Guild Wars 2

Also, pay heed to the message at the bottom of each mail. Any REAL communication from a GM or an ANet staff member will NOT have the message that states “this message was sent by another player”.

Slomo.1029:

Dear Mr. Katzbach. Consider using the tools you already have available and you’ll see there isnt even a problem to fix.
http://i.imgur.com/DFBPmYu.png

This post wins the thread. XD

Yep. Wait till next week, when the masses will flood back into Silverwastes for the next LS chapter. (And no doubt stay there for a while to grind lots more Bandit Crests and Mordrem body parts…)

^ That. XD

The Rebreathers should have been made tradable, to be honest. I have a guildie who has only 1 character, but he’s got 3 Rime Rebreathers thanks to opening a whole bunch of Giant Gifts. So now he’s stuck with 2 that he doesn’t need or want.

This is why I usually just stick to Hotjoin. You run into toxic types much less there. (Also, if you do get those AFK-types on your team, you can just leave the match instead of wasting your time.)

I’m not usually bothered by them though. If it gets bad enough, I just block and report the player in question. I always aim to play respectfully and politely; it IS just a game after all.

From my experience with Unranked back when I was grinding the Wintersday reward tracks, it did often feel like the odds were frequently stacked against me. I ended up with a 1:2 win-loss ratio that was getting worse until it finally seemed to stabilise. I don’t know whether it was because the MMR was finally kicking in or I just had a bad streak of getting matched with imbalanced teams.

In any case, I know that I’m not skilled enough to really be in Unranked/Ranked. Now that I’ve finished grinding the Wintersday track, I’ve gone back to Hotjoin for more casual PvP.

Yes, I have noticed that Necromancer is extremely rare and Engineer seems unusually frequent. I’m not sure if the dailies are pure RNG or if Engineers are just on a long streak and they’ll be extremely rare later down the line.

laquito.5269:

I don’t even know why people don’t use hotjoin 4 it. Last time I checked , you could also do it via hotjoin without putting your team at a disadvantage.

Same. I do the Dailies in Hotjoin. With the prevalence of uneven matches there, it’s extremely easy to get the daily profession win by volunteering for Autobalance whenever it pops up.

Teckos.1305:

wait for it……….

Waaaaaaaait for iiiiiiit…

I have never seen Charged Quartz drop from the nodes in Dry Top, only the one in your Home Instance. (And it’s still quite rare. Maybe a 1 in 100 chance, based on my experience.)

Mawdrey (and possibly the Star of Generosity) have a small chance to drop Charged Quartz from their gifts. However, it’s again so rare that I wouldn’t rely on this to get your Charged Quartz.

-continued-

9) Achievements

Mark: B-

While the once-off achievements are just perfect, I have two areas of complaint here: the repeatable achievements, and the meta-achievement.

a) I understand that the repeatable achievements are completely optional, but I had to laugh at how ANet changed the Dailies so that “players don’t feel compelled to grind all the dailies every day”, and in the very same update, introduce a number of time-limited achievements that require a large amount of grinding. I mean, c’mon, really??

In previous years, the repeatable Wintersday achievements were also only repeatable 3 times. This year it was 5, requiring considerably more grinding. Snowball Mayhem also got bumped up from 10 matches for 1 tier, to 30 matches for 1 tier. Please consider scaling back the requirements to what they were in Wintersday 2013. They were much more reasonable, and more in line with your stated approach in reducing the player perception of required grinding.

b) In previous Wintersdays (and holiday events), players had the option of progressing the meta-achievement by doing a combination of the once-off achievements, plus dailies. This was removed for Wintersday 2014, and to make matters worse, you needed to complete ALL the achievements to complete the meta. This meant that players who were either not comfortable with, or not able to do, certain activities were locked out of completing the meta-achievement altogether. I feel that this is a really bad move and turns away from the “play how you want” philosophy espoused by ANet.

Please return to the old system of completing the meta-achievement for future festivals. That way, dedicated AP hunters like myself can get the meta-achievement faster if we do everything, but players who aren’t can still reach the finish line simply by devoting a little more time every day doing the dailies.

10) Rewards

Mark: C+

To be honest, I felt that you really messed up with the rewards for this Wintersday, ANet. It’s not that we didn’t like the new Wintersday stuff (we do!), but you forgot the lessons you learnt from Halloween 2014 and went right back to locking all of the good stuff behind onerous RNG.

The various Gifts have too broad a range of rewards, with the result that tons of unwanted goods (like Tonics and Toy weapon skins) got created in the process of players attempting to get the rare stuff they really wanted. Even with the new MF recipes you’ve introduced, the “trash loot” is accumulating on the TP faster than it can be gotten rid of.

It would have been better if the Gifts had a much tighter loot table. For example, let’s say that each Gift drops:

- 1-10 Beautiful Clothes (provides a minor gold sink with salvaging required, creates cloth scraps to help ease the general shortage for cloth.)
- 1-10 random Snowflakes OR 1-3 random salvage materials OR 1-5 random junk items
- 1 secondary wrapped gift, such as a Bottle-Shaped Present, Unsafe Gift, a box containing snowflakes, or rarely one of the Exotic Gifts (similar to the ones from the PvP reward track, that allow you to choose precisely what gift you want).

Next, expand the offerings of the Wintersday merchants so that a lot of the rare goodies (including the Grenth/Dwayna recipes) can be exchanged for a ton of the unwanted stuff. For example, maybe the Mariner’s Oilcloth Bag can be obtained for 250 Ugly Wool Sweaters.

This was the approach you used back in Halloween 2014, and it worked EXTREMELY well. Players had the ability to choose exactly what reward they wanted, and players who didn’t like any of the offerings could always just sell the tokens (candy corn, skulls etc.) and pocket the gold instead.

My feedback for Wintersday 2014:

1) Bell Choir

Mark: A

Still the most fun Wintersday activity, marred only by that annoying bug where it register all your notes as “missed”, even if you got them right. Fix that for next year, and you’ll get an “A+”.

2) Winter Wonderland

Mark: A

Another of my favourite Wintersday activities, although I’m curious as to why you removed the mid-way “save point” this year. I didn’t need it, but the save point would no doubt help a lot of players who aren’t as skilled at jumping puzzles.

Someone also made the suggestion that fall damage be turned off completely for this JP. That seems like an excellent idea to me; you did this for SAB, so it should be possible, and it would stop that annoying “falling to my death while running down a slope” latency bug.

3) Orphan Scavenger Hunt

Mark: A+

Simple, short, and fun, with a nice reward at the end. <3 the Star of Gratitude. I do question the need to time-gate the food you feed to Grawnk, but it’s only 3 days, so not that big an issue.

4) Toypocalypse

Mark: B

A pretty simple, but decently entertaining activity. Not much in the way of replayability though. I ended up playing this just to grind out the repeatable achievement. I also support the common request of allowing players to group up for this activity so they can play it with their friends.

5) Snowball Mayhem

Mark: A

A pretty well-balanced PvP activity. More strategic than it first appears. It’s a bit prone to steamrolls, but that’s not really the fault of the activity itself.

6) Tixx’s Infiniarium.

Mark: B+

Pretty simple, but entertaining. My one suggestion would be to perhaps give better rewards for completing it. There really wasn’t much incentive to replay this once you’d finished the achievements. (I will talk more about the rewards later.)

7) PvP reward track

Mark: A+

Perfectly done. The inclusion of the ability to acquire Permanent Wintersday Finishers as the final reward was an awesome surprise.

8) Ho-ho-Tron’s Donation Event

Mark: A-

I love the dialogue (“Shoo. Shoo.”), but I think the event may require a bit of tweaking because it’s obvious that a considerable amount of donations is required to get it started (at least 30g, I guessing). This means that players arriving late to Wintersday have practically no chance of getting the achievements linked to this event unless they’re willing to shell out a disproportionate amount of gold.

-continued-

They probably overlap. There’s only 4 map pieces, but there’s actually 8+ different types of chests:

- Asuran chest (metallic, silvery, floats above the ground. There is a small and large version)
- Krytan chest (metallic, gold, sits on the ground)
- Pirate chest (wooden, has blue wave motifs on the sides, sits on the ground)
- Ascalon chest (metallic, steel/rust, sits on the ground. There is a small and large version)
- Sylvari chest (plant, sits on the ground)
- Shiverpeaks chest (wooden, keg-shaped, sits on the ground)
- Dredge chest (metallic, flat, sits on the ground. Opens up like a mechanical puzzle)
- Orrian chest (stone, cylindrical, sits on the ground)

The other possibility is that the Map Pieces actually work like the Wintersday ornament scavenger hunt. The type of map that drops is determined by the TYPE of chest (i.e. Sylvari, Asuran, Charr etc.)

Um, I might be misremembering, but I don’t think those actually drop from chests. Those are bought from the Zephyrite merchants for Geodes.

Oh wait, this is the FEAST recipe. But still, all it would take is someone with the base recipe to go create one in the MF and sell it.

As before, I’m eager to see the results of what happens, especially since this is an item now where new supply can still be created.

As an aside, I do think that the loot tables for Wintersday got seriously messed up this year. The Gifts had too broad a range, with the result that tons of unwanted goods got created in the process of players attempting to get the rare stuff they really wanted. It would have been better if the Gifts had a much tighter loot table, dropping a combination of Beautiful/Ugly Clothes, along with a second wrapped gift (Bottle-Shaped Present, Unsafe Gift, a box containing snowflakes, or rarely one of the Exotic Gifts).

Next, ANet should have expanded the offerings of the Wintersday merchants so that a lot of the rare goodies (including the Grenth/Dwayna recipes) could be exchanged for a ton of the unwanted stuff. (If ANet wants to avoid flooding the market with the Exotic stuff, the traded versions can be made account bound.) This was the approach they used back in Halloween 2014, and it worked EXTREMELY well. I’m honestly surprised (and a bit disappointed) that they disregarded the lessons they learnt from that.

Why ARE the Sand wurms there anyway? Is it so that people who glitch out and don’t die when they fall can still kill themselves so they can respawn?

sephiroth.4217:

Zaxares.5419:

I wouldn’t take that approach. That’s the same sort of mentality where players go “Hey, this is clearly an exploit, but I’ll keep doing it until ANet tells me to stop because it’s not SAID that this is an exploit.” In a worst case scenario, it can result in bans.

Safe zones are clearly meant to be just that; places where the enemy is not supposed to be. While they can’t actually harm the players themselves, they can harass them (emote spamming), troll them by killing enemy NPCs (kill off the siege merchants so they are forced to go to another map to buy siege, for example), and just spy in general.

I would immediately report any enemy player I see in my map’s safezone, and I encourage all players to do likewise.

You actually thought I was serious? lol…

I did. You’d be surprised at the kinds of players I’ve run into in my years online. I have met people who genuinely believed that if the devs made a mistake and a bug/exploit existed, then it was their God-given right to exploit the hell out of it until it was patched. And they would raise holy hell about it afterwards if they got suspended/banned because “it’s the DEV’S fault!” Yeaaah, then by that logic, if you accidentally left your house door unlocked and somebody got in and stole your stuff, the thief was perfectly justified in his actions and should face no punishment.

If you were genuinely being sarcastic, then I apologise for thinking the worst of you. I’m REALLY jaded these days.

Astral Projections.7320:

Well there are 4 possibilities,

Gilded Infusion: +20% Gold from monsters
Magical Infusion: +20% Magic Find
Experienced Infusion: +20% Experience from kills
Karmic Infusion: +15% karma

This is my opinion on them
1) Gilded: least useful. Most mobs drop only a few copper and 20% of not much isn’t much more
2) Magical: pretty good but with caveats. Only works on mobs killed and now in the new area on bandit chests if you have the perseverance buff. This means it has no effect on champ bags, various loot bags or chests. So if you aren’t killing a lot of mobs or aren’t opening bandit chests, it’s not doing anything for you. Good for going to Orr and doing events that have lots of mobs to kill though.
3) Experienced: good if leveling. Not as good if not. Will help you get extra skill points if you use the mystic forge, but so does killing champs. (And if you kill champs you get the champ bags with their loot too).
4) Karma: Good if you have a use for it, such as saving up for temple armor or a Legendary. Not as good if you don’t. However with karma you can buy certain karma items and forge them to get something you can salvage or sale. For example there are gloves you can buy with karma, forge them and get an item you can salvage for linen. Or you can buy karma items to fill out your wardrobe and mystic forge them to salvage what you get. If you get level 80 karma cultural weapons (at 63,000 karma each or 252,000 karma for 4 of them) you’ll get another rare or possibly an exotic. Theoretically you could get a precursor.

Which one is best for you depends on how you play and what you need.

I’d rank them slightly differently:

Gilded. Since gold find only applies to coin dropped by mobs (and not from event completion or bags), it will not be very useful unless you kill lots and lots of enemies. If you’re a farmer, or if you play a lot of WvW, this is a good choice since your playstyle will lead to lots of kills. If, on the other hand, you gain your gold mainly through dungeon speedruns (in which a lot of enemies are skipped), harvesting or trading, it will not be too effective. Rank: 2nd or 3rd

Magical. This is similar to the Gilded infusion in that if your playstyle results in lots of kills, you’ll gain the most benefit out of it. However, Magic Find is still tossing your hat into the RNG ring; if there’s a 0.01% chance of getting an Exotic as a drop, for example, with 300% MF, you’d have a 0.03% chance (or thereabouts). Still quite rare. What’s more, you need to increase your MF by a considerable amount before you start seeing a noticeable effect. (As an example, I didn’t notice a real difference in my drops at <100% MF. Once I hit the 150%+ range though, I started noticing more Rare drops, but really expensive stuff like Exotics are still few and far between.) If you’re the kind of guy whom luck never seems to favour, you’re better off going with another infusion. Rank: 2nd or 3rd

Experienced. This is the most useless of the 4 infusions, in my opinion. By the time you’re at level 80 (when you can wear Ascended amulets), you really have no need for experience anymore. You will more than likely be drowning in Scrolls of Experience, so skill points aren’t a problem. Rank: 4th

Karmic. This is the infusion I chose. Karma is one of those currencies that’s difficult to acquire if you suddenly need a lot of it. While the infusion doesn’t affect karma consumables, it does affect everything else, and you’d probably be surprised at how it all adds up over the course of a week’s gaming. Karma can also be converted into gold through a number of ways, should you eventually end up with more karma than you need. Rank: 1st

Well, with the flyweights who have defeated heavyweights, I’d argue that it was due to the fact that the flyweights were either more skilled than the heavyweights, or the heavyweights were simply unprepared to deal with the tactics used by the flyweights. (Which again, comes down to a disparity of skill and experience between the contenders.) All other things being equal, the bigger and stronger contestant will always win, and there comes a point where you’re simply SO big/strong that no amount of skill or technique will overcome it. It would like having a rabbit physically defeat an elephant in a fight. It just isn’t possible.

But yes, draxynnic’s second points are exactly what I was getting at. While the Asura Warrior might not have the raw brawn of a Norn Warrior, in-game, that same Asura might be augmenting his armor with magitech, or used some kind of super-strength serum he developed, which is why the performance of the two appears to be identical. But these are all external aids the Asura used to level the playing field.

The map pieces generally drop more often from chests in their respective zones, but players have reported “wanderer” map pieces dropping from chests outside their zones too. So it seems there’s a small chance of getting a completely random map piece from any chest.

Aside from that, the only advice I can offer is to keep targetting Maguuma chests. The place I got mine from was Caledon Forest, where I targeted the chests in the 4 JP’s repeatedly until I got it.

You can also exit Lion’s Arch to the south into Bloodtide Coast. It also is part of Kryta and there’s usually at least 3 or 4 trees right outside the portal. EXTREMELY easy. XD

EDIT: If WvW Big Spender was up, you could probably get it done in 5 mins.

Definitely go for the Utility versions. They are the only Ascended items in the game right now which can take the Utility infusions such as the Gilded, MF or Karmic infusions. Unless you do really high level Fractals (and even if you do), you can get away with losing +5 AR for the benefit provided by the utility infusions.

Demand for +1 infusions still seems to be high. I have no problem selling mine for 10 or 11 silver each. However, this might be due to people buying them for Mawdrey, rather than a specific need for Fractals. Beyond +5, I’d say it’s purely the domain of collectors and exceedingly rich players who are looking for something to store their gold in (and that they can show off to others).

Back on the ghosts, another important ghost who doesn’t have the blue colour is Captain Weyandt, in Lion’s Arch.

However, all the Spirits of the Wild also have the blue tint. A ghostly dolyak in Harathi Hinterlands, spawned from a recently deceased elder dolyak, also has a blue tint. Maybe there is something to my theory that ghosts who died with valour or a “clean conscience” come back as blue, while evil or sinful spirits return as non-blue ones. (We do have Necromancer Bria who comes back as a blue ghost, but she is a Foefire ghost so this could be excepted.)

In my experience, the condi Engineers use two main strategies:

1. When facing melee opponents, they will keep on kiting you while throwing grenades in your direction. If you don’t have good gap closers + immobs/stuns or a ranged weapon, you’re basically hard-countered and there isn’t much you can do. I’d quit the point and come back only when you have backup.

2. When facing ranged opponents (or when fighting on point), they like using slick shoes and run around you so that you keep falling down when you try moving. Stability can briefly neutralise this, but if you’ve already used it, then you’re at a big disadvantage while they condi-bomb you. For ranged characters, the running around you forces you to move to keep them in your attack vector, which makes you fall down as above.

As such, if you’re ranged, the best thing to do is fight them at range so they can’t get close to you and pull that off. Obviously, 1500 Longbow rangers don’t have a hard time doing this (especially if they can get the drop on the Engi and pin them down for a Barrage+Rapid Fire), but watch out for the Engi’s rifle pull.

I also fought a condi Engi once with my condi Mesmer. He won, but it was a very close fight. Because condi Engi’s spam skills very frequently, he practically murdered himself with Confusion on, while I kept on using stealth to reposition and try to spike him with shatters (more for the Confusion burst than the actual damage).

“Every other profession is OP! Mine is OK.”

In theory, if I can manage to lockdown the Engi with my hammer warrior, I should be able to down him if he’s already burnt his stunbreakers. In reality though, I’ve never managed this.

I have managed to beat a condi Engineer on my Longbow ranger by basically staying far away and wounding him while he was trying to cap a point, and then using my Drakehound+Entangle to pin him down and kill him when he tried to leave the point and come after me.

I also beat one on my condi-minion hybrid Necro when the Engi couldn’t handle conditions AND the direct damage from minions. (Downed the Engi by knocking down with Flesh Golem, immobilising with Bone Fiend while she couldn’t dodge, and then blowing up my Bone Minions next to her while she couldn’t move.) However, I only won that fight thanks to my Death Shroud soaking up some of the initial damage while my minions wore her down. If she’d jumped me early in the match before I had a chance to build up life force, she’d probably have won that one.

I don’t trust those filthy headshotererers. XD

The Icebrood (Icebrood norns, at least) seem to retain enough of their intelligence and personality to be able to avoid killing the Sons of Svanir, possibly on orders from Jormag or his champions. In Dredgehaunt Cliffs, for example, there is an event where a Son of Svanir sympathiser runs to an Icebrood shaman, and the shaman outright asks him if he is ready to embrace the power of Jormag (i.e. become an Icebrood). The tone of the conversation suggests that the two have met before, and the shaman has decided that the time is right to make the conversion. (The sympathiser has cold feet (heh) at the last second, but the shaman doesn’t allow him to back out and tries to convert him forcibly, which the player can stop by killing the shaman.)

As to WHY Jormag doesn’t just corrupt all the Sons of Svanir at once, who knows? Maybe the Elder Dragon thinks it’s better to slowly corrupt the Norn via a “see? Corruption isn’t so bad. It’s your CHOICE to join Jormag and gain his power” approach. Or maybe Jormag enjoys the slow slide into evil by free-willed beings. It might even be a sign of “scruples” on the part of the Elder Dragon, a particular quirk in his choosiness about minions.

I pack Arcane Brilliance + Arcane Wave (both traited), Glyph of Storms and Radiation Field on my Ele. Glyph of Elementals is my elite.

For trash mobs, you can typically get away with throwing up Earth 2 on the mobs as you approach, then switching to Fire and dropping Fire 2+Arcane Wave on them just before Earth 2 detonates. Throw on Fire 3 and then just spam Fire 1 in melee while the Bleeding/Burning takes them down.

For tougher foes, or when facing multiple mobs, I start by throwing Earth 2 on mobs, letting it explode, then let the mobs run to me as I drop Sandstorm on myself. Follow it up with Earth 2 again, swap to Fire, drop Fire 2, then proceed as usual. If the mobs are still alive by the time Sandstorm wears off (happens often if they are Veterans or Elites), then throw down Radiation Field and start the Earth/Fire rotation again.

If you need healing at any time, swap to Water and drop Water 3, then blast it with Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave.

If the mobs look particularly dangerous, summon your Earth Elemental first for extra tanking.

If you don’t have an Asura, you can substitute Radiation Field with another useful utility like Armor of Earth or Cleansing Fire, or Lesser Glyph of Elementals for more tanking.

It might be a case of art direction error. I think I know where Konig is coming from. If you look at ghostly pirates, for example, they are pale, translucent versions of themselves, without any blue colour. The Halloween ghosts are similar, except with a misty green effect around them. I think that blue ghosts are meant to be ghosts specifically animated by the Foefire, but for whatever reason, some other ghosts are also using this colour when they shouldn’t be.

Alternatively, perhaps the colour of the ghosts indicates the “spiritual status” of the ghost. The spirits of those who died valiantly or nobly in battle return as blue. Spirits which are less savory (like pirates) do not. This might have links back to the lore from Prophecies where it was stated that ghosts who died valiantly in battle would go to the Hall of Heroes, which those who died after living shameful or cowardly lives would be trapped forever with their corpse.

Art – GW2 is one of the most visually stunning games I have ever played. The landscapes actually look like real landscapes, and not just terrain with a texture painted over. Extra credit goes to Josh Foreman who came up with the idea of including Jumping Puzzles in the maps, which further helps reinforce the idea that the terrain itself can be an adventure.

Wardrobe/Account Wallet/Account Wide Dyes – One of the best things ANet has done for this game. There are some lingering complaints about how outfits work and the inability to mix and match these, but on the whole I wouldn’t give up the Wardrobe for anything.

Economic Balance – Dynamic scaling is one of the most innovative things I’ve ever seen in an MMO, making it worthwhile for high level players to still visit low level zones. ANet’s also been careful to structure their rewards and gear in such a way that even at high levels, low tier mats and goods still have value. (And I alluded to this in the other thread when talking about Ascended gear.) My own minor gripes aside, GW2 has one of the best economies I’ve ever seen, and it’s working very well even years after release.

PvP Reward Tracks – A very neat and effective way of getting people to try out PvP. (It certainly got me playing.)

Super Adventure Box – One of the most awesome things that ANet has released, bar none. XD Can’t wait for it to be back!

Rethmar Stokestrike.1927:

Pandaren confirmed as the next playable race…
er…
I mean Skritt.

Would be the worst development move ever.

Correction. That would be one of the BEST development moves ever. The first thing I will do is create a Skritt Engineer and, upon zoning into the first zone, scream out “MORE COME, YES?”

In the Borderlands, you can also see a Rat and a Cat running around together around the northern side of North camp. If you kill one of the pair (you monster!) the other will just stop running and look very, very lost.

Yeah, the oil pots do a CRAZY amount of damage. It’s a shame that we can’t repair the gates, because trapping the Mordrem outside and pouring oil on them wrecks them something fierce.

Yeah, I do agree that it’s not in the spirit of “proper competition”, but it’s going to be hard to enforce. What about private guild arenas, for example? They paid the gold/tokens for it, so they can do whatever they want inside, whether it be training, 1v1 or even RPing. ANet already took steps to limit farming by putting in the 2 tier limit for Hotjoin. That’s probably the best compromise for all sides.

Thanks for the clarification, Hugh.

I wouldn’t mind the lack of white swords IF there was a way to drop Sentry Turrets from EotM in regular WvW.

I wouldn’t take that approach. That’s the same sort of mentality where players go “Hey, this is clearly an exploit, but I’ll keep doing it until ANet tells me to stop because it’s not SAID that this is an exploit.” In a worst case scenario, it can result in bans.

Safe zones are clearly meant to be just that; places where the enemy is not supposed to be. While they can’t actually harm the players themselves, they can harass them (emote spamming), troll them by killing enemy NPCs (kill off the siege merchants so they are forced to go to another map to buy siege, for example), and just spy in general.

I would immediately report any enemy player I see in my map’s safezone, and I encourage all players to do likewise.

Hmm, maybe I’ve been lucky, but gold sellers in Map chat in HotM have been few and far between. (They mostly spam whispers instead.) The general Map chat is… quite varied, but I’m pretty hard to offend and I actually find most of it amusing when I actually pay attention. (Most of the time I’m too busy looking at my Bank or the TP to bother reading what’s actually going on in Map.)

I never join the “speedrun/zerk/meta” groups, and I’ve never been kicked, so maybe these groups are the ones more prone to kicking since they have higher standards (and are willing to kick people who don’t meet those standards)?

Over the weekend I finally participated in a kick for the very first time. It was in a level 19 Fractals, and things went pretty smoothly for the first two Fractals. But we got Dredge for the third, and despite the reduced difficulty, we struggled a bit getting past the first console due to some confusion. Things came to a head when we got to the Legendary Ice Elemental and due to a number of factors, we just couldn’t keep the Elemental superheated. The Ranger and the Guardian got into a pretty heated argument, which I can normally ignore, but when the Ranger started throwing racial/sexual slurs around, I seconded the kick when it was initiated against him. There was no call for that, even if things WERE a mess. (To be fair to him though, the Guardian wasn’t completely blameless either.) We got a 2nd Thief joining after that, and we completed the rest of the run fairly smoothly.

I remember reading on the Wiki that there is a bug/restriction where if the NPC associated with the event (a named Lionguard) is dead when Taidha is killed, you are not able to get the achievement for beating Taidha. Normally this NPC is off to the side and is not in very much danger of dying, but maybe just keep an eye on her in the battle just in case. (She’s far off enough that she doesn’t get involved in the actual fight with Taidha, but she may get killed by Pirate enemies in the pre-event.)

The Norn are supposed to possess superhuman strength beyond what their greater size and mass would otherwise suggest. Of course, as Konig mentions, you won’t see any of this in-game due to balance reasons. In “reality” though, between two equally skilled Warriors, an Asura would have zero chance of defeating a Norn in combat unless the Asura had some kind of extra advantage such as a Power Suit to make up for the Norn’s much greater size and strength.

Yeah, this has happened to me too. It tells me that the nodes are actually still on the map, but are just flagged to be “hidden” so we can’t see them or mine them. But for whatever reason, sometimes lag or something else will cause them to be briefly visible.

Ehh, I wouldn’t like to restrict it specifically to human children. Because does that mean that children of non-human races get treated more harshly (“Sylvari are born essentially with all the knowledge of adults. Ergo, they must be tried as adults, even though the individual may only have been born 3 months ago.”) or leniently? (“But all Charr cubs learn how to fight and kill in the fahrar! Accidents happen!”)

You can now go to Heart of the Mists for your banking/merching needs. However, your Citadel is still the only place to go for crafting that puts you back where you were before. Hence me saying that having crafting stations be added to HotM as well being the ideal solution.

I also went with the Karmic infusion. Gold can be gotten in a variety of ways, but karma is one of those things that’s difficult to farm once you decide you need a lot of it. What’s more, thanks to the Karma Converter you can sometimes get some very good deals from it for your karma.

I dabble in just about everything in GW2, so I’m still working towards my own personal goals:

1. Finish Personal Story on my 5 mains (halted until I get more info on how ANet is planning to adjust the PS in the future)

2. Complete all the dungeons (all paths) on my 5 mains (currently up to CoF)

3. Acquire a full set of Ascended gear on my 5 mains, including armor/weapons/trinkets (80% complete)

4. Reach rank 80 in sPvP (currently 53)

5. Complete several of the expensive collections (such as Exotic Hunter, Treasure Hunter and Dungeoneer)

6. Acquire a full Radiant armor set (Very long term goal. Requires completion of lots of AP)

7. Do the Living Story, including acquiring all achievements

8. Fill out my home instance as much as possible. (This includes some new, very expensive long-term goals thanks to the new gathering nodes dropped from Black Lion chests.)

9. Collect some weapon sets that I find aesthetically pleasing (but excludes all Black Lion Weapon sets). Currently working on the Guild Weapon set.

Yeah, I was a bit surprised that the two hadn’t been merged yet, but I guess it’ll come with the Jan 13th release.

I did get spam-attacked over the weekend too. Whoever it was had no less than 4 separate spam accounts, but I blocked and reported them all. That stopped them cold.