That was a thought I’d had myself. There might well be an element where, if it wasn’t for the big question mark over Balthazar’s motives, the best thing for Tyria might well have been for him to consume several dragons worth of magic and leave, taking that magic with him.
ArenaNet does seem to be character-assassinating him into full burn-the-world cliche Dark Lord villain, though.
Isn’t there a 3s global recharge on attunement-swapping?
However, not applying such a recharge to the attunement you just swapped to would be an appropriate solution. If you need a particular skill right NOW, double-tap.
Now, this might get silly with the minor master traits, but that could be resolved by giving them a 3s internal cooldown so they only trigger once from a double-tap.
Hrrrmn. At this stage I’m… cautiously optimistic, particularly since I’ve been pretty meh on playing druid. I do have a liking for skills based on the abilities of creatures, and that does seem to be what soulbeast is offering.
Not getting the F2 skills, as some have been indicating, would be disappointing, but I can see the logic behind it – it stops soulbeasts from being able to use the same skill twice by having the pet activate it, absorbing the pet, and using it themselves. While something similar can happen for the other skills, the fact that they aren’t player-activated makes it harder to do and less likely to be a major issue in PvP.
Rangers refuse to use rifles and technology, but rather to develop their affinity to nature. That’s the lore. Bother to understand.
Having an affinity to nature does not mutually exclude using technology nor is that explicitly stated anywhere.
Engineer’s were scientists who used gadgets in battle and then suddenly got to smash things with giant hammers like a warrior.
Warrior’s were brute force soldiers who can now use fanciful dagger dances to take down sorcerers like some kind of martial mesmer.
Hell, even using steel weapons is unnatural as that’s a man made alloy. To say nothing of the mythrilium used in ascended gear. If we were some druid hermit people we’d only use flint axes and sharp sticks to kill things. Using way points would also be verboten.
I think there are justifications for the line to be drawn somewhere between ‘stone age’ and ‘open slather’.
One possibility, for instance, that it’s the nature spirits that set the rules, and with that being the case, the rules don’t need to be rational, they’re just the rules that are set. Maybe the nature spirits feel that the use of a chemical propellant is the first step on the road to an unnatural technological society that employs polluting fossil fuels (and the charr give evidence of this) and the nature spirits want none of that. Or perhaps they feel that the sound of guns going off or the smell of gunpowder disturbs the tranquility of nature. Whatever their reasons, rational or not, that’s where they’ve set the line.
Another possibility is that it is a matter of practicality – rangers are happy to use the products of civilisation, but they don’t want to rely on it. A sword, for instance, is something that you can buy in town once and, barring accident or misuse, it will last indefinitely. For a bow, you can make everything you need in the wild, even if you might need to be using stone-tipped arrows in a pinch. For a gun, though – depending on the complexity of the gun you might not be able to repair it in the wild if something goes wrong, you may not be able to get sulphur to mix gunpowder, and making proper shot requires a forging process. So it may simply be a matter of having the freedom to range deep into the wilds without worrying about your ammunition supply.
Now, it’s still possible that not using guns is a choice that current rangers make, and some future elite specialisation may still go in that direction. But I think there are justifications for the line to be drawn where it is, at least for now.
First: Every game gives the same amount of rating gained or lost, regardless of if one team is favored or not. Winning +2 and losing 15 creates nothing but dismay and is stupid. Can you imagine if your favorite football team only got 1/2 a win for beating the Browns cause they were ‘favored’ to win anyways? Gimme a break.
I think the big issue here is that each player has their individual rating compared to the average rating of the enemy team. This means that a player who is put in team where the rest of their team is below their level is triply punished: they’re in a position where they have to carry the team to have any hope of winning, they stand to lose a lot of points if they fail, and don’t gain many if they win. And the last two points hold even if on a team-versus-team comparison, your team was clearly doomed to lose, as long as your personal rating is higher than the enemy team’s average.
It’s often the games where you feel the most frustration that then lead to the most point loss – you’re playing with a team that’s clearly not at your level, you try to carry and come close to succeeding, and then you get a big ratings loss because your personal rating was higher than the other team’s average.
Meanwhile, players who get carried get the opposite effect.
I don’t think the idea of losing less points if you were ‘expected’ to lose and so on is inherently a bad one – the idea is to soften the blow of obviously bad matchups, after all – but it needs to be done entirely based on the team comparison, not individual ratings against the enemy team. The current system punishes people who need to carry while protecting and even promoting those who get carried.
Once the system is working on a team-versus-team basis, you can introduce things like adjusting the rating loss/gain based on how close the scores were. I wouldn’t have the ranges as tight as you suggest – in my experience, a game where the losing side got over 400 generally feels like a close one (keeping in mind that in many maps, an upset with a secondary map mechanic can mean a difference of 50 points or more). I wouldn’t make the divisions any finer than 50 points.
On the ‘rewards’ issue…
I don’t think there’s an issue with allowing people to get the same rewards in ranked as they would get if they played the same match in unranked instead. For those rewards, if the player is just in there for the rewards, they have no incentive to play ranked.
The problem is the rewards that ARE exclusive to ranked. So the backpack and the reward pip track.
Personally, I can’t say I’d be sad if both of these got shifted to unranked, although the pip system might then need some reworking. I’d be inclined to leave the rewards in ranked as well, since if they are available in unranked, this should mean that the people who are only interested in losing their way to Ascended gear have no incentive to do so in ranked matches and will stay in unranked.
And here I thought that Anise being almost subservient to Livia would put paid to the theory of Anise being one of the Lyssa twins.
Sometimes, a powerful human spellcaster is just a powerful human spellcaster.
Personally, I can’t wait to ally with Joko…
So I can then proceed to actually be the first to betray an alliance and hack him into pieces as soon as the immediate threat is dealt with! That would be refreshing from being the usual “well-to-do hero type” as Joko himself put it!
Arguably, we did that to Joko in Guild Wars 1, when we took the quest from the Mad King to insult Joko until he sent his army out and then cull his army. We just didn’t take the next step and try to destroy him… although who knows what would have been in the Elonian Guild Wars: Beyond that got cut.
Wow, you’ve done your research!
Most people probably wouldn’t notice it, but it would be a nice touch. Then again, unless it’s really easy to do, it might not be worth it because, well, most people wouldn’t notice it.
Isn’t the Skimmer supposed to glide? I know they talked about it hovering over water and obstacles, but it looked like — in the video where they introduced it — it was gliding like a player between two cliffs.
That would make sense, actually. They’ve said in the FAQ that you won’t need HoT masteries to get anywhere in PoF, but there was always going to be an aspect that gliding can sometimes just make getting from one point to another so much easier. If they have a mount that essentially replicates gliding, though, then that box is checked. HoT players might have an advantage in that they don’t need to focus on the skimmer as much with their early masteries (and, with mounts seeming to have lower health pools, a gliding PC might be harder to shoot down), but a player who doesn’t have HoT can always have the option to train up the skimmer masteries and use that.
Well, Joko has certainly showed that he’s not content just ruling his own patch.
The question is whether he conquered Elona because he genuinely believed he had a legitimate right to it, and therefore might stop there, or whether it’s just because he’s an expansionist opportunist. If it’s the former, then he might be willing to stop at Elona’s borders (although there might be a problem if he considers Kryta to still be rightfully Elonian… or if he decides he wants to go after King Thorn). If it’s the latter, then he’s a clear danger to the people of Tyria. He doesn’t need to be world-destroying evil to be a threat.
Even his forces seem to be akin to a duplication of Abaddon’s – his mercenaries seem no more, replaced instead by these “Forged”, and just as Margonites were demonic-like beings with watery bodies, these are demonic-like constructs with fiery bodies… Next we’ll learn the Forged are the mercenaries… Or better yet – they’re the Zaishen!
spoiler about the first instance and open world below
In the first instance you see the streamers play, one of the forged, the ‘herald of balthazar’ has combat dialogue where she says “every life i claim is another conscript in Balthazar’s army!”
I also think somewhere she states somewhere Balthazar chose her, inclining she was human before, and you see Zaishen in the open world trying to recruit people to join him as well. Given all that I reckon we can predict the Forged are mercenaries, or just souls in constructs.
Which kinda just makes him another Abaddon, except with Forged rather than titans and shiro’ken.
Heck, even at first glance the Forged have a shiro’ken vibe, except based of Balthazar-esque themes rather than Canthan creatures. They also have a certain resemblance to the Blades from the Spellforce series.
The trailers clearly show us fighting Awakened, which would point to us fighting against Joko as well as Balthazar and Kralkatorrik. A kind of “against enemies on all sides” kind of situation seems to be the case.
Lets hope they don’t turn him into an unredemptive megalomaniac like they seem to be doing to Balthazar, though.
Yeah. One of the things that turned me off the Warcraft setting entirely (I never played WoW, but I did continue following the lore for a bit) is that Blizzard went on a trip of having every character with a touch of grey going full pure evil villain just so they could have a raid boss. Now it feels like ArenaNet is going down the same path… and if they are, I’ve got to be honest, it might have the same result.
That said, there was the mention that a lot of the people of Elona see Joko as their rightful ruler. There’s clearly opposition to his rule as well (we’ve known the Order of Whispers has been opposing him since the Movement of the World) but it does suggest that his rule is at least tolerable.
I think one aspect of some people’s dislike for Jenna that hasn’t been touched yet is that the “tyranny = good, any hint of democracy = bad” story is sketchy no matter how many in-world justifications the writers decide to throw at it. These people and events aren’t real, they were written that way by choice, and it’s simply not a theme that works for everyone.
Caudecus’ intentions were about as democratic as Assad. He puts on a show of using the trappings of democracy, but there is no doubt that his reign would have been an authoritarian one.
Now, Jennah’s position is not a democratic one either, but the idea that undemocratic = bad is a fairly modern kneejerk reaction (particularly strong among Americans) that doesn’t fit in a medieval context, and in fact a monarchy which succeeds in achieving a succession of good monarchs is in many ways a better form of government than democracy. The main benefit of democracy is that it provides for a means of getting rid of a bad ruler, but there are a lot of weaknesses in democracy – in Churchill’s words, it’s the worst system of government ever devised apart from everything else that’s ever been tried. It’s often been said that a benevolent dictatorship – and, to all evidence, Jennah appears to be benevolent – is actually the best form of government. (The problem is the question of how to ensure that the dictator remains benevolent, especially when one dies and you need to select a new one.)
Which brings me to…
And the purpose of the Blades is to get rid of the Mursaats and to protect the Royal family of Kryta. Now the last Mursaat is dead. The only reason to exist for the Blades is to protect the Royal family. Now the royal family of Kryta is represented by Jennah. And Jennah has under hers command a powerful organization having one single reason for existence – to keep the queen safe :-))
First, the Shining Blade did not defeat the White Mantle single-handed – far from it. Most of the fighting was done by the Seraph. In fact, the Charr auxiliaries in Lake Doric did more of the work than the Shining Blade did there. The Shining Blade is a combination of bodyguard and special forces – they do not, and did not, have the power to fight a war on their own. They’re the smallest of the military orders of Kryta.
Second… we actually do get the priority list of the Shining Blade. It goes “Kryta, the Krytan monarchy, and the Krytan people.” Even then, they have a justification for putting the people last of those three – because sacrificing the nation or the monarchy would make the people worse off anyway. They do care about the people, and the nation, and by extension, they care about the world, because Kryta is part of the world. However, despite having the odd magical artifact, they’re not big enough to try to look after the entire world themselves. They specialise on direct threats to Kryta, and leave the bigger picture to the Order of Whispers.
Third, and why this links into the start of this post…
In Sea of Sorrows, Livia makes it clear that the Shining Blade is dedicated to the Krytan monarchy, not to the individual who happens to be occupying the throne at the time. They can, and do, defy the monarch if they feel that the monarch is putting the interests of Kryta at risk, and this is particularly so if they feel that the monarch might be putting the continued rule of the royal family at risk. This essentially means that, far from being a tool of autocratic power, the Shining Blade themselves are one of the checks on the monarch’s power. The last thing they want is another Oswald that would lead to a revolution where the people might decide after the revolution that they don’t need a king or queen after all – if a monarch was to start going in a tyrannical direction, it might well be the Shining Blade that quietly arranges for their removal before it gets to the point of triggering a revolt.
They normally restrict recruiting only to humans. The Commander was a special exception, made because it was necessary for the mission and because Anise trusts the Commander. Even then, it’s questionable whether a nonhuman Commander is genuinely considered to be part of the Shining Blade now, or whether it was purely to get around their magically binding oath of silence.
(Note that the objection Salia raises to a nonhuman taking the oath is “Never before has a nonhuman supplicant taken this oath”, and after the oath-taking, she mentions that the Shining Blade isn’t opening up per se, it’s the Commander in particular that’s special.)
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I’m going to go with “you’re the only one who drew that conclusion”.
Those are very tenuous links to draw together to come up with ‘new profession’, particularly a profession whose general playstyle (sit back and drop AoE buffs) is already in the game. An elite specialisation expanding on that principle would be more likely than a new profession, I expect.
Logan’s injuries are also a complicating factor. Minister Estelle seemed fairly confident about taking Logan on, and she appears to be a guardian herself. Logan’s comments about his body feeling different and taking up noncombat roles might be an indication that there’ll be some permanent effect that hampers his ability to fight, which might make him weaker as a guardian… or might mean that he’s pushed towards the more magical side of the profession (as Estelle seemed to be) rather than the physical.
Yeah, I am not on TC but they are definitely not the same server we fought several months ago. I dont know what happened to them but I assume the same thing that happened to my server….a lot of highly active commanders, players, and wvw guilds departed with no one stepping into their shoes. Result? Both TC and SoS have fallen substantially on the server leaderboard.
Which is the same as what happened to SoR quite a while back.
I think part of the issue is that they needed to persuade the Commander to hand over an aspect somehow, while also having the Commander present when Lazarus was released.
The obvious approach would be to have said right at the beginning that they were going to put the artifacts away for safekeeping. However… consider how the Commander would then react if Livia then started pulling out the aspects in order to resurrect Lazarus once the final aspect was located. Without knowing that the plan was to resurrect Lazarus simply so that he could be killed a final death, it would be reasonable for the PC to conclude that Exemplar Kerida is a traitor and attack her in order to prevent it. Which would be… bad.
Kerida seemed to think that informing the PC was unnecessary, but it’s Anise that has the greater degree of familiarity with the PC, and she made the call that the PC needed to know. Likely because she had some idea that trying to string the PC along might be… unwise.
Yeah, I have to say that was one of the things that really disappoints me about GW2’s stat system. Having the stats affixed to gear (rather than something on your character that can be freely switched around) makes changing builds harder than it really should be in a franchise that has generally been designed around adjusting your build according to what you expect to face. Granted, GW1 often had some gear-swapping when you changed builds, but it wasn’t so important to do so, and you could often achieve significant changes by changing one piece.
Note also that the tome says nothing about being restricted to season 3 portal scrolls. Which could mean it’ll work for season 4 scrolls as well.
If minionmastering isn’t working for you there, possibly try a different build? I know I started enjoying necro a lot more when I got out of the mindset of always running minions and branched out into other builds.
The Magma Elementals are nasty, but thus far I’ve found them soloable as long as you don’t get too many adds. The lava hitting over a wider area than the lava graphic is more of a pain to me, to be completely honest.
Actually, I’d be inclined to say that it would meet the aim – or at least would be better at meeting the aim than not having the oath. Having a relatively small number of protected secrets can still mean that you might lose sensitive information at times, but the big secrets continue to be protected. Such an arrangement might, for instance, still have allowed for Markis to betray the Shining Blade, but would prevent him from leading them to the Henge if the Henge’s location was designated as a protected secret.
It would also be easier for the oath-takers to know which secrets are under oath, rather than dying because the magic of the oath decided that something was sensitive and they didn’t realise.
Having the oath sense intent could be one way around that. Nevertheless, as I noted, it appears that Exemplar Kerida’s secret does not fall under the oath, despite being a pretty significant thing. This suggests to me that the scope of the oath is not nearly as broad as some people are making it out to be.
I remember there being a lot of dryders and riders in the initial four rooms you have to fight through.
Like I said, the Fury was clearly involved in making them. This does not mean, however, that Dhuum necessarily retained control over them.
Are we going for most powerful ever, or most powerful currently? That might change things up a bit.
On Joko… we do get to fight him a couple of times, once as Turai Ossa and he’s a possible opponent in the norn tournament (weirdly enough). In terms of fighting him one-on-one, he’s not that tough – I’d argue weaker than Khilbron, in fact. Now, that might be a characteristic of necromancers in general: they’re not that tough one-on-one, but as they grow more powerful they can maintain an increasingly stronger army of undead. The same argument can be made for Khilbron, however.
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Incidentally, though, this reminds me that it does confirm a theory that I’d had:
That Livia was not Anise, but was still around in the Shining Blade under an alias and keeping a low profile.
On the oath…
I can certainly understand people (especially players with charr mains) having reservations. However, I don’t think the oath is as broad as people have feared. While Anise mentions not acting against Kryta, the oath itself seems to be limited to not telling specific secrets.
And it also seems to be specific ones. Exemplar Kerida, at the end of the final instance, asks the PC not to share her secret – rather than simply informing the PC that said secret is included under the oath. That indicates that said secret is not part of the oath… while still being something I’d imagine the Shining Blade would consider to be pretty sensitive information! That indicates, to me, that there is some means of designating certain pieces of information as being for oath-takers only.
Which is probably the mechanism of how the oath ‘knows’ if it’s broken or not. A specific secret is designated as being under oath, and the magic of the oath links to that secret. If you tell the secret, the oath checks if those you’re telling it to have taken the oath. If they have, the oath-magic on the teller informs the oath-magic on the recipient that it’s protected information. If they haven’t, you die before you can spill the proverbial beans.
If my understanding is correct, than that means the only real effect on the PC is that they can’t tell the specific secret they swore the oath in order to be told. Which is now, essentially, obsolete information.
Personally, I’d have to say, I did find the episode on the whole to be a bit ‘meh’ – particularly as the season finale!
I appreciate that they’ve tied off a loose end, but this whole process with Lazarus having been used for a bait-and-switch and then resurrected by his enemies to die within minutes is a bit of a disappointing conclusion to a plotline which was set up ten years ago. In the meantime, what has become the main story was purely incidental. They could have had Aurene give us the vision at the end of the previous episode, had the Shining Blade destroy the aspects offscreen, and it wouldn’t have significantly changed the story.
With that aside…
While they tried to explain it, I think it was a miss-step to have those statues of Abaddon clearly visible in the landscape of Orr. It’s a plot point that all evidence of Abaddon’s existence was hidden or destroyed, successfully enough that he was mostly forgotten for millenia. That does not fit with having giant statues towering over parts of the landscape.
They try to justify it by having the reliquary of Abaddon being an important part of the system, but I think this doesn’t really make sense for two reasons:
1) The reliquary itself might have been important, but could they not have destroyed the statues and other decorations that identify it as Abaddon’s, at least from the outside?
2) Furthermore, at the time they were destroying or hiding all signs of Abaddon, they were preparing to leave Tyria (with the possible exception of Balthazar). Why leave important objects behind on Tyria at all?
At the bottom line, the fact that you’re even arguing over it shows that it hasn’t been confirmed to be right. You’ve had a few more hints suggesting it might be right, but it’s not a confirmed thing from which you can say that your theory was right.
I’ve got my own that I was going to put up here – that the Enchanted look similar to the mursaat because the Forgotten based the Enchanted on mursaat armour – but then I realised that while we’ve had more hints pointing in that direction, there hasn’t been anything that actually confirmed it.
Yeah, I’ve called for spirit shards to be treated as a repeatable mastery myself. It really does seem to be a simple solution.
The demoralisation thing is real, too. There are some achievements I deliberately avoided getting, in fact, because they had autoconsumed XP rewards. Come to think on it, I probably should get around to killing Lenner the Eagle-Eyed sometime.
(I also built up a lot of chests from the Season 3 map dailies that I left unopened until I finished off the HoM masteries. There’s some I still have stockpiled, in fact, so I can immediately unlock the chapter 6 mastery.)
That is interesting. I’d had the impression that a large part of the reason Zojja tends to get put on a bus a lot is that she has a busy schedule and is hard to get to fit in, but that suggests it isn’t the case. It would be nice to see her further development, even if it is just to finally send her off – particularly since Logan is up and about again.
I’m not sure about that. Aurene has already given us a prophecy while still in the egg - that of Logan, Zojja and Trahearne being used as templates for armies of super-Mordrem. Now, that could have been farsight and extrapolation rather than foresight per se, but that’s at least a step along the road.
Heck, the vision just before the Dragon Vigil instance was a prophecy, albeit a short-term one. Other prophecies may be coming.
I would have liked the XP one on Doric Lake.
The XP helps players gain spirit shards or to train their masteries. It’s far from useless or wasted.
Unless you don’t raid.
If the player is at that point where all that they have left is the raid mastery line. Unless most players are at that point, the OP is incorrect.
There are also going to be people who haven’t gone hunting the mastery points, and thus have full XP bars on all their currently available masteries but don’t have the mastery points to unlock them. I was in that situation myself until a few months ago, when I finally got around to hunting down enough mastery points to unlock everything.
In that situation, XP boosts are literally worthless because you can’t gain XP in the first place.
Where it is, precisely, might say a lot – it might turn out to be something that WAS hidden, one way or another, when Orr was still inhabited.
I would argue the Realm of Torment would be a terrible place for such a monument, because until shortly before Nightfall (exact timeframe unknown), the Forgotten – faithful servants to the five – were in control over the entire realm, all the Margonite cities and structures and used them as prisons.
So unless the shrine was very, very recent, this would basically be putting up a neon sign saying “Balthazar’s on my team, love Abaddon.”
The ‘exact timeframe unknown’ is a bit of a killer: there’s a good argument to be made that the last time the Forgotten had complete control before Nightfall was at least 200 years ago. Who knows when they might have lost control over the Domain of Secrets?
Even then, a shrine that appears to be mocking Balthazar but which is secretly not would be in theme for the region.
Again, I’d note that balance-of-probabilities I think it’s unlikely, but… possible.
Eh, the Fury was in charge of their creation, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that the titans were Dhuum’s once created. The impression I always had was that their creation was more of a collaboration, but once created they belonged to Abaddon.
Certainly, though, their purpose has been as part of Abaddon’s advance wave, even if they are technically allied troops – they were among the first to get into Tyria and start influencing events, and they would have been Khilbron’s shock troops with which to conquer Tyria if the Door of Komalie hadn’t been slammed shut again. It’s possible that if the Door had remained open, other demons would follow.
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I’m inclined to agree with Aaron here. To give a few more examples:
The White Mantle is motivated by power – either directly in Caudecus’ case, or through the Mursaat in the case of the truly devout. Neither faction gives a proverbial for security and survival of all humanity, except possibly at the level of the more gullible recruits. If the route to power is seizing control of a human nation and then building it up, then so be it… but the unlikely event of anyone non-Mantle actually benefiting is coincidental. If the route to power comes from killing every human that isn’t White Mantle, then let the world burn…
Now, take the Inquest… the Inquest are actually more hierarchical than mainstream asura ever were. The only real restriction the Arcane Council really seems to place on research is ’don’t put other asura at excessive risk’. Maybe there’s a moral component to it as well, but maybe it’s just that the asura realise that sufficiently annoying another race that is organised at a higher level than skritt counts as excessive risk. The Inquest, on the other hand, is run like an amoral business: everything they discover is regarded as their intellectual property, and the research that gets done is the research that the Inquest leaders feel is worthy of being done.
I never cared about maxing out – I generally go for wood or bronze and then stop. As long as I’m able to make some progress, it doesn’t really matter to me if it takes a while.
It does annoy me that with my rank and server it usually requires getting at least some Outnumbered to even be able to get to wood in what I consider a reasonable timeframe.
i wont get crafting @500 wich meant wont need nor cant use the ascended stuff, so tickets are useless for me as well the ticks are.
I dont care about skins.
Not sure if you realise you can get t3 ascended armor without ever having to craft.
I think Aeolus’ statement about not caring about skins indicates Aeolus does know – by now, most people have enough access to exotic gear that if you’re getting the WvW gear, you’re either getting it for the skins or for Ascended, not because you need another exotic set. I daresay that even if you did need another exotic set, there are a lot faster and cheaper ways to get one.
There’s several levels to this:
First, the bloodstone that exploded is not the one that sealed the Door of Komalie. The Mursaat had means of transferring the souls killed on the Bloodstone to the Door of Komalie, but the destruction of the Maguuma bloodstone would not necessarily affect the soul batteries on the Door of Komalie.
Second, part of the reason why we had to kill the Lich Lord on the Bloodstone is that doing so pulls his soul into the batteries. His soul was much more powerful than that of a random Chosen, and thus the result was that the Door was closed for the foreseeable future.
Then, as Randulf stated, the volcano erupted – although the exact effect of this on the Door was left unclear.
Perhaps the most significant point for this thread, however, is that in the ‘epilogue’ sequence in Nightfall, we get to the other side of the Door of Komalie – the Foundry of Failed Creations in the Domain of Anguish – and clear it out. The Door of Komalie was, basically, another weak spot between Tyria and the Realm of Torment, and the titans were, essentially, Abaddon’s advance troops. As long as Kormir maintains control over the Realm of Torment (and doesn’t go evil like Balthazar might have done), then, the threat of the Door of Komalie opening is somewhat defused – there’s no longer a horde of demons on the other side waiting for the opportunity to invade.
Given that the gods seem to have come back into the spotlight, it’s possible that we’ll see a return to the Door at some stage in the future, possibly for the reverse action: instead of demons invading Tyria from the Realm of Torment, it might be Tyrians pushing through seeking to get answers out of Kormir.
Another example of mesmers having a phantasm with a weapon they can’t wield is Phantasmal Defender. Sure, they have shields NOW, but…
Since we already have Warden, it’s entirely possible that a phantasm coming from the axe will have a different weapon.
“its a 2 hander and they can do what ever they want”. And why exactly doesnt this apply to mainhands as well? Its their game they ca do w/e they want.
Every offhand has a phantasm skill. Putting one on a MH only weapon would leave us the option to have a single weapon set that can summon 2 different phantasms. There is no good reason to expect that to happen.
Sure, that’s the trend that’s happened so far, and the smart money is on that trend continuing…
But is it really beyond reasonable doubt that the trend will continue?
There have been suggestions that the new elite spec is phantasm-oriented. Therefore, it would make sense for them to potentially have a weaponset that allows them to have two phantasms, possibly at the cost of not having a clone skill.
Mind you, there are other possibilities that could lead to more phantasms:
1) I don’t recall if we’ve seen any shots of the new elite spec interface, but one possibility could be the replacement of the current shatters with something that produces phantasms. It’d be complicated to make such a mechanic work with current shatter traits, but not, I think, impossible.
2) The mesmer elite spec might get an offhand axe as well, similar to warrior getting dual daggers.
3) One or more of the utility skills associated with the elite spec might generate a phantasm, similar to the reaper’s “Rise!” utility.
Another possibility, of course, is that it’s another case of ArenaNet taunting us with something that PCs won’t get, at least not in the immediate future.
The leaks suggest sword, and some weird mechanic about having access to less attunements but being able to combine them in some fashion. Apart from that, we don’t really know.
How often do you really need burst in PvE? In most circumstances where your build actually matters, sustained DPS is more important – and bomb kit is one of the better power weapons in the game for sustained DPS, from what I remember of the benchmarks.
Well, without the background text, the shrine could be a memorial to a fall Balthazar had kept hidden from the other gods – the Realm of Torment would be a logical place for it. Heck, it could mean that the trigger for the other gods finding out was Kormir’s ascension and discovery of Abaddon’s dirt on Balthazar…
I don’t really see much of a contradiction there – the hypothesis that Balthazar was going against the other gods but was hiding that he was going against the other gods covers the apparent contradiction.
As for Shadow Army alongside Margonites and not fighting – I did raise that point myself earlier in this thread. I should point out that I’m raising reasonable doubt here – the balance of probabilities is certainly biased towards Balthazar and Abaddon being enemies at the time. Heck, it’s even possible that if Balthazar did remain on Tyria the whole time, his motivation was to be there to fight Abaddon should Abaddon break out, and he was somehow prevented from getting involved… or was waiting to see if the mortals could handle it before stepping in himself.
From an auramancer perspective, my gut agrees with Wolfric, although I don’t find necros to be quite as dangerous as he seems to. Both necros and mesmers can outsustain an auramancer 1v1 (although you shouldn’t be in that situation, it still happens) and hunt you out in a teamfight.
I wouldn’t really call either ‘kryptonite’, though. The auramancer ele is there to support the team, and a good team can stop either from focusing on the ele more than the ele can handle.
Whatever may or may not have been happening with Balthazar, the gods clearly have a habit of sending their representatives to speak for them. Balthazar’s Eternals still dwell in the Fissure of Woe and responded to prayers to Balthazar in GW1’s time. It’s entirely reasonable that Balthazar could have a few Eternals nominated as his spokesperson to respond to summons, attend meetings, and so on.
As for having fallen… who says he was fallen (or regarded as having fallen) at the time? Perhaps he stayed behind for a reason the other gods agreed with at the time, and it wasn’t until sometime between the games that he came off the rails. Or perhaps he was hiding the fact that he was still on Tyria from the other gods, and at the time of the Gate of Madness mission the other gods didn’t know that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be?
Note that I think it’s more likely that the line is simply hyperbole – but there is the possibility that it isn’t.
@Squee: Technically speaking, it was avatars and representatives that were present, and only Lyssa’s Muse spoke. It could have simply been an Eternal that was present there.
@Konig: Also technically speaking, the Shrine of the Traitors description comes from a datamine and is no more canon than Arachnia is. Furthermore, Virashak’s information could have been coming from Balthazar’s deception. However, the fact that Torment Demons and Shadow Army never fight suggests to me that we’re not looking at a ‘the Shadow Army was there to hinder Abaddon rather than to help him’ scenario, unless they were playing a longer game than Tyria had time for.
If you are right than Balthazar is behind the Unseen One plot, is infact the mysterious Unseen that Abaddon was summoning to the Domain of Fear and the man behind the man of everything in Guild Wars!
That would mean that Menzies’s forces’ not actually speaking to Abaddon’s forces like Dhuum’s forces(we only see them in the same general area) were may not be a coincidence.
The only indication that they are allied with Abaddon are Forgotten and since Balthazar is likely using his Ghostly minions to perpetuate the façade that he’s still on the side of the Gods they’d believe anything he tell them.
All they know for a fact is that the armies of Menzies are tracking down the Margonite leaders. No actual statements on the actual reason.
Now, that would be twisted…
However, you can bring them into contact with one another without them fighting, so if that does turn out to be the case, I’d consider it a retcon.
(I was going to cite the Darknesses, but I don’t think there’s anything that actually indicates that the Darknesses are actually Menzies’ followers)
Valid points, Aaron – I’d forgotten about Rachel. And yes, it’s likely that nobles are likely to be respected to begin with and thus there might not necessarily be anything sinister about them being predominant in the Ministry.
Then again, it might be. One of the reasons we have anonymous voting nowadays was that before it was introduced in Britain, it was common for people to be compelled to vote in a particular way. Better vote for the preferred candidate of your employer or landlord, or you might find yourself fired and/or evicted… and even if they can’t be quite that overt, they can still favour those who voted for them. Similar rackets might well be going on in Krytan Ministry elections.
Certainly, neither side seems particularly interested in democracy. If anything, Jennah might be the one that’s more interested in genuine democracy.
But yes, ‘autocrat’ does not mean ‘bad’. It’s commonly said that the best form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship – someone who genuinely cares about the people and who can do what needs to be done. Democracy, and the various checks and balances that support it, basically exists because ensuring that you get a benevolent dictator is hard, and if you get the wrong person you want a means of limiting the damage and eventually replacing them that doesn’t require a revolt.
As for the “Jennah is a powerful mesmer, so maybe she’s mass mind-controlling people!” argument…
Well, maybe. We’ve been told that the Mesmer Collective deliberately hides and suppresses aspects of their art, specifically to avoid such accusations. But we have no evidence to suggest that’s even possible, let alone that she’s doing it. In fact, we have good reason to believe that she isn’t - since if she did have the power to force someone to love her against her will with little or no risk of her enchantment being discovered, don’t you think her first target would have been Caudecus?
Illconceived Was Na and Donari make good points – the litmus test of Jennah’s intentions would be what happens after the emergency is concluded.
Keep in mind a couple of other things:
First, as far as we know, Kryta has had no equivalent of the Magna Carta or the events that lead to its implementation – the Ministry exists purely because some past monarch thought it was a suitable means to help run the country and provide settlements outside of Divinity’s Reach with some representation at court. Legally speaking, it probably exists purely at the pleasure of the reigning monarch, and said reigning monarch has the right to dismiss it at any time and for any reason. Now, there are likely complications with doing so, and doing so without good reason could result in rebellion even if it is technically legal, which probably explains why Jennah waited until the last minute to dismiss it. However, it was probably never intended to be a check on the monarch’s power, as the British Parliament originally was, so much as a tool for more effective government.
Second, don’t go thinking of this as a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism. The Ministry is, at best, a 7 on the Democracy Index, and probably quite a bit lower. Off the top of my head I don’t think there are any Ministers who are not nobles, suggesting that either it is not legally permitted for a non-noble to run, or the elections are sufficiently unfree and unfair that the odds are stacked against a commoner winning – heck, we don’t even know if non-nobles have the opportunity to vote for their Minister at all. (Come to think on it, we don’t even know if there actually are elections even among the nobles – there’s a lot we don’t know about the Ministry.) We’ve also been specifically told that Caudecus’ support of the carnival is part of a bread-and-circuses routine, and that a lot of Ministers simply don’t care about the wellbeing of common citizens. Add on top of that that Kryta has separate judicial systems for foreigners, commoners and nobles, and the Ministry controls the process for anyone who isn’t a foreigner – these are NOT indications of a full, healthy democracy. In a very real sense, it’s the crown that protects the people from the Ministry more than the other way around.
Here we go again…
Jennah suspended the Ministry because she knew it was so riddled with White Mantle that the Ministry as a whole was effectively working for the enemy – not every minister was White Mantle, in fact I don’t think they were even a majority, but there were enough that they could direct Ministry policy where they liked, and they’ve been using this to sabotage Kryta from within. Jennah knew this, it’s been obvious since release and she knew Caudecus was her enemy way back in Edge of Destiny, but simply dismissing Parliament – sorry, the Ministry – is a big step that she needed pretty good evidence to do without risking provoking a civil war.
Leaving it until several months after it was shown that the equivalent of the Prime Minister was a traitor and the war was on their doorstep was actually showing a lot of restraint.
I think you’re overestimating how much mesmer magic can actually influence the thoughts of groups. The infighting you’re referring to is all directly linked to Caudecus trying to pull a Palpatine, sabotaging Kryta from within in an attempt to get Jennah declared incompetent and removed from power… or failing that, keeping Kryta as weak as possible for when he resorts to an attempt at direct conquest.
There are about a million conspiracy theories around Jennah, but everything we’ve been shown indicates that she’s actually a pretty decent ruler hamstrung by a political system that had no safeguards in place for a Legate Minister who was willing to destroy the country if it meant he had a chance of ruling over the ruins.
Seriously, the end of the episode didn’t leave much room for shades of grey – Caudecus is pretty much responsible for virtually everything bad that’s happened to Kryta in the last ten years or so that wasn’t directly dragon-related. You can read it for yourself.
(edited by draxynnic.3719)
I’m not sure if I’ve said so publicly, but returning to Orr was one of my predictions for Episode 6. It makes a lot of sense – if there’s anything to be found on Balthazar that’s not already known to the Durmand Priory, but which is somewhere that the PC can reasonably be expected to go looking to try to find it, it’ll be in Orr.
(Of course, it’s possible that what we find in Orr will be the first step of a journey that will lead elsewhere.)
Granted, Braham is a loose thread – however, my understanding of the end of Episode 5 points to Taimi and the PC essentially believing that the worst-case scenarios are defused. Taimi believes that Braham doesn’t have what it would take to kill Jormag. However, with Jormag possibly back in hibernation, the risk of Braham’s expeditionary force getting Verdant Brinked is probably quite small – in fact, it makes it a good time for the norn to push north.
So it’s possible that the Pact Commander will visit Hoelbrak to attempt to touch bases with Braham, but won’t go deeper into the Shiverpeaks than that. Or it’s possible that Rox will tell us that Braham still doesn’t want to hear from us, and the PC and Taimi will decide that it won’t hurt anything to just let him blow off some steam. Either way, there’s no need for the next map to be in the Shiverpeaks.
Personally, I consider Rytlock’s trial to be a bigger dangling thread, but if and when we get to see that, it will probably be in the Black Citadel and, hence, not requiring a map.
I might be going out on a limb here, but how do you sit afk and gain participation? If this is somehow against the rules somewhere, don’t reply to that.
A common behaviour is for people to have been actively participating for a while, and then letting their participation to run down while they get the rewards. This is relatively benign, albeit probably annoying in primetime when they might be occupying a slot that puts someone else into a queue. (If they’re responsible, though, they’ll shift to Obsidian Sanctum, or at least to a map that isn’t full.)
A more abusive behaviour, which I think is what the new decay timers were looking to fight, is if instead of simply letting their decay timer run out, someone runs out every ten minutes, does the absolute minimum required to reset their timer, and then returns to spawn.
I don’t understand the problem people have with this update. The only players who will get “penalized” are those who “deserve” to be = last minute map hopping parasites.
For everybody else, nothing has changed.
I think it’s a step in the right direction… at least on paper.
Personally, though, I haven’t received Outnumbered since the change. I don’t know if that’s something to do with the system, or just because there have been less people playing on other servers so there isn’t enough to cause Outnumbered to come up (we’re still basically permanently in last place at the times when I play… grumble), but since I’m at low rank and Outnumbered more than doubles my pip gain, it’s frustrating.
If it’s purely because the numbers aren’t right, well, that’s the game. I think it would be nice, though, to have some sort of ‘pre-Outnumbered’ indicator, so a) if you are looking for the buff, you know which map to stay on, and b) to fulfill the role that Outnumbered used to play in giving the server as a whole a warning that they were Outnumbered on a particular map.
One thing to consider:
The rise of Zhaitan was the cause of Cantha and Kryta being cut off in the first place. With Zhaitan removed, it’s possible that eventually word will reach Cantha and they might reach out to Kryta to resume what had been a profitable trading partnership… and, depending on the current state of the Canthan government, possibly to attempt to assert control over Kryta and/or Orr.
So it’s possible, if the map is in Orr, that the ship is a Canthan exploration vessel. However, it might be a setup for LS4 while the expansion storyline heads in another direction.
Are you serious decay timer? I understand you want everyone to be active so you dont have afkers getting pips. What about defending a tower or a keep and im alone not getting participation, It will start to decay? What about the guild raiding for 2 hours and decides to take a medium break to give players a chance to go to the bathroom, get something to eat the participation starts to decay? Seriously Anet just keep destroying WvW.
You get 10 min for a defense event.
Decay always started after 10 min (AFAIK). So nothing changed there.
Getting credit for defence events is pretty hit and miss. I’ve had a few times when I’ve participated in a defence and not received credit, and that’s without even considering times when the defence you provide is in the form of providing a deterrent and the enemy doesn’t engage.
That wasn’t different before the patch. When you didn’t get it, decay didn’t reset.
Sure, but it shows that you can defend without renewing your decay timer. When the decay timer is a default 10min for most things, that’s not likely to be an issue very often. When your decay timer might be less… well, people just might not have the time to defend, especially in cases where the defence is in the form of ‘the enemy roamers don’t attack in the first place because they’re deterred by your presence’.
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