Sarrs.4831

I'm not sure what to make of it

On one hand, hitting Renewed Focus and expecting to survive through your Renewed Focus is reasonable

On the other hand, condi'ing up someone and watching them die in the middle of their Renewed Focus is always funny

Ehhhh.

Death Magic needs 4 traits changed:

Soul Comprehension: Needs to do something. +1% LF/3 seconds while in combat is fine.

Flesh of the Master: Roll the toughness into the GM trait; roll the health into the base minion.

Necromantic Corruption: Roll the transfer effect into the GM trait; roll the damage into the base minion.

Death Nova: Take all that stuff that got rolled into it:

You gain 20 Toughness for each minion under your control, and minions will periodically take conditions from you. Whenever one of your Minions strikes a foe, it transfers one of its conditions to them. Whenever one of your minions dies, or whenever you are downed, create a Death Nova at its location. Whenever you kill a foe, summon a Jagged Horror.

I know it's a long trait but it's a GM and I don't see any reason to be afraid of a big GM trait.

Even if they put *nothing* back in to replace Flesh of the Master/Necromantic Corruption the tree would be better.

There is no difference for non-MM Death Magic as these traits are useless for you anyway.

Minion Masters can now pick two of the other perks, including the nice Death Nova/Putrid Defense synergy that you couldn't take before.

I don't care what they put in the top row to replace Flesh of the Master/Necromantic Corruption, but some good defensive boon application would be neato. Necromancers don't have a +concentration trait outside of Scourge.

Hello Irenio!

Does Death Magic have a Master Minor trait yet? :)

> @"FrizzFreston.5290" said:

> Then again, the whole kill mobs to get drops is....kind of... i dunno, old fashioned? I thought we were beyond mob-farming by now, yet this latest map which the FTT and spare parts farming is all about farming random mobs.

Killing mobs to get drops is fun.

We should get drops from killed mobs from this meta chain.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> Do you think that it's inconceivable that i might want to do guild missions with my primary guild, without it being my WvW guild? Most big unspecialized guilds will have a group of WvW players that might want to play wvw together, even if some of them _also_ have different specialized WvW guilds.

It's far from inconceivable that you'd want to WvW with two guilds but that's a choice you'll have to make. It's kinda difficult to see *guild missions* being the impetus for that though.

Or you can try to get your two guilds allied and you'd have your cake and eat it too.

> @"Crinn.7864" said:

> It also took them over 6 years to make those stories, and that's with Bioware outsourcing the engine work.

>

> Do you want to wait a entire year between living world episodes?

For the initial storylines, it took that time.

What's worth looking at is the KOTFE content; released on a roughly monthly/bimonthly cadence with new chapters with real impact towards both gameplay and later chapters (at least, as real as you can get in an MMO). Choices between characters, characters dying, romances, distinct flavors between the classes depending on the choices you took both during the KOTFE story and the other storylines. While it wasn't perfect, there was a bit of filler and ultimately all roads led to the throne ship, different choices did have impacts.

What I'm actually curious about is how much pre-production went into the entire cycle rather than on a per-episode basis.

> @"Fluffball.8307" said:

> I wouldn't exactly call it strong, especially considering Colin's suggestion that we all make sylvari characters. You got some extra dialogue but it was entirely forgettable. I'd rather not waste resources on that level of change. I can basically remember nothing about the story as a sylvari character versus a human.

The dialogue changes, Bitter Harvest and the Mordremoth fight change. Honestly it's probably more memorable that the mordemoth fight changes based on which faction you choose (or Trahearne's double meme if you never picked a faction).

Really all they'd need to do is add flavor based on race and class. They've always poked this idea.

To me it makes perfect sense that a Necromancer playthrough in the Palawa Joko story sections should be different from the other classes, or a Warrior might have a different reaction on meeting Koss.

It makes sense to me that as a Norn you should have a different interaction with Braham than other races do; and for the other races, the same.

They actually went strong on this idea in HoT with a Sylvari playthrough having that different flavor than other races' playthroughs and it was enough for me to want to play through it again as one. From what I understand there are a few Blessed by Balthazar changes as well, but I haven't actually played through to see.

There was also the faction choice that really doesn't bear into anything in PoF to the best of my knowledge (maybe there's some Order of Whispers flavor?), but the Mordremoth fight showed what you can do when that choice gets referenced. Getting to see Leftpaw again gave that scene a lot of punch for me.

Amnoon's allegiance was also a choice that was made that could have had big impacts, but I haven't played through on Joko or Sunspears yet, only Independence.

The only reason the PC needs to be treated as a 'blank slate' is time & resource constraints. Maybe it'd cost too many resources to have a Sylvari-exclusive bromance between the PC and Canach. Who knows?

> @"DaShi.1368" said:

> Yes, those two "innocent" individuals were irreparably harmed by her. :rolleyes:

Whether those individuals were harmed is irrelevant.

What is relevant is whether the business was harmed. Attacking two *customers*, on its own, in such a public space, can absolutely cause enough damage to the brand to warrant their removal.

But these aren't just customers, they're content creators who for all we know make a living off producing this content, and it's *their job* to try to create these kinds of conversations. She's attacking what are effectively advertising partners who create their content out of a love of the game at no cost to Arenanet. You would have to be *insane* to think that there was a winning play for ANet that didn't involve at least removing Price (or at least forbidding her any kind of social media).

> @"Zaklex.6308" said:

> If we here in the United States made it illegal for businesses to use an employees personal social media accounts against them, that would be a big step in opening up the avenues of dissent and discussion on all fronts, but that will never happen because...reasons that would probably get me in trouble.

You believe that someone who uses their personal twitter to attack their employer's customers should be protected under the law?...

> @"kimeekat.2548" said:

> She obviously felt it was a backhanded comment that plays into a larger pattern of sexism that women deal with when they step into games, and as such *did warrant a response* so I'm not sure what good this advice does.

...This is the *exact opposite* of what you should do. Internet rule 1: Don't feed the trolls.

> @"kimeekat.2548" said:

> a dev doesn't owe you anything on their own time

If you, as a twitter user, genuinely don't feel a post warrants a response?

Don't respond.

> @"Kimmy.1985" said:

> I'm very disappointed in ArenaNet they've really let me down with this.

Truth be told, I somewhat think that the only letdown from ArenaNet here is that she was allowed to keep her twitter at all. First thing HR checks is this stuff. If they didn't see it coming then something's not right there.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> (no, having all of them join _another_, WvW specific guild is not a good solution, for a multitude of reasons).

It is somewhat peculiar that you clear WvW missions with a specific guild and cannot select that guild for your primary WvW guild.

This's been an interesting few days, and I'm sure it was a very difficult decision to make. I'm very glad that a swift resolution was made, though, and this can be put to bed.

This might be a stupid question, but...

Is there anything memorable in Kourna?

Almost all of the other LS maps have something that really stands out as memorable. Bitterfrost Frontier's berry farm is maybe the weakest, but it's still memorable.

The beetle doesn't really feel like a map feature, and a lot of peoples' joy with the beetle comes from getting it and then doing custom races on *other maps*... So what is there?

> @"Benjamin Arnold.3457" said:

> Paid microtransactions DLC for endgame content, outside of obviously expansion purchases, is anti-gw2. Endgame content should be free! (with purchase of related expansion) A microtransaction paywall would decrease population, which would be a bad thing.

Anet thinking of revising the Living Story "pay for previous chapters" idea? :tongue:

I'm actually genuinely curious if this would be a good idea or not.

I haven't played the chapter twice, but part of me thinks it might have been neat if Braham actually didn't spell Epidemic right, like Homer spelling SMRT.

> @"Sojourner.4621" said:

> why are we being attacked for asking?

I'm not attacking you. I RP from time to time. I just don't see the issue and don't see why someone'd get wound up about it.

> @"ugrakarma.9416" said:

> The final line of Gorrik makes me wonder what he to he refers to as "here." Elona as whole? Kourna? Gandara?

>

Gandara, most likely.

Honestly I think RP is kind of a non-issue, if you're a serious RPer then you're in an RP guild anyway, and you can use the RP guild as your anchor to enter RP servers in PvE. The game already has a number of ways to decide which shard you enter other than home server which you can use to get into the right shard.

The main people who it might really punish are people who are literally bystanders who see people RPing and think "hey that looks fun" and they won't see that, but they're probably already not on tarnished coast anyway. It's very very few people who are joining tarnished coast and this feature needs to be seriously rethought because of it??? Don't think I agree.

Outside of WvW, if you have plenty of alts, make sure you are parking them at a farming spot, and run through each of them once a day. Doing this on a Rich Iron node, a Flax farm, or a good Elder Wood farm gives you one of the highest GPHs in the game.

Dessicate is great if you're trying to provide Might.

Sand Flare is arguably your best heal.

Sand Swell is neato.

Foes don't really tend to have enough boons for Ghastly Breach to beat Plaguelands.

Trail of Anguish is Swiftness in PvE - but you have mounts for out of combat movement, and you have Sand Swell for quick movement.

Snake Throw is a weird hypothetical skill.

This seems like it would reduce the game to "put siege and bodies on the frontmost objective you own and you never need to worry about anything" on borderlands.

> @"coro.3176" said:

> Even this is risky sometimes because you'll get random heals and barrier from your teammates.

I would figure it's more for blowing up side point defenders, or solo roaming in WvW. No teammates to worry about keeping you alive.