Guild Wars 2

If you’re having trouble retrying because of NPCs, try reviving them all to 90-99% before you actually “finish” any of them. At least then they aggro in a loose clump rather than a dribble.

You can kill the Locust Swarms, but I don’t think you can do it quickly enough to save the NPCs, and if you’re doing that once they’re all down, you’ll struggle to do enough damage to get him before he gets you.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

a simple question:

what do you want?
2 weeks events?
1 month events?

for me, i want 1 month.
2 weeks is too short.

for example, some people may go on a 2 weeks holiday and missed out an event.
so, you want 2 weeks or 1 month?

There’s no reason that one thing has to end when the next thing comes out. Just because new stuff is arriving every two weeks doesn’t mean everything that arrived two weeks ago has to vanish. Dragon Bash hasn’t vanished just because the Aetherblades have appeared.

Did you read what they’re planning? “What they do now” is, if they achieve what they seem to be aiming for, will be as mouse flatus to a hurricane, when compared with their apparent aims.

Just because it hasn’t happened yet in the Living World doesn’t mean it’s not going to. If the Living World shapes up to Colin’s expectations (and ramping up the teams to support it and developing the engineering behind the systems to accommodate it could easily have taken these first few months and explain why it’s not happened sooner) it sounds like it’s going to deliver all of those aspects that are ever going to be delivered: features; zones; stuff to do. Whether they’ll ever add new classes or races is yet to be determined, but why so adamant that this couldn’t be done as part of the natural progression of a game where the architecuture underpinning it has been designed to allow it.

If they can’t develop engaging content incrementally, I see no reason why they should be more capable of doing so with a “big bang” release. Prior “failings” don’t automatically mean they’ll continue. Remember that it was over 2 years from WoW’s launch til their first expansion. I don’t think that Guildies quitting can be blamed entirely on a world that’s been “static” for 10 months.

So again: if the content can be delivered organically as a game growing week by week (a technical achievement way beyond the cast iron worlds of WoW/SWTOR etc), why should an expansion necessarily be better?

Latinkuro.9420:

womble.2153:

Out in the world, there are lots of nodes; if you have a dozen level 80s, you can either go and mine each of their personally-instanced nodes, or go around mining with just one character. Mining output per account is limited by time spent.

Nobody is talking about how many characters you can gather with at the same time !
it’s about your ability to swap characters and mine the same node again that is in question !
read properly b4 answering !

If that’s what you’re talking about, as you’d know if you comprehended my post, you’re talking about an irrelevance. There are hundreds (thousands?) of locations for nodes for other materials. There will only be one location for the crystal node. If you camp all your toons at one Gold (or whatever) node, and cycle through them to farm it, you will (if your loading times are at all typical) get less gold ore (et al) per hour than if you ran around with one character and mined a number of nodes equal to your number of characters. Your output of every existing resource is bounded by your account, not the number of characters.

Why should this new resource be any different?

Maybe if you thought about what you’re reading rather than assuming everyone else is wrong, you might have understood this and posted something a bit more constructive?

Why does it matter? If they’re releasing new content all the time, including zones and abilities, with some of that content being “sticky” or persistent, and they’re doing that to maintain interest to keep the cash shop ticking over, and that’s funding the “rolling” expansion, why do you want a “big bang” expansion pack?

Of course, it might not be like that; the best case outcome of my interpretation of their aims as stated in the recent publicity might not be achieved, but still, what’s so special about “an expansion”?

Latinkuro.9420:

if you went through the leveling process and all that why shouldn’t you be allowed to earn and reap the rewards as well, limiting a mining node to just one character is NOT cool.

Why? Because you can only mine with one character at a time. Out in the world, there are lots of nodes; if you have a dozen level 80s, you can either go and mine each of their personally-instanced nodes, or go around mining with just one character. Mining output per account is limited by time spent.

So, by your logic, you are already being “punished” for having lots of Alts because you can only use them one at a time.

With just one node (at whatever respawn rate) in the world, if it was available separately for every Alt, the output per respawn cycle would be limited by the number of characters in the game, not the number of accounts. That’s entirely inconsistent with all other resource gathering, whether it be RNG boxes, or money, or items or other raw materials, whether they be drops off mobs or hacked out of nodes. That’s the reason you’ll probably only be able to harvest a given node once per account per respawn period.

in your case you’re saying it’s ok to make this a single character game !
don’t presume to call it an mmorpg than !

What the kitten (yes, I typed kitten) does the number of characters that any one player can roll have to do with whether the game accommodates large numbers of players? Total kittening irrelevance. If you actually think about impact on markets, you’ll see that having one node per account (or one access per respawn, from whichever of your myriad characters you fancy giving the harvesting XP to) is the only way it will work.

You do realise that the prices are what they are because people pay them? Whether it’s because something else desirable uses those ingredients or because people are mass producing unknown grey dyes, it’s a market price and if you think it’s too high for you to make a profit out of, you should just stop buying and find some other market niche to occupy.

Roquen.5406:

So, I began crafting these dye in an attempt to increase my odds at getting better selling rare dyes.

Just because you don’t think the profit margin is large enough, doesn’t meant the ingredient prices are too high; they’re just too high for your purposes. They’re not going to come down, and ANet aren’t going to alter the proc rate just because you’ve wasted a bunch of gold on a scheme that turned out not to be viable.

You can either mooch around the lowest level areas til they’re all done, then step up, or you can do enough of the low level areas to achieve two things: getting to a power level that you’re comfortable moving up to the 15-25 areas; getting tough enough to complete your personal stories. If you follow the personal stories, they’ll drag you around the world a bit, with yellow stars as your guides, and at some point if you do “mostly” personal story, they’ll jump in difficulty and you’ll need to go off to one of the places you’ve found and do some “ordinary” missions to improve.

With all the XP from “non-quest” sources (crafting and gathering mostly), I found I was well past 15 with my first character by the time I’d got zone completion on the first zone; I still have most of the other continents to explore with my alts.

Darkorical.9213:

zenleto.6179:

They aren’t even races they’re different species.

actually it does say races on the creation screen.

That’s just a “stoopid RPG mistake”. A holdover from DnD, and possibly Tolkien. It’s what everyone expects to see in an RPG, so its what designers give us. It’s not trying to be biologically correct.

As far as it being an attempt to “make fun of racism” I don’t buy that.

Nope. Me neither. It’s a depiction of a world where biology/Creation has produced sapients of markedly differing physical characteristics that have been engaged in some pretty destructive conflict with each other and haven’t had the time to develop civilised relations. And the Asurans are just unsocialised narcissistic psychos (as you’d expect given their background), even if they haven’t waged any major wars.

Bigotry is a given in such an environment. ANet are just generating immersion.

daimasei.4091:

What’s next? Complains about killing pretty much everything in-game? Should I call the cops whenever someone jump into a centaurs camp and kill everyone inside?

If you notice there ARE limits on what you can kill. that camp of centaurs is going to attack you if you get close to it and therefor you can kill them. BUT you cannot for no reason simply walk into a city and start killing non agressive NPCs.

Neither can you attempt negotiation with those centaurs. It’s an unending cycle of violence, based largely on assumptions about appearances: racism.

Game’s full of it, but the best of the characters reach above and beyond it.

I do know this is a game I do know the toons in it have their own fictitious culture. I also know that in this fictional world racism not only exists. but is quite rampant. and nobody in their world seems to care, not even the members of their world controlled by those of us from our REAL world.

It would be wrong for the player characters to care. They come from the culture, so if they interact with that culture (that’ll be roleplaying), it would jarr if they didn’t roll with it. Failing to set aside C21st Western Hemisphere attitudes is just going to make you look stupid, like protesting against slavery in an RPG set in the Rome of the Ceasars.

Look at it this way if in game I tell someone I think they are a stupid N-word I will most likely see a ban and have lots of people mad at me but I can mean exactly the same thing and instead call them a stupid bookah and everyone laughs even tho everyone in game KNOWS it is a derogatory term to mean that I feel I am talking to someone obviously inferior to myself and want them to know it. But its a game so we don’t care.

The first is intended as an insult to the player (since there is no bigotry based on skin colour within the game’s defined “races”), and thus actionable. The second is a roleplaying insult to the character and thus acceptable. How is that difficult to understand?

I know its a game and we shouldn’t be bothered by it … but are we sure we shouldn’t?

100% sure.

M: TG has the advantage that if you just have some old cards you can keep playing with them. If you play the game half a dozen times a year, they’ll still be fresh.

A few months isn’t long enough for the casual player to get a proper grip on the skill set. And it would shatter any illusion of reality that might remain after the (necessary and unavoidable) gamification of the notional environment.

marnick.4305:

Let’s just be clear here:

40 skill points … doable by levelling alts. With a lvl80 … takes a lot of time
20 group events … takes a few hours
50 invaders killed … takes a few hours
100 events … happens after 2 weeks
10 dungeons … for most people this means 10 days dedication
60 champions … that’s quite a lot if you don’t hunt them specifically
20 group events … should be doable in a few days

I’m afraid that’s anything but: is that your suggestion? Or if not, out of whose fundament were they pulled.

60 Champions? That’s 2 a day. I can go a week without killing any Champions.
10 dungeons? I get to do maybe 1 a week: I don’t PUG, and that’s all my Guild can support, since it’s made up of adults with responsibilities.
Group events? Maybe I could manage 20 a month.

This is actually a pretty hard month for casuals. I don’t see people with a life completing those in less than 2 weeks. Doable though with targeted play.

An accurate assesment, I think. While monthlies at the moment might be a bit easy, that sort of order of magnitude increase is just turning them into a “hardcore only” achievement.

I like the idea about tiered achievements. Sliding scales improve many things

Baronessvonbaugh.2165:

Why can’t guardians use rifles. Warriors can so why can’t they?

The same reason Warriors can’t use daggers, or shortbows, or pistols, or staves – they’re warriors; shouldn’t they be competent with all weapons that are actually applied to the bonce of the enemy? The same reason there are no 2-handed axes, compound polearms, or (I think) crossbows. The same reason longbows shoot as far as rifles, and rifles fire as fast as longbows, and neither they nor shortbows use ammunition and they all have pitiful (compared to real life, and relative to apparent running speeds) ranges.

lordkrall.7241:

marnick.4305:

In real life Longbows and shortbows have exactly the same range. Longbows have higher damage, at the cost of mobility.

In games, shortbows have shorter range. Go figure. That’s not what the “short” in shortbow stands for.

Actually a longbow DOES have longer range than a shortbow.

This is largely true. I think at least a couple of people in this thread have confused “shortbow” with “crossbow”.

Roquen.5406:

…I find it lame that they cost so much…

Do you mean that the ingredients to make them are costly, or the TP price is too high for your liking? Or are you sourcing them somewhere else?

It would be more realistic if combat movement speed were faster; You’re making rapid steps; that last few yards to contact can be really quick. But then we’d have to be slowed down when we ran long distances, because even Usain Bolt can’t keep up that kind of speed for more than a few 10s of seconds.

Many MMOs have started with one OOC runspeed, and then you get a “buff” at a certain level that speeds your long distance pace when not in combat. Some of them have then altered it so you automatically get the speed buff at level 1. It’s been a buff you have to cast, sometimes, and sometimes that’s been changed to autocast when you drop combat.

The \only\ reason you’re even considering whining about “slow combat speed” is because GW2 doesn’t explicitly show the buff you get to run speed when you’re not in combat. That other classes can get /in-combat/ speed buffs, and yours can’t is, unsurprisingly, nothing whatsoever to do with the general mechanic.

It’s a bit odd that the tokens are account-bound, but the gear bought is soul-bound. Sure, it’s user error, but lots of potential user error instances are prevented/prohibited by the code, and it would be more consistent for the gear and tokens to have the same initial “bind” status.

Donari.5237:

Also now you can see little glowing dots going from a corpse to you if you are looting that corpse.

Ooo, is that new? I thought I’d just not noticed it before

I love this new feature.

Aye, ’tis good.

Ah, it’s good to know that the transformed appearance of a skin can be moved the same as an “unmodified” appearance can be. Makes sense of course if you realise that the replacement skin is a replacement not an overlay, but that wasn’t immediately obvious to me. Thanks.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Shakes head, Vayne, Vayne, Vayne. -LOL I’m not saying I was ripped off but the new/future buyers because they will never see this story-line progression…

Which they haven’t paid for, so haven’t been ripped off by.

Saying that anyone is “ripped off” by free content changes is just silliness.

The patch notes mention: “…will only trigger the AoE Loot functionality while none of the forms of the interact dialog are visible…”. Perhaps you’re hovering your mouse over a lootable corpse when you hit F. Since the mouse-hover would pop an “Search” flag (a form of interact dialog), the AoE loot function would not trigger.

I don’t think DeadPrank is saying there should be ongoing bifurcation of story choices, just that the majority of player choices should be reflected in ongoing, fixed, permanent changes to the world. Tabletop RPGs have done something along these lines, where their CCG franchises have determined the direction of future in-game history, as reflected in new modules.

So in the example given, once the “temporary” content had expired, there would be a change to the world that everyone would see, come the next stage of the Living World. It would jarr with the expectations of some of the players, since they chose a path that wouldn’t have led to the change depicted (unless some rationalisation can be made that could be reflected in some background accessible by interacting with NPCs), but as it stands, the “future” wouldn’t mesh with anyone’s expectation, since something should have changed, yet nothing has.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

Actually aggro should depend on the intelligence of the mob.

An intelligent mob attacks the player with least armor but highest damage.
An unintelligent mob (e.g. Zhaitans servants) attack the players with the highest damage ignoring the armor.

If I were an foe I would always attack the player that dies fast but does too much damage.

It’s a good start, but it’d be better if the mob wasn’t assumed to be always perfect. They might go for the nearest guy, thinking it’ll be too hard to get to the guy further away who’s a “better” target for cutting the damage. Healers are always a good priority. Anyone stabbing you in the back pretty much always needs dealing with (they’d be doing a potload of damage). If the damage source is non-obvious (depends on the casting paradigm, and positioning of the caster).

Unintelligent mobs should only take into account the last few seconds of the fight; they only really care what’s happening to them right now and won’t pick on healers/ressers.

Just some opinions, based on many years of “monstering” for LARP.

Erasculio.2914:

Katai.6240:

Changing traits is 2 silver at level 80. Are you really that pressed for cash?

It’s a detriment for something ArenaNet should encourage players to do. Having players changing traits once in a while is good for the players and it’s good for ArenaNet.

Detriment? 2 silver? At level 80? Do you want free teleports too? I bet you spend more on those between spec changes than 2 silver. Any “detriment” is in the time spent to go to the re-traiter and interact with them; that probably costs you more than 2 silver on its own. Really, 2 silver is irrelevant at that level. It’s irrelevant at 40.

While getting map completion progress done is a good source of XP, might it be advisable to hold off actually completing the map (save a Vista or two, perhaps) until you’re higher (near cap) level? That way, the items you get in the chest might be useful for more than a level or two. I know getting completion of a map also awards XP, but some items at 79 might be more useful than XP you can get so many other ways.

Alex Griffin.1829:

I hate juggling multiple characters when i only really play one.

You don’t have to touch any of the other characters if you don’t want to. The last one you logged in as will be leftmost in the list of slots. You can throw away or sell anything left in the bank by your “resting” toons that’s no use for your “new favourite”.

No juggling involved.

By deleting the “old” toon, you’re losing, not only all the hours you spent on them and any gold you spent (should you decide that you fancy trying them again, perhaps after an expansion or class rework in a patch), but their craft skill slots and their inventory space. Admitted, you’d have to “juggle” to use those things, but just leave them next to their best/most used crafting station and recycle their gear to feed your current one, if you want; if you do start using them again, the TP will provide with adequate gear to get them going again.

One of the tips in the “I wish I’d known that at the beginning” thread is: get your harvesting tools early.

This is an excellent tip. You should be able to afford an axe, a pick and a sickle after your first money reward, and raw materials sell on the TP. Especially cooking raw materials, and cooking is probably not the best trade skill to choose for your first character.

Don’t buy weapons and armour from the money vendors. It’s just not worth it. You can get better from the renown vendors, and you can manage for a good while on that and drops. I found I needed to hit up the TP at around level 20 because what was “coming out of the game” wasn’t keeping me up to speed, but gear on there is really cheap.

If you’re worrying about whether to spend 6 or 10 silver on your book at 11, you’ve done something wrong.

Moriturus sum.2069:

…if you must enter a zone before its updatded, then and only then do you have to wait…

Since Dragon Bash nonse is splashed pretty liberally over the entire game, you’d probably have to wait wherever you’d hoped to go.