Guild Wars 2

Welp. Convenient timing, SWTOR.

Adding a new tier of gear would not have bothered me if there were soloable means of aquiring them.

This was clearly added to placate hardcore dungeon players at the expense of casual players.

ANet has seven years of goodwill built up with me, so I'm not quite ready to stomp away and pout in an inferior MMO like TOR. BUUUUUT... if this turns out to be more than a once-off addition of an armor tier I'm going to get pissed quick.

I'm pretty grumpy over the new item tier and stats on infusions. But I also still enjoy the gameplay, and will be trying to find Fractal groups all tonight. Still: GRUMPY, ANET.

I already preferred SWTOR's PVE by a good margin, and was playing GW2 for 2 reasons - 1) my guild mostly moved to it and I missed them, 2) WvW. Since 1) they all disappeared mostly over the last couple months and 2) I have to PVE a bunch more anyway (for now) if I want to keep my WvW gear up to par, I may as well go back to a game with PVE I like (and NPCs I don't want to punch in the face, TRAHEARNE/DESTINY'S EDGE.)

Shame about the WvW thing, since no other game really offers anything like it - I'm sure I'll check back in when they have equivalent gear available through WvW and see how silly the grind for it is.

It's WvW. It will be 1,250 badges of honor, and the drop rate will still suck for them. :P

I dunno, I never got a full set of exotics and I've never really noticed being at a disadvantage in WvW. An extra couple percent doesn't seem like it would make that much of a difference there.

It sort of does. I thought I was doing fine with all Rares, and then I did my exotic set and my damage ramped up pretty noticeably. At the very least, get an exotic weapon off the market for 1-2G. It's a large bonus.

Once I got all exoticed/runed up my survivability and damage output spiked very noticeably, yes.

Geez. That sounds like....uh....a fundamental failure of design in wubwub. It could all be easily remedied by controlling stats to normal levels. You know, like it already does for anybody that isn't 80 that goes to there, but in the opposite direction. I'm kind of baffled at that call.

They explicitly said no more tiers and that this one was a one time thing, but who knows what with infusions serving as a pseudotier.

Not pleased, but hey at least new content. Dat dungeon does seem pretty cool. Also they fixed the fuckawful underwater necro greenball speed, yay.

They also explicitly said no gear treadmill at all, up until a week ago.

Just a reminder - 8:30PM Eastern tonight I'd like to try to gather up and give the new dungeons a go. I'll pop the various guild buffs we have for this weekend as well.

I won't be around, but maybe tomorrow.

Fractals are pretty fun.

I'm hopping on now. Hope to see you guys in game!

We did a guild Fractals run last night and got what I think is one of the harder ones right off the bat - the Dredge cave. We managed our way to the final boss, but even once we figured out what needed to happen to beat him it just required too long of a perfect run of evading every 1-hit kill attack and hoping he doesn't aggro on the wrong person since it's all about getting him into position. After a couple hours we gave up, with our best run getting him down to 40%.

Today I PUG'd a fractal run and we got the cliffside one first. This one was a lot more fun and involved having to use a special hammer (that conveniently slowly kills you for holding it) to free a giant by breaking a number of seals all over his body. There was a good mix of traps and challenges at each seal, and the hammer itself required the group to pass it back and forth as we moved it all over the map. After beating that fractal we came into the Assault on Ascalon one, which would have been fun but 3 of us crashed a few minutes into it. With no way currently to get back into a Fractal if you get D/C'd we had to call it quits.

Pros:

-Fractals seem pretty fun and each has some interesting design elements that focus on teamwork.

-No graveyard zerging - you only can respawn if the entire party wipes. So you do have to beat the challenges straight up.

Cons:

-Time commitment seems very random. The Drudge fractal would have taken us 45-60 minutes even if we had been able to beat the boss. The cliffside fractal took an hour. One of the guys said that he's seen a few fractals that were easy and only took 20-25 minutes. With getting 3 to do at random, it seems like you could be looking at a run that might possibly take as long as 3 hours with no way to swap a party member out if they have to leave sooner than that.

-The D/C problem is just ridiculous. It really makes me not want to run these until that in particular gets fixed. Taking the chance that a single crash or connection hiccup among any of your 5 players will ruin a 2+ hour run for the entire group is beyond ridiculous.

-Needing to get everybody into the same instance of LA to begin the fractal makes getting started harder than it ought to be. I wish the staging area could have been entered independently and just brought everybody together.

I really hope that's due to a bug because that's an oddly terrible oversight.

They say they're working on an active fix for it. I'm a bit confused because "fixing" it implies it's a bug and not intended, but if so I'm amazed that made it into Live.

Story Instances work that way too so it's not exactly a new thing.

Now that I think about it, you're right. My game froze up during a long one the other night and I had to replay about 20 minutes' worth. It's pretty damn stupid problem to have, though.

Story instances aren't designed to last 1-3 hours. So it's a new thing with an old solution that no longer fits.

Some of them can last almost an hour (or more if you're dying a lot). It was already a problem.

This is an important argument.

It is if the end result is me being able to rejoin an instance after a crash or an internet hiccup.

I don't think any of us here have that kind of authority.

Maybe Jon Peters is a secret lurker here, was unaware of this particular problem, and has now decided to make this priority #1.

Crouching Jon, Hidden Peters.

This seems weird, because I know for a fact that I have rejoined an instance after having to leave the game. It was just a problem with my machine (the video card on my laptop likes to choke and die at random intervals while trying to draw this game), but after I hit Alt-F4 and restarted the game on account of the screen went entirely black, the game immediately asked me if I wanted to go into the instance that I was in when I had issues.

Then again, my group apparently sucks, so maybe I'm getting the special game for limited players. We've never done a story instance in anything even approaching an hour. Granted, we've only done AC at this point with the actual group of grown ass dudes who know how to punch buttons in order, but even that took us at least an hour and a half.

Sunday's event was pretty bad. 2-3 hours of mostly killing karka, half of which instagib just because they and their attacks don't load on screen right away. Also the lag was horrendous.

But if you were one of the lucky few who got a precursor weapon, it may have been worth it.

I wish anet would get a clue and stop doing such limited time events.

Yes, that's how it works in every dungeon instance in the game except for Fractals. That's why people think it's a bug because there's no good reason you shouldn't get the pop-up to rejoin the Fractal in progress if you get D/C.

They had a limited time event? What's this. beside the quick ending Halloween event, was there another?

This past weekend they introduced the new 80 zone as part of the Lost Shores content patch. The new zone was set up for the weekend to bolster everybody to 80 and they ran a major one-time event chain during the afternoon/evening on Sunday that took 4-5 hours and culminated in a massive battle against the leader of the giant enemy crabs. After several hours, players were finally able to attack his weakpoint for massive damage and everyone who participated got to open a chest that contained a 20-slot box, a unique level 80 earring with fantastic stats, a couple random exotics and a couple random rares.

Well they did a stand up job letting people know about this!

Yeah, I logged in around 3PM to find that the event had just ended. There were some rumblings that A.net might possibly be considering running it again and, like, keep an eye on the forums but...no, I wasn't going to do that.

Anyone interested in forming a regular (weekly, say) dungeon group?

Well, four people in the guild will be running dungeons semi-regularly on Thursday nights. Dryne and I and my brother and Arogan will be doing that for the foreseeable future. Not this week, obviously, but on "normal" weeks.

I'm generally down most nights and would love to get something regular going, especially with the new Fractals, but I wouldn't be opposed to running the other dungeons from time to time as well.

I don't know any of you, but I'm usually down for a group when I'm on. These days I've mostly flipped to doing world completion out of a crazy desire to just do it. I don't even want a legendary!

What is this, a Japanese history lesson?

I don't really get the new zone. Will there eventually be a map completion bonus? Will it have vistas? Does it have a really low density of events or am I missing something? Why would I ever want to go there again?