You won’t believe the amount of people sitting on their mystic toilet all day everyday throwing greens, blues, runes and what not inside. Zommoros strongly disagrees with your proposal! …seriously though, I think the drops are fine, now with the “Salvage all” option. Even without buying extra inventory space, you can still go through a whole round of vinewrath without looking at inventory to salvage.
Besides, things have to be consistent. You can’t change the whole scheme of drops just because a character has reached a certain level; GW2 even went further than that, and normalized drops across every map, so you can go do events back in Snowden Drifts with your high level char and still expect to get champion boxes and that kind of stuff. This is great and a mile beyond what most MMO’s used to do before, and I believe changing drops at level 80 would be a step back from this.
I must say that, personally, I love GW2 because it gets me bored sometimes.
Think of it kind of like a relationship (of sorts, not necessarily a romance). When you start you’re all fired up and passionate; you want to spend every waking hour [playing the game] and can never get enough of it. However, a time comes when finally that first flame starts to fade out, and you start to see things going wrong (that were always there but you notice them now) and start to get a feeling of “every day is exactly the same”. Then you come to the conflict that you don’t want to stop playing, but since you’re just not into it anymore, you simply stop.
Then, in my case at least, after I stop for weeks or even several months (I stopped playing during the whole of S2 to be honest), something comes out and I’m suddenly pumped up again, then I hook up (or log on, the analogy is getting mixed up here!) and spend some more time playing the game. When I do that, I know I’ll get bored again (I stopped for a month after LW3 was first out, because I farmed rubies so fast that ran out of things to collect), but I also know I can get back anytime with no penalties, unlike in WoW where it was social/gear suicide to leave even if for a couple weeks.
TL;DR: This game is a long term relationship, learn to go through its downs and you’ll be rewarded during the ups.
This achievement is unsatisfying in every way. While I refuse to give out some ancient artifact to the literal Monsanto of Tyria aka Consortium, I have no idea how can the PC allow a priory agent to conduct an experiment with the shadowstone in spite of all the red herrings, and now I have no idea what actually happened to my char. Which was the point of the quest to begin with, so yeah, at least I don’t smell like Krait.
If we are to believe the Tablets found on Ember Bay, the other elder races had their fair share of guilt during the last dragon rise; According to the writer of the tablets, not only did the races refuse to fight against the dragons, the Forgotten apparently “tricked” or gave up on the Mursaat at some point. After all that, it would be no surprise that the Mursaat race chose to leave the world rather than surrender their magic to someone who offered no help before.
What would make more sense, however, is that the Mursaat were actually a warmongering race (their eagerness to die to our GW1 heroes on the Battle for Lion’s Arch goes a long way in showing that), not unlike the charr, and were warned by the other elder races that the Dragons were actually important to maintain a detailed balance of the different kinds of magic. The Seers probably sought to create surrogates to hold all the magic for a long time, but the Mursaat would not settle for anything less than destroying the dragons and whatever stands in front of them.
All that said, Lazarus is certainly not like the other Mursaat anymore. To begin with he probably has no reason to fear Titans or most creatures from the Mists, as well as basically anyone who is neither a Dragon nor the PC. Even if he (very likely) is going to betray us, I highly doubt it will be as simple as a “Ha jokes on you I’m actually a bad guy!” scenario. I trust the writers at Anet that they’re going to do more justice than that to what now is a demigod who had 250 years to think up of ways to torment the younger races of Tyria.
If you turn on text from NPCs you’ll see it appear on chat quite often; Maybe it’s just something niche they added, or something that they sneaked in from the next fractal (remember the “Chaos” one has 2 more “episodes” to be released)
The price difference is big, but take into account the amount you’d spend in materials (and time) to merely get to 500 crafting (and you need 500 in nearly every craft if you intend to make the 3 weights of armor) and it starts becoming attractive actually.
Well I stand corrected, bloodstone high and dragon corruption are profoundly different in nature, but that doesn’t solve the issue of a [newborn, perhaps benevolent, but still very powerful] dragon adopting us (the walking machine of doom and destroyer of worlds, mary sue of the mary sues, master of nature, etc etc.) as her champion, i.e mental slavery until she explicitly decides to (or someone else does) cleanse us of her own magics.
Last line for no spoilers, close now if you don’t want to see it!
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So, during last episode of Living World we learned that 1) Magic works similarly to light and has a spectrum; 2) Each dragon holds a major portion of some ‘frequencies’ of magic, and upon release of it, others (which may or may not include non-dragons) can get hold of said power. This is not much different from what Kormir did to Abbadon, for he was supposedly going to tear apart the Realm of Torment upon death, so in the end it seems like Tyria and the Mists are held together by a detailed balance of different kinds of magic.
But what about “corruption” then? In LS3E1 we saw people going crazy over large amounts of bloodstone magic consumption. Wouldn’t dragon corruption merely be another form of this magic sickness, just amplified and/or fine tuned by its bearer?
Now this wouldn’t be so relevant if it wasn’t for Aurene (still inside the egg back in Tarir) literally summoning us from the Ring of Fire to safeguard her, not to mention the many instances where the PC was hailed as “her champion”, and also the visions the PC has from time to time (we even knew “her” name beforehand!).
It may not seem like that right now, but there’s no way around this as far as I’m concerned: that thing’s a dragon, and it’s stockpiled on Glint and Mordremoth’s magic (even has the long face of its cousin), and it’s not communicating with us through “good vibes and the best of intentions”. No, if we truly are “Aurene’s champions” that must mean we are “corrupted” in a sense, right? I didn’t see this being addressed anywhere, and the PC+Dragon Watch seems completely oblivious to the fact that he/she has been going through hell and back just like any minion would do for its dragon. So what do you guys think? Even if Aurene is ‘good’, is that even good to us? Are we becoming what we seek to destroy?
It’s easy to shave off destroyers not being attacked by assuming the mursaat defenses are triggered by biological markers, and destroyers are merely corrupted frames of molten rock. The part about the Crystal Sea though, doesn’t make sense at all. The wiki claims both Margonites and Luxons sailed there before the Exodus of the Gods (or rather, that both sea faring tribes were confused out after Abbadon fell, and we don’t know who was who), so that would mean it connected to the Unending Ocean for hundreds of years, probably during the last time dragons were around as well.
It could also be on purpose, if Lazarus himself or someone else wanted to write the tablets as a decoy or as a sort of false version of history (or romance even, maybe some White Mantle got bored!). That would be really bad though: creating an entire set of collectibles over a false recollection of history? Not the best storytelling I tell you. I’d rather think they merely overlooked it from the content being rushed, and will eventually fix it.
Aurene actually shares the Mouth of Mordremoth’s look, albeit it has to fit a much smaller frame and thus appears to be infantile. Her design makes plenty of sense considering the egg was explicitly shown to have absorbed a quarter of Mordremoth’s own plant magic. Remember Gleam only had Glint’s own magic and nurturing to go by, so it would make sense its buildup was similar to Glint herself.
Aurene was “conceived” by Glint somehow and used Mordremoth’s magic to hatch, so I suppose she’s a very abnormal case. Besides that is not even that cute of a dragon, it’s bearing the uncanny valley route if you ask me, because it doesn’t fit with the rest of Tarir’s visuals (but it makes sense if you assume Mordy’s magic would shape her frame).
It would make a lot of sense if that is what Lazarus considers to be a “virtuous pursuit” as Kormir already did it before with Abbadon. Then again, if this is how magic works for Elder Dragons, there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t work like that concerning the gods either. Would be nice if that explained out why the gods worked out together to begin with (they had to join because each one only had control over certain parts of the magic spectrum) and why other gods went to war with the others: perhaps Abbadon’s “gift of magic” consisted of spreading the whole of magic everywhere, which sounds as dangerous as lighting up a star on your neighborhood considering the new facts. There’s also Menzies, who was probably (or still is) seeking out Balthazar’s share of magic, as well as Dhuum who was in slumber during some time and during that, Grenth ruled over the Underworld magic.
I don’t believe Anet had everything laid down clearly and set on stone upon release, but they probably did want to leave as many options as possible, hence why we have many other cases of “totally not portals to another area boys” across every direction. I mean, just go north of frostgorge sound where there is a waypoint near an obviously frozen portal leading to Jormag’s domain, the door to Crystal Desert locked by the queen, etc.
They certainly didn’t plan a release order for these (if they did, HoT wouldn’t have been the mess it was, and Mordremoth’s arc would have been much more intense since he should have been the most personal one so far), but whenever they feel like going somewhere, the way is already there, quite literally.
I don’t quite know the purpose of playing here, but it’s the only MMO I can play nowadays really. I suppose it has something to do with the community; I feel welcome into any group regardless of the time I spent not playing before (I took a 2 year break and hopped back into the game). It’s like I somehow “belong” to the whole context of whatever is going with the game, Anet has done a really good job of making the player “be someone” inside their game world, and that’s not even considering the Lore. It’s ironic because the playerbase is so much more uniform than games like WoW (everyone is at different gear tiers, and they’re basically locked from each other, gameplay wise), and somehow I feel like it matters when I stop to revive someone or another person arrives at the champion I’m soloing to help me finish it. Go figure.
Non Raiders blocked from XP bar spirit shards
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: maxwelgm.4315
What we really need is a toggle on/off button to choose whether or not we actually want to level masteries or get spirit shards, anyway. I doubt they planned to give out spirit shards solely from tomes of knowledge after lvl 80, because they are so rare outside of PvP to begin with.
This a much better solution than implementing another separate mastery line. Why is it not simply “mastery” anyway? I got gliding from HoT masteries but I can glide anywhere, and I can grab items as commander mastery anywhere too, but have to farm the much more difficult central mastery points, why not farm any point for any mastery? It’s not like the F2P crowd is getting those, either, so why force us to play either part of the content? It’s basically the same problem OP is facing: he wants to get more shards (and he should be able to, regardless of his stance on raiding), but his exp line is sealed shut from exp belonging to mastery lines.
EDIT: regarding the voip and raid thing; I am mute IRL so I put up a LF guild party on the game’s LFG tool mentioning that. I got into a guild and didn’t really run too much with them (currently I’m not playing because of work), but knowing my problem beforehand, they were really comprehensive and thankfully I had no issues concerning disrespect and such. I’m sure no matter your condition, someone will be up to understand it, but it might take some time
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
Canonically, we should always remember our PC is a mistwalker, in the sense that he is often seen at the Heart of the Mists, the WvW borderlands or inside fractals. Now, the Mists are a ‘proto reality’ and it can spur into existence anything and everything there was, is, and will ever be. Including silly anime wings and mini queen Jennah’s that follow you around just because she was inside your bag minutes ago.
Did the Mursaat always employ soul energy to their crafts? That would be a good reason for a pile of tormented souls twisted into monstrosity hunt them down for eternity.
The logic here is the same everyone wholeheartedly agrees with for raids: if you’re pugging, getting to play “hard” content with people you supposedly don’t know, you don’t want to take chances; why would I take that glass cannon tempest/PS war that I’m not sure knows his damage rotation while dodging agony stacks? Mobs have more raw toughness inside Fractals therefore he would actually be on higher pressure to get it right than inside a raid, even though avoiding death is much easier.
If you really think necro is that suboptimal concerning damage that people should endanger their runs by bringing in more wars/mes/tempests/whatever you should make analysis much more in depth, say, by comparing runtimes with the same players on different classes or by using the DPS thing on LA simulating fractal situations (e.g you have to dodge every 4 seconds and rotate around the mob while dealing damage at range, like Bloomhunger).
I guess it wouldnt be enough for an expansion to “only” feature the Crystal Desert; at least they should put in the other Charr homelands and/or the Scavenger’s Causeway. HoT featured all of the Maguuma Jungle, and so far only a tiny lil small map from LW, and people complained/are still complaining to death how small it was for an expansion (specially because it literally cost another full game).
Bubbles better be referenced to or better yet partake with some minions in some way this LW or things will start getting creepy; he might as well have literally become the sea floor by now akin to Modremoth and the Jungle, except the Oceans are much, much bigger and there’s much more Leyline area to cover.
That’s also assuming he had nothing big to worry about, since he’s driven the Krait and Karka away, and probably whatever else creepy thing was down there, so apart from destroyers here and there I guess nothing stopped him on his track to sea domination.
Now, the idea that something ocean sized is covering the whole (or a big part of) sea floor with nasty tentacles, by directly corrupting the water around it, on a planet that has A LOT of sea floor area to cover (Tyria), amidst magic surges and its (presumably larger than all the other dragon’s) minions, and it does NOTHING to the continents, not even some tidal waves, makes no sense at all.
The answers here clearly demonstrate the general intolerance and impatience you’ll be faced with by playing raids. Those saying he should have been kicked, really? This is literally baby’s first wing, anyone can type the explanation for this part while facetanking the kittening boss, and most stuff is done over voice anyway.
But alas, you also sounded very unwilling to have a dialogue there, considering how they cold kicked you. If you were all there communicating with each other properly you’d have discussed out that you should stay close to Glenna at all times so she doesn’t die, and the commander would have correctly informed you that the Warg could be focused at that time without worrying about the debuff. This case looks like most other cases, where neither side communicated clearly before the beginning of the content.
That said, it is wrong that they kicked you even if you didn’t communicate much since the raid started; intolerance and impatience shouldn’t be met with even more of it. But it will keep happening, because the answers you got from this thread are just a hint of the general raid population, so just try and lay out the plan very clearly to people even if they are a supposedly “exp” group (e.g “hey guys so just to get it straight we’re keeping someone close to Glenna at all times right?”). Better be kicked before the raid even starts if you say something they deem unnaceptable to their almighty experience, than to lose 20 mins like you said.
This is exactly the kind of Stephen-King-Lovecraftian stuff I was expecting from this game since ever, only I was expecting it from the Deep Sea Dragon, but that works too. Great storytelling job right there to lay hints and details around instead of throwing everything for us to feed on (kind of like the Souls series and I love that).
People have stopped playing dungeons, but if you took a peek inside the Honor of the Waves dungeon you’d come across some nasty Icebrood Quaggans that will make you think again about them being weak or cute…
How much money would the Consortium make from this? If the answer has over 9000 digits it’s bound to happen.
I’m not sure if that happens with minions too, but I’m pretty sure my condi necro transfers all the confusion we get from the panels directly to him. I suspect the minion condis were also being transfered because he had 70 stacks of confusion for about 10 mins last daily (EDIT: actually I just realized how long 10 mins are, and it felt really fast so I guess it was just a couple haha), and that put him down, really, really fast. So I guess he should be immune to the panels other than the shield breaking? Otherwise I see no reason to do anything else other than 5 condi transfer necros and sit on the panels. I also believe that, it would be a good opportunity to force players into a hybrid playstile, by giving him an attack which only hits outside of melee range on top of his pull attack. That would be even more of a mechanic than the green panels from VG, since a single player could have a single playstyle there (range or melee).
You’re right, GW1 had whole maps for the sole purpose of being there (like the Poisoned Outcrops , which was one my favorites even), and the only thing to do really was maybe getting one elite skill or two and vanquishing. And there was a lot of fun areas to explore that would reveal the lore behind the place (for the case of the outcrops, it was a mountain area full of giant bones and petrified tendrils, way above the sulfurous sands of the desolation, suggesting this race probably lived at or, at least went up to the mountains when the Crystal Sea was turned into the Crystal Desert).
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
That’s actually a very good solution to all the unwanted insignias people have lying around! I second this.
Just to be clear to OP, every Mursaat has those feathered wings. And yes, it would be hell of an awesome LW reward (please, please don’t make it a gemstore item).
So lately I’ve been seeing a very particular trend on the LFG; I’ll explain what I mean with examples:
- Doing fractal dailies, that day it was Mai Trin, Aether and Swamp I think. I go into LFG and join a team titled exactly “T4 Meta’s 1 DRUID 4 NECROS ONLY”. We go into Fractal 100 and dude start stacking and taking a lil bit of agony damage from the asura champion. Then my other teammates ask how much AR he has, and turns out it’s 145. They them proceed to say “rip” and vote kick soon after he types “Well I’m gonna pull out a tears of alba and the singularity will give enough AR anyway”. We die not long after and I leave without saying a word. Nothing big, that happens when you pug, so I join another one with a more friendly “T4 meta’s everyone welcome” title and casually run through (kinda slowly even) my dailies. After I’m done, out of curiosity I go back to LFG, and what do I see? Those same players, with a party of 4 now, “T4 Meta’s NECRO ONLY EXP”. Huh, I guess they got unlucky with so many bad players joining their experiencied group.
- Another day, I’m done with the other 2 dailies (uncat and something else, no matter) and only swamp left. So I join a team asking “77 be exp”, well ain’t that my lucky day that I was in another condi meta team with a druid and 4 necros, we’re gonna steamroll this. Since everyone is exp they clumsily claimed “well we must get ready for wisps at 25%” and jump right into the boss. 4 wipes later and a lot of 2 guys fighting over not dodging/not ressing, we get to 25% and are not able to get wisps in time. Bloomhunger sends us back to oblivion, resets, and I leave without saying a word. Well such is life pugging, so I simply hop up on another group and do swamp alongside 2 mesmers, a druid and a necro. Run is so smooth I end up redoing the other 2 with them, no one asked anyone else about being experienced but we all spontaneously dropped personal waypoints to wisps we would get at 25%, and everyone kinda already had traited for survival except for one guy that was no hassle ressing here and there during there fight. I finish the dailies and go to LFG to get the fractal pages, lo and behold, there was one of the guys from previous run “77 EXP ONLY DODGE PLS” all that time.
What I mean by these (and there’s like hundreds more like the ones above I remember of) is not a complaint that I can’t find teams to do the content with (I clearly can and do, it’s no hassle and I’m not being unfairly kicked or anything), neither is it a demand that people take in someone who has no AR or no experience to a T4 fractal run. What I want here is to give a suggestion to those struggling to find groups who are likewise experienced and want a smooth fractal/raid run like they do. Perhaps “LFG EXP ONLY NO NOOBS DODGE OR KICK” is not the best way to go about it. Perhaps you’re only hindering yourself because you’re looking for perfect scoring players, when it would be even faster to just go through the content with laidback ones instead of spending so much time looking.
Asking that people meet prerequisites is a double edged blade: if you’re not flexible, you will get to join people who are just as (or even less) inflexible as you are being, and there is a high chance you will end up fighting yourselves instead of understanding each other’s shortcomings and actually joining forces, no matter how good you think you are. I find it very ironic that, after pugging for years (even before the LFG feature came in, back when dungeons were the bomb), I statistically obtain much better results from laidback teams who take almost anyone in, than when I join the so called experienced farmers who spend a half hour trying to find their soulmates on LFG. So, maybe take some time to look at your own attitude to see if there’s room for more tolerance (which does not mean taking in people who are clearly not ready for the content, but you can talk to them instead of cursing!), and I promise your experience, if it’s not very good currently, will become much better.
We know Titans come from concentrations of tormented souls, there were many inside the Foundry of Failed Creations because the Fury was somehow “twisting” the souls into Titans.
That does not exclude natural formation of Titans wherever there are large amounts of lingering, tormented souls. We have good reason to believe Gorseval was formed in a similar manner, and we could probably run into more Titans as LW3 goes on (bloodstone powered Titans from enslaved souls?).
So, while we clearly killed every single Titan we ever went into contact with during GW1, they seem to be naturally occurring to an extent, and we could count from them existing around somewhere, even if it’s some backwater waste inside the Mists.
It has been asked for (to make use of GW1 lore be it things our heroes actually did or not) since the very release of Fractals with the Lost Shores, and yet what we got for new fractals were all from Living World 1 and 2, if even. GW1 lore is a gold mine for fractals but for some reason it was possible for 5 people to dish out three raid wings with 3 bosses each and unique mechanics that were so good they got copy-pasted everywhere else, in the span of few months, while we have the same fractals since ever and got a Lego one to boot. /rant
Hmmm, you’re right Konig, so far we’ve only seen this drug like effect coming from ‘bloodstone touched’ magic. Actually thinking back, we have no evidence that people went mad around Zhaitan neither Mordremoth, and they released a hell of a lot of magic.
The point about them only exploding if unstable though, is harder to come to terms with, for me at least. Even if it requires “going unstable”, so far the bloodstones were shown as a passive mean of storing magic (to my knowledge there is no reference claiming the Seers or the gods could actually control magic influx, it merely soaked up everything it could find). Even if there are means to harness (in the sense of controlling what already is inside the stone) this energy, it seems inevitable that it will eventually grow up to this critical and unstable point. Unless we pull some Asura Ex Machina and the almighty Zinn has some leftover research concerning a controlled bloodstone reactor at least.
And you also raised the good question of how the bloodstone was even cut in pieces to begin with, if a mere crack from the White Mantle caused it to wildly spawn outward, and that before reaching critical point. Perhaps the particular thing about the bloodstone is that its main source of magic are souls: this either means that souls have A LOT of magic stored inside them, much more so than any other magic Tyrians come across daily, or that souls hold a special kind of magic energy, which is both addictive and destructive.
With the new lore presented with this LW episode, we know that individuals absorbing too much magic (this time from the Bloodstone, but it is heavily implied it goes for any magic, presumably only not the divine one) can go mad like drug addicts, to the point they’d die over their thirst for it. That rises yet another interesting parallel between Abbadon and our own endeavors; Not only we are releasing magic unchecked onto Tyria just like he was, it is apparently driving people mad and causing much more destruction than it could ever cause good.
Just take a look at Bloodstone Fen, bloodstones are no more than nukes, they even have magic fallout to boast. So, while Abbadon could have been caring and wanted what was best for humanity in a way, he was arguably not doing good at all even before being tormented, by running around giving literal nukes to everyone. Alas, I bet the Margonites did not rule the Crystal Sea with their amazing pacifist policies before Abbadon transformed them. Then again, that is indeed akin to Prometheus, as one could argue no good left without evil came from the flame of knowledge either.
That would be awesome. Being RNG and taking a long, very long time would be fitting to the nature of fractals. It was supposed to be this long stretch of content we’d supposedly want to play endlessly, effectively for as long as the game is available, and right now we have nothing to strive for in this regard (the legendary, if not time gated, would be able to be acquired within a day). I for one would certainly play GW2 until it either went down for good or I got that shiny piece of extra rare equip. It’s already fashion wars anyway, so we might as well have our own Armani here.
Has the matter of ascension not been dealt with already with LW3E1? I kind of assumed the strong magic that Jade Armors pulled against us was spectral agony, and Taimi’s counter magic is what allow us to pull through it. This is not a case of cheap solution either: Zinn already gave us something like that during War in Kryta for GW1, a temporary buff equivalent to both infusion and true sight: asuras have, centuries ago, actually skipped the ascension process concerning the Mursaat.
Even after reading all the very informed posts here, I still can’t grasp the concept of the Mursaat actually rushing themselves into battle and dying. Could the Titans really track them so well inside the mists?
What I mean is, what is the actual nature of the gift of true sight? If they are merely invisible in a literal sense, Titans or us being able to see them is still no good, if they can simply hop onto the mists to a random fractal/unformed region and keep running potentially forever from danger. Why even come back after their first dragon rise? What is there in Tyria that was so precious to them, if they were scared enough to run away in the first place?
Maybe there are some long term effects of being inside the mists, the Mursaat didn’t want to neither could undertake. Or maybe it required juicy Tyrian magic that they ran out of, or maybe there is something actually keeping them here, but Anet, if I recall, never really explained that out. The concept of the Mursaat race is amazing but this particular point is pretty much a blank on their lore. I hope (actually, I profoundly expect) that whatever Lazarus’ virtuous goals comprise, will finally explain out what is the deal with Mursaat and the Mists.
In an increditble twist of events the mysterious asura turns out to be…drum rolls…Zinn!!!!!1!!!11!!!
No really, regardless of who it is, I can also only wonder what would it accomplish to destabilize fractals (as a stable one, according to Dessa, is much more research-friendly).
Bloomhunger is really fun to go at now, besides, it was GREAT that this one changed in particular – swamp was the worst fractal for so much time (swamps of the mist seems so far now…) and now it requires some actual management to beat.
Also, it’s not really that hard if everyone goes a bit more survivalist for that particular fight – I insisted my team brought more heals/aoe boons after our first wipe and we did get it second try.
The new Bloomhunger, I believe, is what many of us called for so hard: a challenging bit of content that did not introduce enrage timers to cheaply force us to go the damage route.
I would actually welcome this; People will always farm the game, no matter what. Giving dailies for every single map will stimulate people to “map train” and would bring variety to their farm table. I doubt even with current level of daily rewards, that it would be on par with AB multi-loot or even SW, so wouldn’t be game breaking either.
That variety in turn (playing a lot of different events and maps for their rewards, even if eventually the same ones in each map) would keep people feeling that the game is “fresh” and reassure the notion of just how immense our game world actually is (it is VERY huge already, and even if we only unlock areas in what portion of Tyria we currently have now, that’s still A LOT).
- I did not encounter the stuck-after-dodging bug since the patch, and I used to get it A LOT on my necro, so that would have been worth a patch on its own, really, very nice to finally see it happening;
- The salvage and health percentage additions were so good to have that I can’t even remember how I played without these just yesterday, so that’s another big thank you for finally getting these;
- The new fractal and the new map are both enjoyable, though the story was kind of short. As I understand it, voice acting hundreds of different dialogues for each playable race and gender must be a tiresome process, and honestly I wouldn’t mind if a lot of dialogue went back to the old window reading style instead of talking balloons, if that would even somehow allow to develop more encounters/areas per update in the future.
- The changes to previous fractals are much welcome and bring a wind of fresh air, but they still do not address that we are far from having the endlessly repeating content fractals were originally intended as. I’m not sure what I would like to see here, perhaps a rework of the daily so you can go through many more fractals without diminishing returns (you can do up to 8 dungeon paths and get dailies but only 3 fractals which are supposedly shorter? c’mon) or maybe we’re just lacking a higher number of fractals so they don’t repeat inside tiers (at least, but I’d surely enjoy having more than 25 unique ones);
- Somewhere it was said armor and weapon developing was the tightest bottleneck for the whole team, and if that’s because of the art side (the balancing is presumably non existant since stats are preset), then we should lay down a little on the outfits (e.g the armor Canach was wearing could have been actual armor) to focus on armor. we already had so many outfit releases and I believe a healthy 50/50 armor to outfit ratio would please most people. Specially with such relevant cases like White Mantle and Canach’s armors, it would complement the lore side of the patches very well.
Whatever happens, I sure hope Lazarus doesn’t purposefully power up Primordus to achieve his “revenge” against humanity. That would make no sense seeing as how it would be dangerous to him: remember the Mursaat have ran away like cowards to the Mists during the previous dragon rise; and also have come about their own end because of how scared they were of the Flameseeker Prophecies. Even the battle for Lion’s Arch in GW1 didn’t make so much sense, seeing as how the Mursaat would hardly run straight into death like that.
I actually have a faint hope that Lazarus will actually come up with something smart and not kill himself like every Mursaat ever, eventually even draining magic from Primordus and becoming the main villain for our new guild to focus on before Kralk/Jormag. Or maybe he even stays there as a persistent villain, inducing the dragons to rush into us just so we kill them and he can acquire more and more magic. Whatever, as long as he doesn’t end up with the classic self fulfilling prophecy of death Mursaat plot (at least not so fast).
Playing devil’s advocate here, but to be fair, most of this update was actually focused on Quality of Life and bug fixing, and they did A LOT of that; they have fixed things that were around since the kittening release (like the getting stuck after dodge roll bug which ruined my PvP since ever), added things like salvage all fine/rares and a lot of small tidbits that we won’t notice after some time but makes our life that much easier/entertaining.
They could have released more content if all that polishing happened before release, but here we are, and it is what it is. At least they’re not fooling us that much anymore, for Mo explicitly said it would be quality big, not quantity big, and it is, indeed, very high quality. Furthermore, it is the nature of GW2 as a game that it will always seem to have less content than other MMOs, because in other games 80% of everything is comprised of gear treadmills, which I personally hate because it makes the game seem too empty (get gear, beat boss of corresponding gear, get next gear, etc.). In GW2 I play less, but play better, if that makes any sense. That was an hour of story but it’s an hour of a unique and well thought story, not just another excuse to grind on the gear treadmill.
One other question actually. If we need gliding for this new fractal, what will happen for the people that don’t have HOT? Will they be unable to do the new fractal?
Gliding? We’re unable to gilde in current fractals, why should this new one be an exception?
I’m more confused about how this new level will be pasted in the current fotm line-up. Will all levels get shuffled (and thus reset the fractal achievements… AGAIN) or will it be exclusive post-lvl-100 and thus raising the AR req?
There’s plenty of leisure room to fit more fractals in a 100 list without repeating any inbetween tiers: they can just remove 4 of the repeating ones in each tier and fit this one and it’s still gonna be a few fractals short of never repeating inside a tier. Then, when we have 25 non repeating ones to fit in each tier (hopefully soon™ ) we can expand on 100+, but I kinda wish they’ll do that without increasing the AR needed, since we’re already punished enough for pursuing the T4 fractals (i.e I have to forfeit all the +++infusions to stack up on AR until I have the 9000000000 +1 infusions to put +21 on rings).
Yeah I’m hyped, Anet has gotten me* baited again; hopefully it’s bait for a beautiful aquarium and not to become fried fish.
I kinda hope for a new map, but a large batch of story is fine as long as the fractal comes with it. But if they’re gonna release with 2, 3 months apart from each episode, I’d imagine they’re gonna bring big guns to each one (so, one map per episode? one can dream).
Even if the achievements go away, my money is on the events staying. They do not take the place of any other events and are just fine additions to the maps. And also, because LW3 has been designed to last unlike LW1, the events would also be a good way to link the Personal Story up to HoT to LW3.
I guess after 400 posts we can conclude, at the very least, that raids do introduce a lot of drama. Is it worth it? The encounters are fine but look what happens simply from using the “raid” label.
Personally I think raids are at a good spot and should keep up precisely the kind of things we have now. It’s not that hard, really, but it’s not that easy even if you think so after doing it for the 200th time, and that’s fine, I’m here to play MMO, not Dank Memes Souls. Even then, I do agree with a single criticism, and it will only become more and more relevant as time goes by: grouping up with 10 people is really hard in GW2. Between people farming their kitten off in HoT and Silverwastes, playing map completion or doing dailies elsewhere, and just logging on to get their Fractals daily, there’s not really that many people sticking around to group up at all times, and more raids and maps will only spread the population thin, as much as I want more of it. Not to mention the last straw, that there is no incentive at all to keep raiding after you’ve done the weekly schedule, so that’s even more people being shut off from your LFG pool after monday.
So how do we go about fixing that? Please recognize it does need fixing, as it would be a shame that, eventually, the only time ever possible to raid would be a couple hours during reset, because everyone has already composed their weekly raid group by then.
If reverse psychology is a thing, and Anet has said before they would totally release new legendary weapons, then they are definitely going to release the Abbadon fractal eventually.
EDIT: Actually, our PC and the Pact are more or less accomplishing what Abbadon more or less has originally intended if you think about it. By killing the elder dragons we are seemingly releasing the whole of Tyria’s magic for anyone to grab it (or not, if it’s unstable beyond control), which is quite similar to Abbadon giving power around with no mercy to everyone worshipping him (pun intended). So regardless of getting a Fractal for him or not, his intentions at the very least are kinda still related to our current lore and he would be worth a mention.
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
Abbadon has been kittenly insane for so long (long before GW1 even) and the other gods have done such a good job in erasing him from story, that the Fractals would be the only reliable source [citation needed] of what he looked like before succumbing to Torment. I imagine he was not very loving but the Margonites certainly made it look like he was paternal; they worshipped him greatly because of how much power he gave and for his teachings presumably, not because he particularly cared about them.
What would really give some insight into Abbadon though would be finding out how he became a god to begin with. This is a long stretch because it happened long before nearly everything else ever mentioned on the GW franchise, and would have to bring Arachnia or whatever god he got his powers from into canon. But it would bring an extremely nice ‘closure’ not only to Abbadon as a character, but to the whole gods arch we worked out in GW1.
As mentioned above, most issues the OP has mentioned boils down to being burned out from playing the same thing over and over and over again ad nauseam. That said, it does no justice to OP being sarcastic about it: he is obviously not requesting a T4 chest from the login rewards so he has nothing to play at all;.
I got quite the opposite from his post, actually, what OP really wants (and most of us do too) is change, be it changing what fractals we already have (Anet made it clear they can do this with Cliffside) or introducing new ones. I particularly believe new fractals should be introduced without further modifications to the old ones (honorable mention to Snowblind boss though, that could totally change), so that newcomers will have the same enjoyable experience we had when we first started.
People who mostly play fractals everyday are in desperate need of fresh air, literally and figuratively I might say, and Anet could help by expanding our choices with fresh ones. A team of 5, 6 people were able to pull out the Forsaken Thicket, in a very short time frame for the quality/amount of content. Surely there should be no excuses for even another small team like this not pump out fractals regularly (the mists should, after all, be an unstable environment full of surprises at every corner, not a static tower of bonus stages).
The answers here so far (and really, in every other thread about this “issue”) only ever mention that “raids are interesting precisely because they are hard and require a challenge”. The OP did not refute this; In fact, he is even implying they could be even HARDER, as long as there was a mode with toned down mechanics for everyone “casual” to play in.
Note here that, toned down does not mean easy and auto attacking at all. Anet has already done this right, very right in fact, with Fractals of the Mists. To someone who regularly play through lvl 100 mai trin and cliffside and whatnot for their tier 4 rewards, it may sound like easy mode auto attacking to play lvl 25, but to the player at that level, it is indeed a challenge, and that player definitely does not feel like he is just tapping 1 on his keyboard. And this is precisely what the OP requests to increase raid population – this is good for everyone: no matter how much LI you may have, you want more people to play with as your static group gets less and less playtime together due to many reasons.
So, what we have here is not anymore of those threads asking for raids to be nerfed. Quite on the contrary, as I see it the OP is asking whether or not it is better to introduce progressive rather than static difficulty. And as someone who is getting into raids already, I welcome this idea greatly, because there would be something to look forward to even after I get used to a particular wing, because “nightmare” mode would supposedly always be a nightmare; and for every other day I didn’t feel like going through that hassle, I could still raid in a lower tier and help people through (like many of us already do with Fractals, including me).