Guild Wars 2

Palador.2170:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Or they could have been told that but never actually put it to the test themselves.

Are you suggesting that the leaders of the Shining Blade have told the members that if they’re being tortured, to just blurt out the deepest secrets of the Shining Blade? Knowing that instead of dying like they expect to, they’ll actually get the words out?

Yes. Because studies show that information extracted under torture is unreliable. The victims will say anything they think the torturer wants. When the blade members tell the truth, their captors will think they’re lying. Doesn’t that sound just like the kind of devious plan Anise would come up with?

I’m just kidding. I don’t think anet ever invisioned it to that depth. This whole deadly oath think just smacks of so much misinformation. Do the shining blade members actually say that Anise told them that would happen, or did they hear it from a friend of a friend? Did anyone ever come back after being tortured and reveal that they blabbed but didn’t die? Is there any evidence this thing has ever really been demonstrated?

There is another non-magical possibility – some kind of psychosomatic death. If blade members are so indoctrinated that they truly believe the oath will kill them, the belief itself might kill them if they start to blab.

^ And above and/or below the thing.

PyrateSilly.4710:

lawfan.7095:

If LS3 is the future for this game I’m probably gone. It takes someone with a 4 year degree in college to play this now.

No it does not.

My wife got her a 2 yr degree in 1986 and that’s all the of the ‘degrees’ that she has. Her job title before she resigned 4 months ago was “Commissioning Engineer for Automatically Guided Vehicles”. And her previous job is calling and texting trying to still have her work both without getting paid and also trying to get her to come back into a job, any job, including doing IT. She keeps getting phone calls from head hunters to work at various other companies doing that job. And all this is with just an a 2 yr degree from 1986. What has set her apart from all those with Bachelors and Masters degrees around her is her willingness to learn – software, electrical, mechanical – whatever is needed to do whatever is asked of her on a job.

Uhm…. o-kay. TMI. O_o

I think you may have taken that a little too literally. When someone says it takes a 4 yr college degree to do something, it’s an expression that suggests something requires an unreasonable level of intelligence to accomplish, in their opinion. The speaker might have equally suggested it takes “two college degrees” or a “PhD” or “a 12-th level intellect” – all of which are figurative expressions used to make a point, and do not require a concrete rebuttal in the form of a resume. Just saying.

But we got to bring back someone from the dead…. just to punch them in the face! Isn’t that the ultimate shade?

“Who disturbs my unending slumb—”
BIFF
“Ow! That was my nose! WTF dude?!?! Wait… you?!?”
“Yeah, me. And this time I’m going to kill you for good.”
“Wait..what? I was already dead.”
“But now you’ll be deader!”
“Dude… that’s really messed up. You need hel—”
POW
“Ow! My thorax!!!!”

Hello,

Out of curiosity, I’d like to ask a question to do with my PVE viper chrono regarding perplexity vs nightmare runes. They both boost condition damage, but perplexity boosts confusion duration only while nightmare boosts the duration of all conditions, albeit to a lesser degree.

This got me thinking: given that mobs in the open world only attack once a second or so, is it better to focus on confusion (which, admittedly can be quite powerful as I discovered against the ancient jotun in BFF who almost killed himself with confusion on my perplexity build below) or is it better to spread the duration across the 11 conditions the builds below are capable of on staff? The elites of both runes are also quite attractive.
It’s probably a question best answered by experimentation, and I’m going to do just that. But any thoughts/opinions/experiences you’d be willing to share would be appreciated to.

[Disclaimer: it’s a given anything works in open world.]

My build is below, in two forms: the first with perplexity runes, the second with nightmare.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQNArfWnsnBNqhlpBOoBEgilXjCNAypnreYT2l1cFGuaC-Txh0wAQV+BTfwlTBAgnAAh9HAq+jZlgBAOA2tu1d3AjP+4jP+4t7u7u7u7GA-e

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQNArfWnsnBNqhlpBOoBEgilXjycFGuaqeYT2lFNAypnD-TxxXABDr8Dg9HU8UAMq+gsVCO3TAYW1fCAcAsbdr7uBGf8xHf8xb3d3d3d3NA-e

Doni.3402:

If the oath doesn’t kill magically Anise and the other Exemplars could just have decided the Commander is trusworthy enough and tell him what he wants to know.

Or, they think people outside the club might be angry about their plan and want to scare you into keeping it quiet.

Mana Garmr.7582:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

On replaying this, I’m not sure if the oath actually kills magically, unless I missed something. I get the impression that if you break it, the Shining Blade might come after you, that’s all. I also get the impression that when Kerida says “she would die” after revealing secrets, she means it personally. I think she means that if people knew her secret (i.e. that she's Livia), her life would be in danger from various sources.

If you talk to the other Blade members after the oath one of them mentions that an unintended but handy secondary use for it is that, if a member is captured and being tortured for information, they can purposefully try to break the oath as a means of suicide. So it’s definitely intended as magical insta-death.

Or they could have been told that but never actually put it to the test themselves.

Look, this kind of death-oath propaganda is exactly what a secret society would want you to believe. I don’t think there’s a death oath and, more importantly, I don’t think the oath is about the aspect or the plan for Lazarus at all.

Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.2946:

Have to say that…choice by Anise struck me as a little odd. Was it because she wanted to keep an extra close eye on us or something else? Anise’s earlier comment suggests that she’s had her eye on us for a long time, possibly from even before the start of the personal story.

Much longer than you think. She’s actually been watching you from before you ever heard about Guild Wars, probably from your birth. She knew you were destined to play the game one day and become the Commander who defeats Zhaitan and Mordremoth and saves Tyria!

Don’t you know it’s traditional for villains to have overly-convoluted plans in order to give the good guys a chance to beat them? If villains were efficient it would all be over in a second. Balthazar would steal the power of the bloodstone then – when we face him in the arena in BF, he could just nuke the whole arena with us and Cadaceus from one of the floating platforms above. BAM All witnesses gone. Problem solved.

Maybe if we pray to Balthazar..

It’s really difficult to understand what you’re trying to get across because you’ve presented a wall of text. You need to insert some line breaks in there, and either number or bullet point your suggestions so it’s clearer what they are. I’m curious about your suggestions but it’s very difficult to read the way it’s structured.

On replaying this, I’m not sure if the oath actually kills magically, unless I missed something. I get the impression that if you break it, the Shining Blade might come after you, that’s all. I also get the impression that when Kerida says “she would die” after revealing secrets, she means it personally. I think she means that if people knew her secret (i.e. that she's Livia), her life would be in danger from various sources.

I’ve nothing for or against this idea, as long as anet introduce it as an option so people can toggle between above/below. It might seem oxymoronical (is that a word?) to point this out to anet, but they have demonstrated that they’ll sometime implement something across the board in a knee-jerk fashion – so it doesn’t hurt to give them a hint.

Djinn.9245:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I had no problem with my characters taking the oath. If we’re serious about saving Tyria you have to do whatever it takes to get the resources and information you need, and if that means lying to some secret society or the Orders or the PACT so be it.
I’m working to save the planet, not just one region. They can play their political games with their secret handshakes and oaths and clubhouses.
Meanwhile, I’m out there getting the job done.

You apparently didn’t understand the idea of “magic oath that will kill you if you tell a Kryta government (not Tyria) secret”. Which means that the government of Kryta could be planning to take over the planet and you couldn’t tell anyone. Stupid plot.

Pfffft. Magical unbreakable killer oath. Pleeeeze. I don’t believe it for a second. It’s just misinformation meant to scare the oath-taker into keeping silent. They have no actual power to stop you spilling the beans.

I support this, especially considering where the expansion is going.

I had no problem with my characters taking the oath. If we’re serious about saving Tyria you have to do whatever it takes to get the resources and information you need, and if that means lying to some secret society or the Orders or the PACT so be it.
I’m working to save the planet, not just one region. They can play their political games with their secret handshakes and oaths and clubhouses.
Meanwhile, I’m out there getting the job done.

I’ll add my agreement to this. A solid jp with no laggy gimmicks to worry about like Draconis Mons, or trial and error guesswork like Chalice. Well done!

I noticed that too the other day. The usual small colocals were gone too. Anybody got any goss what happened?

I didn’t have any particular problems with this area. It’s good combat at ground level for those who want the challenge, and if you don’t you can hit the air and skip it all, or fly straight to the heart vendor as others have noted.

If anything, this area is a little dull. None of the relinqueries are especially impressive as shrines. No wonder the gods left.

Finished it now..

1. Abbaddon’s Ascent is fun and all the better for not requiring any special mechanic, like Draconis Mons requires the oak vine which suffers from lag. Most of Abbaddon’s is fairly intuitive, and the glide down from the top is incredible. It feels like one of the classics jps from Core.

2. I thought it would be annoying… but I didn’t mind unlocking the waypoints. This is one mechanic I wouldn’t mind trying again in another map.

3. Got the new mastery but didn’t find much use for it. It needs to find a way to be useful all over Tyria.

4. I liked that past episodes found another use with the legendary trinket, with a new collection to complete for each past map.

5. The map itself was easy enough to navigate with some suitably challenging vistas and mastery points and mapping it once was decent fun, but it’s not really interesting enough for a repeat visit. There’s plenty of gloomy Orr already and this Orr, which was supposed to be cleansed, didn’t look any different. It would have been nice to get some inkling of Orr in its hey-day, even if only via a vision.

6. I enjoyed the interaction with Kerida/Livia. More than that - I liked her as a character, despite not having played GW1. Her world-weary way of speaking, and strange unfamiliarity with modern tech, made sense once you find out her story. The ending, where you leave her in that chamber, contemplating what to do with her life now that the mission that's been driving her all those centuries is over, almost moved me to tears. She seemed so tired and fragile. I'd love to see her again but I think that would spoil the gravitas of her ending here. It's better this way.

In summary, the season was disjoint and confusing, but overall I liked this episode.

I wasn’t expecting to like this… but I enjoyed unlocking the shrines. It wasn’t hard to collect the pearls and the waypoints are not only free after that, but they’re account bound! Having said that, it was only four waypoints. I did wonder if I would feel the same if it were a larger number.

Just played the story, up to the oath taking. My thoughts so far:

Thank you for the merging of the Sentient eaters, the Portal Tome and the material storage additions. All wonderful improvements. Thank you also for the new core mastery points. I didn’t need them but it always feels good to get more points and they were places in places that previously had no particular use so well done there.

On the story:

Turtle Dragon.9241:

The fact that you made something as casual as collecting Cats for our Home Instance into something hardcore is plain disgusting. You are forcing everyone who loves Cats to do Level100 Challenge Mode just to get that Cat. Most casual players cant even get it or complete their Cat collection anymore.

For those who dont know, the newest Cat requires to eat an item that only drops from the Fractal 100 CM Chest.

Oh… just as well I gave up on the cats after the SAB bumblebee one. Say, any chance the item is tradeable? I’m guessing not.

All else aside, I really liked the dialog about “my magic ghost friends” or whatever in Draconis Mons. That bit was funny.

He’ll come back in the expansion with even more powers and even less explanation.

Ayrilana.1396:

Theme is fine when you look at it from a high level rather than get stuck on minor specifics.

How high is high enough? Will an airship do?

I think the game is trying to lower our self-esteem so we feel like we can’t do better and won’t ever leave it. :/

It sounds almost like they reused an existing node id for the new node… but that would be just stupid. So I’m hoping it’s not that. :/

I’m …starting to feel a little less cautiously hopeful. I haven’t had time to play it yet, but is it true there’s a tome now to hold all the portal scrolls?

Edit: Wait… is it true Lazarus is back? And Balthazar is gone? Seriously? And only a few messages ago I was saying the below. It’s making my head spin.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Lazarus is back. No, wait, he’s not. Primodius is active! Oh, no he’s not. Jormag is active too.. or is he? Kas is gone. Kas is back. Kas is gone again. Braham’s back.. oh, he’s gone again. At least Rytlock’s still here.. oh, he’s gone too.

^ Oh, I dearly hope there’s a catharsis.

Arden.7480:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I remember LS2 mostly fondly. There were some boring political bits, but overall there was a clear direction and ramp-up to facing M.

LS3…. wasn’t quite as clear. Lazarus is back. No, wait, he’s not. Primodius is active! Oh, no he’s not. Jormag is active too.. or is he? Kas is gone. Kas is back. Kas is gone again. Braham’s back.. oh, he’s gone again. At least Rytlock’s still here.. oh, he’s gone too.

It’s episode 6 and I still have no idea where this is going. I hope this episode ties up some loose ends instead of creating new ones.

Personally my favorite thing in LS3 was coming back to human matters- Caudecus, White Mantle, Jennah, Anise, Mesmer Collective. That was really exciting.

Let me make the summary and I am looking forward to your opinions about this summary.

I’m not sure what opinion you’re expecting from your summary. I know what things happened during the season; I played through it. I’m just saying that the season itself doesn’t have a clear, coherent direction. Maybe this episode will bring it together, but it’s got a hard task ahead of it. We’ll know soon.

I remember LS2 mostly fondly. There were some boring political bits, but overall there was a clear direction and ramp-up to facing M.

LS3…. wasn’t quite as clear. Lazarus is back. No, wait, he’s not. Primodius is active! Oh, no he’s not. Jormag is active too.. or is he? Kas is gone. Kas is back. Kas is gone again. Braham’s back.. oh, he’s gone again. At least Rytlock’s still here.. oh, he’s gone too.

It’s episode 6 and I still have no idea where this is going. I hope this episode ties up some loose ends instead of creating new ones.

I’m ….cautiously hopeful. I want it to be good but I’m anticipating corny.

Rasgalinj.2763:

I merely ask that they drop the whole multi-leveled maps and just flat out make them much larger in square mileage.

^ Plains of Flatness?

Genesis.5169:

I’ve never wiped at dragon stand ever, or any meta event.
Fractals of the mist is easy too its made difficult thru AR if your over the AR suggestion you can face roll all of it easily hell 1-49 can be done with 0 AR with exception to bosses who have the AR check at the entrance.
Never failed any world boss ever since launch, not one ever…

Same here. I also get 300 every time I go bowling. It’s too easy.

Still, a crossbow that shoots sword would be cool. Especially laser swords. With chainsaws on them.

Is this something gw2efficiency can display? Just a thought. I can’t check right now.

To those that judge the hammer falsely, I say..

“And the scales didst fall away from his eyes, and didst he cry out that he hath seen the light. And took he a hammer, and struck he about him, ’gainst his false friends, calling out to The Builder to save him, and was he saved. "

He was living in the Wizard’s Fief Centre for Celestial Wellness – i.e. the floating castle outside Wizard’s Fief. They have an eel treatment that can keep a god young and wrinkle-free for centuries.

Then again, Sylvari are living creatures with their own will that were enslaved by M. The risen are reanimated dead. Who knows how much of their own mind (or brain) they still have. They seem to have their own batteries at least, as they don’t all drop dead (pun intended) without Z. But they might just be automatons, running through a preset script. We’ll never know because dead men tell no tales.

Rauderi.8706:

The Lake Doric one wasn’t so bad. I actually liked it. Kinda. I appreciated that it does what no other JP does; it have multiple paths to success. More of that, please, ANet!

Seconded. I liked that too.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen this video so I might have been using the term “force of nature” wrong myself, but the term force of nature when referring to an antagonist in a video game doesn’t refer to anything like tornados or earthquakes.

Here is the extracredit video about force of nature villians.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TyyE8c27-9Y

True. There is that. I think I’m somehow apply a different standard of force to the EDs than to other villains. I don’t know why that is. Dragon discrimination perhaps.

No argument on the power discrepancy and the need for restraint. It’s the classic Superman problem, or Neo from Matrix Revolutions. When a character has so much power they can solve any problem, they need to be restrained somehow to allow for story. The challenge is in how to make the restraint believable, to explain why the eagles don’t just fly to mordor. And it’s not just Tolkien and anet that have trouble explaining the actions of their uber-powerful characters. There’s another book about a super being in the sky who does all kinds of confusing things. I’ve been told not to think too deeply about it. Just accept the dude does mysterious things. That’s not satisfying to me but that’s just me.

On another point, I don’t agree that sitting and doing little is behaving like a force of nature, but I take responsibility for that. I started talking about sentient mountains, meaning to describe the scale of the dragons, not imply that mountains were forces of nature. To be clear, when I think of forces of nature I mean tornadoes, earthquakes and such, which clearly don’t sit still and do nothing. Gentle gusts of wind are also forces of nature and they don’t do much but bring a pleasant relief on a hot day, so doing little is possible for a force of nature. It just isn’t a defining feature.

EDIT: The.. upshot of that long-winded spiel is that I don’t think the EDs were handled well as forces of nature. I don’t think it works. I prefer to think of them as super-powerful elder beings who somehow evolved in the magical ecosystem and now form an important part of it.

I feel a haiku coming on..

Pumped On Fantasy
Posters Offer Freely
Predictions Of Futurity

^ sooo…. Pages of Fail ?

The crux of it comes down to the word ‘impersonal’. If they’re playing games with us, they’re not impersonal. They may still be forces of (Tyrian) nature but they’re more than the forces of nature we understand.

And that’s the problem with calling them forces of nature to begin with. It starts the player off with a misleading impression, because we’re used to the term used for things that are i) non-sentient, ii) non-living and therefore unkillable, iii) impersonal.
The EDs don’t meet those criteria so we’re in a state of mental gymnastics trying to reconcile opposing concepts.

Speaking of acting rationally, the EDs certainly don’t have to act in a way that seems rational to us… they just have to be internally consistent. They have to act in a way that’s consistent with what they’re supposed to be. Given, as I said above, that it’s confusing as to what they’re supposed to be, it’s not surprising that it’s confusing why they do the things they do. Forces of nature work in mysterious ways and all that.

Imho the dragons failed at being impersonal forces of nature. :/ They’re too small for a start. From what I read before I started, I was expecting the equivalent of a sentient mountain. Something that would put the bosses from Shadow of Collossus to shame. Then you see Zhaity and he’s… well, he’s kinda big, I guess.

And they were very much personal, especially M who references characters by name. Can you imagine a force of nature doing that? Could a sentient mountain range look down and notice the ants on its flanks? If it could, would it bother to learn their names and try to psych them out? No, it would crush them with an avalanche and think nothing of it. Only a thinking, scheming lizard with a big appetite would bother to play games with the ants.

Lastly, the forces of nature sham was done the moment you discover you can kill them. That’s right. You kill…. a force of nature. I can’t wait to kill Gravity in the expac. That kitten is always getting me down.

Ider.1276:

Ayrilana.1396:

I had already addressed the point of it potentially attracting new players in a previous post. If someone currently has no interest in this game, how is adding Tengu, going to attract players? It’s like if WoW added crocodiles as a playable race. People that haven’t played it yet are unlikely to suddenly start playing.

Well, you’re wrong. I got into WoW cause “Wow, you can play as a huge werewolf! Awesome!” And don’t start on pandas. Pandas are not cool. Werewolves are, as well as big samurai-birds. If Mists of Pandaria featured giant ninja were-grizzly bears as a playable race the sales would have just skyrocketed.
By the way, crocodiles are fine too. But dinosaurs would fit better. People love them, people want them.

Especially dinosaurs with lasers! OoO

I like this… but it sounds eerily similar to something I read a year ago….

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

So, why not give us the option of hiring npc workers to farm our home instance and deposit the goods directly into our materials/bank? We would pay these workers some silver each day for their trouble, which would not only be a money sink but also give it some verisimilitude and let us concentrate on more interesting things.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Home-instance-hired-labour/first#post5897819

Now, about that finder’s fee…..

Prisoners of Fate

Pride of the Fallen, if that hasn’t been suggested already.