashing down due to Burntfur’s spell, were you aware of all of this background behind the attack that you’re happily touting here? Did you know about the powers driving the Searing Cauldrons, of the Titans who had granted the Charr these powers? I’d hope you didn’t, to know that you would have had to be reading spoilers. The story was revealed as you progressed through the game.

Now I know back during Prophecies that there were some players who whined and complained about the Searing and that they loved pre-Searing Ascalon and would have characters that would never leave it. Okay. But I certainly don’t remember having any players who complained about the powers the Charr wielded in smashing the wall, calling Burntfur a Mary Sue villain doing impossible things. I don’t remember hearing anyone complain about the White Mantle’s insidious hold on Kryta and how unrealistic it was that such a cult could gain influence. Even if there were people who might complain about such things, after a few weeks/months there were spoilers available that revealed how the Flame Legion aligned with the Titans, or how the Mursaat were involved in Kryta, and so on. The difference with Scarlet’s arc is that there has (at least until recently) been no ability to look ahead and find spoilers. The story is being told in episodic form, we can’t peek ahead at what is to come. This means that you aren’t getting all the answers you want right away, and for some people that’s apparently inexcusable. You want to know how the story ends, sometimes even before the story truly starts.

I’ve been avoiding spoilers, myself. I don’t know what Scarlet is after, but I do know why she’s after it. After the last month of updates I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out what’s going on in her head and why it’s pretty earth-shaking, at the end of the day, even without knowing exactly what she hopes to get out of drilling through Lion’s Arch. Am I complaining that I don’t know what she hopes to achieve? No, because I’ll find out in two weeks. You will too. But you’ve already made up your mind to hate her for whatever reason, be it “she’s a Mary-Sue” or “it’s unrealistic that they’d follow her” or “she’s a Sylvari and they didn’t exist in the first game”.

If you dislike her, you dislike her, that’s fine. She wasn’t designed to be a likeable character. I just think, after that tangent I went off on, if you’re someone who likes maintaining old locations the way they were, that this is the wrong game series for you.

I don’t think you really understood my question, if that’s the reply you’re going to give.

Unfortunately, you missed the “lets recap the story thus far” Living Story entry by a couple of days.

The very short version is as such. Sylvari villainess Scarlet Briar has invaded Lion’s Arch after masterminding various schemes throughout Tyria for the last year. She became a villain when she underwent an Inquest experiment to let her mind try to contact the ‘Eternal Alchemy’, which allowed some kind of foreign entity to seize at least some control over her and begin manipulating her to yet-unknown ends. She formed several alliances between disparate factions. The Dredge and Flame Legion are the Molten Alliance, Inquest and Sky Pirates are Aetherblades, and Krait and Nightmare Court are the Toxic Alliance. She also seized control of the mechanical Watchwork armies originally created by Queen Jennah, using some sort of tie to the steam creatures to pull that off. With these armies, she has now launched a sneak attack on Lion’s Arch, an attack that the player characters as well as friendly Captain’s Council member Ellen Kiel saw coming, but that the rest of Lion’s Arch ignored as implausible. You can see the results in the burning city that’s left today.

Scarlet seeks something buried underneath Lion’s Arch, and has a giant drill digging through the ruins of Old Lion’s Arch to find it while the city burns around her. We’ll find out what she’s after in two weeks with the next story update, in the meantime efforts are focused on rescuing survivors from the city and dealing with her armies within it.

Okay, so what else do you want to do? Talk to NPCs to get story info? You can do that, and there’ll even be conversations on their own that play in the refugee camps or at the rally points.

You tell me. What else were you hoping for from this update? If you were running around killing stuff/saving citizens in a private instance, would that somehow be more acceptable for you?

Try, I don’t know, ‘not zerging’? If you want to get the “Citizens Rescued” bar up to 1500 for the highest tier of rewards, there’s going to have to be a bare minimum of zerging involved, as they’re incredibly inefficient at clearing events in Lion’s Arch. An event results in the same number of citizens saved whether it’s 10 players facing groups of level 81 vets/elites, or 50 players facing groups of level 84 elites/champs, just that the former takes 3 minutes and the latter takes 10.

lazarus.1639:

Even the Great Northern Wall might not survive this year.

Stop destroying the old lore please.

I hope you can look back at what you wrote and see the irony there.

What is the ‘lore’ of the Great Northern Wall? Well, it just so happens that in the original game, it was destroyed by the Searing. For you to complain now about the potential destruction of something that was already destroyed in the game you’re nostalgic for is more than a little silly.

If anything, this attack on Lion’s Arch is very much staying true to Guild Wars tradition. Things get destroyed. Everyone has fond memories of ‘pre-Searing’, the peaceful Ascalon that is lost once you reach a certain story step and that can then never be accessed again with that character. But the Searing happened. The game went on. Now it’s Lion’s Arch that’s being scorched. This is the kind of ‘nothing is sacred’ approach that the original game embraced. So why can’t you embrace it now?

They’ve said in another thread that it’s a bug and will be fixed to match what the patch notes say.

If people want to rescue the amount of citizens needed for the highest tier of rewards, they need to specifically avoid big zergs, as that both upscales events to the point where they take too long to complete, and takes away players from other parts of the city reviving and rescuing the random stragglers.

The content isn’t even 24 hours yet. People are currently taking what seems to be the path of least resistance. In time, they’ll evolve and start doing what’s needed to save more citizens, you’ll see less of the big zergs, and everyone will get more loot.

Palador.2170:

Maybe you should see who posted what and rethink that statement?

Already did and deleted the mistaken post in question.

That’s a nice reply, but at no point does it actually say that Evon isn’t selfish and doesn’t only care about glory. Even the Order of Whispers wouldn’t try to defend the indefensible.

Palador.2170:

Because they chose Kiel. Why should he spend his money only to have them take the credit for it? (And let’s be honest, Kiel would take the credit for it. She’s done it before.)

So you’re saving that Evon is selfish and only cares about glory. It’s good to see that you’ve finally come around to Kiel’s side on this! Fortunately, she’s principled and is making Evon help even when he doesn’t want to, so perhaps there’s still some hope for Lion’s Arch in the end.

I went swimming to it and the minimap said the PoI was above me, but when I swam under it I got credit for it.

Oddly, I was at 23/25 PoIs in Lion’s Arch before getting it, but after doing so it bumped me up to 25/25. Is it two PoIs in one?

Ah, if you’re new to the game, then you should probably gain a few levels first. Gendarran Fields is a level 25-35 zone, so it shouldn’t be out of your reach even as a new player, to get to that level within two weeks. Gendarran Fields is accessible from Black Citadel via the Lion’s Arch Asura Gate in Black Citadel, so once you’re high enough level, you can go there and participate in the event.

You have to walk manually into Lion’s Arch, rather than taking a waypoint or an Asura gate. The three entrances are in Gendarran Fields, Bloodtide Coast and Lornar’s Pass. Your Living Story mail will direct you to them.