Guild Wars 2

Hello there, topic title says it all, I’m already on a guild that does weekend raidings and occasional runs, but I’d like something more consistent. However, CET is too early for me so I cannot join the Raid Training Initiative guild. Any help/invites are appreciated.

I currently have 7LI but have been to training runs of all fights and exp VG/Gors/Sloth runs (most of these LI’s) and play DH/nec/ele/druid/chrono, all full asc (not confident on chrono yet though).

Concerning the poll results, I hope you realize they are kinda skewed towards the population that raids since the start (you can see most people there are on the 150+ LI range) simply from it being posted on the raids forums instead of the general one. That shows in some of the results (most people apparently want raids to be harder from your poll, yet about 40% of them didn’t even kill Matt), so I don’t think the polls are indicating anything at all at least for the moment being. It is worthy of notice that Anet’s observation is reinforced from the poll results: that players who do not raid yet but wanted to, do not do so because they want to be able to raid at anytime instead of spending hours to come up with a group/organize their own static team.

Awesome! Very good job and it was relatively fast too. This stuff should motivates people to keep improving the engy rotation :P

I agree it is a great encounter. Since the chest reward is a daily thing, I believe they could ramp up the rewards a bit though. I acknowledge this could lead to burnout and players feeling like they NEED to do it everyday, just like would happens with raids, so not that many rewards, maybe just guaranteed integrated matrices? The title is a nice touch as well and the skins I didn’t see yet but they are nice prestige.

Also, please let more fractals get this challenge mote treatment. This is a whole new layer of replayability and adds so much to the life of fractals, if each one actually has two versions which you can choose to either do it normally or challenge yourself in interesting and new mechanics. It is also much better than the usual reduced healing or timers and even more interesting than the enrage mechanic. So we definitely should be seeing more from the Harbinger (it might even be a good way for the next fractal-related legendary collection if it ever arrives).

The collection for Ad Infinitum if that’s what you mean, remains the same; you just go to 98 instead of 100. The challenge mote for 100 is a whole new thing altogether, tied to this “Harbinger” stuff.

Mai Trin has been moved to 98, 23 and so forth.

The challenge mote for 100 is a complete overhaul of the original fractal. Instead of the 3 regular bosses you fight a reskin of them with many mechanics overlapping, including new ones that are not present on the original Nightmare. It is a true test of mettle for people who used to claim Fractals did not live up to the challenge (pun intended, this is literally the achievement for running it, which I hope it’s daily or weekly!).

The orbs are hard to see at times for players with higher latency, but I’m not sure this can even be corrected (I have the same issue with Sabetha and eventually learned to pre-emptively avoid stuff). It also happens with Arrk’s shield sometimes, the AoE simply doesn’t show and I have to either know the cooldown by heart or be ready to follow my team at all times towards it. I don’t think it’s a video issue because I can clearly see and avoid the puzzle orbs during capture parts.

Other than that, I must say, I was one to criticize the decision to keep using LS1 content instead of some actual meat of Tyrian history, and I’m very glad of how wrong I was. The whole thing seems very original and nostalgic at the same time (like fractals were supposed to be), and it gave a new life to old enemies. Not to mention the challenge mote, that was a very good surprise and I’d say you guys graciously shoved your response to “fractals are too easy but raids are too hard!” on our faces, without locking out the already established fractal people. While normal mode T4 is the perfect balance in difficulty, the challenge mote is grounds to train many mechanics at once. I can safely claim it’s a good practice for many raid mechanics outside of the raids themselves, because there are no timers like some people wanted and you can also rally off adds at most times, while still being unforgiving and hectic. I personally loved it!

Good Job! I went in challenge mote with a couple guildies and random people but we got stuck at second boss, then I had to sleep. MAMA was a great encounter to begin with, definitely a mini raid; I was tired and still have no idea what to do when second boss phases and 4 beasts spawn. Will definitely try it out again today.

@ AndyS: some (mythic) WoW raids and some others (notably Wildstar, I suppose FFXIV and SWTOR are fine though) actually fall in that definition of “challenging” being wipes even after training. The only countermeasure they have for it to not be a problem is introducing both tiered gear and tiered difficulties for people to fall back to if it gets tiresome.

Here, however, we have a game that plays like Skyrim normal difficulty and suddenly becomes Dark Souls when you go into a raid; it might not be so hard (I don’t think it’s too hard really), but it’s certainly not flexible, and this is by design. Naturally there should also not be any variance in classes just like you said, because there are definite skills that work better than others even if we discount DPS and concerning only specific mechanics (e.g any reflect works on Matthias but feedback is hands down the best one in any scenario, simply because it spawns around him and not in front of, not to mention distortion is the fastest invulnerability cast on the lowest cooldown of them all = a single class is objectively the best tank) . I don’t believe the WoW solution of giving everything to everyone is the best, but I don’t have any other suggestions for this not to happen.

Here even experienced pugs with LI requirements of up to 50 struggle with every single encounter at times, it is glaringly inconsistent, and I don’t think there are that many people lying to me about their LI numbers and kill proofs. I’ve been on teams with 30+LI failing to green circle VG right after split and 50+LI overeating mushrooms and killing everyone with volatile poison during Sloth. People are either not living up to their own training or Anet has done such a good job with raids that it is indeed impossible to pug them consistently. I tend to think it’s the former; regardless of what all the raiding guilds think, our raid population is very low, lfg does not have training runs up all the time at all, and existing pugs take too long to fill even without requirements. This all leads to a very sparse environment, and also sparse results: you’re either getting a newbie or a pro in your team, and the chance of any case repeating for the other 8 people is very slim. While I am part of two raiding guilds myself, sometimes I want to raid in hours they didn’t schedule to, and also sometimes I wish I could just join in something instead of leading pugs, while even starting my own takes 1+ hour just to meet people who won’t give up after a wipe.

The Deep Sea Dragon will probably turn the whole Unending Ocean into a tentacle ridden canyon and we’ll fight him inside a deep, dry abyss of Lovecraftian hentai. You read it here first!

Fractals do no justice to what the content originally was. We would be better off seeing actually historical figures like Turai Ossa, Lord Ordran and Abbadon; it would also push for the creation of many new assets (that could then be used elsewhere to make new maps more diverse). With what is going on right now, we might never, ever get a proper filling to the gap in our story journal left by LS1, and this is very serious in a game where progression is firstly done through means of story like GW2.

The moletariate will not be satisfied hearing of this and will surely seize the means of distribution. Long live the Dredge!

The Pact Commander is implied throughout Heart of Thorns to be really, really strong. During each race’s personal story up to Zhaitan we often develop tools and assist in Asuran research to conquer each foe up to the Elder Dragon. After Zhaitan however we literally run up to stuff and kill it (notably so past LS2). This is not a sign of growth but of growth beyond measure: this would not be good mechanically but lorewise we are likely on par with your legendary, map-wide meta mob. Even if technically we are still being assisted by magitech (with Taimi more than any other asura right now), it is still the PC that is personally achieving stuff. Not to mention we have also by now likely surpassed every member of Destiny’s Edge (every member together even? I believe we are pretty much walking terminators by now), and they were pretty powerful to begin with.

Lazarus has absorbed most of a bloodstone’s power but we don’t really know to what extent he can actually even use it (maybe he’s overloaded and has to keep an effort to maintain his form?); He also acknowlegdes that we killed both dragons we came across (one of them, quite literally in that we broke apart its mind). If you assume he is a walking Gary Stu godlike figure (which he isn’t because he has clear flaws outlined unlike Scarlet), the PC would certainly be an even bigger one.

They still have the chance of either turning the remaining dragons far too strong to deal with (specially the Deep Sea Dragon, if they don’t kill him off-screen it probably should not be dealt with at all), forcing us to strike a “deal” of sorts and move on to more interesting yet “mundane” threats; They can still bring baddies like Palawa, Lazarus and whoever rules Cantha into play, as well as beings from the Mists like Menzies and Dhuum (or even completely new outsiders, that arrive here just like the human gods but with bad intentions).

What matters is that they absolutely do not play out the eldritch horror trope anymore. Lovecraft does not suit an MMORPG where everything can be killed by our characters. We are the omnipotent beings here, not our enemies, and it’s kinda silly that an elder dragon like Mordremoth simply bent over to our will. An enemy like Lazarus or Palawa Joke, however, would bring far more immersion into play, because their intentions are much more “human-ish” and they have actual feelings that we can either despise or relate to.

@TexZero: whether or not content is challenging to you is largely irrelevant. It should be commonly understood when something is called a “challenge” outside of a personal opinion, that it is being meant in an objective and not subjective way. 8-bit older games were objectively challenging for instance, in that you died from a single hit: you were required a full streak of jumping over enemies or obstacles in order to succeed. This does not take into account who is playing, it is inherently handicapping to have ‘1 HP’ to whomever attempts, no matter if the person believes it to be or not a handicap.

That said, things like taking 5k ticks from Mordrem Wyverns should indeed be called challenging because of that, regardless of what your personal experience with the encounter is. Chances are, you also consider an encounter like Matthias relatively easy now that you have trained it and ran many times over. That you don’t realize the encounter did not change at all and remains the same as when you had no experience, that should be depressing. You cannot print over your personal experience to decide what is and what isn’t appropriately challenging content. To be fair, this is the same mistake on the other end of this topic: people claiming raids are too hard are actually claiming it’s too hard for them, when they would do a better job by just pointing out which mechanics are objectively an unnecessary handicap, such as the enrage timer.

About raids themselves: Doing away with enrage timers would solve most issues by allowing people to cheese every encounter with 10 minstrel tempests and taking 40 min to down VG, but it has been somehow implied that having a limited timer in a game that already pushes for full damage builds (every defense is active rather than passive i.e toughness is kitten) is absolutely necessary to keep the content “challenging”. I don’t see how this would keep qT and other optimization specialized guilds in coming up with the very same meta and the very same rotations we already have, while everyone else would just bulk up and do their weekly raids however they wanted to.

About open world: It is not like the timer matters for most fights anyway; you die long before Sabetha can even enrage due to all the flak going around, Sloth builds up on millions of Slublings, etc. There is absolutely no reason for the DPS check. The mechanics could and should also be reused on open world; Bosses like Axemaster in Verdant Brink already have CC checks, it would do no harm to have green circle-ish mechanics and fixation on open world bosses, as well as volatile poison checks, etc. It would make fights funnier, which is a better word than “challenging”, as it probably is less offensive to the ones seeking to differ themselves from “open world people”, and would also get everyone to learn. Furthermore, I don’t remember ever seeing complaints about nerfing open world content before, other than the Chak Gerent when it was bugged; I don’t believe people ever went mad about open world PvE being hard, let alone to the level people go mad over raids.

About buffing 10 people at once: This would enforce a meta of 3 support classes and 7 tempests, stacked for maximum DPS. It would allow more people to sucessfully complete the encounters because the DPS checks would be that more lenient, but it would not do anything to actually change the fact that it’s a DPS check instead of a mechanics check (it would actually undo many mechanics, as KC for example could potentially die regardless of caring about rifts, and Sloth would not come into one single lap).

About rewards: I agree that this is indeed all about having rewards locked behind raids. When you claim that people can get stuff elsewhere, you have to remember Anet’s own claim that developing armor is the most time intensive work they have, in detriment of literally everything else. So this is the bulk of their work, and guess which content is going to be graced with legendary armor first? I wouldn’t mind if there was no legendary armor to strive for, and they instead released 9 or 10 new sets across every other piece of content, but they chose a single legendary set for raids, and so it is natural that people want their slice of the cake. It is also natural that they want to keep getting cake slices the same way they have been doing for years already, which is going into content with whatever build they wanted and eventually getting it. Like many others who do raid and get their LI’s, I don’t believe cake should be given so freely and actually enjoy what raids have to offer, but I don’t think it’s somehow “wrong” or impossible to understand, that people in general are surprised by the sudden shift in content.

EDIT: I have perhaps overlooked that people do complain about HoT content being hard to navigate; these are not complaints about the content though, what most people find annoying is how they can’t run around without being CC’d to hell and back and crippled and what not. Another common complaint about PvE is that many champions are redundant: current event ones and some that spawn on HoT have no reason to be champion quality because there is no great mass of players doing them anymore. So what people really want is for these specific encounters to be demoted to Elite or something similar. This is by no means in discord with buffing encounters like Sloth and Unbound Guardian that are still popular and done by many everyday, and would remain so even after introducing more mechanics, I believe.

Take a boss like Matthias for example; his mechanics enforce certain aspects (most notably reflects) that are simply not available to some professions. So, if you have a Chrono, you know you’ll be in for Matt because you have the definitive reflect skill (Feedback), to the point people might even overlook your lazy everything else. If you have a Revenant however, you have no reflect skills whatsoever, and the group needs to count only on your damage, if even (same with Necro that doesn’t even have damage). So there you have it, a meta enforced purely mechanically with no ways of being fixed by balances, because every Necro and Rev has 9 out of 10 spots to fill while a Chrono will definitely fill that last 1 spot every single time (or does anyone use dagger storm or wall of reflection for this?). Not trying to dwell into whether this is right or wrong, but it is there, and it is a depart from the whole rest of the game, even fractals.

The Black Lion weapons are strictly NOT like the common exotics we get (who else has sold 5000 Stardust bows by now?) because their art design is much more detailed and intricate. Even if plasma weapons cost 1 gold people would still use them to fit their character, as well as fused weapons and whatever other Black Lion skin you can think of. People gotta stop using the exclusivity argument to them, because what makes them uncommon is precisely how hard it is to get them without spending what would get you a nice glider/gems/ascended/legendary grade stuff. The Black Lion skins are a total waste of developer effort and it should actually be offensive to the art team that they are spending so much time on what Anet apparently considers to be filler. We already have enough rare skins (e.g Aetherized weapons) without having to throw 90% of them into a literal trashcan of unnattractiveness (is this even a word?).

The thing is that, other than very fancy magic Rifts (can’t be Asura gates if the Asura didn’t go there to build the other end of the gates) we have no way of crossing to anywhere outside of continental Tyria without dealing with the elephant in the ocean. Problem with that is they dropped underwater combat altogether, HoT was dry as kitten and laughably so since it’s a tropical Jungle, Mordremoth filling the low ranges was a silly excuse as he feeds on leylines and not water. We never even saw a DSD minion unless the Chak turn out to be so (very unlikely). So they have one of two choices: having a whole expansion to reveal stuff about him or killing him off-screen, before even thinking of expanding the world. That or killing two or more dragons is enough to create rifts leading everywhere including Cantha.

It is very hard to showcase ones power without it being through gameplay. I’ll return to Dark Souls because it’s one of the best and most widely spread recent examples: you know a boss was kitten not only because it seemed to be, but because it could wreck your kitten at any moment if you didn’t play your absolute best. Bosses that had menacing appearance on the game like the dragons were actually considered “meh” for the same reason you consider Zhaitan meh, you literally just keep shooting him until he dies. Mordremoth was an improvement in spite of the bugs: you’re actually fighting a manifestation of his raw power and grappling with his mind.

The problem there was that there was no context; because HoT was so rushed, even compared to LS1 and 2 (which made Scarlet look more of a Mary Sue than Mordremoth, a terrible mistake), we had no reason to believe our PC would be able to grapple with an Elder Dragon in a fight of minds. No matter how we spin that he was being weakened on the Dragon’s Stand event and that we had help of the rest of our group, it makes no sense from a lore point of view that we are psychological juggernauts that surpass even Snaff or other memorable characters, and that Mordremoth simply can’t take us. So they were quite correct in pushing hard mechanics, but ironically failed on the other part, as Mordremoth never appeared to be menacing, only his puppet Scarlet did.

The story of Tyria has been retconned in a certain way from one game to another, so that it could fit the Gods being from outside (from the Mists) and being mere visitors as opposed to creators. Magic in particular has been fully rewritten. Even so, the GW1 user manual has some of the information you seek I believe. Other than that, it’s all spread on dialogues really, in the case of GW2 much of it is written on the Priory files in game, at Lornar’s Pass, and a lot is discussed/written on the Arah explorable (which is sadly hard to access with the low amount of people doing it).

Nah let us just rehash Living World stuff instead, since the playerbase is closer to that lore!… this is an awesome suggestion but I highly doubt Anet will ever [have time to during the game’s life and] actually care for it.

Or maybe they’re just saving the juicy stuff (Underworld, Realm of Tomernt, Fissure of Woe, Abbadon’s past, Palawa Joko, Ordran and many more) for when they really need to get people pumped up to return to the game. But that might be wishful thinking much.

Shiro Tagachi was very hard for everyone without Pain Inverter or some sort of damage punishing mechanics, the last mission before Abbadon in Nightfall was a true challenge to get the master reward, and you have to put yourself on Prophecies doing Lich with only prophecies skills to realize how it could actually be hard. Claiming what is or what isn’t challenging is an exercise in futility as seen by the Raid threads on Raid forums. Anet is already doing the best they possibly can by having an extreme mote for people who want it to at least look like a last epic boss. And it does so objectively, because the enemies on Hearts and Minds extreme cause many stacks of condis and huge damage that instantly knock unprepared players down. Dark souls does the same with its New Game+++++++ (mere upscaling of damage) and no one is complaining.

There is a huge post on the lore forums about Sya (formerly Symon) and whether or not she was using mesmer magics to appear female or had went through a complete switch, and it was confirmed makeover kits are canon. I know it’s a silly excuse, I know it’s just probably lazy programming assets (you drag anything from the NPC table and match to any dialogue, no need for particular assignments, yay a single loop is now the whole NPC loading scheme!) but it’s not immersion breaking as the OP claims, because it makes sense within the lore.

These examples are very easy to dismiss as intentional; Phil is very dubious to claim he’s Thackeray’s cousin, to the point even your character says “You might hurt yourself from stretching so much” or something along these lines. So it’s very likely he’s indeed just a guy hoarding makeover’s to play out his facades(perfect gender change and complete physical transformations are canon on Tyria). The circus even more so, I mean in a world full of magic how the heck would you entertain people if not with actual magic? They are probably mesmers or have their own makeover’s, and changing appearance randomly just to mess with you would be no surprise…given they are crazy enough to be living on the freaking Fire Islands already.

The historian also, only changes appearance after you (SPOILERS) return to him from the Consortium Tradesman, which is also when you get the chance to lie to him and go back to LA to get the krait oil. This is very important, you as a character gets the chance to notice the very purposeful transformation on his appearance and either keep trusting it or dismiss him as a spy of sorts. So we need to see that on more NPCs before claiming it’s a bug or ruins immersion,such as merchants or among other races (do charr models change on the Citadel? Are there even different Kodans?)

These skills were supposed to provide a unique flavor and diversity to builds, but were put down to the ground with absurd cooldowns so that every race was equal (no race equality puns intended, but yeah…).

Ironically, on a side note, Sylvari necros now have the best possible necro elite, which is Take Root, that has less cooldown and same bleeding duration as the Jagged horrors :P

The ancient dwarves survived a previous dragonrise and lived among the Jotun, Seers, Forgotten and Mursaat as one of the great elder races. They occupied a lot of the Shiverpeaks and had what were probably very impressive fortifications at the time, also they were industrious like the Charr and had many tech capabilities. Do not let EOTN fool you that they were “just there”. What we saw with Ogden and Jalis was a mere glimpse of what the dwarves used to be; their time has come and gone and we were only there for the last couple minutes of their story, unfortunately.

Even the OP missed the point of his own post. What he first argued and it is arguably a very good point regardless of what you all think of raids, is that it was not the best idea to lock the first 3 legendary armor sets to a raid.

It has been said time and time again by Anet themselves, that armor development is the bulk of development time, among everything else. So all these maps you see being released, all the voice acting, all the beautifully designed environments and all the achievements and all the balance patches? Their development time is actually dwarfed by the effort to develop new armor, according to the devs themselves.

So, it doesn’t matter if you think everyone could be raiding (and I strongly agree to that), what matters it that few people even care to, and the ones that do try come here to complain most of the time. And, as much as we try to argue that the raid team is only 5 people and the others are doing something else, well what are they doing? The legendary armor you actually need to raid in order to acquire! So, indirectly, raids are indeed taking up a lot of development (think of the armor design team having to animate 3 sets of legendary armor: how many original sets could they have released for other modes without these in the meanwhile?).

LS3 SPOILERS AHEAD=========

I think it is not that safe to assume the orb is tied to the DSD, given the Krait
found it lying around the depths and it wards against Zhaitan’s death spectrum. While we can argue that DSD’s magic would ward against Zhaitan, we already know for a fact (as per Taimi) something else that would be able to do it, which is the Chak and their death magic filtering organ. So it might be an artifact made for that specific purpose during a previous dragonrise, or even a petrified organ of some ancient creature that consumed leylines like both the Elder Dragons and the Chak.

Furthermore, this Elder Dragon in particular is purposefully shrouded in mystery and what little information we do have on it is either second hand or unreliable just because; I think Anet is going to play it out different from what they did to Mordremoth (Sylvari were dragon minions from their very conception and CoE already hinted at him) or any of the others, and it might be the case that they simply gave no hints at all whatsoever, and we must wait for some kind of Abbadon-ish “Ha It was me this whole time doing X and Y!” or something of sorts. I just hope this game lasts long enough for something to be done about it, because an Elder Dragon is not something you put there just for the sake of mystery like the Wizard Tower, and even this season (the Ring of Fire is literally the unending ocean’s doorstep!) should definitely have the DSD involved.

In GW1 a Halloween NPC called Nameless Lich would show up on the Shiverpeaks (https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Droknar's_Forge) and would say not much but, interestingly, it had a clearly female model. So that in game NPC alone would give leeway of claiming there can be more “female looking” Liches, though I doubt they have any specific gender bias once they’re powerful undying skeletons. NPC: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Nameless_Lich

Gonna have to agree with Absurdo concerning the necro nerf. Nerf! not bug fix: stopping movement after rolling was a bug, glyph of elemental power stacking burns when description said it would share cooldown was a bug, but this, nothing about the skill description neither about the jagged horrors was buggy or written wrong, they simply chose to basically remove the elite from play (the other elites, as they must know, are already out of play mostly, so necros are without decent elite just like elem).

Also, the minions didn’t really make or break anything even as 15 or more stacked: you’d still die to every single mechanic in any mode if you weren’t careful. They didn’t truly cleave that much on fractals, as you’d still see players going down to ettin on uncategorized and dying to lava elementals at volcano. They also did not bring that much damage to the necro table. We could barely keep up with the other condi builds by playing a necro, and now all it takes is anyone who is not a mesmer to be a better option than necro.

There’s also the argument that it was overboard to just summon a ton of AI and let them cleave stuff for you. This is the only sound argument but it fails to address how turrets or phantasms are so different; even if they don’t stay alive much like jagged horrors did, they were certainly not on a 180 secs cooldown, and a shatter mesmer can overwhelm an enemy by spamming phantasms much faster than any minion master build.

Lastly, the death magic trait is clearly inspired by GW1’s own death magic: you kill things, you use the dead things to spam minions, and your whole rotation is dependant upon the minions. Being a minion master player was highly unpopular due to micromanagement back in GW1 (trust me, you probably don’t want the option to further control/use your minions with utilities/etc. if they do it even barely similar to what it was before), but minion masters controlled by AI were pretty much used everywhere because of their effectiveness in cleaving and holding off melee damage. While GW2 is a whole different game, they did get some inspiration there: you can stack toughness from your undead “army” (not much of an army now), use them to blow up on someone’s face and deal poison damage, or you can use them to control and transfer conditions, which really should be a necromancer specialty (other classes can probably do just as much or more now even if you take plague signet). Well, you could do all that very effectively, but now you can only do all that for 30 seconds every 3 minutes, with a couple rats from “Rise!” here or there popping up just to say hi. So, I suppose the very 1-1-1 traitline for death magic was actually unintended, or at least the power creep from HoT nullified it, because it just can’t be used for jack now.

Well in a way it is a little economics sandbox, just not* his own lol. But then again, governments don’t really own people and…let us not dwell too heavily on this and just go with “John is testing the invisible hand of the market hypothesis” I guess.

OP, I think you’re stressed beyond the point of solving this in game: you probably need some rest from GW2. I must say, I do get stressed just like you do. I actually avoid picking up my druid and chrono even though they are the most wanted classes, merely out of performance anxiety. It also gets me impatient that people don’t listen to each other and won’t even see markers on the map and go there (even if they have a matching marker on their own head!).

In fact, the only group I actually felt comfortable raiding with was this guild I joined about a month ago but only started grouping them couple weeks ago. They run both training and exp and everyone who knows mechanics is already welcome to “exp”. Yesterday I had a semi smooth Sloth run with one of their exp groups (I knew the fight but only got as far as 30% before). We spent about an hour and a half doing it, true, but no one cursed at each other, and we all had a good laugh and got to kill it a min past enrage with our downstate. And rather than cursing everyone for low performance the commander/tank simply joked it off as “well it’s not fun if you kill it with too much time left!”. I’m kind of rambling just like you are lol, but what I mean is that you need to find a group that caters to whatever kind of anxieties you have (e.g if you’re a speedrunner type and get anxious about underperforming you should look for the 200+LI crowd..but you seem to want a more relaxed ambient like me so you join one of the guilds with more training runs, etc.).

Do you plan on switching stats constantly? Getting the ascended backpack from ember bay would actually be the shortest path.

If you didn’t get the PvP backpack started by now, it’s too late to get it this season. Since we don’t know how hard it will be to get it after this year ends, it’s a risk to start it now. So that leaves you with Ad Infinitum, which is heavily time gated by fractal research pages (about 3 months for 3 sets of 28 pages if you’re unlucky!), and is going to cost you thousands of gold. But it’s more viable than the PvP one if you didn’t start that yet.

The accessibility to raids I believe, is worse for people that are “kinda there” than for absolute newbies that haven’t done any boss before. Because if you have a couple LI’s from downing a few encounters, but still don’t know the harder ones (e.g Matt, Xera) and join a training run, you know you’re jumping onto a sinking ship: neither will you be able to carry the newbies because you need more training, nor will you have as much patience to have the encounter explained over and over and over and see people not listening over and over and over, and instead of actually training your role, you’ll just watch people wiping repeatedly over mechanics you already went through.

But you can’t join groups that are too exp either: most will politely tell you that you need more training if you try explaining you’re new but already familiar with many of the mechanics, or simply flat out ask for 80+ LI’s and leave you out for good. So basically (at least concerning lfg) there’s a vaccuum there; Xera training runs, for example, I think are completely absent if you’re not on a guild that runs you through it.

I suppose the solution would be for these people that already started on their raiding but are not quite there yet (e.g you wouldn’t join a VG training run to have it explained to you but you can’t join the LFM wing 1 50+ LI ones) to make their own groups like “LFM practice [Boss] (know the fight!)” or something like this. I do it myself sometimes but I feel like there should be much more of those around, because I think these people are the ones that actually want more access to raid (unlike a lot of the newbies that can’t/won’t listen and do not really learn the mechanics during a training run).

No balance to any class will change the game breaking mechanic of quickness and might. You can do whatever you want, but unless you simply take away everyone’s ability to maintain 25 stacks of might (all alone, 1 person in 10 can do this by him or herself!) and 100% quickness uptime (2 person in 8 is all it takes, I mean yeah what?!) then some classes will always be absolutely necessary and others will always be absolutely unnecessary. Because you now have a situation where that swinging hammer guardian actually doesn’t have to give up on speed, while that super fast hitting Shiro Rev is just as normal paced as everyone else with 100% quickness uptime. And let us not even dwell on the topic of classes that have no ways at all of competitively being either power or condi if they chose so, like necro.

Is that the most expensive effect on the game right now? seems like it is. How rare is it anyway? Mystic opened 100k bags and got none, a dude in LA the other day was pinging 5 of it after what he claimed to be 3500 bags.

I think Anet has opted out of boats with a very good lore excuse that they didn’t even touch (and won’t touch for quite some time apparently), since the Unending Ocean (and probably every adjacent sea if you go far enough from shore) is literally a tentacle hentai fest at the moment with the Deep Sea Dragon (he was kitten enough to drive the karka, the largos, the quaggan and the apparently immense and magically powerful krait civilization away from the depths).

As for airships, the only limitation would be travelling across diferent instances; there are very huge maps around (of which ember bay is a good example), and an itinerant airship that travels accross it from time to time would be fitting for some event I guess. We could also have a static airship that keeps going around and we can go to and from it, hell maybe it’s the only safe spot on a map, e.g we’re deep inside Jormag’s territory and after 30 mins down on the frozen tundra we get a nasty debuff lest we get back to itinerant airship or use some item, don’t know how moving waypoint would work though. I don’t think there are any developing or engine limitations: dynamic events happen all accross the map (i.e moving events) and NPCs even before HoT guild missions would be able to circumvent most of the map in a circular manner. Controlling a personal airship would be a problem (and unnecessary, as the asura gates and waypoints, as well as our gliders are hands off way more practical) but having a moving part of the map I don’t think would be so hard at all. Also, this will never happen, but WvW airship battles would just be so hot.

https://img.ifcdn.com/images/02cb71313846916a55502a587380e691c3353805fff58714b2bf01e2e85b7461_1.jpg Sorry this was too tempting to resist;

Speaking seriously though, don’t forget the achievement points and the very act of collecting should be rewards in itself. Not to say the rewards couldn’t be more creative, but eventually they do run out of shinies to give out (specially concerning accessories: this is fashion wars and those do not show up, so apart from their description…they are basically indistiguishable and therefore equally desirable/undesirable).

@Malediktus:Well that’s good and bad to know at the same time! So the +stats+AR infusions are all equally “hard” apparently. Just find it sad that the refractors are jewels so you can’t really apply them to ascended stuff (or can you?), which makes them pretty much something to wear on LA.

@Mystic: Some guy was on LA showcasing 5 of them from ~3500 bags; I assume they can drop because, what other way is there? Mystic Forge recipe or something? He had the aura too so it wasn’t just pinging randomly. I would say you’re unlucky but 100 000 bags is already bordering the law of large numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers) and if none dropped, well kitten that’s a low appearance rate, so low I guess it wouldn’t hurt for Anet to reveal it :P

Wow you got like no infusions at all. Compared to baubble infusions which you can buy (I should have bought them, kitten it), and the ghostly ones you can drop from gors and/or buy from glenna/TP, that must be like the rarest infusion by a loooong stretch. I wonder if it’s intended…

The other issue regarding the armor would be if you wanted to mix’n’match (it’s an armor and not an outfit so…). Would a standalone piece of equipment change its appareance? Could you have transformer boots with otherwise scallywag (literally) armor? That would open a lot of nice possibilities, but I’m afraid Anet might simply pull “it only animates for the whole armor” stunt if they have [even worse] clipping problems than they already will (notice the guy on video had no backpacks and no shield of course).

^ Well, to be very specific you’re right; I suppose what I actually mean is: the very collection you need to obtain the armor is tied to the Thicket, as you are required to get items which are very specific to the bosses and to the environment: like the chromatic ooze from the Juggernaut collection (among countless other examples), they can’t and shouldn’t be obtainable elsewhere. It just so happens that such items are inside raids instead of open maps, but how is it really different from other legendaries aside from that?

I think there should be more sets of legendary armor available from other sources instead of normalizing everything. In Guild Wars 1, you had a variety of “elite” skins obtainable from content (vabbi armor, obsidian armor, etc etc.) and if you wanted a certain skin you had to get it from the specific content that gave the currency for it. There was no “well this one is too hard and too few people do it”, you either go there and do it or don’t get the armor.

This is only fair and I don’t understand this trend of “I should be able to get everything doing anything!”. No you shouldn’t, I don’t want to get experimental envoy armor which is lore tied to the Forsaken Thicket by instead killing randoms in WvW or farming 5000000 woods on the shiverpeaks, that would make no sense, would break immersion, and would devalue the skin to the point it would just be ugly. Not like it’s not ugly already, but right now it’s something ugly you can be “reasonably proud” of, because it means you went through a lot of some specific content. Going around Ravenwatching to get Nevermore is also something to be “reasonably proud” of, because you spent your own time doing a very particular task to achieve something, regardless of the value that other people give to said task or said achievement, and that’s rewarding in itself. If the devs have taken Psychology 101, they will never release this set outside of raids, and will release other armor instead.

Glyph of Elemental Power: The trigger chance of this ability has been increased from 25% to 100%. Weakness duration has been reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds. Internal cooldown can now be shared between elementalists. This ability will no longer apply conditions to nonenemies.

So, I want to ask what is the meaning of this line; what is the internal cooldown of GoEP for a single person? and for two? This is important because, within one day of the patch, my guild was already stacking tempests to smoothly finish off raids by accumulating absurd amounts of burning damage (I don’t think this condition was intended to stack past 50 or so ticks at once outside of world bosses?). Now, I do have a tempest and I do like playing it, but if GoEP is not bugged that seems pretty game breaking to me. Perhaps not much on WvW because other sources of damage and CC would obliterate a full tempest zerg, but elsewhere? Say goodbye to your necros, thieves, etc. because anything will quite literally melt in front of a couple tempests.

Well concerning raids, I guess necros are going to be the only ones definitely dropped, with guardians favored due to “Feel my Wrath!” helping Chronos in their more difficult job. I think FoTM is still going to be stock full of necros, even without jagged horrors they can cleave through anything easily. But mostly they’re back from barely feasible to complete trash on min-maxing endgame content, oh well.

Diminishing returns make sense for the game as a whole, but during festival activities? Hell no, this is the little time we have to play them. I took a week off to play SAB and it was worth every minute; we won’t see it again for a whole year, so why keep the loot at bay?

Didn’t Taimi conclude that chak could filter out death spectrum when digesting leyline? Thinking of how much chak there was so close to Mordremoth (I bet millions and millions, the way they swarm and because, if Gerents are the highest “tier” there were at least 4 around if not more spreading even more chak), would it be a long stretch to think that his big leyline eating tree trunk would simply not be getting enough death magic? So, even though he could have absorbed it and used against us, maybe he just didn’t have enough, because the chak were (still are) eating all of it on that side of Maguuma. Primordus on the other hand, went for the southernmost leyline and chunked on a completely clear leyline, thus getting a huge portion of death magic. Or something like that.

As other people said on above, the fight indeed is heavily punishing to melee: in fact, there is no way to stand on the same 4 panels most of the time (which would be an “acceptable” melee locking him into position) without confusion cleaving through whatever heals you bring, on top of the third, circular auto attack.

However, I think rather than changing this, Anet should introduce more range punishing content for Fractals; as it is right now, there is absolutely no instance at all where it is not the absolutely best idea ever to simply bring two (or five!) necros and cleave through every damage with jagged horrors. There is nothing as interesting as Sloth or VG split phase, or even escort where you’d be punished for going away from your team. Even Bloomhunger is absolutely doable once you’re a 5 man ranged team. Snowblind boss has an attack that you can dodge into him to avoid, but it’s not really punishing to range players since they won’t even be on the range of the attack anyway.

Since fractals have no time limit it is the perfect content to force players into bringing original hybrid builds that can off-range or off-melee when required to. But no, let’s make some “elite” content that has a clear cut meta for everyone to blindly follow. Fractal team could learn a lot about making use of the environment from raid team (they are actually, but Bloomhunger is still not quite there yet).

@Khisanth:

It would not be a long stretch to justify Toughness increasing CC capabilities as a measure of how mean you are (literally, how tough you appear to be!). Traditional RPGs already employ this, as it is sometimes easier to scare away enemies with higher constitution/CON (or conversely, to entice, but that’s a whole other topic); I’m not sure this is the original meaning of what a “Defiance Bar” is, but it would definitely be fitting if a “tough” being (which might not be the same as a “strong” one) could more easily break whatever “defiance” an enemy has, being tougher and all.

@Kite:

Granted, I also acknowledge it could come in with an expansion and with a lot of planning time for players. Also, keep in mind I do agree with most of it, and would love to see it happening, but I still don’t see it happening anytime soon. About the dodging stuff though, you’re right, perhaps it would make classes more evenly relevant instead of prioritizing any one in particular, but since it would be Anet and not us doing the balance, it might just transfer the waste to the other side, i.e, we start seeing CC specialized teams, built to stomp as fast as possible, and zerker gets done for (which is just as unhealthy, as we both seem to agree). Nevertheless, it’s a good idea, read this devs!