Guild Wars 2

Crabtacular has also become a lot easier to achieve since the Friday patch. Previously you needed to have the entire enemy team downed at once (with you staying alive) for the achievement to trigger. Now you just need to get 3 – 5 enemy kills while carrying the Crab; it doesn’t need to be all at once.

I prefer to earn my titles on my own merit, but I commend you on the charitable and friendly attitude you’ve brought to the table. Plank Wars and Fishing Duels do sound rather fun if you’re not after any of the titles or the loot.

I can confirm that the speed boosting signets do not work as a Ranger and a Necromancer. (I have them on my bar by default. It wasn’t intentional.) I have noticed that the Guardian’s Aegis still works, but only for the first attack on them. It doesn’t seem to renew after that.

Good tips. Here’s a couple more I can add from my own experience:

1. There is a split-second of immunity when you are picking up the Crab. This can be used to your advantage by being the first to pick up the Crab in the middle of a bunch of rolling Karka. You will be immune to the roll, but anybody else near you gets flattened. This gives you an opportunity to run away without using your precious Dash at once. You will need precise timing to pull this off, however.

2. If you are immobilised with an Egg while carrying the Crab, use your Dash if the other players are about to swarm you. Although you can’t move while immobilised, you are still immune to attacks while the Dash is in effect. This lets everybody waste their Grabs and Punches on you, and then you can dodge away as soon as the immobilise wears off.

3. The Southsun Punch and Conch items are great to have while carrying the Crab. The Punch restores all your health and endurance when used (useful when you’re under heavy attack by Hatchlings), while the Conch can Fear other players to give you breathing room if your Dash and endurance is still on cooldown. The Conch can also be used to Fear other players away from the Crab so you can pick it up first.

4. If you are chasing a Crab carrier, do not run straight after him. Instead, coordinate with the other players to encircle him, or wait on the other side of the Arena since he will probably use Dash to escape. Throw a Rock at him to daze him to ensure he can’t Dash to safety before going for the Grab.

If you notice he’s low on health, you can also just wait until the Hatchlings take him down and then grab the Crab from him. Throw a Rock at him to make sure he can’t Dash away from the Hatchlings. This will force him to burn his dodges to escape, which means he also can’t dodge you when you close in.

5. As a Crab carrier, try running straight at Karka. You can dodge through their rolls, but they will probably flatten anybody who’s chasing you. Even if they are smart enough to dodge through the Karka as well, the Karka will likely obscure their view and make it harder for them to target you with Rocks/Planks/Fishing Rods.

Chopps.5047:

If you are good you use the crab toss skill to throw it at a chasing opponent, knocking them down. Then you steal it back and run away!

This. It’s a good tactic for dealing with opponents if it’s just 1v1 or 1v2. Not as useful when there’s a big rush of opponents though.

I’ll admit, if ANet releases Kasmeer’s swimwear as new underwater options for female characters in the gem store, I’d buy it. It would be the first town clothes I would actually buy. XD

Have all of my thumbs-up, Plagiarised! (A rather fitting name, considering this thread. XD)

I quite like Ellen too. Not sure if she’s higher than Rox, but definitely higher than Braham.

Job-o-Tron is hilarious. I wonder if I could convince it to come work as my personal assistant…

To answer the OP, no, I do not see it as cheating. As others have pointed out, you simply need to complete 25 achievements, and there’s way more than that available. The fact that ANet also made the Sample Collection title completable with just 10/11 samples collected tells me they were careful not to force players to have to complete the JP sample if they didn’t want to (or couldn’t).

As someone who likes completing JP’s the normal way, I take satisfaction in the knowledge that I have completed it myself. That satisfaction is its own reward, so I have no issues with somebody who needs help to get to the end. I completed Skipping Stones normally on 3 of my characters. My last two characters I got portals up there (an Asura and a Charr), but I know I could have done them normally too if I wanted to. It was just a matter of saving time.

There should be a title for completing all the Jumping Puzzles, in my opinion, but it’s not something I urgently want or need. (Besides, my “Distinction in Applied Jumping” title is already neat. )

None of the stuff in the Crates interests me particularly, so I haven’t been going out of my way to farm them. I’ve just been exploring Southsun, killing things that get in my way. Got a bunch of Potent Blood, but not a lot of Powerful Blood. Got a fair number of Large/Armored Scales too. I had one Crate drop for me, but it contained just Passion Flowers/Fruits/Karka Shells.

Some people have reported incredible drops from the Instigator chests, but that’s probably just them being lucky (and remembering that MF does not affect chest drops). The best I’ve gotten out of them is some Rares. Ironically, I’ve gotten more Exotics from playing Crab Toss than farming. XD

My female Human Noble’s reaction seeing Faren:

“You cad! I join the Vigil to go save the world from the Dragons, and I come back to find you’re already shacked up with some blond hussy?! I thought we had something special!” ((runs off crying))

Or she would have, if Faren had reacted to her as if she weren’t some generic Hero.

Oh, right. I forgot that the leaderboards were out now. (Seriously, I forgot they even existed.) Well, that’s the price you have to pay for keeping at the top of the leaderboard, isn’t it? There has to be some way for the competitors to pull ahead, otherwise you’d just have 10 or so people with lockstep scores sharing the #1 spot forever.

Personally, I support having the Sclerite Shell (and the Fervid Censer) being relatively easy for players to obtain. Who cares if everybody else on the server is using the same item? I get items because I like the way MY characters look with it on. I couldn’t care less what other players think of my characters’ appearance. If you’re wearing a full Arah set while shooting rainbow unicorns and like it, good for you! If you’re a male Norn wearing starter armor transmuted to level 80 and dyed pink and wielding a Princess Wand, good for you! Equip your character according to your own preferences, but don’t deny other people the chance to dress up their characters the way they want to.

Incidentally, not many people on Tarnished Coast seem to be wearing their Censer or Sclerite Shell. In LA and in the Instigator zergs on Southsun, maybe only a handful of people are using the item. I expect that people are using the items only if the appearance suits their overall theme, not merely to show it off. And that’s the way it should be.

I love Crab Toss, and I can easily get the achievement in 1 – 3 games. Aside from the people who are die-hard completionists, however, I don’t understand why people are complaining about it. It’s one of 11 (previously 10) achievements you can complete to get your Daily, and I, for one, appreciate having the extra option available instead of having to do Dungeons/WvW.

I like the term “permanent farm pit”. XD

I’m with Pope Urban on this. I suspect that the vent wall inside Ember Passage is the route to the SoS dungeon (or a lower level of Southsun) where we’ll battle Canach and Subdirector NULL. Canach’s obviously been aggravating the wildlife of Southsun for some reason. My personal theory is that he’s extremely disgruntled that the Consortium basically let him be the fall guy after the Lost Shores fiasco and he wants to see their resort fail at all costs.

I’m intrigued to hear of this secret cave in LA holding Consortium gear though. Where can I find this cave?

There’s two possible bugs here, so I’ll address them separately.

1. Putting the Tears in the right pattern does not cause the torches to light.

This may be an issue with detection. What I’ve done to get around this bug is put Tears onto ALL the stones, then remove the Tears one at a time to get back to the correct pattern. Note that it may take a couple seconds for the game to detect the right pattern and light the torch.

I do not know if the patterns must be done in a particular order. I’ve always done the left cheek first (from your perspective), followed by the right. It’s possible that the torches will not light up if you do them in the reverse order.

2. The patterns are not showing up on the statue’s face.

The patterns on the face tend to be identical each time. (There may be a small subset of workable patterns, but it’s been the same patterns each time on Tarnished Coast.) So what you can do is look up a solution for the puzzle on Youtube and follow the patterns shown on the face there. I managed to complete this mini dungeon twice even when it was bugged by this method.

Yeah, the modelers had to build in some leeway space to account for differently sized characters, as well armors of different bulk. Otherwise, you’d have situations where the weapon couldn’t be seen because it was clipping into the thicker armor the character was wearing, which I’m sure you’ll agree is worse than having the weapon hover a short distance away from the character (which isn’t really visible from behind).

Kojiden.8405:

I would like for there to be a title for throwing crabs.

“Master of Crabs”?

The Repair Canisters repair all of your armor in one shot though. The Armor Repair Kits only repair one damaged/broken piece of armor at a time. The number of uses for the Kit may need to be scaled down to avoid it overshadowing the Repair Canisters, I guess.

For some reason, the message at the end saying your shoes have been damaged made me laugh. XD

Founders, yes. Given its nature, I think the Consortium is probably stable enough to operate without needing financial support from investors.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Ummm… No, no one is going to get arrested for looting a guild bank in GW2 that they were given access to. If that starts happening then it’s time for me to grab my bug out bag and hit the woods because the world would have certainly gone to hell at that point.

Actually the laws you are talking about are more related to cyber stalking and cyber bullying and are more likely to target things like FB griefing you mentioned.

But yes I agree that it’s not a good idea to act like a total kitten online and in game and I agree that the person that did the looting was not playing very nice.

There was also a case where one guy’s roommate stole the super-expensive sword he’d farmed for months to get and sold it for a sum of money. The roommate was sentenced to a few years jail for his efforts. I know that’s not the same situation as what the thieves did in the OP’s story, but it is an indication of what might be in store for cyber-laws in the future.

Supported!

/fifteenchars

@Falafal: It did come across as being somewhat aggressive, but that’s OK. No offense was taken. I know that it’s hard to have the same kind of empathy for plants as we do for animals or other humans given how different they are from us, but the attitude you have towards them is still commendable. We should always treat the things we use to enrich our lives with respect, and you seem to do that.

Just wondering though. The plants that are cut down to soil level during wintering, are those plants native to such cold areas? Or is that a technique that’s done to ensure a plant that normally can’t tolerate the cold will survive the winter?

There’s a Sylvari Priory member at the Priory outpost in Snowden Drifts who says she’s not affected by the cold at all, so perhaps it’s individual preferences as to whether they find the sensation uncomfortable.

Someone raised this idea in another thread, and I thought it intriguing enough to warrant a repost here.

Essentially, the idea was to allow Tailors/Leatherworkers/Armorsmiths to craft Armor Repair Kits, using:

- 25 Cloth Bolts
- 25 Leather Squares
- 25 Metal Ingots

Different Armor Repair Kits for each Tier exists, and each comes with 25 uses. They are used to repair damaged/broken armor instead of going to a Repair vendor. (Each broken armor piece costs 2 uses as opposed to 1 use for a damaged piece.) This method allows players to repair their armor on the fly (and possibly more cheaply too), and at the same time it should also help to consume all those massive stacks of unwanted basic crafting materials on the TP.

I was originally thinking that each of the three Armor-crafting disciplines has its own unique Repair Kit, but that might be needless complexity.

Thoughts?

Geotherma spends some crazy amounts of money ($) buying gems though, so I appreciate the research he does on our behalf.

Oh yeah, certainly. It’s something I’d only do with a guildie-run for laughs. You bring up a good point though; is it any less immersion-breaking seeing someone shoot unicorns or confetti (Quip) at Zhaitan?

Keeping your armor current is not essential, but it IS extremely helpful. The difference between using gear at or near your level and using gear more than 30 levels below is remarkable. It can mean the difference between taking 3-4 hits from a Champion and getting one-shotted by that same Champion.

At the same time, until you reach level 80 there’s no real need to get the best armor/weapons. Fine/Masterwork gear will suit you just fine, and you can usually buy those for 1 copper over their vendor price off the TP. I’m currently running around in a mixture of level 79 Greens/Blues on all my level 80’s because:

1. I’m not yet at a stage where I’m ready to start farming dungeons/crafting Exotics for them.

2. Transmuting level 80 gear requires Transmutation Crystals, which are much rarer (and more pricey) than Transmutation Stones.

If you do a lot of dungeon running, definitely Gold. It will add up rather quickly over time. Otherwise, I’d go with Karma or Gold depending on your preferences. MF is too nebulous a stat and it’s still linked to the spectre of RNG. You could have a permanent +200% MF and still get nothing for weeks on end.

alcopaul makes a very good point. In this day and age of online persona proliferation, it’s usually extremely easy for someone to track down who you really are via Facebook, Twitter or other social media. From there, they can then make your life hell.

What’s more, countries like South Korea have already passed laws governing online behaviour, making it quite possible to be charged and arrested for things you do online. It’s a safe bet that other countries will soon follow suit.

In short, don’t be a Bad Kitten online, because it could very well return to bite you in the rear one day.

YAY! That’s fantastic news, dulfy. It’s been over a month since the last weapon category gallery, and I was actually thinking of dropping you a message to ask if you were planning on adding the new weapons to the existing lists and whether you’d stopped making these.

CharrGirl.7896:

Who would seriously like to see a character with boxing gloves and rabbit ears fighting dragons?

I have to admit, I’d probably giggle my rear off if I could fight Zhaitan with boxing gloves and hear the Brawl Champion jingle going off every 2 seconds. XD

Hmm… I hope this means that Azurite will be added to Southsun Cove as a source for them after F&F is over. And also that Passionflora and Karka Shells become somewhat easier to obtain.

The theory that the personal nemesis is interested in the karka themselves is one I can get behind. It makes sense for the reasons Konig mentioned above, and let’s not forget that the karka are also incredibly dangerous and powerful. If they could be tamed or controlled, they would make excellent troops for combating the Elder Dragons or for subjugating the other races. This kind of thinking would match typical Asura strategy too, if it does turn out that the personal nemesis is one of the Asura backers of the Consortium.

Southsun has been badly in need of new content since it was released. I’m looking forward to visiting it again and seeing what’s been changed.

Unbreakable Sickles will be coming very soon. Stock up on gems!

Ascalon has already healed remarkably well over the last 250 years. I’d wager that in another couple of hundred years, it’ll be as if the Searing had never happened (aside from the ruins of the Great Wall and the odd Searing crystal still scattered here and there).

Yep. That settles it. Rox is DEFINITELY my favourite of the two.

I’d need to see the final Jellyfish skin before deciding, but I’m certainly not averse to having the Rainbow Jellyfish get a unique appearance. I have no preference between the different Jellyfish skills, so if it turns out I don’t like the new appearance, I’ll just switch to the Blue Jellyfish.

Also, while we’ve got you, Jon… Are you guys aware that the River Drake pet looks like a Rock Drake for some bizarre reason? And that the portrait for the Marsh Drake pet looks like a Scaled Drake?

Allowing players to host their own servers opens the door to cheating and hacks, so it’ll never happen.

Hosting servers across the world is also more complicated than just buying a server and sticking it in a country. You’ll also need to hire staff to maintain that server, which may mean you need to hire someone in that specific country where you haven’t an official presence. Is it worth it to pay an extra $20k-$30k a year for one person’s salary just to maintain one server in Oceania? And you probably at least two people, in case one person is sick or quits suddenly. And then there’s the data side of things. I don’t know how ANet have their player databases stored, but considering the fact that they couldn’t even get cross-region guesting working between the US and Europe, adding additional server regions would just be tripling or quadrupling the amount of maintenance and complexity.

Don’t get me wrong; as someone from Australia, I’d love to see more servers across the world, but as someone who works in the IT industry I know lots of reasons why it just wouldn’t be feasible or economically sensible to do so.

Mithril Ore might have dropped in price since April 30 because of the Molten Facility dungeon. There are 5 Mithril Ores (relatively) easily available at the start of the dungeon, and there appear to be lots of players running the dungeon every day. All of those excess Mithril probably get dumped on the TP.

Falafal.9135:

This must be one of the most ridiculous threads I’ve ever read on the internets. I like plants, very much in fact and I know quite a lot about them having been into doing things in the garden for a few years now.. so when I read: “plants should be treated humanely”?! lol complete nonsense. I suspect most people commenting similar things to that have never planted or even watered a plant in their life.

Right, listen: have you ever heard of “propagation”? Plants can reproduce by “mutilation”. You cut a bit of the root off a living healthy plant and dah dah!, you get another one and the “mutilated” plant continues living. You can do the same with the shoots, branches or twigs in other plants. In fact the way to be “cruel” to a plant is to leave it as it is and never “mutilate” (prune) it. Dead-heading also, ever heard of it?

“Plants also do not appreciate being eaten”. Oh yeah? Berries are sweet and tempting to birds just so they ARE eaten and thus sown and propagated with the bird droppings. Not to mention leaves which are full of nutrients such as tea leaves, for instance.

Plants feel pain? Yeah because every time I prune my bay tree it shreeks really loudly. Come on…seriously.

I’m no gardener, but yes, I’ve heard of propagation by root cuttings, grafts and the like. I know it’s also used by horticulturalists and agriculturalists primarily as a means of mass producing a plant with desired traits. Is it useful to us? Certainly. Was it intended by the plant when it evolved such a trait? Probably not. It likely originated as a survival mechanism where if a plant was badly damaged, but at least one portion of it survived, it was able to regenerate from that and live on.

I’m not entirely sure what dead-heading is, but I’m guessing it’s something like pruning or trimming dead portions of a plant to encourage healthier growth. In that light, it could be seen as medical treatment, so I have no objection to it any more than I would object to a doctor insisting I cut off a gangrenous limb before it kills me.

Fruits (and to some extent flowers and nectar) are an entirely different matter when it comes to plants. I certainly don’t deny that plants evolved them specifically to encourage animals to eat them. What I meant was that plants will also evolve defenses against unwanted grazing. That’s why cacti have spines, and why some plants secrete poisonous or irritating sap. In fact, chili peppers originally evolved their capsaicin content specifically to discourage mammals from eating them. The plants wanted BIRDS to eat them, because birds lack the receptors to detect spicyness and thus suffer no ill effect from eating chilis. Birds could also carry the chili seeds much farther and more widely than most animals could, and thus were the preferred method of transport for seeds over mammals. (It’s therefore ironic that humans now cultivate chilis specifically because they enjoy the piquancy of the fruits, something which was evolved originally to drive them off.)

Again, we’re operating on the assumption that just because plants don’t display any outward sign of pain or distress when we prune or harvest them, that they don’t feel pain. Indeed, plants may not experience pain the same way we do, but I’ll wager that they CAN sense when they are being damaged, and it’s not an outcome they desire. Plants want to survive just as much as animals and people do.

1. Tengu. I love their Asian-influenced culture and the fact that they are an “honorable” race. They almost certainly will be the next playable race, and I’ve already got plans for a Tengu Thief.

2. Skritt. Sadly I doubt we’ll ever see the Skritt as a playable race due to their unique communal intelligence, but I can always dream about a Skritt Engineer who just runs around hurling junk at big nasties. XD

3. Krait/Naga. I’ve always been a big fan of serpents and serpentoids, and to my knowledge no RPG has ever allowed you to play a serpentoid before. (Reptilian humanoids, yes, but no serpents.) Models already exist in the Krait, and the Krait Witch shows that male and female serpentoids look visually distinct enough from each other for them to be viable player characters.

It seems to depend upon the type of chest (Splendid, Magnificent, Glorious etc.) as well as the level of the zone you do the JP in. JP’s in low level zones like Goemm’s Lab or Morgan’s Leap will never give anything higher than blues or greens appropriate for their zone. (In some cases, this can actually work in your favour, because the level cap means that you have increased chances of getting, say, Silver Doubloons from a chest, and you won’t ever get a Gold Doubloon or higher.)

I’ve gotten Rares from the chests in the 3 JP’s in Lion’s Arch, but no Exotics so far.

Goloith.6349:

-Remove the repair vendors and have a player driven economy through homogeneous craftable repair kits available for all trades except cooking. Quality/charges would be based on the tier of materials used to craft it.

Now THIS is an interesting idea… So what you’re suggesting to increase demand for unwanted basic crafting materials is allow players to craft “Armor Repair Kits” that use, say, 25 Cloth/Leather/Metal + 25 of another basic crafting material that isn’t the first, to get a Kit with limited uses (15? 25?) that can be used to repair Damaged/Broken armor? I could really get behind this idea.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

3) We know why the Consortium went to Southsun Cove, and how they “stirred up trouble” (100% unintentionally, might I add), and it holds nothing to do with the Elder Dragons whatsoever.

At face value, yeah, the Consortium may be nothing more than opportunistic rogues seeking to make their holiday resort into a success. I just have the feeling that someone high up in the Consortium is using the corporation as a front for their own agenda. The low-level staff may even genuinely believe in their stated goals; all this shadowy figure would need is a few dedicated minions who know the truth and can carry out the real plans behind the scenes. (Was Canach one of these minions? Hard to say. We don’t learn enough from conversations with him to really know for sure.)

The only Forge recipe I know of is the Molten Berserker tonic, and that must be learned from a recipe sheet.

There are 3 discoverable cooking recipes introduced with F&F, but I imagine you know about them already. They’re used as intermediate ingredients for some of the new recipes learned from the sheets dropped by the F&F chest.

ANet won’t take any action as it is the responsibility of the guild to set permissions on what their members can and cannot do in regards of the guild bank. However, I agree that what your friends did was extremely scummy and worthy of breaking a friendship over. I do not want to be friends with people who think it’s fair game to steal someone’s car on the street just because the owner happened to leave it unlocked.

Don’t worry about informing the guild about what your friend did though. As others have mentioned, they can see who removed items from the guild bank, so they’ll know who was responsible. What action they take from there is up to them. Hopefully this also serves as a lesson to them that new players should NEVER be granted access to the guild bank. Heck, even long-term members shouldn’t be given access; in my guild, only the guild leader and officers are authorised to make withdrawals from the bank. If a member wants something from the bank, they need to contact one of the former and plead their case.

Yeah, “Descent into Madness” is my benchmark for what constitutes a “casual-friendly” dungeon. That dungeon was short and easy enough that you could literally grab any 4 strangers off the street and have a very good chance of completing it. The Molten Facility is more on par with the difficulty of the standard dungeons (although still easier, from what my guildies tell me).

Like Danikat above, I’m largely a solo player. I enjoy being able to play on my own time and my own terms, and not be dictated to in regards to “you must bring this build/stand in this spot/attack ONLY my target”. That said, I have a feeling that many people here who are vehemently against dungeons and formal group play have this position because of bad experiences with PUGs.

PUGs are a real mixed bag. Sometimes you’ll get good people, who are friendly, polite, and are able to laugh it off when mistakes happen and everybody gets wiped. Other times you’ll get annoying kittens who are stuck up, arrogant, demand that everybody do things their way, and scream insults at people who won’t or aren’t quick enough to keep up. You never know what you’re going to get, and for people who don’t have a lot of time to game, I can understand why they’d prefer to cut off the risk of being grouped up with these people completely.

It would have been nice if Story-mode dungeons were designed so that one could solo them if one so wanted (enemies can scale up as more people join in), with Explorable-mode dungeons left as the more difficult option. I don’t find the MF dungeon at all bad (keeping in mind that this was my first “real” dungeon), but I have no objections to Story-mode dungeons being soloable in the future.