I think it's less that it's supposed to be the endgame zone, and is more supposed to give you the idea of what their dev concepts lead to. When Orr works, it's absolutely awesome. The problem is that on release it exposed a bunch of issues with event resetting. I honestly prefer it as a design concept (hearts are doable once, events N times), it's just that the zone mobs are annoying to fight, and the whole World Vs Undead thing gets dragged out across three zones when you can summarize the concept in one (the first zone is the best example of the idea, imo)
One thing I wish they'd fix is how some events in the game are beneficial to fail so they reset quicker. This leads to people throwing a fit if, heaven forbid, a group actually finishes one.
Which ones in particular? I keep hearing about them, and I'm sure they exist, but I've never actually seen it.
I have no idea how many there actually are, but I frequently see the one at Thunder Rock in the Harathi Hinterlands end with people screaming not to kill the champion centaur at the end. I haven't taken part of many of the level 80 events, but there's one in Malchor's Leap I've seen people failing and chain running.
The one event in Orr that people seem to not get is the one where you're supposed to let a horde of undead take the NPC you're following down to 0 health (at which point the NPC Hulks out and goes on a rampage, and you get completion). JMost of the time though, the mob waves keep coming, and people keep killing them all as fast as possible, making the thing take FOREVER. You realize how many people never look at their chat box, that's for sure.
That's been going on since beta, mostly over a rumour that you get better loot if you don't kill the thing the centaur summons. I've never seen it confirmed.
It's bullshit, it's just a splendid chest that's always spawned as far as I can tell. And nothing modifies chest loot.
Well, the people I see yelling about them say that failing gets the events to start over quicker than finishing them, so it seems to be more about wanting to farm karma. Because, you know, why play the game normally when you can just repeat the same shit over and over?
Because playing the game "normally" is hilariously non-viable if you're chasing after some of the shiny endgame stuff? I mean this game goes from "do what you want to hit 80" to a Korean-style grindfest the second you hit cap. If there was an LFD system and dungeons weren't pug-hostile slogs, maybe the 80 game would be more enjoyable.
Bullshit. The events I'm talking about are being failed this way to save a few minutes of reset time. Saying that's the only viable way to farm endgame gear is ridiculous.
Are they farming Karma? Do you get that for just killing dudes? I thought you had to finish the mission. I'm struggling to grasp why you'd ever want to fail a thing in Orr. Maybe this is why I suck so much at there.
"A few minutes" rapidly adds up if you're grinding for an hour or two. Which you will be, if you're grinding endgame gear and expect it in any reasonable timeframe. There are plenty of other places to collect numbers, but the theme that that runs through all of them is that they're totally different gameplay experiences than 1-79. It is not a "stop and smell the roses" experience; it's all about squeezing every bit of Karma/Gold/Exotic drops from each minute of gameplay. If you don't care about full exotics or legendaries (or you just don't care about getting them anytime soon) then you're golden. I hit 80 and stopped playing til they can figure out LFD and fix up some of the glaring WvW issues, but I hope to get a Sunrise one day on my Guardian. I accept that's probably a year or more away, though, because I'm not going to kill myself trying to get one next week.
I think our definition of "reasonable" differs. If I'm in a level 35-45 zone and people are gaming events because it shaves a few minutes off of their karma farming time for their level 80 characters, that's obnoxious and I don't buy that it's the only viable way of getting endgame gear. I should also say that I'm not up in arms about this whole thing since you still get credit for completion even if you fail an event. It's just the annoying endgame gear-chasing attitude brought into a game that mostly avoids such things. It's especially baffling since the stat upgrades on this gear aren't so enormously improved over the stuff you can obtain without intentional mindless grinding and GW2 isn't a game that favors extreme min-maxing. Still, I do understand that if there's a faster way for people to get their online costumes, they'll take it. It's still pretty damn annoying, though.
A full set of exotics is trivial to get. Do your dailies while you're leveling up and save your karma pots. When you hit 80 get a karma boost, chug them all and head to one of the temple armor vendors in Orr. Voila! A full set of exotic armor! No grinding required.
So one of the very few things I don't like about this game is the fact that you pretty much get all your toys well before level 80. My engineer is now 60 and even though I haven't been super diligent about getting every single skill point in each zone, I have basically all the skills I want. I like how freeform GW2 is in general, but I think I actually miss gradually gaining abilities like the usual MMO does it.
I actually like that traits are the thing you gain as you level, and your full kit is available by ~50-60. Most of the specs I play really key off of that level 60 trait line access though, and 60-80 is filling out the concept.
Once you hit 50-60 you then have the freedom to actually try out radically different specs and have the trait points to make it worthwhile.
The specs themselves may be different, but you don't get any new abilities is all I'm saying. I like how the trait system is set up, although I'm not yet at the point where spending 2g is trivial so trying things out isn't exactly easy. In other news, the BFF guild's pretty much dead, isn't it? Most of the people I see online anymore are usually representing another guild.
Spec book tooltips are a LIE. Your trainer has a respec option in the dialogue that costs like, 2 silver.
I can login and upgrade stuff, and/or promote someone (I think.) Reldan is the other person who can as well.
Well, I'm mostly concerned with the activated boosts. My permissions allow me to build things, but not activate already built ones.
As much as I love this game: ANet, why are you camping on your patch notes so long? Seriously, you should have told us class changes before the patch dropped, and you shouldn't be sitting on the notes until the patch deploys unless you still don't know what is going live today. I get keeping the living story changes under your hat, but the rest of it seems pretty strange to not announce ahead of time. edit: Notes are up at: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013 Highlights: New living story content, combat and two new achievements. Old achievement/title is still available. Daily tasks are now selectable, no more underwater kill daily unless you like that one. ***A new event scaling system is being prototyped with a few high volume events, no note on which ones. These events should be HARDER with large numbers of players present now.*** Item preview on Trading Post items (yay) Guild Missions of course Event reward chest loot table improvements. Some chests are now lootable once per day(tell us which ones, Anet?) Stealth change in pve, probably preventing solo players from accidentally resetting their mobs if they use stealth skills. Eles: Minor bunker nerf (evasive arcana's heal is now 50% in pvp) RtL cooldown increased to 20s Guardian: Assorted buffs Necro: A whole mess of trait improvements trying to make Jagged Horror not suck. Thief: Cloak and Dagger no longer works on walls (yay) WvW: Swords only appear with 25 players fighting now, improvement for small groups not showing up on the map. Invuln NPCs no longer killable via condition damage
The unlock order for them sure is. My guild is small and PvE-focused, so we never unlocked the top tier of Art of War, since everything in it is useless to us. So now we're hosed for ages while we waste Influence just to be able to earn access to a mission type that few of us even care about, just so we can use it farm the merits to finally get the ones we do want.
Pretty much. It's locked behind ~67,500 influence of bullshit, as well as about 19 days of unlocking.
They fixed the flamethrower! Fantastic. Now it looks and sounds like a flamethrower, applies liberal amounts of burning, has lower cooldowns, hits reliably, and the 2 skill can be self-detonated. Awww yeah.
The 1 flame graphic is more impressive, and the sound effect is no longer that weird crk-crk-crk-crk noise when you're hitting a target multiple times.
I tried it out last night and it sounds and looks exactly the same to me. I still get the smacking sound when I'm hitting an enemy up close.
It's definitely different for me. The smacking sound is way in the background, the overwhelming noise is that of roaring flame. I hated how it used to sound so it's a positive change. Maybe it's some weird mixer bugfix?
Yeah, could be. Or it could just be a different bug. The sound has always been pretty inconsistently goofy.
I'm beginning to think it's actually location dependent too. I was in uh Frosthingy Gorge and the sound was much more pronounced in some of the snowy areas. Weird.
I'm starting to think my engineer has too much stuff to play with because I'm constantly switching weapons and kits and such for no other reason but because I can.
