Guild Wars 2

Thanks to a helpful soul over at Reddit there is now a least of “easy” JPs to do the monthly on.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1bjk07/puzzle_jumper_monthly_achievement/

Meaning that the periscope monthly will be the least done monthly in the history of the game so far.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

I’ve found the periscope knockback annoying but not egregiously so. I think they’re supposed to be slightly annoying and so far their placement hasn’t interfered with anything I was trying to do.

Of course my opinion might change if I find one placed around something I do want to do lol

Well there is one near a hill top vista in Wayfarers, that one can border on sadism.

Heh, one thing that mortar is actually useful for is cracking sonic periscopes. It deploys quickly, provide stability while operated, and the barrage seems to pack enough punch to level a periscope in a single shot.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stability

Not exactly a promising list if you’re not a guardian or warrior…

The engineer potion option is especially nasty, as it has only a 1/2 chance of granting stability…

Ugh, those snakes. Seems the projectiles in their spread has a hit box twice the size of the actual models used. Again and again i think i have sidestepped a projectile only to have it send me flying. So when you have 5 of them spamming spreads of them on every attack it becomes a nightmare.

Even more if a event of some kind happens to tick off nearby or something else makes the usual mobs more aggressive.

ANet seems to be on a knockdown binge between this and the sonic periscopes…

Heh, backpack mortar. While it is active you can either move about as normal but have no attacks, or deploy legs (kinda like the sylvari taking root) and be able to pop off rounds from a tube on your back.

Dunno why it slipped my mind before, but Zhaitan was strong enough to not only animate the remains but pull the spirit back into it and bend it too his will. So the mindscrew could simply be a side effect of the spirits having been accomplished mesmers in their lifetime.

Dunno, Zhaitan showed very little interest in over recruitment of the living and instead reanimates their remains.

Jormag however seems to have this as a theme as seen with the Sons.

Primordius makes his own creatures from fire and magma.

And what we have seen of kralkatorrik is a virtually instant conversion of living beings into crystalline recreations of themselves.

Bubbles and “Jung” we know little about so far, tho if speculations are accurate it may well be that the latter will in essence grow his forces similarly to what the Pale Tree do with Sylvari.

Oranisagu.3706:

KngGilgamesh.3481:

Audio Logs? what are those?

you get those when you smash those periscope things in wayfarer foothills and diessa plateau..

I just delivered 10 of them yesterday, because I thought I wouldn’t need them for anything..

They can be found in more areas than that. I have smashed a couple out in Iron Marches, and i think they are also found in Snowden Drifts. Would not surprise me if they also show up in Fireheart Rise, Dredgehaunt Cliffs and Frostgorge Sound.

A major issue, beyond their general annoying nature, is that you can only get one log from each of them each day…

Seriously annoying in PVE. I drop a turret down, expecting it to fire at the mob in front of me and it starts shooting at a nearby wall or similiar because behind it happens to be another mob that the turret AI deems to be closer than the one i was planning to attack.

End result is that i either need to take out the other mob first, likely requiring me to take a path that will aggro my original target in the process, or reposition the turret. The latter being highly aggravating on some of the more high powered turrets because of their near minute long cooldowns that only starts counting when the turret is destroyed or picked up.

How kitten hard is it to make the AI actually check LOS to a potential target before starting to pop off rounds?!

Or better yet, make it prioritize whatever i am attacking as long that target is in range and the turret is not under attack? That way it will only attack when i attack and so not aggro every last piece of fauna in range!

Likely they are just reusing the normal dungeon code, and it is hardcoded to recommend 5 players. Honestly i wish the rest of the PVE dungeons scaled like this ATB does.

Best i can tell they can make these things because they have scripting tools that allow idle designers to mock up things rapidly.

I want to like rifles, but once you step out of melee half the skills become useless. So in the end i rock pistol and shield, because at least i do more than hit one and wait for the mob to drop.

Actually used it today to finish a event out in the Iron Marches. Specifically the one where 3 flame shamans are summoning something nasty. Kinda helped that none of the shamans bothered to start attacking me while i was spamming everything i got at them.

But yea, the mortar (and the rest of the turret and other deployed objects) suffer from the high mobility inherent in the combat mechanics.

Abominog.2874:

way to go guys – who changed the despawn time on Baubles – up the timer a bit so I can collect them all without dieing

This! Seriously, between these mobs and the sonic periscopes ANet is on a rapid fire knockback binge lately. And no amount of dodging, blocking or running in circles will keep you on your feet for long!

Max Lexandre.6279:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Max Lexandre.6279:

As the title says I’m wondering about that.

If this mini-game replaces the normal general content updates we saw last months.

Thanks.

There will be another release at the end of April on top of this bonus living world release today for Super Adventure Box. Date, features, and content TBD (spoiler: of course we have a Flame & Frost release!)

TBD = ?. But that’s nice, since it would make sense update the Monthly at it was before, mid-month, it’s strange to say March update at the end of March :B

MY CRYSTAL BALL SAYS: Arenas Going to be Lauched!

But it works the same way, nice work

To Be Decided, most likely.

Sadly it is a must if one do not want to deal with the dungeon demographic…

cat-a-tonic…

grumble grumble, 15 letters, grumble…

If this is the case, than ANet has a paradox on their hands. The game mechanics foster the caffeinated youth demographic yet the tone and style targets the older gamers?

Hrmf, either the shockwave is instant or dodging on the sound is already too late (i have yet to notice any tells). Or it could be that these turrets highlight the, imo, issue that dodges have a windup just like skills. Meaning that you basically need to dodge a split second before you actually need to dodge to make sure you are actually evading when you need to be evading, if that makes any sense what so ever!

Ahy, my bad. I had not looked at the monthlies since they rolled over.

Wiser with Age.3714:

digiowl.9620:

Honestly i feel it has become overly important. Btw, that thing shoots a knockback cone at least 1200 units out. And doing it so fast that unless you have swiftness up you need to dodge two times before you get close to it, only to get knocked back once the third blast happens before your endurance is back unless you happen to also have vigor going.

Never mind that they spawn in the weirdest of places, like on the hillside sporting a vista on top. Meaning that you need to get past it to get to the vista. This is on par with the sonic knockback dredge they parked on the unsecured walkway right next to a vista high above a major drege dig site.

Amen to that. If the Monthly achievement didn’t include these things as part of the monthly list, I’d permanently avoid them.

Actually i think that is a mistake. What is required are reports from a whisper agent, distributed in various places around Diessa and Wayfarers in much the same fashion as the refugee items. The audio logs from the periscopes are just a karma source (100 a log, iirc) with no affect on the achievements.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

digiowl.9620:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Turgon.8625:

How are you dealing with them once you get close? I found them much harder to dodge at melee range.

As an experiment, I did one on my warrior. I mostly walked in a lazy circle around it and dodge rolled as soon as it finished drawing a bead on me.

So in essence it is like any other mob, pain in a behind to deal with unless you zerker strafe it to death…

Nice work ANet, do anyone on the team not main a sig zerker?!

. . . you do realize that was the intent, right? That you not just stand and wail on things but actually have to dodge?

My ranger, I drop “Rampage as One” and it dies before it runs out. My guardian, I drop “Hallowed Ground” and maybe it dies in time. My warrior lacks Stability right now so instead I just club it to death and sometimes bring my Shield Stance out.

And as I said, I’ve successfully taken them down at range or up close by waiting for them to draw a bead and then dodging the blast.

Funny how many solutions right now seems to involve elite skills, when these things are popping up in areas meant for characters that are working towards their third utility slot…

And i have no problem dodging things like the ogres, but those telegraph their major attacks strongly. This thing spams a long range knockdown as its basic attack from the word go. Walk into range (never mind trying to judge the max range, as it seems the attack propagates more than 1200 units out) and boom.

I was not aware that this game required the reflexes of a energy drink guzzling squirrel for basic open world fights.

Soulstar.7812:

APRIL FOOLS ENGINEERS

No skins for you

again.

The kit curse i guess…

Scourge.4317:

lol the video they made for it is pure awesome. I did not expect that. Brings back memories.

The ending tho, ugh…

matjazmuhic.1649:

I’m not big fan of jumping puzles but it’s kinda ok. On the other hand, I would rather see all this effort put into improving/enchancing/adding stuff to PvP.

The jumping is largely optional if you have a chat with the friendly cloud.

1. do you circle strafe during fights?

2. do you play with a programmable gaming mouse?

Dustfinger.9510:

It may just be a case of the type of technology. Player races don’t seem to have much advancement in electronics.

There is not much need for it, because of magic. charr seems to be the furthest ahead in non-magical tech, and they focus mostly on heavy mechanical machinery in the form of steam and internal combustion, while the asura has basically replaced electrical and electronic systems with crystal magitech.

Asura gates have to be paired. Each one in LA points to a twin in the relevant city and so on. The waypoints are a different story, and as best i can tell there are no explanation for them in game outside of the starting area scouts pointing out their practical uses. Hell, one of the opening asura stories are all about non-gate teleporting magitech. It is short range and barely working.

I dunno why, but every time that darn guide, or its author, gets mentioned, my bloodpressure spikes…

Yea, there is really something lacking in the longer range department of the engineer kit. We seem to have much more to go on in the melee range (two kits, a turret, mines). Now if the mine was knockdown rather than knockback, and the toolbelt being thrown with a tighter cluster, we would have something of an alternative non-kit to grenades right there that we could mix in with other ranged attacks without having to kit swap constantly.

Never mind that outside of SPVP the spike is the big meta winner right now, and so constant kit swapping (or the equivalent weapon/attunement swapping) to spike the most damage and conditions you can is a virtual requirement. I sometimes want to call it the alpha strike (mechwarrior) mentality. Unload everything you got at the enemy from the word go, and hope you blow him up before you blow yourself up.

Ezeriel.9574:

I think it has more to do with saving on bandwidth and lag than anything.

Likely this. AOE limits and condition stack limits do not greatly affect SPVP and so are tuned to allow maximum enjoyment there while maintaining bandwidth and server traffic. ANet really didn’t foresee WVW to be the big hit it was, with zergs of 100s of players running around the maps. They expected most to spread out across the PVE maps or do SPVP matches, with the occasional dip into WVW for the variety. Also, siege engines…

Phineas Poe.3018:

The Flamethrower however delivers relatively good, consistent damage that doesn’t come with a cooldown.

Flamethrower, consistent damage? Sorry, but we must be playing different games. Sometimes as simple as a strafe can make ol’ flamie miss multiple channels in a row.

ANet needs to be careful about the rewards tho, or they need to introduce two tiers of WVW. Already the “elites” are making must have claims regarding acended gear outside of fractals…

Vayne.8563:

Veldan.4637:

Vayne.8563:

This survey could have been a lot better. Things like what do you prefer…hearts or traditional quests. Anet didn’t add the hearts to replace additional quests. They replaced traditional quests with dynamic events. The purpose of hearts was to get people to hang around in the areas where dynamic events spawn, since people were just running around missing dynamic events.

Several of the questions had no middle option. Like would you prefer one time events or the living story. Well, I’d prefer first of all to see how the living story evolves, but surely there are more options than just those two.

For example the Karka was a one time event and it failed miserably but that doesn’t mean other one time events wouldn’t work out. Given a choice between the living story as it stands now and the Karka event, I’d take the living story every time. But these two things are not all we’ve seen in the updates. Mad King Thorn’s instance wasn’t really a one time event and it wasn’t really living story. It was it’s own thing and it was great.

There are several questions in which the answers are leading, and for that reason, I’d say this survey isn’t going to provide the best information.

Thanks for your feedback, if I ever make a survey again it’s helpful :P However:

1) I do think the quests or hearts question was right, because most people I know/knew ingame, and also myself, used hearts as method of leveling rather than DEs. DEs were sort of a little extra when you ran into them. This was caused by the fact that hearts are reliable and always available. To use DEs as main leveling method, you either need to search for them or be lucky and have them spawn close to you. Add to this that people want to do hearts for world completion, and you’ll probably find hearts are used a lot more than DEs as quest replacement.

2) I didn’t think the karka event failed miserably, cause it was probably the day that me and some guildies had most fun in GW2

Re Hearts, you can’t level reliably with hearts, because you can only do them once, and then they run out. Anet has stated straight out that dynamic events have replaced quests in Traditional MMOs. Dynamic events are the meat of the game not hearts. That’s why they’re repeatable.

If so i wonder why ANet made those pesky events so hard to find when not already triggered. You more or less have to walk into the trigger NPC to find them, while hearts are called out by every kitten scout in the area (and show up on the map permanently once uncovered).

The NPC trigger starburst should really be visible like hearts once you have a map section uncovered, and a indicator should be on a NPC while they are transitioning between events in a chain/meta. I see all too many people run away the moment they get the medal, and then return once more when the next link in the chain show up on their map and sidebar. Once again the idea is good in theory, but the ANet implementation lacks refinement (or downright stinks).

The company seem to to have too many designers and not enough engineers.

There is a sliver of health sacrifice still in the game, in the form of the self-inflicted bleed from blood is power. But beyond that the concept is indeed pretty much gone. Now if Life Force had picked up some of that slack…

If you hold down ctrl and right click on a skill, it will get a golden border (usually said border defaults to the first weapon skill). This means that during combat the skill will automatically trigger whenever it comes off cooldown. Only one skill can have this set at any time.

I suspect Orr and nearby lands will stay as they are for the foreseeable future. Even if the process has begun, the amount of risen and such still roaming around is likely to be huge. So while they will dwindle away, and can be contained now that the source is out of the game, there will likely not be a massive clearing effort undertaken as long as there are 5 other dragons to deal with.

On the topic of electricity and crystals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity

Dunno, news to me this. Could be that GW2 already have the mentioned flag set, i have not kept a sharp eye on the memory usage of the game during play.

Seems it can interfer with ground targeting in a similar way to the target info.

By this i mean that if you have the mouse over it when you initiate a ground targeted skill, the target will be at your character feet rather than where it should be in 3d space.

No trinity as a concept is one thing, the ANet execution in GW2 is quite another…

Talock.7340:

zerorogue.9410:

Rule #1 in survey taking, be non-bias if your not non-bias your survey results mean nothing.

A lot of the questions on this are very bias.
Examples: “Do you hate being ‘forced’ to do them,”
“Is it nice that Arenanet got such a tight control of gold sinks and inflation”

The simplify your questions and remove any personal option. Your here to get others option not push your own

Although I 100% agree with you as that is how a survey SHOULD work, 9 times out of 10 a survey is done specifically to push ones own opinion through leading questions. Often intended (and much more subtle) they are designed to showcase how one is indeed correct or to sway people towards their opinion in whatever it is they are thinking and/or trying to prove by providing “evidence” that the majority of others feel the same as them. That being said I don’t believe this individual was trying to push his agenda in a malicious manner but probably did not realize that it was being done.

Another option is to run questions that are biased one way at the start, and another further down, so they cancel out.

Suicide by confusion, yep i have heard about that one. I’ll stick to Supply Crate.

Heh, makes pistol #3 somewhat interesting for ele hunting then

And that such a “bug” exist do not surprise me, as best i can tell ANet have taken shortcuts on many of the “on dodge” traits and simply made them an alternate trigger for the same skill code. As such, the confusion code likely do not know what triggered it.

Way more than needed, as i think GW2 is still a 32-bit program and so can’t handle more than 4GB of ram.

Amadeus.5687:

erik.7084:

Instead of legendary kits I wish the current legendaries would change the appearance of your kits. Like with the Predator it already turns your grenade barrage into plasma grenades. Maybe with the Flameseeker it would make them Holy Hand grenades and with the Quip some kind of firework.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDuGl6hv6oc

Yeah, you got me on the “Holy Hand grenade”, but I want that sound track to play every single time I kill someone iwth a grenade barrage then! :P

Lets reference the original, shall we?

1. Largos (and i hate underwater combat)
2. Tengu
3. Skritt (just love ’em rats)

Do wonder how many only read the first part of the trinity question…