Guild Wars 2

Ouch. Guess I’ll be farming those Thumpers hardcore then.

The devs have stated unequivocally that Abaddon is dead.

That said, who’s to say that the whispers of a dead god could not still echo through the Dream/Mists and inspire one who heard them to madness and attempt to resurrect the god? (Luring an Elder Dragon to a specially prepared spot and killing it might provide enough magical energy to accomplish such a task.)

Once you unlock Scarlet’s Secret Lair, is it unlocked for all characters on your account? Or does each character need to unlock it separately?

I used a BLKey that I got from the Personal Story last night. To my surprise, I actually got another BLKey from the Chest. I thought the Chests didn’t drop keys anymore?

The second chest had a Scrap in it, for the record. Yay? :P I’m now up to 7 Scraps.

TTS managed to kill the Wurm? If so, excellent! Share your tips and strategies.

EDIT after Smooth edited his post while I was replying: Oh, never mind. XD

Scruffy is more like a pilotable golem or a HAZMAT suit than a true, autonomous golem.

@Malafide: You, missy, get +1000 Internet points for awesome TMNT nostalgia.

It’s also possible a vendor will be put in that trades Watchwork Sprockets + coin for the recipes. Might be a good long-term way to soak up additional supply now that players are getting a Sprocket generator in their home instances. (Plus, bonus gold sink.)

But regardless, I’m going to get a set for my own use anyway.

I thought you can no longer use Mesmer portals to bring the Wisps to the trunks? (The Wisps disappear when you warp through.)

Sometimes I wonder if you’re John Smith under a different alias, Wanze.

To add to Wanze’s post, I can also guarantee that a gem store item to go from 0 – 500 in crafting would be widely viewed as a P2W item (correctly or not), similar to paying to level from 1 – 80 immediately. It would not be accepted by the wider player base.

^ LOL, that was the exact same thought I had when I saw the screenshot too. XD

I don’t mind this, as long as ANet refunds me for the 4 extra sets of unlimited gathering tools I bought from them.

I’d hang onto it for now and sell in about 6 – 8 months. I fully expect the recipes to be available again next Wintersday so be sure to sell before then.

Also keep in mind that as long as there are supplies of Wintersday Gifts on the TP (and in the banks of players), there will be a slow, but constant stream of new recipes being added to the TP, so this is not really a market you can corner. The price will go up (till next Wintersday), but don’t expect it to go stratospheric like the Greatsaw and other old Halloween skins. This will be more like the Dragon’s Jade skins where the odd skin is still getting added to the game via Dragon Coffers.

Yeah, I’m considering buying up the full set too. (Except the Satchels. I generally ignore those.) I wonder if they’ll still be available even after the Marionette fight is gone though. It seems a rather short window of opportunity to get them otherwise, especially since the finished items are account bound and can’t be sold.

Yeah, I would love Ascended Giver’s stats too. It’s the only equipment stat spread that boosts Boon Duration. :/

So… Tequatl is still a DPS race then?

There’s actually a very logical reason why you don’t see fat Sylvari. They’re plants; plants don’t have fat cells.

:O

You just made my day, Bagel! Placing an order for this when I get home tonight.

Thank you for your informative and professional response, Anthony. And tell Bill not to get too disheartened by the angry responses to his post either. I understood perfectly what he was getting at; he just could have worded it better.

So basically, we have a situation where you don’t want to remove the Pet Whistles/Fire Elementals completely because a) they’re fun, and b) some players DO need just that little bit of extra help to beat some content (e.g. an experienced player with all Exotics is usually capable of soloing a Champion all by himself, but a newbie player cannot unless he majorly stacks the odds in his favour with consumables).

At the same time, aside from the technical strain being placed on the servers, I think we as players also acknowledge that abuse of the summoned monster items also trivialises certain game content, which is not something intended as part of the game’s design.

Therefore, Anthony, I strongly urge you and the ANet team to consider looking at tweaking the balance of some of the game’s most difficult encounters (namely, Tequatl and now the Great Jungle Wurm). Players have basically adopted this strategy because the risks of failure are unacceptably high to us otherwise; we often spend up to 2 hours camping out in the map beforehand, meticulously planning out strategies and using voicechat software. To have it all end in failure with little or nothing to show for our efforts is basically driving us to adopt any edge we can get.

You said yourself that you don’t want to create a game culture where players are expected to use consumables to succeed. I urge you therefore to consider easing the difficulty of the encounters where players are often compelled to use them. Some suggestions I recommend:

1. Ease or even eliminate the time restriction for Tequatl and the GJW. 15 mins is very, very tight for these bosses with HP probably in the millions (billions?). Extending it to 20 or even 30 minutes would give players more margin for error.

2. Adjust the scaling of the bosses so they can be completed by much smaller groups. Currently Tequatl is in a situation where, if you zone in and don’t see a massive zerg waiting for him, you leave immediately because you know you don’t stand a chance of beating him. This has resulted in situations where Tequatl is only tackled after reset (on very populated servers), and only specialised guilds like TTS manage to take him down outside these rare windows. This is rather unfair to people on smaller servers, or whose play hours are outside of these windows. I predict the same thing will happen to the GJW too.

In contrast, look at the other World Bosses like the Shatterer or the Maw Shaman. These bosses remain quite popular because players know that, even if they show up late, they still have a decent chance to contribute and earn full credit. And if they’re stuck in an overflow, they can still have a decent chance to kill them, or just try again later because you know there’s enough interest that people are always tackling them all day long.

Obviously, we don’t want to have Tequatl or the Wurm able to be soloed, or even 5-manned, but it should be possible for a group of, say, 10 – 20 people, to beat their events if they are experienced and know what they are doing. Any extra players beyond that is just icing on the cake. You have a great thing going with your Dynamic Scaling system; it’s possibly one of the greatest selling points of Guild Wars 2. Bring it back to the fore with the ultra-hard bosses! Make Tequatl and the GJW fun for smaller groups AND zergs. I know you guys have the talent and ability to pull it off.

I would also add the Draconic Shield and Voltaic Spear to my list.

Yeah. It’s not much time which is why I’m scrambling to complete the achievements now before players move on and the Marionette becomes impossible to beat.

What exactly is the commander doing when he says “stack on me for count”? What does stacking on the tag DO?

Thanks for the info. Still haven’t been to a successful Mari kill yet, but I’ll be sure to cheer as soon as I see the last chain being severed.

OK, had a chance to try our the Marionette event last night. It’s fun, really. However, two things I would prefer to see implemented to make it even better:

1. Better scaling. Zerg content is OK, and fun in small doses, but zergs should NEVER be required to complete content. The Marionette fight has the same issue as Tequatl where unless you have a certain baseline number of players, you are doomed to failure from the start. Right now, it’s an Overflow problem, but I’m certain that as time goes on and people get their achievements, the Marionette fight will get less and less popular until the latecomers have the opposite problem of never getting enough people in their main server to complete it.

It should be possible to beat the Marionette fight with as few kitten players (1 on each lane). The mobs that rush up the lanes scale to the number of players, and during the platform phase, the Regulators scale down to Veterans if there’s only 1 player. After each platform is destroyed, the force field around it and an adjacent platform fades so you can go assist another platform (making it possible, if unlikely, for a lone player to destroy a chain by himself if they’re very skilled).

2. Achievements tied to stranger success. The various dodge achievements should not rely on your entire lane succeeding to be awarded, especially since if a platform is in trouble, you can’t do anything to assist them, essentially holding your achievement hostage to them. Rather, it should be awarded when you dodge the Marionette’s attacks AND successfully kill your platform’s Regulator. I feel that would be a fair compromise.

But other than that, I found the fight very enjoyable. The addition of the various siege weapons to each path was a neat move! Punching a Watchwork Champion as a siege golem was strangely satisfying. XD

Thanks for your hard work and research as always, dulfy.

I agree. The achievement should be awarded for avoiding the attacks AND killing the Regulator on YOUR platform. We shouldn’t need to be beholden to what other platforms are doing, since we have no way to influence their success or failure, yet our achievement depends on them doing well.

Loved the story instance too. Only two gripes:

1. Why does Rytlock sound different in his first line? Did Steve Blum forget to get into character? XD

2. Why does Logan walk off and disappear? I had to replay the instance again so I could talk to him as I didn’t realise I wouldn’t be able to talk to him afterwards.

Roasted Meaty Sandwiches have been bugged for a long time and don’t count towards the daily achievement. Most other foods do.

However, the cheapest and easiest way to get the daily is to just buy Rice in Bulk from a Chef NPC. For just 49 karma, that gives you 25 Rice Balls that you can quickly consume to get the daily.

While I wouldn’t mind Sonders be updated to trade Gifts etc. for Ugly items, I’m still astounded at the thought of keeping 30,000 of them in your bank. O.o

I think it would have to be since her awakening, since she talks about seeing a Mender, and I think the Menders would only be found in the Grove. Or at least in Sylvari-held lands. I’m of the opinion that her journal dates from the time before she left the Grove to pursue studying under the different masters.

Both sides have a valid point here. Maybe ANet can look at doing a compromise; individual mobs don’t drop loot to discourage people just farming Champs and ignoring the bigger objective, but you also get incremental rewards for each successful sub-event/task you complete. For example, if you succeed at defending your lane, everybody in that lane gets 1 Champ bag plus assorted loot (and a successful event completion reward.) You do that however many times it takes to defeat the Marionette.

At the end of the encounter, you get a further reward based on how many successful events were completed, plus a big bonus if you successfully killed her.

I also think that rewards for the big three bosses (Tequatl, the GJW and the Marionette) needs to be majorly increased to compensate for the time and effort it takes to beat them. The Marionette is less of an issue since it’s temporary content, but I feel that Tequatl and the GJW should give a guaranteed Exotic in their daily chests, spurring people to keep attempting it each day even if an attempt or two fails.

Cool, thanks. At work atm, and spidy and gw2tp still haven’t updated.

Can the recipes be sold?

Does the Wurm actually have its own set of achievements like Tequatl? (Still at work, but Wiki only lists the Origins of Madness meta-achievement. No new entry for the Tri-Wurm under Bosses.)

If not, then I predict the Wurm will be abandoned even faster than Tequatl without the hook of achievements to keep players trying for him.

You sure that’s a Largos? It looks more like a harpy to me. Even though a Harpy-Tengy alliance would be even more horrifying.

Actually, what does everyone think the races are? Here’s my guesses:

Sylvari —-——- Tengu
Asura —-——— Dredge
Charr —-——— Human? (Although technically the Aetherblades are Asura and everyone else.)
Ettin —-———- Skritt
Harpy —-——- Quaggan
Ogre —-———- Krait
Grawl —-——- Kodan?
Centaur —-— Hylek

Huh. Surprised that JQ or BG wasn’t the first NA server to beat her.

Gnat.9405:

And here is the race chart for hilarity

The world would have crumbled under the horrors of a Quaggan-Centaur alliance.

Hopefully ANet will update Sonders to take them too by way of a new tab.

See this post:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/madness/Mari-dodge-achieves/first#post3529407

Apparently you must not get hit by the attacks in question AND succeed at severing the chain in the same attempt. If you do not successfully sever the chain without being hit, you won’t get the achievements.

No idea why you didn’t get the Dismisser achievement though.

EDIT: Clarified that it’s the chain that needs to be destroyed, not beating the Marionette.

Why not split Map Exploration into separate PvE and WvW/PvP achievements? You get one Gift of Exploration for doing either, so you’d still end up with two if you did everything, but you only need to do one to get your Legendary.

Zergs are OK, and admittedly it’s kind of fun to run around in a huge ball o’ death, but I dislike it when content starts REQUIRING zergs to beat, like Tequatl and now the Triple Wurm.

Congrats to Ehmry Bay. Please help the rest of us now with tips on how you did it.

Karka Queen actually has very decent rewards now. Guaranteed 30 Dragonite Ore, 5+ Karka Shells, 4 Exotic Champ Bags, and a decent shot at an Exotic inscription/insignia that fetches 2g+ on the TP.

If the pre-events just weren’t such a pain to setup, I guarantee she’d be one of the most popular World Bosses.

-immediately votes “DEATH”-

Trust me, Taimi, this is for your own good. There are some things man- er, Asura, were not meant to know.

Yeah, I salvage Exotic armor pieces/weapons for Ectos and inscription/insignias. Haven’t gotten any Dark Matter from them so far though, which is odd…

If anybody happens to get the Molten boss fractal and still hasn’t gotten the Shockwave Skipper achievement, please post here if it’s been fixed!

The balance changes are coming later. ANet has stated several times that the “feature patch” is AFTER the end of the current Living Story. So don’t expect anything big till March at the earliest.

Whoops. I forgot to trade in all my junk too. O.o Dang. Hopefully there’s still someone who’s taking them, otherwise I’m sure there’s some speculator on the TP who’s happy to take them.

No increased chance of Scraps/Tickets? Still not buying any Black Lion Keys then. XD

Hmm, has Helper Dee disappeared as well?