Guild Wars 2

Harper.4173:

Also the dredge as enemies come close to your vision of PVE and you know what? I’m going to bet money that the majority of players in this game hate the dredge.

Well, they completely negate one class of active defense. But the Toxic Alliance seem to be a better example of a good mix of PvE abilities. They dodged, used conditions and boons, reflects, revived the downed, I think they even used combos.

Southwest of Dry Top is my best guess, if you mean next “map” and not next “map area”.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

perilisk.1874:

PeterFries.1057:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Since you’re here… why does the Far Silverwastes, formerly Mamnoon Lagoon, no longer looks like a lagoon was there? I don’t mind but was really looking forward to seeing an old lagoon.

Edit: And any other naming trivia? ^.^

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

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

It’s a reference to the GW1 zone that overlaps the western part of the map, Silverwood. Not sure where the silver came from there either, though.

There are a lot of metal references. Ignoring the breach bosses, Prosperity was a copper mining town, we’re in the Silverwastes, looking for some hypothetical Golden land.

PeterFries.1057:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Since you’re here… why does the Far Silverwastes, formerly Mamnoon Lagoon, no longer looks like a lagoon was there? I don’t mind but was really looking forward to seeing an old lagoon.

Edit: And any other naming trivia? ^.^

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

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

Astralporing.1957:

misterman.1530:

So, on trial for stealing the egg? She could have a very good reason, as others have stated. It could sort of be like putting Frodo on trial in Gondor for “stealing” the ring.

If Frodo was part of a group that went to retrieve the ring, and then decided to take it for himself and run, then yeah, that would be bad, regardless of intentions behind it. Caithe is not Frodo of the story, but rather playing the part of Boromir.

Maybe the PC is Boromir. Some people have theorized that the PC has been compromised since viewing the Eternal Alchemy.

I liked it for what it was. It just felt incomplete, from a narrative perspective.

So… make gear with berserker stats? If you’re playing PvE, that is.

Windsagio.1340:

Both for stealing the egg and for her part in Faolain’s crimes that there is now a prominent, highly respected witness to?

From our character’s perspective inside the tent, while Faolain was definitely being provocative, the centaurs attacked her first.

As for the egg, you’d have to prove a property right for it to be considered theft. Since our entire group including Caithe had just found it after the death of the previous owner, and the Master of Peace didn’t leave a written will, that would be tricky.

As much as I don’t anticipate another episode for a while, it’s a shame because the story left off with a whimper, not a bang.

Michael Conrad.6704:

I started out the Living Story on one character and obtained my Carapace Pauldrons. I noticed that they didn’t have the luminescent hue to them like I’ve seen with other players. I then started a new character and obtained the gloves, leggings and boots (in that order). Again, I’m not noticing any particular luminescence. What am I doing wrong ?
Great Patch and Thanks.

Carapace and Luminescent armor are different things. Check the collections tab to see how to get luminescent skins.

Zaxares.5419:

Bah, Raptors were easy. Now Angorodons… They were a real party killer, especially in HM when they all spike your Monk to death with unblockable life steals. :P

That one looks a bit like an angorodon. Definitely not a tyrannus, it doesn’t have tiny little hands.

The Vindicators.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Tyrannus
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Angorodon
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ferothrax

Most probably the Tyrannus. They did used to exist along the coast of the Maguuma Jungle. So it’s quite plausible.

Looks more like the Angorodon.

For ordinary JPs? No, for the reasons pointed out. For an instanced, challenging JP (SAB or similar content)? Sure.

As he’s sitting on Elona’s doorstep, it’s possible that conflict with Palawa Joko is consuming Kralkatorrik’s attention and, conversely, that the presence of the dragon has been a factor in preventing him from expanding his empire westward.

After Mordremoth, my feeling is the next arc would either take us to Elona, or else have us caught between Primordus and Jormag.

If I was given free reign to fix things, without regard for the work involved or resulting rebalance task, I’d probably drop gear stats altogether, and focus more on armor giving role-related buffs like traits or food.

I’d also rework base armor stats so that armor has both a defense range (directly subtracted from damage) and a durability stat (the number of hits it can take before being disabled and losing the defense and the buff). Durability would reset when ooc.

I’d collapse attributes into just 5, one for each traitline. Power (boost direct damage), Accuracy (boost critical rate — criticals tend to hit low-defense armor or bypass it, but don’t actually do more damage), Focus (boost condition and boon duration), Vitality (boost health), and Endurance (boost “Energy”, which would be a combination of Initative and what is now called Endurance; so more attacks and dodges).

• Power would be ineffective against high-defense foes, but it would help squash squishies.

• Accuracy would counter defense strongly, but wouldn’t be useful otherwise except for things that proc on crits.

• Conditions would all stack in duration. Damage, if any, would be a % of health (on elites and above, %s would be smaller and durations would be cut substantially). Thus, Focus would counter Vitality. Armor would semi-counter conditions, since some conditions (esp bleeds) would only attach if the associated attack did at least 1 direct damage, and the condi component would not contribute to breaking defense. Vulnerability would not stack, but instead cause the next hit to bypass armor.

• Vitality would boost health. Fairly straightforward — heals would all be % based, so it would help there, but would not help in healing others.

• Endurance/Energy would govern how often you could dodge (which would compete with attacks), and what skills you could use. It could theoretically boost different strategies — evasive, spamming attacks to wear durability, more access to bit attacks to pierce armor, more conditions or boons.

Maybe the solution isn’t changing the way cutscenes work, but changing the way episode achievements work?

While not removing the options of going through it honestly a second time, why not just let players click a button in the achievement description (once achievements for the episode are unlocked) to bring up a special version of the instance that just skips to the relevant content?

E.g., for a challenge mote achievement, go to the achievements panel, bring up the achievement info, click a button (close to the one that tells you where to go to complete the achievement), and then you go into an instance that contains nothing but the upgraded boss fight (as in, you can’t leave the boss arena without exiting the instance). For the rare achievement where the point is to find a secret or take a detour, you would just go to a standard instance.

hybrid.5027:

2. Support is more powerful than DPS. so your other point is countered.

This is a debate about stats (gear stats, mainly), not roles or abilities. DPS benefits strongly from (some) stats. Support does not. Therefore, whether you are bringing might, vuln, aegis, blind, CC, reflect, portals, or whatever, you still have no incentive to pick anything but DPS stats. Since conditions suck in PvE and have no synergy, and direct damage has three stats that synergize, “DPS” means berserker or assassin.

The mechanics behind conditions and boons would have to change for the condition and boon related stats to become useful in PvE. For toughness/healing to become useful, enemies would have to use a mix of rapid, minor hits and big hits, such that you would need to be picky about when to use active defenses (big hits), and when to tough it out and heal up (piddly spam hits).

Atlas.9704:

Actually my reasoning for calling her Eeeeevul right from the start stems from how she never truly changes compared to how she’ll eventually be.

In this back story, well she’s a racist or at least has Sylvari supremacist-like feelings which isn’t too far from the former. Aside from that she’s still pretty much the end result, minus the kidnapping part.

Maybe, but I just don’t see it. If your point is that she didn’t go from angelic sweetness to darkest black, sure. But she starts out suspicious, not paranoid; a freethinker, not a terrorist; protective of Sylvari, not xenophobic.

If you only showed me part one, I could easily envision a character arc that ends with Faolain as a Byronic anti-hero, with Trahearne being the one who falls from grace as secondborn start questioning Ventari’s teachings and his authority, and he reacts by codifying the tablet into a set of rigid laws enforced by a brutal Inquisition.

We can easily see the traits (questioning orthodoxy, a suspicious attitude, self-confidence to the point of arrogance) that will combine with her experiences and the influence of others like Cadeyrn to corrupt her. But it doesn’t mean most people with those flaws will become a paranoid, racist terrorist.

Now, in part three, she’s clearly most of the way to the dark side. But by that point, it should be clear that the Nightmare Court exists in an embryonic form, and she has joined their team since part two. The arc of her fall is traced between parts 1/2 (the start, where she’s about as good as she ever was) and part 3 (where’s she nightmare court in all but name).

Yeah. They could be, like, a bunch of breather-wearing assassins or something. But fish tails are too boring and the transform is weird. Maybe if they have manta-style wings? That would still work on land.

It’s a shame that the debate focuses on dungeons — they should be the easiest content to fix, since they are instanced constant with a standard party size, much like GW1 content. You don’t have to worry about scaling issues, unlike open world content, so you don’t even really need gimmicks like stability as long as bosses get some OP stun-breaks and stability.

They should be able to rework dungeon encounters so that they function more like PvP/WvW skirmishes, in terms of enemy HP/armor balance, skill rate, and use of standard player skills where possible (so that PvE is also PvP training) — especially using more boons, conditions, reflects, dodge/aegis/blind, heals, downed-state, revives, etc.

The Toxic Alliance events are evidence that it can be done in PvE with the tools they have — it’s a question of devoting the resources to polishing old content.

The best field test would be a new dungeon that functions like a PvP map, but with some story bookends — instead of a linear series of encounters and cutscenes, you have a smallish map with multiple simultaneous objectives — some are essential (holding all the points long enough to draw out the boss), others are optional but make things easier. At any given time, a smallish group of veteran NPCs is ranging the map trying to stop players and fulfill some competing objective. If you die, you respawn even if your party is not ooc. If the enemy achieves their goal, game over.

Maybe go up against the sinister triad, since that could more easily tie into an ABC point capture setup, and NPCs already have downed animations and whatnot.

Yargesh.4965:

Astralporing.1957:

Incidentally, Trahaerne is also a GS using necro now.

Always was one.

By that logic, so are some PCs. All, if you consider Caladbolg similar to a semi-permanent sylvari variant of FGS.

DarcShriek.5829:

No, we don’t need to kill them. We just need to keep the magic levels under control. We can put them to sleep and keep them there indefinitely buy controlling magic levels.

Worst. Environmental parable. Ever.

“Monsters are awakening because there is too much oil in the world! We have to burn copious amounts to put them back to sleep!”

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I’m aware of this.

Apparently whomever wrote Malomedies’ dialogue is not.

While it’s almost certainly a continuity error, I suppose if they are going to put on a brave face and march forward instead of rewriting it in shame, the most plausible explanation is that the Sylvari felt it when the Dream felt it, which is not precisely the same thing as when it happened, and with the Dream being dreamlike and mysterious, the gap can just be handwaved away. With the secondborn, in contrast, it seems like they actual physically saw their deaths, or at least their bodies.

Alternatively, take an uglier view of Sylvari society (building on the debate between Trahearne and Wynne about what to call the secondborn) and say that Riannoc was objectively not the first Sylvari to die, he’s just remembered that way because the secondborn who preceded him in death were basically nobodies and second-class citizens of the Dream. Sort of like a few kids from the wrong side of the tracks get killed, you get a blurb in the paper, but a celebrity dies and everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news.

DarkWasp.7291:

The question is: Would that lead to us returning to the old issue of having to boot people from our group because we already have 4/5 and have yet to get a healer?

It’s a risk. Right now, if you’re meta-obsessed, you boot people because you’re 4/5 and don’t have another zerk, but you can muddle through most content with nearly any group if you play well enough. Having a healer in GW1, in contrast, was practically required.

So, it would depend on whether the new, more diverse meta is optimal (like the current zerk PvE meta), or necessary (more like the holy trinity, or healers in GW1).

Zaxares.5419:

Nah. We know that Scarlet already started having the visions from Mordremoth before Zhaitan’s death. All available evidence in-game suggests it was due to a combination of her choosing the path of the Soundless, and then moving out into the Maguuma Wastes where the closer proximity to Mordremoth affected her. (Her going into Omadd’s machine basically was her throwing open the door instead of trying to strengthen it.)

Is this definitive? I mean, it is broadly assumed, both in-world and out-of-world, but the only dragon that is known for a fact to have telepathic powers is Glint (and possibly her offspring). The presence of Mordremoth’s champion in the Dream suggests he may be active there, but it could just be that he is prominent because Mordremoth is the Sylvari nemesis dragon (like Zhaitan for humans, Jormag for norn, Kral for Charr, Primordus for Asura, and DSD whenever it floods the Tengu homeland).

Other than that, AFAIK, Mordremoth’s mind powers are mainly inferred on the basis that Scarlet’s actions benefited him, therefore he was the one responsible for driving her nuts.

BUT. Scarlet saw something similar to what we saw when she broke her brain — she would have known about the balance among the dragons, and the fact that killing Zhaitan would create an imbalance in the fabric of magic that could lead to cataclysm. Mordremoth was the opposing force, but he was still sleeping. Scarlet’s actions basically opened up a pathway for the magic so it could get dumped into Mordremoth (at the cost of waking him up and putting him on roids). If you aren’t a resident of Lion’s Arch, you could even view her actions as beneficial, assuming magical cataclysm is somehow worse that Elder Dragon attack.

Certainly, she thought her actions were somehow justified. Maybe she was wrong, or misguided, or manipulated by Mordremoth. But it’s possible she was being driven by a semi-benign being (that is, someone willing to invade people’s minds and drive them crazy or destroy cities, but opposed to global cataclysm).

Anyandrell.6238:

They are not the firstborn, also obviously. They can’t be second born either, because the second born just woke up and are like babies, right? while these guys are all full-blown warriors and stuff.

It isn’t well-explained, but my understanding is that some time has elapsed between the second part and third. In the interim, the Wardens have likely been established (which means that Sylvari have been getting arms and training), and Cadeyrn has attracted a group of followers, which Faolain must have joined after returning from Metrica. Combine the two, and you get Faolain’s squad. It (i.e., hanging out with Cadeyrn and co) also explains how Faolain’s attitude has gotten so much worse between the second and third part.

Atlas.9704:

How did I feel about it?
I liked Caithe, but I didn’t like Faolain and not just because she’s evil.
It was how they portrayed her.
Right off the beginning she hates the tablet and kitten everyone’s opinion other than hers.

Yes, much like everyone in Real Life™ who objects to a society where people are forced or heavily pressured into living their lives according to a set of rules written on a stone tablet by a guy a long time ago are Very Bad People and obviously just waiting to go psycho. Anyway, while she clearly values the ability to think for herself, she doesn’t want to impose her ideals on others (at least, judging by her words). She doesn’t care if Trahearne wants to rigorously observe the tenets of Ventari’s tablet, but she has a problem with his desire to indoctrinate the secondborn (as he calls them, notably, emphatically placing the “firstborn” above them in terms of actual and moral authority)

People calling Faolain obviously evil from the start are letting their memories of the first two parts be overwhelmed by their reaction to the last bit, even though it should be clear that a fair bit of character development has happened, unseen, in the interim. Even in No Refuge, it’s not clear that she’s Eeeeevul, rather than paranoid and roughly as jingoistic as your average modern military FPS hero. If she wanted to just slaughter a village, she could have done it and left Caithe behind, rather than saying “Why don’t you do the talking with these creatures up ahead? You have a better way with strangers.”. She expects all outsiders to be hostile or at least untrustworthy, and isn’t good about hiding her feelings in that regard, manipulative though she may otherwise be. Her particular dislike for centaurs is probably rooted (heh) to a large extent in that fact that it is centaur philosophy that is being forced on the Sylvari.

At any rate, the centaurs aren’t peaceful baby seals here — while they’re initially pretty friendly, once they see Faolain’s sunny personality, they don’t act much better than she does. The first thing Nekhii says in talking with Caithe is that they have a history of violence which they are trying to escape. Faolain’s attitude was just the push they needed to fall off the wagon.

I wanted to see a bit more of a lighter personality before meeting with the Faolain I’ve already killed off in that one dungeon.

Killed who now?

Windsagio.1340:

Still Faolain is utterly loathsome and against everything they’ve been taught. She’s petty, spiteful, hateful, racist, violent, and subversive.

While we only get three vignettes, I think they’re intended to show a downward spiral.

In the first bit, the worst you can say about her is that she is a sort of Byronic figure (or a rebellious teenager) — she wants to find her own path rather than live up to someone else’s ideals, and feels the secondborn are going to be even more suffocated than she is. Ironically (but not unsurprisingly — nature abhors a vacuum) it seems like she ends up adopting Caderyn’s ideals rather defining her own. As she already feels controlled and pressured by the other firstborn (especially Trahearne, who comes off like a bit of a jerk here) and the Pale Tree, learning of secret discussions among same about what sounds like a mind-control device makes her assume the worst about their intentions.

In the second bit, she clearly thinks direct confrontation is better, but has no problem with using stealth and violence only as needed — until they find the newborns being experimented on. But there’s nothing “evil” here, and her horror and anger is entirely understandable (and probably shared by Caithe). However, between that, the fact that she is placed in a situation where she has to (indirectly) kill newbies or be killed by golems, and the fact that Vorpp gets away and faces no repercussions, we can see what, for a human, could easily be psychological roots of her xenophobia, her acceptance or even embrace of cruelty and subversion, etc. But pain and negative emotions (guilt, anger, horror) seem to affect Sylvari more deeply and fundamentally, and as a independent-minded Sylvari, she can’t lean as deeply upon the Dream or Ventari’s teachings for mental/spiritual support.

A lot of time has elapsed by the third bit — it seems as though she has been meeting with Cadeyrn, and their interaction (from the wiki: “He was there to witness the aftermath of Malomedies’ first bitter contact with the asura, and in battle he saw no hope in mercy. In each occasion, he only saw peace through aggression, and as each turn was stymied, his enmity of the Tablet grew.”) combined with her personality and her brush with Nightmare in Vorpp’s lab to transform her from someone rebellious and independent and maybe a little paranoid to something much darker (though more like a fascist than the Evil for the sake of Evil villains that the Nightmare Court usually come across as). Still, there’s no evidence that she has does anything this horrible before this incident.

So, tldr, Faolain didn’t start out Evil, she started out as a romantic hero who got corrupted by a combination of bad life experiences and hanging out with extremists. But she was Caithe’s bestie and lover from the get-go, and it’s understandable that Caithe would blind herself to what was going on with Faolain, or at least to how far exactly she had fallen.

Healix.5819:

From Caithe’s perspective, she didn’t see what was happening. She only heard that her comrades were under attack. Would you really let your friends die over a tribe you knew nothing about? Also consider that you had previously encountered a dangerous species of “imps” that were killing your people and before that, you were told to protect and not let another Sylvari die. Also keep in mind that she is young and inexperienced at this point and is likely now biased in assuming that other species are hostile.

Yeah, she’s all like “What’s with these ponies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta front? What did we ever do to these guys, that made them so violent?”

Canakun.8031:

I am so sick of this discussion.
There will ALWAYS be some kind of meta, because there will ALWAYS be a most efficient way of clearing content. ALWAYS.

True, but in group-based content, that meta could (with the right game mechanics) still involve different roles for different stat configurations. As opposed to a team of zerk, zerk, zerk, zerk, and zerk.

Short of rebuilding combat mechanics and character stats from the ground up around active defenses and dropping defensive attributes altogether (other than vitality), that seems hard to do. But if they were going to put in that effort, I would rather they drop professions completely too, which would help address a lot of the remaining balance issues (in the sense that only certain skills and traits would be useless, not whole characters).

Well, if it’s Greek, Scylla is plausible. Or, corrupted versions of names like Seto or Scyrybdys

But actually, it’s Serendipity

Really? That Elite is… you saw the cooldown, right? And the fact that you stay in stealth mode when you attack?

Use that, then use #1 to teleport to a single target and backstab the crap out of it over and over, or use #5 to go blender mode on groups. While it’s recharging, use your other skills to evade and reflect any attacks headed your way. If all else fails, throw caltrops and run away.

Caithe is OP.

I actually liked playing as Caithe. The flashback mechanic is a good way to get backstory, to get a feel for a character’s capabilities, etc. Her skills are reasonably fun to use.

The best thing, though, is that there can’t be any complaints of this class or that class being screwed by the mechanics. You all get the same skills, so (choice of armor aside — and attributes, equipment, and traits should really be overridden in content like this too) any complaints are mostly going to be L2P issues.

I wouldn’t mind having some sidequest (ie, non-mandatory) flashbacks with the biconics or other key characters to help introduce the characters to new players and familiarize the player with their skillset.

I imagine you’ll be surprised next episode when you learn that the cavern actually leads to Tixx’s secret workshop (built on top of a bloodstone) where he steals Sylvari lifeforce to power his toys, which is the Wintersday plot this year.

Then, just as we’re about to give up on ever finding the egg, as the final memory was completely unrelated, Caithe comes back and tells us that she took it back to Glint’s lair, since we were blabbing to everyone about it and thus too stupid to be trusted with carrying it.

She’ll tell us that she got Taimi to build a mobile waypoint, and tell us to plant it and send mail (and 3s) to her when we get where the egg needs to be, so she can just WP in with the egg without it getting jacked en route.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

A stark contrast to his display during Festival of the Four Winds, but he was talking to himself then too, and had some strange lines such as:

“Pale Mother guide me…the Zephyrites are right in front of me, but how can I convince them to let me help?”

Why would the Zephyrites need help?

“Ok, Aerin, this is it! The Zephyrites are here, you’re here… This is the beginning of great things for you.”

Beginning of great things, eh? Like… obtaining a dragon egg?

Unless I’m misremembering, didn’t this last episode carry some implication that Sylvari might misinterpret their Wyld Hunts and be led astray? Maybe something like that explains why Aerin felt so determined to join the Zephyrites. Could Mordremoth corrupt a Dreamer’s interpretation of his Wyld Hunt? Say, he found someone whose hunt was naturally to join the Zephyrites, and corrupted him to instead want the power of the egg.

Alternatively, the Nightmare Court have their Dark Hunts. The Nightmare Court is also part of the Sinister Triad, which conveniently operates where the ships went down. The attack might not have been been Mordremoth’s doing at all, and could have been planned before he became active; it seems less likely, as Aerin was evidently mad rather than tendril twirling evil — but it could just be that he isn’t a Courtier, but instead someone tortured into serving them (like the Sylvari in Twilight Arbor), except as a sleeper agent.

Underdark.3726:

scum masturz? i so loled

Well, looks like you’re getting fired too, then.

Jaken.6801:

Well, even if they are the ones who build it. The question is how they want to get it out.

They seem to have a tunnel leading toward an old ship that is wrecked off the coast to the south of Metrica Province, based on their map. Alternatively, it could be foreshadowing a flood of some sort (they will collect two of each of the shinies and place them on the ship, etc. etc.) in which case somehow going straight up seems more likely.

I will just reiterate what others have said. As much as I enjoyed it mechanically (when it didn’t bug) and the storytelling, and the openworld bits, in the larger arc, it was pure filler.

There was essentially no advancement toward the larger goal (Mordremoth) at all, we didn’t even make it to the end of our detour. Cliffhangers are nice and all, but it’s good to resolve something with each episode, even if it’s just a villain of the week. That’s hard when you’re just experiencing someone else’s flashback, but even by that low standard, Vorpp escaped, we only rescued Canach (who we hate), and then we got conned into slaughtering innocents by an up-and-coming villain. About the time it seems like all of this might pay off with some progress… dun dun dun, tune in next week.

As for Faolain’s characterization, I think the intent is to show the fall in progress. In the first bit, she is skeptical about Ventari’s teachings and feels that the Pale Tree and other firstborn are too controlling, and is curious about Cadeyrn’s ideas (not exactly evil, more like a rebellious teenager with strict parents). In the second, she is angry regarding actual mistreatment of Sylvari, and prefers straightforward violence to free them and punish their victimizers (given that this is the typical PC approach to these sorts of situations, it’s hard to call her “evil” yet). In the third, time has passed, the NC is coming into being, and between her experiences, her personality, and her interaction with Caderyn, she has progressed to outright xenophobia, bloodlust, cruelty, and deception/manipulation.

Hopefully at some point they will rework the Orrian maps to work more like Silverwastes, so things will reset eventually anyway.

I second the interpretation of that story as an allegory for the imbalance introduced after killing Zhaitan. Remember, dragons don’t drink up all the water in the world, they drink up all the magic.

Rather than give specifics on features, it might be nice to have a Manifesto 2.0. In the runup to the original release, I always enjoyed reading about the team’s thoughts on design. A lot of the original manifesto might still apply, but there have been plenty of changes as well.

Iason Evan.3806:

It really makes no sense. There is a thread in the BLTC section started by John Smith from ArenaNet titled, “RNG as a Concept” and the feedback in it is predominately negative towards RNG. Primarily, the rewards being too RNG focused. A lot of times, we as players are also forced into spending gold on top of collecting things in order to get new items introduced into the game. I am not against gold sinks. The game needs them and ArenaNet needs to flush gold out of the economy since it is directly tied to how they make a living, but stop putting RNG in our rewards and int he cash shop. If I wanted to waste my money on lottery tickets, I would go to the liquor store. Stop preying on the gambling proclivities of idiots and start putting stuff in the gem shop we can buy outright instead of treating our money with disrespect.

I don’t gamble because the odds always favor the house. I don’t do it to try and get real world money in return so why would I do it with real or fake money for fake items in a game? It’s asinine.

People dislike RNG. It boggles the mind that farmable gold gets you direct, reliable results (via the TP if nothing else) while actual real-world money gets you a big maybe. Seems backward.

Hey, I’ve got nothing against Disney/Marvel, but now that I think about it, aside from from Kasjory, our main characters in this arc are a genius in a robot suit, an archer, a big viking-style guy with a blunt weapon, and a sneaky-type with questionable loyalties. Now we’re all working with a high-tech global defense force (complete with floating battleships), and its hands-on leader. All we’re missing before we can really start to avenge Mordremoth’s victims is for Canach to get exposed to draconic energy and transform into some sort of incredibly powerful Husk.

hybrid.5027:

phoenix.3465:

Simplest solution would be to increase enemies armor and decrease enemies health.

No one wants conditions to be viable more than me, but if the “solution” is a brute force idiotic nerf to direct damage builds I will pass on it.

Bringing PvE mobs more in line with player or WvW NPCs is going to be an essential ingredient in fixing PvE problems without imbalancing PvP, short of a split. This is especially true for veterans, which should roughly be equivalent to players in power.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I inquired about these concerns, and our narrative director shared the following:

Thank you so much for your comments. We realize that the changes that were made have impacted the personal story, and we are working to fix this. This requires a good deal of resources, so we do not have a set date for when these fixes will be implemented. We appreciate your patience and will update with more information as it becomes available.

I take it that restoring the PS to its pre-NPE state as an interim measure is off the table?

Zaklex.6308:

The problem with that scenario is that Faolain would know, and at least one of these secrets is something that Faolain doesn’t even know…so there goes that theory out the window.

If it was Faolain’s doing, yes. But if she preceded Faolain into Nightmare, and since then has been fighting to keep from falling back, like a junkie trying to stay clean…

Aaron Ansari.1604:

The problem there is that you’d have to assume that the gods were mistaken. That’s a bit harder to swallow, especially if you accept that they’re in the same general category of sphere-based entities as the dragons.

Maybe they assume they’re in the same general category.

Anyway, the gods have been mistaken about plenty of things. Setting up shop on top of an Elder Dragon, giving humans magic, etc.

PetboyJoshua.3108:

I don’t see which pain could it be, if it isn’t about the NC.

The Pale Tree is still in recovery, so there’s that.

Otherwise, maybe the egg is in pain? Or it inflicts pain on those that carry it? Or she suspects the PC is corrupted and Mordremoth would torment them mentally into bringing it the egg?

Or something related to the Nightmare court, of course.