Guild Wars 2

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I wouldn’t consider the fully active and strategizing risen in Arah explorable or Tequatl to be “brain dead” nor dependent on Zhaitan – though they act like Zhaitan lives.

Sure, there are many cases of Dragon minions exhibiting intelligence and independent action (viz. Sylvari), but I guess I mean the central overmind that linked them all together in purpose and to some extent awareness died when Zhaitan’s physical form was destroyed. Not necessarily that monster barks reflect that, but I think that’s more of a gameplay limitation. Sylvari characters no longer feel Mordremoth’s will trying to dominate and corrupt them once it is killed.

Mordremoth’s case wasn’t that Mordremoth was his corruption but that he could transfer his mind into his corruption. Mordremoth’s body (dubbed Mouth of Mordremoth in-game) was still his physical body, but he could basically do a mind transplant on the fly with any of his corruption.

The Mouth of Mordremoth isn’t Mordremoth, it’s just a champion like the Mouth of Zhaitan, an implement by which the Dragon consumes energy. As they point out in the next to last story instance, all the plant matter you’re walking and fighting on is physically Mordremoth’s body. But in a more expansive sense, not to get too religious or anything, the Mordrem are the body of Mordremoth. Short of the Forgotten excommunication ritual, that’s a permanent transformation.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Amaimon.7823:

So dragons consume Magic and create Corrupted Magic
During their sleep, the Corrupted Magic seeps back into the earth and is slowly returned to normal Magic. When the Dragon wakes up from its hibernation, its hungry again and starts consuming that Magic again.

There is no written lore on how exactly this magical exchange is performed, though, I always just assumed that the ‘earth’ or ‘eternal alchemy’ purifies the corrupted magic

Actually, when Elder Dragons hibernate the magic they leak is not corrupted. The Six Gods pulled magic from Zhaitan to empower the Bloodstone, and the asura used magic leaked from Primordus. If that magic was corrupted, there’d be no asura or human race – there’d be destroyer asura and risen humans only.

Dragon corruption is shown to be an active act and not an innate one like breathing out carbon dioxide.

Arguably the dragon corruption is the dragon. In some cases (e.g. Zhaitan) the physical Elder Dragon is such a critical organ in that body that killing it renders the corruption brain-dead. In other cases, like Mordremoth, the body is irrelevant or cannot meaningfully be killed, and the mind has to be attacked directly. In both cases, the corruption persists as an organism, just without a single intelligence.

Seems like the magic the Dragons leak is not part of them, but a byproduct of inefficient digestion. They’re like magical bacteria colonies — they consume and break down more complex magical structures, growing and spreading but also producing raw elemental magic as a waste product, that could then be used by other creatures and races. However, this suggests that leyline magic is, for lack of a better word, low-entropy magic, unlike Dragon magic poop (assuming there is a Second Law of Aetherodynamics). Either it’s being refreshed somewhere in the cycle by something that is or takes an input (the magical equivalent of the sun or photosynthesizing organisms, possibly the Mists?), or ley energy itself is an input from outside the system.

Ayrilana.1396:

I’ve heard reports that you can directly attack the wurm.

You can definitely attack the wurm (ranged, if nothing else, from the lower level). If there are enough players up top, then others should probably do so.

Menadena.7482:

ArchonWing.9480:

So what happens to the people that don’t unlock the story? Are they barred from the zones without a teleport to friend?

Even worse then that. Say someone buys GW2 now. How do they get to BF? Buy the story? Buy (or otherwise obtain) a TP to friend?

Yes. But it’s not as bad as it would have been last season, since it seems like the new zones and the new LS2 episodes are more closely related on a 1 to 1 basis.

The VA for GW2 is for the most part pretty solid (although I replayed Claw Island again the other day… shudders), so hopefully the industry can work things out and avoid too much delay.

If not… well, never a better excuse to re-release LS1 content for those that missed it.

Hoping this one can fly, or at least hover.

Best guess is that based on his time in the Mists, he was shown a vision that led him to decide to do what is best for Tyria, and what is best for Tyria will not be the total victory the Charr are hoping for in their ghost problems. And he was probably set on that path by the human gods, which would be taking a bad thing and making it worse (serving gods), and then making it worse again (serving human gods) from a Charr perspective. It isn’t going to go over well with TPTB, so he was avoiding having to talk about it for as long as possible.

If you mean the Jotun, there was some new lore in Ember Bay:

“VIII. As the dragons returned to their cyclic slumber, the elder races reemerged. The once-powerful jotun refused to rely on magic ever again. They have since remained ignorant, brutish creatures.”

Tiefsee.3647:

Dragons absorb magic of dead dragons, that means the more we defeat than stronger they will be – except we have a dragon of our own. We could use that dragon as cleaner after a dragon was defeated that the other clearly evil ones don’t do it. And that’s just the most obvious tactical advantage

Do all dragons absorb magic, or is there something special that set the Elder Dragons apart? Glint and her offspring aren’t really a guide for what is normal with dragons, since at this point they’re as much dragons as Sylvari are humans. The Canthan dragons might be the only real dragons left.

I mean, the Gods might just be humans who gained or naturally possessed the Elder Dragons’ ability to absorb certain types of magic (Kormir’s apotheosis would certainly suggest that all the gods may have once been human, and the lore for some like Grenth and Lyssa as much as says so). The Chak eat ley energy and filter out certain types of Dragon magic — maybe a Chak hive could eventually become the equivalent of an Elder Dragon. And Bloodstone crystal seems to absorb magic and have some related ability to grow and spread, like an Elder Dragon.

In the end, it seems to be an ability shared by a number of beings/phenomenae.

The main issue with the economy is that there’s very little avenue for players to differentiate themselves in terms of what they need or what they can provide. There’s minimal specialization of labor except in how players spend their time, and not much specialization of demand either, even less once alts are considered.

In the end, you just have an economy primarily comprised of subsistence farmers who trade the occasional surplus they come by for the occasional shortage they have, with a few dedicated farmers and a small merchant class of TP enthusiasts with more dedication to watching prices, a longer time preference, and/or more storage space to spare.

Hesacon.8735:

The Not So Secret jumping puzzle was worse than any adventure.

Of course, it also gates a Mastery Point.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

It’s been my theory that all three Central Tyrian ED would become active in S3. Two down, Kralkatorrik to go.

Is K considered Central Tyrian? I figured they would save him for an expansion into Elona.

But yeah, I had expected the next storyline to be a song of fire and ice too.

Edit: Wow, just noticed how old that post was. The one I replied to, that is, not the link. But that too.

Ayrilana.1396:

Access to both LS2 maps occurred in the open world and outside the LS . None of the events within LS2 created access to the two maps.

Actually, Ft. Vandal was abandoned as a result of the events of LS2.

If keys were made more expensive to purchase and otherwise just obtainable as map rewards, it would be less of a thing, at least once people blew through their initial stock. Though maybe then they would have the opposite problem.

I don’t know what they intend to do about the hero point glut and future specializations, but it is a valid issue. I don’t know that adding another specialization fixes it, though, since you then have the issue of really having to hit every HP in Tyria and HoT to be able get the extra spec, which is the same complaint that caused them to tone down the original HP requirements in the first place.

If they were following a model of 1 expansion = 1 specialization, then it would almost make more sense to split up the expansion weapon/utilities from the expansion traits. Then they could have the former be bought with ordinary hero points, and make the latter purchasable only with area-specific hero points (so, say, a HoT HP would award 4 generic HP and 1 HoT HP). That way, they could ensure you had to play a certain amount of expansion content to really get the full use of the specialization, but time you spent going after map completion in Central Tyria wouldn’t be a total waste, and you could at least have a full skill bar early on to be able to play your spec with.

I… got every single Auric mining drop the first time I mined a node in AB after having gotten the Mastery. I had sort of expected that, at least for the specialization collection, you would have to use a character of the right profession, but no, 9 drops for that plus the luminate one.

Of course, it was an ori node.

The sea dragon’s name is Serendipity

Ardid.7203:

Deposite runes! Yes, an inventory only for runes, that would be soooooo OSOM.

Add it as a Gem Store upgrade, everybody wins. Well, everybody with gems.

Why are We Helping a Dragon?

Because it’s CUUUUUUUTE.

Dvantaman.3617:

Yargesh.4965:

There was a picture in the HoT website (can’t find it now) that showed a hydra surfing into the new lions arch on a huge wave. Could be artistic licence or the direction the game is going. The lack of work on underwater combat sort of limits this though.

LINK : PICTURE OF 3 HEADED DRAGON ATTACKING LION’S ARCH???(BACKGROUND OF HoT WEBSITE)
PIC LINK:
http://i.imgur.com/3tAr7wl.jpg
REDDIT POST: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ivbea/whats_happening_to_lions_arch_again/

Some say the end is near…

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Then I remembered that gathering flax seeds was a good way to make gold… except it isn’t anymore (they dropped to 8 silver a piece).

There’s one spot where you can consistently harvest 10+ seeds. Park all your alts there, get your 4+ gold for the day, and then play for fun after that.

Vayne.8563:

Errors are not perfectly fine. Errors are perfectly human. With your attitude you wouldn’t last a minute in my business. See how easy that is.

A single word in a single NPC’s dialogue is only a big deal if you’re trying to make a big deal about it. Which you apparently are.

Uh, it’s not an obscure plot point, it’s the main villain of one of the GW campaigns, and technically the boss behind the boss for the other two. Basically, they flubbed the name/backstory of the most significant antagonist in the series prior to the Elder Dragons.

That’s like making a Batman game and mixing up the Joker with the Riddler.

My thinking is that they should never take away your participation level in an event. Instead, they should have two sets of thresholds for determinining bronze/silver/gold. If you meet the new logic (staying close to the area and whatnot), you get judged by the old, easy standard. If not, you get judged by a standard which is much more demanding, but not unrealistic. That way, if you fully participate for 90% of an event, and then get distracted or die and WP or whatever, you’ll almost certainly get rewarded.

Earning Masteries would feel like less of a grind if it wasn’t region limited. There’s just a better variety of things to do in Central Tyria than in the new HoT areas. There is a lot more XP to be earned through exploration or completing personal or living story instances, plus there are fractals and dungeons, plus there are just many more maps and areas. Some maps are based heavily around dynamic events (Orr and Maguuma Wastes), others are oriented toward solo roaming. In the new areas, you have a small amount of exploration XP and only a fraction of the story instances, no dungeon content. Once the one-time rewards for exploration and story are done, you’re stuck running the same dynamic events over and over.

The only argument I can see in favor of region-limiting XP is ensuring people are playing the new content, but having different pools of Mastery points for different regions is sufficient for this purpose. Moreover, since mastery points are one-time awards for doing different things, they’re the exact opposite of grindy.

I saw one in SW, on the north VW lane.

lordkrall.7241:

Because if you can unlock both with the same character it isn’t really branching.

Maybe it’s a quantum thingy. The character didn’t really choose so much as probabilistically did both to some extent, and incidentally ended up at the same place either way when the waveform collapsed.

lordkrall.7241:

^ I think it was simply a matter of having to make a choice.
Either they could have real branching story-lines, or they could make it replayable. And it appears that they decided that more people would prefer replayability over branching.

They can’t really have both after all.

How do you mean they can’t have it both ways? They could do it just like any other branching unlock system. By playing through a story segment and fulfilling one objective, a new story segment could be unlocked. By playing through again and fulfilling a competing objective, a different story segment could be unlocked.

It would definitely work better if players had more fine-tuned control over replayability (ie, segment by segment, rather than in blocks of segments). And of course it wouldn’t necessarily be possible for a choice to make a small alteration to a future segment (like having NPC A or B show up), only to open up two different paths.

At any rate, they’ve already done branching missions together with replayability in GW1, though only in a very limited fashion.

As an alternative that still makes summons useful when well-positioned, some AoE attacks could be converted to a Shaped (just pulling a term out of the air) damage attacks. A Shaped damage attack would be more powerful than a typical AoE in terms of direct damage, but each target would add some portion of its defense rating to the next target’s defense rating. The order of targets would make sense positionally (meaning, in a cone attack, the closest target would be first, the one behind it next, etc.).

Aside from giving minions more use as meat shields, it would also create opportunities to play a tank role in groups by positioning a high Toughness or heavy armor character in front of a glass cannon.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

in the blogpost it’s stated that:

Mastery tracks are trained by gaining experience while the Mastery track is slotted on the Mastery training bar. Higher tiers in Mastery tracks require progressively more Mastery points and more experience to fully train.

I’ve seen a few posts where people claim that they will look for the fastest ways to gain experience in order to level up your mastery-tracks. As I understood it in the first place, we will only get mastery-progression by doing “very specific things” like completing a zone or finding a hidden secret… not that these points can be farmed.

Did I get this right or can mastery points be farmed as well?

Mastery points can’t be farmed, they’re once-per-thing, per-account. The tracks seemed to be based on experience, as we know it now, so they can presumably be farmed.

Shadelang.3012:

perilisk.1874:

Aidan Savage.2078:

No offense perilisk, but that’s about the most bookah idea I’ve ever seen to solve the condition problem.

Could you be more specific as to the cons, since they’re apparently very… apparent?

In reading your post I can’t quite see how what your suggesting would deal with the core issue of power builds incidental condis interfering with the condis that are hte core of a condi builds playstyle

Edit: Are you suggesting that every single bleed in the game be active and applied as a separate entity?

Huh? No, I’m suggesting keeping the existing caps, which are apparently for technical rather than balance reasons, and use the power of statistics to completely eliminate a lot of the incidental condition applications.

Basically, when someone tries to throw a crappy bleed that does 5% of the DPS that a condition-specced player would do, there is a 95% chance it won’t be applied at all. In the 5% of time that it is applied, it has the same strength as a condition applied by a condition-focused player, so on average it is still doing the same damage. That should reduce the amount of rebalancing necessary.

Aidan Savage.2078:

No offense perilisk, but that’s about the most bookah idea I’ve ever seen to solve the condition problem.

Could you be more specific as to the cons, since they’re apparently very… apparent?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Food for thought:

I see a dude in Daedric armor playing pin-the-tail-on-the-Ogrim and someone who probably travels via Lemarchand puzzle box.

Yeah, straightforward solution to PvE cap issues:

• Each target has a standard DPS for each condi stack. Every single condi that is applied will do this DPS! For PvE mobs, it should apply scaling like health (though maybe not to the same extent).
• For each hit that does condi damage, the ratio of nominal condition DPS for the skill is compared to standard DPS to get a real number X.
• The integer part of X is stacks applied.
• The fractional part of X is the probability of an additional stack.
• For DPS conditions that only stack in duration, the standard DPS is set large enough that even a condi-specced player should rarely match it; the stacks applied are capped at 1.

So, say the standard bleed DPS for a certain critter is 100 DPS.

• Condi specced player A uses a skill that inflicts 215 bleed DPS. He applies 2 stacks of bleed, and has a 15% chance of adding a third. Each will do 100 DPS.
• Non-condi specced player B uses a skill that inflicts 24 bleed DPS. He has a 24% chance of applying a bleed; if it is applied, it will do 100 DPS.

For another elite critter, with a stndard bleed DPS of 500:

• Condi specced player A uses a skill that inflicts 215 bleed DPS. He has a 43% chance of adding a bleed; if it is applied, it will do 500 DPS.
• Non-condi specced player B uses a skill that inflicts 24 bleed DPS. He has a 4.8% chance of applying a bleed; if it is applied, it will do 500 DPS.

Aside from cutting down on the amount of ticking data that the server has to account for (replacing it with one-off RNG calcs), it also means that the amount of condition damage is capped in a much more controlled way, which seems helpful for balancing purposes.

How to make condi viable in PvE without changing caps:
1) Figure out how much maximum DPS to allow for a given condition. Can vary with target (e.g. higher for creatures with higher rank). Divide by 25 where applicable. The result is the standard damage for that condition.
2) If the standard damage for, say, bleeding is X, and a player attempts to inflict a bleed that does Y damage, then the probability of successfully adding the bleed is
min(X,Y)/X. In the rare event that Y is greater than X, there could also be a small chance to add a second bleed, calculated more or less the same way.
So, if your bleeds are half as powerful as the standard bleed, you have a 50% chance to actually inflict bleeding (but it is standard strength when you do). Thus, whenever you do reach 25 stacks, you’re at the DPS cap that the designers have chosen for that condition, for that enemy, not some arbitrarily lower point. Plus, for all the crap bleeds getting thrown around, the game just has to run an initial check, then it can discard most of them.

Maybe have the option to replace the numbers altogether with a graphical indicator, e.g. show the health bars of any targets you hit prominently, and color a section of the bar corresponding to the damage you dealt, with critical hits in a separate flashing section.

pdavis.8031:

The problem of the Mursaat is that they’ve all been killed off, with the exception of Lazarus, and he is considered MIA. Unless they rewrote the lore on them, and in fact more then Lazarus was still alive and they spent the last ~250 years just breeding and increasing their numbers. I don’t see the Mursaat becoming a player race. MAYBE an enemy, or a final boss of something, but certianly not a faction, or playable race.

All of them, or just the ones that were working with the White Mantle in Tyria? For all we know, there were still more that were phased out of reality.

Anyone else see shades of the conversion of Saul in what people are predicting for Rytlock’s story? An enemy (kinda) of a certain group ends up face to face with that group’s god(s), goes blind, and then ends up becoming a champion of those gods (ok, probably grudgingly and without considering them more than superpowered aliens with honorable intentions).

gervasium.4567:

“Sylvari and the Pale Tree don’t even look like Mordrem. Yet they were intended to be dragon minions from the beginning? If this was so, wouldn’t Mordrem have looked like sylvari? Wouldn’t the Pale Tree look like a Mordrem tree? Remember: the one and only means of removing corruption does not change the physical appearance – it just gives free will.”

Considering that, these are are old GW2 concept art pieces by Kekai Kotaki:

Caithe (a sylvary) before the redesign:

Mordrem/Corrupted guys (obviously servants of Mordremoth). They look like the old version of Sylvary and you can’t say they’re just corrupted because I can’t find any other race corrupted in the same way in concept art.

Another one.

Then this one , which shows an obvious Mordrem with a Mord-sylvary that’s even listed in the wiki as Sylvary concept art.

I can’t look at these and not believe it was their plan from the beginning.

They certainly planned on having a plant dragon named Mordremoth from the beginning, and there are more than a few indications about the Sylvari. That said, it doesn’t mean they had all the details worked out in advance.

Mickey Frogeater.1470:

As far as I know the only Elder Dragon that is confirmed to have mindless minions only are Kralkatorrik.

K’s minions aren’t mindless. I remember going solo against one particularly verbose Branded Charr champ in a Dynamic Event somewhere in Ascalon.

Edit: Ah, here we are.

Mursaat. They’re inspired by the way that Tyrians can completely put aside their differences after four or five more episodes, and awed by the fact that they were actually able to kill an Elder Dragon this time around, so they decide that peace and unity is the way forward. Their racial abilities are related to phasing, spectral agony, and summoning jade constructs.

It’s possible that after M, Tyria will be caught between J and P making their move against Tyria and each other. Not only would it allow for some metaphorical parallels and contrasts between Tyrian and draconic disunity, but Fire and Ice are pretty traditional motifs for opposing factions (and conveniently map to red and blue, which are pretty traditional colors for opposing factions, at least in games).

We really have no idea why the gods left — there has been speculation that it was due to the dragons, but if divine fire really is a such threat to the dragons, then it’s possible that the gods could probably stand their ground pretty well against dragons and the reason for their departure is entirely unrelated. That provides a pretty reasonable excuse for changing the subject entirely — have whatever threat they left to fight in Tyria’s equivalent of Asgard finally invade Tyria, introducing something otherworldly that is a greater threat than even the dragons. After four dragons, people will be fatigued enough that they will probably welcome something other than a dragon to fight.

Since anet loves their tropes, they can build up Kralkatorrik over several living story episodes as finally making his move on Tyria, and just as the climatic battle is about to begin, the gods emerge from a portal with no f’ing warning or foreshadowing, falling back to Tyria after their homeworld is lost, and they just smite K and his army into shards almost as an afterthought.

saventis.1485:

also the last image with the B team makes me think we will be getting canach on the team

That’s been predicted since Season 1, due to the absence of a Sylvari biconic. I’m more surprised it took this long.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I suspect Wynne’s murder by Caithe is simply an “unspoken truth” amongst sylvari. Not known by everyone, but those who do know, don’t think it’s important to dwell upon.

That, or they just didn’t think it through too deeply.

Whoever E is, it’s someone who is very knowledgable about human politics, dragons, etc. That means either a human (in which case it’s probably a well-preserved Evennia or Edair), or someone with an antipathy for the Mursaat (and thus the White Mantle), like a Seer or maybe Glint’s offspring.

To the extent there’s any backing (including purely literary stuff) for any of those options:
Edair could be foreshadowed by the Concordia subplot about the locket. If he never died, maybe it would impact the line of succession? I have no idea about Krytan succession laws, though.

If the figure in the PAX trailer was a Seer, it could indicate that one still exists, in which case it may want to use the human civil war as a proxy to continue the Seer/Mursaat war.

If it’s Glint’s offspring, then there is more narrative sync between Destiny’s Edge and DE2.

With our luck, it will turn out to be Ellen Kiel, though.

Just random speculation, but maybe the Seer, if it is a Seer, is Mr. E?

Given the bad blood between the Mursaat and Seers, and with the White Mantle remaining the tool of the Mursaat, it would make sense that a Seer would be very attuned to human politics. And of course, they would also be very knowledgeable about the dragons.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

• Does Ogden mention that divine fire may kill the PC on non-sylvari?

Yes, he does. I wonder if it has any relevance to what Gixx was saying in the start (I didn’t fully catch it, it was related to Balthazar).

• I still don’t like how easily Braham makes up with Eir, but that’s personal preference.

He had to make up with her, so that they could talk about mending things, so that you know for a fact that she is toast well before the last cinematic.

Why does everyone know about the Jungle Dragon, such that Wynne can just toss The Terrible Truth About Sylvari out there matter of factly with no further explanation (“Caithe, we were created to be the minions of the flying spaghetti dragon!” “Noooo—- wait, what? Did you just make that up?”), even though no one mentions that there is such a thing until LS season 2? Sure, Caithe is a dedicated Dragon-hunter, so if anyone would know, she would, but it’s still a little weird.

Don’t actually think about the GW lore or writing like history, think about it more like the infamous Book from Anathem (basically, in a society of secluded monastic scientists and mathematicians, one of their punishments was transcribing and learning a book that, depending on the degree of offense, was inane, random, or subtly inconsistent and illogical in ways designed to drive the penitent crazy in trying to systematize it).

Arenanet. /15 chars

The problem with the forgotten ritual theory is Mawdrey. It seems like Mordrem can actually be trained, in a formative stage, to not be jerks, unless Mawdrey is a joke and not canon.

Maybe the forgotten ritual isn’t needed for them. Unlike any of the other known dragon minions, Mordrem are living things, not magically animated constructs of dead flesh, crystal, corrupted ice, or semi-molten stone. They may naturally have some independent will of their own on that account.

On the other hand, clearly the dragon can corrupt Sylvari who were raised in the Dream. So, presumably, a lot of people are going to be strangled by their backpieces when they head deeper into Maguuma.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Sigh… after this patch, I feel like ANet’s leaving me twisting in the wind, but… I’m going to stick to my guns and hold that sylvari immunity is due to the Dream, and the Dream alone, which I’ve begun to suspect is a product of the forgotten ritual (it would explain why they were dragged in in a big way for no real reason, and also how Glint was able to know so much).

Maybe it’s harder for Elder Dragons to control their minions close to another Elder Dragon, and the forgotten ritual doesn’t simply free a mind, but, in the case of a dragon champion, creates a sort of mini-Elder Dragon. Thus, not only would it be hard for Jormag to operate in Orr, but it would be hard to control his minions near Glint, or the Pale Tree. Or Glint’s Egg, which is why Caithe wanted to retrieve it. That would also suggest that the Krait orb is somehow tied to Bubbles and has champ-level power.

That would also explain why Mordremoth sent its champion to attack the Pale Tree. Too dangerous or difficult to directly move its own ponderous mass, and minions alone wouldn’t cut it, so something of equivalent mental/spiritual power had to be physically there to maintain control of the other minions.