Guild Wars 2

Absence of friendly fire has graduated from gameplay mechanic to canon. With hard work and perseverance, it, like waypoints before it, can take the next step and become an important recurring plot point.

Mortifer.2946:

WHAT IS NOT SO COOL is that Treharne used really really complex tactic – he put all his assests on one place without scouting it out first and shouted: FIRE! ………how unexpted that everyone was doomed.

I dunno, they turtled, built a ton of carriers and interceptors, and then massed them for an assault. It might not be Sun Tzu level strategy, but it carried me through more than a few Starcraft story missions.

So, the last thing our team said before the video was that we needed to check in with DE to find out where Caithe went. And now they’re all… MIA, at best. Convenient.

I liked the fight well enough, mainly because it initially seemed frustratingly hard to the point where I was cursing at the dragon, but then over time the mechanics “clicked” and it became… maybe not a breeze, but a lot more manageable. The feeling of solving a puzzle or something can be rewarding.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

why do such on a group of seeds (or a single seed)?

Prophecy? Remember who the Forgotten were working with.

Anyway, does anyone else feel the whole cave thing was a bit of a red herring? I mean, ignoring the fact that firstborn Sylvari apparently have shoot divine fire out of their noses when they sneeze (how else did all three of them get into the cave when we can’t?), the location itself, while cool looking, seemed to be irrelevant to the story. The events we saw and the followup boss fight could have pretty much happened anywhere.

Just call him “PC”. You know, short for “Pact Commander”.

So, what are the odds of getting Mursaat as a playable race?

Awesome! Hopefully the logo and name implies that we can finally get some content that’s focused on the Sylvari.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There is no resurrection. Being defeated is just equivalent of being knocked out unconscious. This was a mechanical choice in order to try and more sensitize NPC deaths – to paraphrase, Jeff (iirc) stated that having resurrection magic in the world created a case of “why can’t we just resurrect those characters?” so they went and made it so that PCs in GW2 don’t die, ever. Resurrection magic has been lost.

Very well, then, replace “resurrection” with “their capacity to instantly heal grievous and completely incapacitating medical traumas, such as one might receive from being punched off a cliff and subsequently falling hundreds of feet to land in a pool of molten rock.”

Well, until their remote resurrection powers are confirmed as canonical, which I don’t expect to happen, I see no reason to assume anything else about how they work for players (as distinct from NPCs or in stories) is anything other than gameplay convenience.

Not to contradict the OP’s general point, but not every ending lacking in resolution is a cliffhanger. If you end an episode with the series protagonist literally hanging off a cliff, or stabbed and kicked off a cliff, or whatever, that’s a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger has some inherent drama that makes people anxious to see the resolution.

When you end an episode based on unraveling a mystery with “welp, I guess we’ll have to take a break for a while and figure out what to do next”, that’s not a cliffhanger, it’s just a comma.

lordkrall.7241:

Most parts of Ascalon is controlled by the Charr, the parts that aren’t are controlled by Ghosts, not Humans.

There’s one notable exception, of course.

Well, it seems like it reacts with blood, both in terms of how it got its name, and the rituals the White Mantle conducted back in GW1.

Maybe you could get some interesting effects by injecting it straight into the bloodstream in combination with other reagents. Sure, why not superpowers?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Horses are up in the air.

Thinking about this again, I’d have to argue that there’s no way they’re up in the air.

Pegasi, on the other hand…

One thing that could help a little is to drop the daily requirement of 3 for 10 AP, and instead have a monthly reward track that rewards you for every third daily, to a monthly cap of 300. If you want to get every single daily, you get all the AP in 8 days, and you’re just in it for the rewards after that. Otherwise, if you’re a one-category gamer and there’s one day where you can only do 1 or 2 dailies, you can still catch up by doing 4 on another day.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Then there’s the fact that the PvE ones kind of make you feel like you’re a dog doing tricks for a treat.

I think if they had actually gone farther and made the dailies actually difficult, it might have gone down better. If I was picking them, I would probably make it more like the Zaishen challenges, with the following fixed categories:

Daily Dungeon/Fractal: Specific dungeon, including FotM. Bonus dungeon tokens.

Daily JP/minidungeon: Specific JP or minidungeon, bonus chest.

Daily Racer: Talk to an NPC, then hit every POI and Vista on a certain map within a time limit without dying or using WPs for a chest.

Daily Bounty: Specific World Boss or one of the tougher event bosses. Bonus chest.

Daily Donation: Donate X of some crafting material to help rebuild Lion’s Arch. Reward doesn’t contain crafting materials, because that’s stupid.

Daily Treasure Hunt: There’s a chest for you somewhere in Tyria. Each of the preceding dailies gives you an increasingly zoomed-in map identifying where to find it. The location of the chest is different for each account, so no consulting the wiki.

The corollary is that if you don’t love Guitar Hero, don’t play it. It’s just AP.

Just throwing a few ideas out there (or, in some cases, just agreeing with what has been said)

Jeweler 400 – 500 could give some advanced infusions. At 500, perhaps it could also create a one-use item that would allow you to reselect the stats for any Ascended item.

Chef 400 – 500 could create sera, consumables for a third buff slot that works similar to infusions in that the ordinary PvE benefits aren’t too powerful, but it provides agony resistance or some other elite-content-specific boost.

Serophous.9085:

As for rytlock, he is now some varient of the old " ritualist" profession. Not an exact copy, but close. Yes, it will deal with spirits, as rytlock had to deal with them first, not to mention the other hint of delaque now having her sister’s soul and weapon.

So yes, maybe a ritualist-like profession soon™

I hope we don’t to have to go to the gem store to unlock “Stuffed-into-the-Refrigerator Was Belinda” for our PC ritualists.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

perilisk.1874:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

But it would also feel like retreading old ground, even worse than episodes 3 and 4 did- and I remember those taking quite a bit of criticism in that regard. Increased national support is good and all, but at this point they either have to be complete imbeciles to ignore what threatens them, or so far out of the line of fire that they have no motivation to help us no matter how many one-sentence arguments we throw at them.

If you mean, in terms of recruiting everyone and so on, sure. That should hopefully be a done deal.

But if their alliance stands up in place of the Pact, there will be more troubles and infighting than can be resolved with a speech from Trahearne on the Lion’s Arch docks, especially if someone or something is working to undermine that alliance.

I could imagine some old wounds being reopened between Sylvari and Asura (which would help justify the most recent episode a bit more), or humans and Charr, either by fate or by malicious conspiracy, and the PC has to get to the bottom of it.

So babysitting squabbling children? That’d be retreading the dungeon storyline, would it not?

In the same sense that fighting Mordremoth is retreading the Zhaitan storyline. That is, the execution is what determines whether it feels like a retread or something compelling in its own right.

But, no, I was thinking more along the lines of unraveling a conspiracy to fracture the alliance, not helping racial exemplars take care of personal business and listening to them whine about each other.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

But it would also feel like retreading old ground, even worse than episodes 3 and 4 did- and I remember those taking quite a bit of criticism in that regard. Increased national support is good and all, but at this point they either have to be complete imbeciles to ignore what threatens them, or so far out of the line of fire that they have no motivation to help us no matter how many one-sentence arguments we throw at them.

If you mean, in terms of recruiting everyone and so on, sure. That should hopefully be a done deal.

But if their alliance stands up in place of the Pact, there will be more troubles and infighting than can be resolved with a speech from Trahearne on the Lion’s Arch docks, especially if someone or something is working to undermine that alliance.

I could imagine some old wounds being reopened between Sylvari and Asura (which would help justify the most recent episode a bit more), or humans and Charr, either by fate or by malicious conspiracy, and the PC has to get to the bottom of it.

So, someone who logs in regularly is getting a 26% boost to gold find per annum? Huh.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

What I don’t expect:

• The Pact getting their butts handed to them, at least in a permanently damaging way.

The Pact getting their butts handed to them would make uniting the traditional forces of the five races to fight Mordremoth, a thread that began this season with the meeting at the Pale Tree, even more imperative.

It would also give the PC (Pact Commander, convenient acronym) something to do in a future season in terms of building them back up. Trahearne could give us a little cube to help things along.

Could be a mini.

jamesg.7128:

PeterFries.1057:

By all means, continue to direct your writing criticisms at me.

Okay then.
I really think you need to get a Thesaurus, okay? You seem to be really overdoing the use of okay, but let me tell you it’s not always okay.
Surely the occasional alright, very well, fine or good could be thrown in now and then, okay?
There were some episodes where it seemed like every other line had an okay or 2 or 3 which I found somewhat annoying.

Uh-huh.

That Guy.5704:

Thaddeus.4891:

Ya it only need a small amount of time each day to eventually craft it. Of course is heavily time gated so it will still take about a month from the moment you start doing the actual crafting.

21 days min.

Or you can buy the time-gated components. I imagine the price will only go down over time, unless they find another use for foxfire and plant food.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

-points to OP-

On one hand, you have a Priory theory continuously stated for 10,000 BE as the previous dragonrise approximate date

Note the bolded.

The possibility of the Priory theory being wrong has always been there in my argument.

What perilisk said was:

There’s nothing anywhere that suggests that Giants were around for the last dragonrise, so Varra must be talking about an earlier one. Could just be badly written.

I pointed out that yes, there is.

They may be wrong, there may be wright, but perilisk was wrong by claiming nothing suggests the previous dragonrise and when the G-Lupe were wiped out were the same timeframe. But that’s the more common argument, in fact.

Yes, the Priory could be wrong, but as I stated in the OP, it would also mean that an interview with Ree Soesbee (which unfortunately I haven’t been able to find again…).

As for when the G-Lupe were wiped out, that’s been known to be approximately 10,000 BE since the days of Prophecies – it was part of the first lore we got. In fact, Jeff Grubb stated in this interview that the Giganticus Lupicus’s lore was the foundation for the Elder Dragons’ creation. The Priory theory is that they suppose that the G-Lupe extinction was brought by the ED, and this could be true (likely is, we see a risen GL from a previous rise), but it’s not the one and only thing pointing to 10,000 BE – just the most numerous.

Thing is, if 10,000 BE isn’t the previous rise of the Elder Dragons… ArenaNet sure are pushing almost everything to make us think it is.

Well, I could definitely be wrong. I just never got the sense that there were still giants around when the Seers/Mursaat/Forgotten/Dwarves/Jotun faced off against the dragons (why not invite them on the team?), so it seemed like there must have been two dragonrises.

I want the Personal Story to be fixed, so I can actually complete it on my alts without feeling bad about it.

Narrrz.7532:

I recently had the reason for the condition cap explained to me, which gives me a bit more tolerance for it – however, that still leaves conditions in a sad state. I’d like to see that rectified.

My suggestions to address this:
*Conditions’ damage should scale with their stack count/% max duration. All the way up to 100% bonus damage at full stacks. To avoid having this shred pvp entirely (where conditions can already be quite strong) I’d suggest an exponential scale. 5 stacks of bleed inflicts perhaps 110% normal damage, while 25 stacks inflicts the full 200% (you could perhaps scale the upper bound off ferocity)
*Your conditions are prioritized based on how much actual damage they will do. A 1k condi damage bleed applied on top of a full stack will push off the bottom, 0 condition damage bleed. Burning will always tick for (and deplete the duration of) the highest condition damage application.
*Applying a condition to a full stack of superior-damage conditions, OR having your condition pushed off, inflicts an instant tick based on the condition type, its remaining duration, and your condition damage. This tick has NO base damage, meaning if you have no condition damage, you don’t qualify. It is incapable of critting, as any other condition tick.

Another way of fixing it is to use RNG to effectively increase the cap, even though people hate RNG.

Give each condition stack fixed DPS, based on the level/rank of the target, using a rate appropriate for someone who is geared and traited for condition damage. If your stacks do that much, great. If you do less than that, you have a chance to fail to apply the condition; if you do more, you have a chance to add a second stack. So, if a default bleed stack did 100 DPS, but your bleeds only do 50, then you have a 50% to inflict bleed; if you do 150 DPS, you have a 50% chance to add two bleed stacks. Ideally, the DPS will be set so that very few people would get bonus stacks, and then only rarely, so the net effect will mostly be to get rid of a lot of crappy condition stacks. from non-condi characters.

Since this could potentially mess up the damage for fire and poison, which don’t really have the stacking issue anyway, it makes sense to only use it for intensity stacking DPS conditions.

On the plus side, this would also make it easier to get a sense for how much damage you are taking just by glancing at the number of stacks of bleed, torment, etc. on you.

Just thinking, could each of Scarlet’s alliances correspond to one pair of opposing dragons/spheres?

The Aetherblades brought airships to the party, merging Sea (ships and pirates) and Air (flight and zappy lasers).

The Toxic alliance brought the miasma, created from the spores of plants (plant/growth, obviously) and bringing rapid, choking death thanks to the Krait’s expertise with poison, expertise shared by the necromancer Marjory (death, though not undeath).

It falls apart somewhat with the Molten Alliance and their mining technology (which ought to merge the spheres of Primordus and Jormag). While the dredge live in the Shiverpeaks, their technology seems to be sonic in nature. However, the arc that introduced the Molten Alliance was called “Flame and Frost”, and the Norn Personal Story suggested that the dredge have learned how to use Icebrood cries to power advanced sonic weaponry, so it’s not a completely ridiculous stretch.

Zera Allimatti.2541:

Something I never understood at all: why is it that when you enter combat, your running speed is reduced by like 50% (or whatever the actual reduction is)? What is the purpose of slowing down a player’s movement in combat? Combat mechanics already have things like cripple and chill for movement impeding purposes, why further reduce it passively? It just seems like a very unnecessary and awkward game mechanic to me.

Would someone please explain the logic behind this? It just doesn’t make sense to me. Please note I’m not asking for it’s removal or anything (I don’t want this thread to become a Q_Q storm from the PvP community or whatever, and I know ArenaNet would never make such complicated change), I’m just hoping to understand why this feature exists at all.

Well, I guess the glass half full way to look at it is that they give characters a speed boost when ooc to make travel less tedious.

There’s nothing anywhere that suggests that Giants were around for the last dragonrise, so Varra must be talking about an earlier one. Could just be badly written.

Zaklex.6308:

Unfortunately, we didn’t get inside the cave yet…which is the final piece of information that is needed to learn that information.

It’s more like the first piece of information needed to learn that information. I enjoyed Ep 7 for what it was, but at the moment it seems like it could have been completely skipped without affecting the broader narrative at all.

Would be nice to further break dungeons down by path.

Jaken.6801:

So far we got Rytlock down and possible Evil (red and black armor. Either it`s the much wanted and clichè dark knight class, or he has gone to the dark side and is pulling a darth vader with rox)

Rytlock didn’t turn evil, he just turned awesome®. He’s the king of ghosts now, or something.

Zaklex.6308:

Perhaps you missed it, but the entire point of Ep, 7 was for us to get a look at Caithe’s history and get an idea of what might have caused her to steal the Egg at the end of Ep. 6.

Oh, so based on what we learned in Ep 7, why did Caithe steal the Egg?

Sephas.8793:

Ok, where is the “Old Boat”

South of Metrica Province, it looks like.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

To me, this indicates a new zone is coming, and the last two images are of said new zone. The sky and appearance is far too different from anything we’ve seen, and the lines from the notice that E8 is post-break, saying the Pact will assault the jungle… that really feels over the top for that three laned area.

Could be that Rytlock somehow managed to wander into the Dream, assuming it’s in the Mists like Realm of Torment. If Mordremoth is waging war against the Pale Tree in the Dream as well as in reality, maybe Rytlock will help fight back from that side?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

There are no ‘rewards’ from the new Dailies, only Achievement Points for the first three, as I understand it.

No, there is an actual reward attached to each daily, which seems to be specific to the daily.

“Rather than having a generic reward for all achievements, each one will give players something that is thematically tied to the content they’re playing. Completing a fractal daily achievement will get you an extra pristine fractal relic, some additional agony resistance , and a tome of knowledge; taking a tower in WvW for an achievement will grant you World vs. World experience and additional badges of honor; or capturing a point in PvP will give you additional reward track progress.”

All points are points of no return, unless you start bringing time travel into it.

I like the new system. The old dailies were so generic that they might as well have been a reward for logging in.

The new system helps give people some direction, if they didn’t already have some goal in mind, which can help players stay engaged. It also potentially helps cluster people at content that might otherwise rarely get completed due to lack of an appropriately sized group.

AncientYs.8613:

“Missed a day because of work, vacation, or a work vacation? No worries, your progress is still there! The next time you log in, you’ll pick up where you left off. The system will only reset once you’ve claimed the 28th and final reward. "

ok this is about the “advent calandar” type reward system where you get something by logging in daily. It says if i miss a day my progress is still there..

so what does it mean? if i have for example got to the 3rd reward in the first line but missed a day i cant get the 4th one? and i automatically progress to the 5th one?

or does it mean i still stay on the 3rd and can catch up on that one day i missed out on and get the 4th one on the day after the day that i missed?

Every day, on logging in the first time, you advance a step on the track and get the next reward in line. Once you get to the 28th reward, it resets back to 1.

Solution is probably to more finely divide perseverance stacks (so, say, max 10 stacks, but same benefit as five), reset it after breaches, and let that (rather than extractors) govern organ drops. It would also end the “crap, I forgot to use my extractor!” syndrome.

My hope is that there was some miscommunication, and there are actually several more episodes left in the season, not just one. The current arc is in no way built up for what TV would call a “season finale”. We might be about ready for the sweeps week shocker where a baby cat gets real. The Pact might be about to attack Mordremoth, but something tells me this won’t… well, you know.

If that isn’t the plan, then they might want to give serious thought to renaming Season 3 as Season 2, pt 2.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Xiem.4719:

One question, are we really waiting 6 weeks for final episode or there is something more?

Xiem — Have you had a chance to read the blog post? It’s here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/season-2-returns-on-january-13/

The post says that a pivotal moment is coming up, but it seems like a lot of people think that the next (Jan 13) episode is the final episode in the season. Is that the case, or does Season 2 run through the spring?

Vargamonth.2047:

perilisk.1874:

Active defenses are good gameplay, but they’re unrelated to stats, which is a lost opportunity for build diversity. Condition damage mechanics are also part of the problem.

As long as we accept this game was meant to have an action combat system, the problem is with the stats, not the active defenses. Current gear stats are just too MMO generic and barely add anything to an action oriented gameplay.

I agree.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Ayrilana.1396:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Ayrilana.1396:

Jedge.3619:

Ayrilana.1396:

Jedge.3619:

mtpelion.4562:

Arnath.2319:

I do not understand why ArenaNet are deliberately trying to kill this game!
Almost ZERO content has been added since release, and any content that is added is either finished within an hour or removed.

I do not understand why you feel the need to deliberately post false statements!

If he’s going to argue that there’s no content, the least you could do is back up your response. Cause’ right now you’re going to lose this battle my friend.

Technically it’s up to the one stating there’s a lack of content to post their evidence as they’re the one who made the argument first.

My friend, you are not diving deep enough into this argument. Look forward not back.

Yeah… Still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not on him to provide the evidence. Arnath stated that almost zero content was added without provide any proof and mtpelion challenged it.

If you want, I can state that the state the Earth is flat, have you challenge this, and then say that you must prove me wrong.

You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist, how would you do that exactly? It is up to you to prove that there has been a substantial amount of content added.

Like this:

In the first 2 years of WoW Blizzard released:

8 new dungeons
5 new raids
10 new zones
1 new race
500+ quests
6 PvP maps
2 PvP modes
10 new levels
20+ new skills
50+ new talents
LFg system
Cross server system (first of its kind ever)
4 Festivals

WoW is considered the golden standard of MMO’s, your job would be to show that GW2 does indeed release a similar amount of content. (Hint: it doesn’t).

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

Ahh yes the old use a logical fallacy to end the argument when you lose….

Here I’ll start for you:

Number of zones added: 3*
New zones are 1/3 the size or smaller than original game zones
Number of new races: 0
Number of new classes: 0
Number of new legendary’s: 0
Number of new dungeons: 1
1 dungeon also removed
Number of new raids: 0
Number of new quests(DE’s): ~50
LFG Added
Fractals Added
New PvP modes: 1
Removed from rotation
New PvP maps: 3
One removed, one removed from rotation
Number of LS episodes: 29*
**22 removed

Note: This was over 2.5 years as opposed to WoW’s Two years

Would you say that GW2 released a reasonable amount of content in those 2 years as compared to WoW?

Part of the issue here is the problematic execution of Season 1. There’s an entire year’s worth of content not on the list, because it was added briefly, never to be seen again. They’ve learned their lesson, at least, in that regard.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

So we’re boiling down to:

I think the argument is that, while many types of gear are viable in PvE, zerker is almost universally the correct choice, especially in older content (ie dungeons) and that’s very dull.

Active defenses are good gameplay, but they’re unrelated to stats, which is a lost opportunity for build diversity. Condition damage mechanics are also part of the problem.

Thaddeus.4891:

Guys it’s christmas, what is going on. Everybody will be on vacation, including the dev. Did you really expect them to make a update on december 30? Really????

I think the problem is not what’s happening on December 16th, but what didn’t happen on December 2nd — Seeds of Truth didn’t leave people with the feeling that they had actually accomplished anything, and anet is leaving things for six weeks on that dull note.

Dondarrion.2748:

perilisk.1874:

PeterFries.1057:

One of the names I suggested for the Silverwastes area was “Fractured Mamnoon”…

Why “Silver”? I mean, the “wastes” part is pretty obvious.

Have you even started hunting the golden badges yet, you’ll understand why it’s silverwastes afterwards… it’s got to do with how many times you need to WP

Hey, I think you nailed it. It does sound a lot more poetic than “Goldsink Gorge”.