Orion Templar.4589

I rarely (maybe never) did Palawadan or Great Hall more than once in a given day so even though the change doesn't impact me personally, I can definitely see where it would cause consternation for some. My thought is that this type of change is likely good for the game overall. I say that because similar to how we want professions to be balanced so one single profession isn't over-powering all others, we likely should have events and maps be balanced so one doesn't clearly have loot over-powering all others. If the game is designed so you can rotate through events and maps with variety and end up with the same level of rewards as you would have had farming the same event all day, that's likely a positive thing.

> @"Ashantara.8731" said:

> The concept is that that Elder Dragon's magic is required **on** Tyria. Regardless of _where_ we kill Kralkatorrik, its magic must endure or else the unbalance will lead to the end of the world. Therefore, it must be contained by someone else, and since we don't have additional options, that someone has to be Aurene. ;)

We could plan to absorb it ourselves and then at the last second Kormir could jump in and absorb it for us. B)

My practice is that when a new episode is released, to disable map chat and avoid the forums until I've completed the story.

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> * There's an account limit on the key rewards for the meta, so once someone has completed it, there's little incentive to do so again on the same day.

I really enjoy the metas on the Thunderhead Peaks map, but I do wish the deldrimor plate rewards weren't once a day. One thing that I liked about Domain of Kourna was that the meta could be repeated as often as we wanted per day for the same rewards. Already a couple times I've jumped into Thunderhead Peaks, saw a meta was about to start, and then realized, "Aw, I've already done that today I guess I'll go somewhere else".

A couple sets I'd like to see are similar to Marauder's and Diviner's, just with the majors/minors switched around a bit:

+Power +Ferocity / -Precision -Vitality

+Power +Ferocity / -Precision -Concentration

I too had been thinking a lounge in Thunderhead Peaks would have been nice. I would place it up on top of the mountains in the middle of the map (that are currently inaccessible due to invisible walls.) From the lounge you'd be able to griffon off for a nice flight to any part of the map, and they could even include a teleporter that could take you from the lounge to the forge instantly. I'd design the lounge so it had the look/feel of the deldimor ruins area of the map with lots of snow-covered trees and snow falling.

Problem is the pestilent golem boss in the Domain of Kourna meta would have an HP number so large it would scroll past the length of his health bar. ;)

Probably too early to know at the moment.

I really wish there were not achievements that required event failure. It is frustrating and causes angst between players. I just left a map where a few people were trying to get that different kind of shatterer achievement, and were asking nicely for people to let it fail, then when a few people showed up just trying to do the event, they asked again, but things still didn't work out in their favor. I could tell they were frustrated, and the people who showed up were just trying to have fun with the event. Please, please update this so we're not pitting players against each other and causing angst like this.

I don't think it is bugged. I got it successfully yesterday.

I really wish they wouldn't have achievements that require event failure. It just brings about frustration.

So far I've had good luck with groups splitting up. When I first observed how the event mechanics worked I was concerned everyone would follow the miner and leave the drills unguarded. But the few times I've gone through the event people have split up as needed. Pleasantly surprised.

Kudos to the dev team for an excellent release. I and my guild mates will be having many hours of fun with this episode and map.

Liked:

* Thunderhead Peaks map is beautiful - the visuals, music, and atmospherics makes me just pause and look around frequently

* I like the two meta events - they are engaging and about the right amount of difficulty

* Story was fun to go through and the ending was quite something

Disliked:

* Light of Deldrimor shouldn't be so short-lived and tied to the plates we get from the meta

* Invisible walls around some of the cliffs in the middle of the map - I'd like to climb those

* Lack of a griffon adventure - this map would be ideal for a griffon adventure

Thanks for posting the video. It did a good job showing the aspects of the bow, although it was a bit long. The video could have easily accomplished the same review in half the time. My opinion of Pharus after watching that video is that I like the looks of the bow (and string!) and think the draw animation and aura were pretty nice. The footfalls seemed to disappear too quickly though.

I wouldn't mind another legendary accessory like Aurora. Something tied to the living world season as it closes out that requires "mastery" of each living world map and release similar to how Aurora worked. (Although I'll admit I did get a bit weary of grinding for those druid runestones in Draconic Mons.)

Whatever the change is, I agree the silver fed needs some kind of update. It's essentially a never-ending masters salvage kit. The runecrafters kit upped the ante though since it's not just a never-ending journeymans salvage kit as it adds the 100% chance to salvage upgrades. SF would benefit from some kind of update. My vote would be to either increase chance for rare materials or decrease cost per use.

I'm curious from a technical perspective how can a VPN improve latency? When I think of a VPN, I think of my endpoint device and the VPN server setting up an encrypted connection, and all packets get encrypted/decrypted on both ends of that tunnel. Then the traffic goes from the VPN server to the final destination, which in this case is the GW2 server. Even if the network path was about the same, that added encrypt/decrypt has got to be adding some overhead, and your physical connection out of your house is still being used and leveraging a VPN doesn't help with that unless your ISP is willing to apply some kind of quality of service prioritization to those packets.

That was an interesting read. Thanks for cross-posting it here!

Congrats on finishing Astralaria. The requirement for the Gift of Battle for legendaries is a pretty common topic of discussion. Yours is definitely not the first thread talking about this. Like was said above, I think they use that as a forced incentive to get people to give WvW a try. Some will find to their surprise that they like it. Some will continue to dislike it. My advice is to set your WvW reward track to Gift of Battle, and then do one of the quicker WvW dailies whenever possible, even if you're not actively working toward a legendary. Pretty soon you'll have your Gift of Battle and you can bank it for when you actually need it and you'll be glad you did. When I finished my last legendary, I started the Gift of Battle reward track over again and even though I haven't decided if I'll work toward another legendary, I've already made an extra Gift of Battle that's sitting in my bank waiting.

I found some screen shots from the Royal Terrace last year Wintersday 2017 when I'd used a temporary pass, and confirmed that arch was not there last year. (And it looked much nicer.)

Funny, I was just wondering about that arch too. I just bought the Royal Terrace pass now since it was on sale so I'm still pretty new to it. But one of the first things I noticed was that arch, and I had thought "This place is nice, but that arch looks out of place..."

Was dismounting from a mount involved in the test? I noticed that dismounting can act as a weapon swap and trigger the trait (including the internal cool down.)

If you watch Dulfy's (or others) Thunderstrike Harvesting Tool video on YouTube does that give you the info you're looking for?

Now if the race NPC would just tell us how long until the next race... but agreed I was disappointed the dailies were tied to the event.

I would assume it's just that most people doing those events now are people who have done them before. People are more experienced and know how to play through these events more skillfully as compared to when the events were new.