Guild Wars 2

Not P2W exactly, but I would agree that there is some power creep happening with HoT. Nearly all of the elite specializations give extra functionality, and in areas like PvP, that little extra functionality could make the difference between victory and defeat. Things like Mesmers getting one extra Shatter when F1 – F4 are all on cooldown, Daredevils having 3 dodges instead of 2. This inadvertently boosts the power of traits or runes that tie into those mechanics, and can make certain builds far more effective if you have HoT when compared to a free/vanilla player.

I’m going to complete all of the BWE achievements (probably splitting one day between each outpost to account for the inevitable bugs), and then take advantage of the PvP bonus to farm reward tracks in Stronghold while testing out the new elite specs. (REALLY looking forward to seeing how Berserker plays.)

I +1’d what Vayne said. :P You think you guys in the US and EU have it tough?? We actually miss out on one whole day of the BWE because it falls on a Monday, when everybody goes back to work/school. So I don’t want to hear anything about “slaps in the face”; we OCX/SEA folks have been getting the short end of the stick for YEARS.

Nobody knows for sure right now, but since normal characters can’t get into Verdant Brink, only beta characters will be able to complete them. So the real question is whether the AP and Mastery points earned via these achievements will carry back to your main account, or disappear once the BWE’s end.

You’ll be able to test that easily by just completing a single event at either of the two outposts on a beta character, then switching to a normal character and seeing if the achievement is unlocked on your main account. If it is, odds are likely it will stay.

My personal feeling is that it will. It’s a way to reward the early pre-purchasers of HoT with a teeny bit extra AP and Mastery points to give them a jumpstart when HoT is out. (We don’t know yet how many Mastery points HoT will have, but I suspect that there will be more than enough to max out all the different Masteries.)

Still down for me.

The easiest way to tell if they carry over is to complete one event at either outpost, then log out and back on your main account and see if the achievement unlocked there as well. If it didn’t, then they’re obviously only for helping beta characters get a few more Mastery points for playing around.

As an AP hunter myself, I’ll be doing that first thing on the weekend to see if it’s worthwhile completing them.

To be fair, today’s blog post kinda does reinforce the “you will still need full zerk, high DPS at SOME point in raids” perception.

^ Agreed. The timers make the two currently challenging world bosses really about a DPS race. I’d like it if the raids took a page from GW1 and made it so that if people die during the fight, they can’t WP and must be ressed manually. This makes it more important both to have players who are dedicated to support roles, as well as having tankier types in the thick of the melee who can survive the big hits that would insta-down squishy zerk types, and can res them up before the boss kills them.

The raid only fails if the boss kills everyone, not because time ran out. (This also gives greater value to things like Revive Orbs that go largely unused except in the toughest dungeons, and only against very specific bosses.)

Not much to add here, but as I mostly play a bunker type, usually I just do my best to try and outlast the Mesmer long enough for my teammates to arrive and wreck the Mesmer or force him to disengage.

Heh, I may end up getting it five times… Unlike weapons, I actually do swap between my armors a fair bit. The sheer cost of making multiple Ascended armor sets has dissuaded me from that, but Legendary armor… That might actually be worth it!

I admit, I felt a bit like a curmudgeonly old guy when I first read about the F2P announcement (“WHAT?! We’re gonna get botters and gold sellers and stupid kids who don’t know their maces from their faces and charge right into that ettin cave and then, guess who has to go into after them to save them??”), buuuut…

Seeing this thread has reminded me of the days when it was all new. The time I took my first steps out of that inn in Shaemoor, marvelling at the very first tree I chopped, wondering if it was safe for me to go down to the river with all those drakes (it wasn’t…), seeing everybody just get slaughtered by that giant troll near the cow farm (who then went on and started killing all the cows). It was a magical time. And maybe for the new people coming now, it will be too.

So welcome newbies! I hope you enjoy your stay in Tyria.

… No, I will not mail you gold. STOP BEGGING!

They definitely still drop. A guildie got the AC recipe drop just yesterday. That said, I do agree the RNG for them is kinda ridiculous considering the trinkets are only Exotics. Maybe when HoT is out we’ll have the option to buy them with tokens or karma.

I only eat pies. XD #Pie4Lyfe

I did Aetherpath waaaaay back during the time when it first came out. My PUG took almost 4 hours to complete it, but back then I still wasn’t using Ascended gear (and I think I wasn’t using full Exotics). I’d probably be much better at it now.

Mourningcry.9428:

Technically, the only piece of Ascended gear obtainable only through laurels are the amulets.

Granted, it may be a tedious undetaking, but everything else can be gotten through other means.

Hmmm… Might this be a possible way for introducing r500 Jeweler? As an alternate way to craft Ascended trinkets that don’t require Laurels? (Of course, any paying player would be daft not to use Laurels + Badges, but work with me here!)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Torsailr.8456:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Perhaps, all those new Beta achievements that award Mastery Points will be the answer.

My concern was less about the availability of mastery points once HoT releases than with the ability to test higher levels of a mastery without enough mastery points to get them.

Well, as those are Beta achievements, they probably will be available in the BWEs, and not after launch. =)

I’m actually curious about those. They reward AP and Mastery points, but will those points remain even after the BWE is over, or when HoT is released?

Aside from the key thing, the Encryptions basically are going to be yet another RNG-fest. It’s the equivalent of getting Giant Wintersday Gifts every time you complete a fractal. Sure, it COULD be a Dwayna recipe, but 99% of the time, you know it’s going to be yet another 3c tonic.

I shudder at the thought that some of the really rare rewards might be as rare as Mini Gwynfyrdd.

Actually, I WOULD like it MF recipes applied to the old skins too. I happen to have 2 Fractal Shortbow skins (yeah, I was THAT unlucky), and I’d love it if I could trade it for another skin that I want. Or maybe they could be traded back into Pristine Fractal Relics. This also solves the future problem of people getting skin drops that they already have unlocked on their way towards finishing the collection.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Here’s the thing: Battle Cat is right…and Brother Grimm is right, too.

• There are tons and tons of people who almost never use the TP (and, alas, these include folks who complain about having trouble earning coin). For this group, Battle Cat’s advice is timely: you are better off using the TP in the first place.
• For those people who regularly use the TP, Brother Grimm’s advice is apt: being more patient and customizing your buy|sell offers will generate 25-100% more coin than not, most of the time.
• And those who regularly set their own prices should consider offering below the highest buy offers and pricing above the lowest sell offers: nearly everything fluctuates in price, especially high-volume items such as mats (and especially ectos and the like), so you can generally get the same items for 10-30% less (or sell them for 10-30% more) by not accept the pricing of the moment.

tl;dr different people need different advice, depending on their current habits.

^ Basically this. I agree that EVERYBODY should be selling on the TP rather than to vendors (except when the market has already bottomed out and there’s no point adding to a massive goods stockpile that will never get sold. A good example are most Minor sigils), but whether or not it’s the best idea to sell immediately or wait for a buyer is subjective.

For example, say you’re the type of gamer who rarely sticks with a game for a long period of time. You happen to be lucky enough to get an expensive, but slow moving item. Do you sell it immediately for the 200g? Or do you list it at 400g and risk it not selling for weeks? Maybe months? If you sell it now, you could use that 200g immediately to have more fun in GW2 by buying some pretty armors and weapons that you’ve always had your eye on, before your attention gets snatched away by some new game in 3 months. Waiting might mean you’re now broke (from the high listing fee) and unable to do very much in-game, after which your attention gets snatched away by said new game. In this case, I’d argue it’s better to cash in now and enjoy the time you have before your interest in GW2 wanes.

It’s possible, but I’m skeptical. As others have said, it is most likely just a placeholder date that could be changed (usually pushed back) at any time. The same thing happened to me with Witcher 3 and EBGames Australia.

That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the true release date was close to the one stated by those websites. I always pegged HoT for a Sep release at the VERY EARLIEST, but it was more likely to be towards the end of the year.

I REALLY dislike the name, but I’ve made my peace with it. (It helps that I don’t have a Guardian character though. :P)

Personally I would have called it the “Archon”, and sold it as a “judge who dispenses righteous retribution from on high with a bow” archetype.

Excluding the exploits, I thought it was lots of fun for the weekend, but I agree that a week is just too long. Nobody bothers defending or upgrading because within 10 mins, a group of 5 – 10 golems just rolls in and stomps the Lord into the ground. Golem vs Golem fights also aren’t as fun as one might have thought; there’s little in the way of strategy or tactics. It just comes down to “who has more golems?”

That said, I made quite a bit of money on the first day converting my stockpile of Badges to Golem blueprints and upgrading them to Omegas for sale.

Like DutchRiders, I do a mixture of both. I use the Reward Tracks to unlock the weapons and the expensive armor pieces (chest and leggings), then use the tokens obtained from both PvP and PvE to buy the cheaper armor pieces + offhand weapons. It’s really sped up my progress on the Dungeoneer collection.

Note that some Dungeon skins can also be obtained via the Personal Story. (Namely, the Caudecus Medium armor skins, plus the Arah helm skin.)

Well, that’s disappointing. :/ Ah well, since it’s currently unobtainable through legal means, I guess I’ll just try and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Thank you both for your replies!

Does anyone know how to unlock the Zhaitan’s Last Stand POI in the Arah Story Mode (now part of Victory or Death)? It’s located at the very end of the dungeon where the Glory of Tyria confronts Zhaitan as he clings to the rocky tower and you spam 1 to kill him. (Talk about anticlimatic, but anyway…)

Trouble is, the Glory of Tyria doesn’t get close enough to the POI for you to unlock it, and it seems that you can’t jump off the Glory anymore (it auto-teleports you back up to the airship once you die), so you can’t use a Res Orb to swim around the bottom. (Word is on Reddit that the POI is located above the sea anyway, so that wouldn’t help.)

I would hate for this to be the ONE POI in the entire game that I haven’t unlocked. XD

Thanks. I didn’t see that line in the article.

As to why I’m keeping a stash of them, it’s just in case ANet ever introduces a new use for them, like what they did with the Mists Stone.

I’m a bit concerned about the upcoming addition of Pristine Fractal Relics to the Account Wallet. Considering that they’re used for only two things (acquiring Ascended Rings and the Mists Stone), does that mean that once they go into the Wallet, we are unable to convert them to normal Fractal Relics? (Since items in the Wallet can no longer be manually removed.) Because if so, then it means we should convert all of them to normal relics now in order not to be stuck with a completely useless currency.

Alternatively, does ANet intend to add new uses for the Pristine Relics? Or will all the items purchased by Pristine Relics be converted to use normal Relics instead?

#SABApril2015. Keep the faith, my brothers and sisters! We BELIEEEEEEVE!

While I won’t be affected by the gold trading limits, I do think that this restriction might not be as effective as ANet would like. Gold sellers will probably just start trading in Ectos or another form of commodity rather than gold. It worked back in GW1; no reason it couldn’t work here again. When you’re dealing with large volumes of currency, players do tend to be more blase about losing out on a few 10’s of gold here and there.

All the same, I don’t think you’re going to have any success, Enaretos. As you yourself said, you’re in the very tiny minority of GW2 players who will be impacted by this decision. It just isn’t worthwhile for ANet to create an exception for so small a group of affected players, any more than they created exceptions for people who didn’t like the account wallet or the shared dyes. Plus, you’re clearly not getting a lot of sympathy from the common player. (Maybe if you gave out donations of 100 gold to everybody here, they’d feel differently. XD)

Crap. So my Ranger and Ele will miss out on their Greatest Fear arcs since I accidentally completed Forging the Pact on them and thus got taken straight to the Battle of Fort Trinity. >.< That’s a great disappointment.

On the bright side, between my Mesmer, Warrior and Necro, they have all 3 greatest fears between them, so I can at least play the story steps through them.

Anyway, looking forward to some news about it in a few hours.

Three bugs that I’ve noticed so far:

1. Player voice calls are being broadcast over a wide area (mapwide?) even if you’re not in the immediate vicinity of the player. Some players are abusing this by setting shouts on autocast while in town. It’s kind of amusing, but it gets tedious pretty fast.

2. Some items are not stacking properly. I did a Fractals run today and I can’t stack the 2 new Pristine Relics I’ve obtained with my old stack.

3. Trying to report a bug gives a whole bunch of [[random numbers]] categories. Makes it pretty hard to tell what they’re supposed to be.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. I was quite certain that I’d seen both Doom and Battle proc on a single swap before. Thanks for the info!

So I was speaking with some guildies earlier and they tell me that on swap sigils only trigger once per weapon. For example, if you have both Sigil of Battle and Sigil of Renewal on a Staff, only the first will trigger when you swap weapons/attunements.

Is this actually true? I’d like to get some confirmation before I change out my Ele’s sigils, and I figured the people here would probably know better than anyone about this.

I have to agree that this is one of the most annoying achievements I’ve ever done. There are so many things that need to go right for it to trigger:

1. You need to have the skill, first of all. That means waiting and hoping you’ll be lucky enough to get the powerup spawn and no other player grabs it. You can’t just sit around and wait at the spawn either because the enemy team will come by and mob you, or your team gets angry at you not contributing.

2. Once you have the skill, you need to find an enemy player who is sitting relatively still. Dragon Kick has a pretty short range and it’s guaranteed to fail if you try using it on a moving enemy unless they’re running towards you.

3. You then need to time the skill so it hits the enemy while they’re in the middle of a casting animation. It’s not that hard if your opponent is just sitting still spamming 1 at you, but the initial rush of newbies is over and most of your enemies now are veterans who are also farming achievements. It’s extremely difficult to land the kick on someone who is circling around you.

3.5. This is made much worse if you have bad lag like I do, coming from Australia. You need to try and compensate for your ping, which means firing the skill off early and thus increasing the risk that your enemy is too far away or they’re not at the proper stage of their attack animation.

4. If you fail/miss, you now have a 14 second wait until you can use Dragon Kick again, during which time it’s almost certain you’ll die because you’ve been fiddling around trying to ensure it gets an interrupt instead of fighting to your full potential. Once you die, you lose the skill, and you have to start all over again.

I’ve played Dragon Ball for maybe about 5 or 6 hours in total now, and I only have 20 interrupts. The thought of getting 80 more makes me cringe. This was NOT one of ANet’s better achievements.

^ This. While there is definitely room with which skilled players can dominate in 1v1’s or even 1v2, they cannot stand against 3 or 4 enemy players mobbing them down. You’ll notice in the video that the OP was almost always with at least 1 or 2 of his teammates. The one time he died around the 2:50 mark was because all of his team was either dead or spread out, rendering him vulnerable to an attack by 2 enemies. If your team is smart enough to stick together at all times and constantly focus down called targets, you will almost certainly win by a landslide.

That said, the OP is definitely one of the better players I’ve seen, and I /salute him for his score. It’s extremely impressive.

This is fantastic news, Bobby! Finally, I’ll be able to proceed with my characters that have been sitting, frozen, on their Personal Story ever since the change went live.

I do have one question though. What will happen to those characters who already started the Greatest Fear plotline, but have yet to finish the arc? For example, I have one character who started Greatest Fear, but stopped on the old PS progression after starting the mission to free slaves from the Krait. Another two characters completed Forging the Pact, but I stopped when I realised that it had jumped them straight to Battle of Fort Trinity. Will these two characters be able to backtrack and do the Greatest Fear storyline? Or are they still stuck?

Thanks for the clarification, Gaile.

I dunno about anyone else, but I use it on my Charr Warrior. It suits his T3 Cultural and Vigil Shield perfectly. (Another neat personal thing is that it’s the same sword skin I used to use back in GW1, so my RP backstory is that this is the same sword used by my GW1 Warrior, given to my Charr as a gift by my Human Mesmer.)

It would be nice if they allowed you to speed up Mastery XP gain, but I suspect that they will simply continue to give you 1 skill point after you reach level 80.

Dinosaur bacon?

Oooh, I hadn’t considered this! Guess I should start stockpiling a second stack of Tomes just in case.

I’m not sure I like the new “slow pan” to the next view target though. :P It’s definitely more cinematic, but I’d rather hop viewpoints and see what’s going on immediately rather than waiting a few seconds.

Even though I’m not much of a PvP’er in WvW, I do agree that PPK was an excellent addition and should be brought back permanently. It leveled the playing field a bit between servers that favoured PPT and those that liked to fight.

Well, according to ANet’s latest blog post, Masteries are in PvE only, so I’m guessing Obsidian Sanctum is getting no changes.

Not really a problem, IMO. You can still get skill point scrolls from Champ bags. I have WAY more skill points than I’ll ever need.

I’m curious as to whether, when they say “new depths”, do they mean new Fractals are coming (because that would be BIG), or just that we can finally go higher than Fractal level 50.

Either way, it’s been long overdue for Fractals to get some loving. Here’s hoping we finally get a system to let us choose the exact Fractal skin we want too!

Yeah, there are some oddities here and there in the game. Like the Fire Elemental world boss mysteriously not immune to Burning. :P

Dante.1763:

Zaxares.5419:

I have to disagree with you over video games not being a good medium for teaching/talking about weighty real life issues. That’s like claiming that books like the Diary of Anne Frank or movies like Schindler’s List are not good ways to teach people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Of course they won’t provide the same experience as going to a Holocaust museum, but they can be powerful and moving experiences in their own right.

It all comes down to whether or not the audience is willing to listen and grasp the lessons that are being imparted. Sometimes they will get it on their own, sometimes they will need guidance or instruction from others. And sometimes they will just not be receptive at all, or even take the wrong lesson away from it altogether.

And im going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that, Its not the same. I have never ever once felt the emotion i have felt in a video game, in ANY video game. than i did from watching Schindler List, or any of the other Holocaust movies ive watched. Can video games? Yes they can, i suppose if done right, im an emotional person for various reasons, but i have never once felt anything like i did when i was watching Schindler’s list in a video game, Movies, literature, and museums yes, but never a video game. Although, this would get me outraged to no end if it was implemented… and then again, i typically dont play story driven games, i split my time between RTS games, wot and GW2…if you do know of any games that may make me change my mind, do PM them to me though

But as you said, this is a MMORPG, you are going to get ALL kinds of players, those that wont feel anything, those that will affect positively and those that affect negatively, and the trolls who will take this as chance to abuse those players who play sylvari, and thats not a good thing, period.

It’s not that surprising. Most video games don’t tend to delve into deep psychological or philosophical issues; they usually function more as escapism and empowerment fantasies. This common perception of video games is also why most people don’t think of them as a media channel for serious commentary, because the general idea is that games are still “childish” and “for fun”.

I can think of three games off the top of my head that really affected me emotionally.

Planescape: Torment – This is an old game from the 1990’s, but it’s probably the best of the three on my list. It centers around a single question, “What can change the nature of a man?” It delves into many themes including responsibility, regret and redemption. You can pick it up from GoG.com for fairly cheap, I believe.

Spec Ops: The Line – I can’t really go into details about this game without spoiling it, but let’s just say that this is one of those games where if you complete it once, then replay it again knowing what you know, EVERYTHING in the game changes when you see it in a different light.

Katawa Shoujo – This is a free indie game in the “visual novel” style developed by a group that sprang from 4chan. Don’t let that discourage you though; it’s very well written, and offers a very moving look into the lives and issues grappled with on a daily basis by disabled people. Note that this game does contain sexual content, so that may be a factor in your decision on whether or not to play it. (Could be encouraging or discouraging. )

Dante.1763:

Zaxares.5419:

I can understand where you’re coming from, tekfan. (And personally speaking, I would be appalled at any Sylvari-oriented bigotry or “ethnic cleansing” that occurs in HoT.) However, this may also be an excellent way for older generations to teach newer ones the horrors that can come when racial, religious or political hatreds are allowed to go too far. I have faith that ANet will not be portraying such behaviour or attitudes in a positive light, and the story will have our characters trying to prevent such inequities (or worse, massacres) from taking place.

Through video games? The only way that works is to actually go and be in that situation or someplace you can experience that. My brother is 18 now, but when he was in 8th grade the school was doing fund raises for a trip to go to Washington DC. One of the places he went to was the Holocaust museum not exactly sure which one, but by the end of it, every single bully in the school was crying, and they went around telling the kids who they bullied they where sorry when that got back. THAT is the way to teach kids, not through a video game…..

(Yes i read your post and saw you areagainst this, im just pointing out that a video game is going to be a horrible way to do this, as these are the kids who play many many games about Killing human beings of all colors, types, shapes.)

I have to disagree with you over video games not being a good medium for teaching/talking about weighty real life issues. That’s like claiming that books like the Diary of Anne Frank or movies like Schindler’s List are not good ways to teach people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Of course they won’t provide the same experience as going to a Holocaust museum, but they can be powerful and moving experiences in their own right.

It all comes down to whether or not the audience is willing to listen and grasp the lessons that are being imparted. Sometimes they will get it on their own, sometimes they will need guidance or instruction from others. And sometimes they will just not be receptive at all, or even take the wrong lesson away from it altogether.

I can understand where you’re coming from, tekfan. (And personally speaking, I would be appalled at any Sylvari-oriented bigotry or “ethnic cleansing” that occurs in HoT.) However, this may also be an excellent way for older generations to teach newer ones the horrors that can come when racial, religious or political hatreds are allowed to go too far. I have faith that ANet will not be portraying such behaviour or attitudes in a positive light, and the story will have our characters trying to prevent such inequities (or worse, massacres) from taking place.