Bast.7253

Anyone else find it kind of difficult to see the orbs? When I'm angling with the camera it hides orb behind the body of my skyscale and I sometimes over or under steer and wind up missing the orbs or wasting the flight energy.

It's also really difficult when they're amidst a ton of other volatile magic but that may be intentional and part of the challenge of doing the rifts.

Not really sure how it could be improved though, outside of making the orbs larger, but then you have people wondering why they're not getting the same magic as they would from a similar larger volatile magic orb that's not part of the rift path.

Along with that, it could definitely still use, if no other changes are being made to the functionality, a steeper turning radius going up and down. At least when you're diving or going down, having it so that your skyscale isn't just kind of... slowly falling but actually diving like a gryphon.

But yeah, maybe it's just me, or maybe the difficulty of seeing the orbs is intended, but that's just a minor frustration I've noticed while working on these collections.

I think an Awakened Abomination warclaw skin could be neat. And just a regular Bengal tiger warclaw skin without all the armor and such.

And some skyclaw skins! Some more traditional looking dragons with horns. Wyvern skin. Completely crystal skin that has a similar feel to Exordium. Maybe even a flying Hydra skyscale skin so I can ride around on King Ghidorah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ghidorah Tons of cool dragon skins that could get really creative.

Also, a complete etherbound set without them being black lion chest random drops would be nice. I really wanted the forged shoulders but after 50 keys realized it wasn't worth the gamble.

I'm having a really hard time finding something that goes with my shiny new greatsword. Was thinking it might be cool to get an outfit that is made of crystal, not just asymmetrical crystal spikes everywhere.

The zodiac armor is a bit low res, I know that's less of a suggestion and more of a request. But some of the textures of the armor are pretty flat. I can understand not being able to dye the blue part, but when the armor looks like plastic instead of medal it kind of lessens the appeal.

The black lion chests right now are also very underwhelming, but perhaps that will be updated in a couple weeks anyway.

Here's a neat crystal dragon concept I found earlier: https://i1.wp.com/newearthenergies.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/crystal-dragons.jpg?ssl=1

I think if we had a wall crawling spider mount and an underwater mount all bases would be covered.

I think it would be more beneficial after that to start building onto the mounts and their capabilities. Maybe also reworking Warclaw to have different pve functionality like stealth or something.

Honestly they could just give skyclaw the ability to actually climb as well as cling and although cool, a spider mount wouldn't even be necessary. I just like the idea of riding around on a giant spider. lol

And no idea about what they would do for an underwater mount. Maybe somekind of Leviathan or dolphin or something. Leviathan could be cool because they could make some crazy skins with it. Like an angular fish or whatever that thing is with the light antenna.

I think she may communicate through Caithe or send us visions but not actually be directly involved, aside from maybe one interaction with her where we see her new form or something. But I scoured Melandru’s area for a place that matched the cutscene and nothing did. I would assume they want her direction to be open as it seems like it was purely an area in the cutscene and not somewhere in game.

I’ve always preferred vertical maps anyway. Just give a more grand sense of exploration for me. It’s really nice for tangled depths too. Lol

> @"Rukario.1695" said:

> Altitude Bar being drained after mounting in the air plans to be fixed.

>

> Other than that I only wish for...

>

> * Keep full altitude bar after leaving the ground with your first flap. It feels like you're a brick on a balloon.

> * Faster stamina recharge, higher jump.

> * Stamina recharge while on the wall, but slower than charging during flight. We can already let go of the wall and recharge and wait for the endurance skill to recharge over the course of 60 seconds.

> * Jump from wall automatically moves around small ledges blocking you, directly above you.

> * Keybind for latch to wall.

> * Updrafts pushing you up, tbh the Griffon needs this too, if you already used Bond of Faith you are stuck on the mount.

> * Dive option for quick descent and engage.

> * Hold skill 1 to show a casting circle.

> * Moderately faster travel speed to make the mount an option to travel to events.

> * Moderately more gracious canopy to allow slightly further horizontal distances.

> * Dash in any direction the camera is aimed.

> * Extra dash if possible, 2 is "eh"

> * Permanent evade during flight, at least 75%... Tired of getting shot down to my death in post-Tyria maps. Not a problem for Griffon, has a skill like this already.

> * More reactive turning speed. If we are meant to use this to jump between cliffs back and forth, the current turning speed makes the user less likely to try in almost all scenarios.

> * Would be nice to fly over water with 0 altitude, just much slower than the Skimmer. The Skyscale drowning is sad panda.

>

> Whatever else makes sense but doesn't break the game, mount, or invalidates other mount mechanics.. Something.

>

> Just don't be afraid of letting players actually do what they want to do if they want to climb. If you fix something to make it more enjoyable and it has that effect later, I doubt anyone would complain that you can get higher if you really wanted to.

>

> People will do what they do. Not everyone cares about going as high as you can. The Griffon can already do that for the most part and it's supposed to be a gliding mount with wings.

Yeah, I noticed earlier that just hitting space bar to put me at the lowest hover range depleted like a 6th of my bar? Lol

> @"Jazz.2643" said:

> Also what does even Rift repair do? I've been doing the entire thing a couple of times, and i've only been getting Volitale magic. It says there's a reward at the end, but i've not been getting anything.

> Anyone know if i'm missing something?

I did the one in desert highlands and got ONE mistborn mote. So their real value is probably just going to be achievement points and volatile magic.

> @"Euthymias.7984" said:

> > @"Ranael.6423" said:

> > I know it is a bit far fetched but what if "Mother" was actually Aurene?

> > During the fight, Kralk says : But you are of me. And soon I will be of you.

> > Basically he says that once Aurene absorbs his power, he will be part of her, as much as she, as his grand daughter, his part of him. Maybe this line is the opening of the plot of S5: how will Aurene cope with having three Elder dragon within her, without the torment that should come along with this cocktail, and some foreign magic (from Balthazar). Will she have to fight against the thirst of magic brought by those personalities and succeed in sharing this magic with the world?

>

> It would be kinda awkward considering that he calls her "Child of my child" as well.

Well, technically that is before we finish the job. I could see it being a possibility though. When you think about it, the magic is essentially recycled endlessly. Perhaps in the same way, Kralk becomes a part of Aurene and is reborn later from her. Perhaps all of the elder dragons have a perpetual existence and reincarnation. Perhaps it's less that, and more that he becomes something else upon death, and that something that he becomes is now a part of Aurene.

I don't know. I imagine it isn't the case, but I can see where he's coming from.

I definitely think the bond of faith part needs to be looked at but I think he said he was looking into a way to fix it. I don't know why they're so afraid of people abusing masteries or whatever to break the initial height ceiling though. I mean, you've been able to do it on Gryphon since launch. It takes a lot of effort and time, but you can get infinite height without skyscale. Honestly, it adds an extra sense of adventure to the game for me.

I got all the way to the top of the trees in Bitterfrost, which I had done once before with Gryphon, and I can't say it feels any less clunky. But perhaps as people experiment with it they can find some of the hidden features of the mount that he was hinting at in the guild chat. He mentioned that you're better off moving horizontally after you propel from a cliff with the wall cling mastery, but I can't say that I noticed a huge difference. The few times I did notice a difference in terms of altitude punishment and what not felt pretty inconsistent too.

It's certainly more fun with the masteries, but it could still use some love all around.

I'd also add onto what Joel mentioned on the guild chat in terms of wall cling, release, and fly away being the best method?... It has a really slow turning radius. I guess that isn't that big of a deal, but it's just something I noticed. I think the same could be applied to descending. You can hold c and descend, but then it just looks like you're falling, not that your mount is actually intentionally traveling straight down. And the dash always dashes forward, but it would be nice if you could dash in the direction you're intending. Straight down, straight up, left, right, wherever you're pointed.

I’d be fine with the time gate changes and 250 currency if it resulted in more than a base one due channel mount. I honestly think this would have been a great opportunity to introduce an in game obtainable skin. It’s something a lot of people have been asking to see, and having that with this mount and legendary worthy collection would make sense. But the functionality needs some improvement in general, either way. And I think once people start finishing the collection we may start seeing more posts about it. It’s just that currently everyone is judging based on the no mastery rental mount.

It was a pain, but yeah, if it stays as it is currently I would say reduce it a bit. 100 seems fair. I’m almost done with mine anyway.

> @"Tails.9372" said:

> > @"runeblade.7514" said:

> > For new zones, exploration will suffer a lot. You don't get to appreciate the little details that is added to the zone as all you will do is fly over everything. If you want to get to the next objective. the best way is to fly up high and ignore everything on the ground. The interesting stuff is on the ground and not on the air. However, there is no obstacles in the way in the air. It is the path of least resistance that players will take.

>

> That's what players are already doing (using the mounts to speed around the map to unlock all the important stuff), people who want to "appreciate the little details" will do that regardless and they are much more inclined to do so the less tedious it is for them as evidenced by the amount of players who said that mounts "made the HoT maps playable" for them. This is pretty much a non issue here.

Exactly. If people are interested in seeing those little details, they will either way. And even at that, the story is pretty short and people like myself rush through the content to finish the story anyway and then go back and actually explore later. There isn’t a traditional quest system so the only time people will rush or skip from point a to point b, is to catch an event or complete a story objective. And with the story objectives being a one off it doesn’t really have any impact.

And I honesty don’t think this game would suffer from free flight in the same way that wow did, because it’s open world is generally designed better and is more interesting to play. With wow, you’re just trying to get to quest objectives as fast as possible because the quests themselves generally are copy and paste and stagnant. Not to mention if you’re on an extremely imbalanced pvp server where the only way you can achieve anything is to make yourself unable to be ganked and camped.

> @"Graymalkyn.8076" said:

> How about an option (could be a mastery) to actually be able to scale the wall you are clinging to? Rather than just stick to it, you could walk up it. This might actually add some relevance to the mount.

It would make too much sense. It’s much better to have a mount just cling to a wall while being locked out of regaining adrenaline or cooldowns and have their only option be to fall back down to a lower ledge. ?

Maybe they should have the flight bar switch to a climb bar while climbing so that you can only climb a certain distance and then when you jump off it switches back to a flight bar and resets the canopy or something. Idk.

I can’t tell if they just didn’t put enough thought into it and Frankenstein’d something together, or if they overthought it and put so many restrictions and added so many weird mechanics to it that they made it extremely unintuitive and clunky.

> @"runeblade.7514" said:

> I would like a default skin but I can dye my mount with more than one channel.

You’d think with this insane collection we would at least have more than one due channel...

I don’t think a wyvern skin is out of the question though.

I imagine we’ll get some premium skin first, then mount packs. I’d like something that looks more like the wyverns or game of thrones dragons though. Thankfully they can do some pretty neat things with dragon skins. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an actual crystal/glint style skin at some point. But who knows.

Hopefully some improvements to the Skyscale in general, even though a majority won’t even have the mount.

> @"Azure The Heartless.3261" said:

> Guild Wars 2: Ocean's Abyss confirmed

> Jokes aside, it's a nice theory. Whoever Kralk's mother is has a heavy bearing on the next story focus, and there was just an underwater rework.. Let's see if you're right.

They didn’t imply the mother thing would be the next story step, only that it was intentional and we would eventually discover the meaning. For all we know that could wind up being Malyck 2.0 until they see fit to juxtapose it into the story somehow.

I just want to know how we’re going to make a saddle out of these currencies. Do they magically run into leather after we combine them? Are we getting leather from somewhere else and bedazzling it with magic? 250 is insane.... especially when two of the maps give 5!!!!!!!! for map completion when all others give 25. Where is the consistency?

I think for season 5 I'd like to visit Aurene in her new form at some point, even if just to catch up for a hot minute before getting back to another plot.

But I'd like to see something a bit more spread out, exploring areas we never have before. Maybe a few smaller sub plots like Deepstone Fractal baddy, where'd the Cliffside giant go?, Malyck's tree, more stuff involving the gods, resolution of the Foefire (though I'm not sold on the idea of a Charr civil war focused expansion), Isle of Janthir/Woodland Cascades and the demons.. the weakened barrier up there with the mists or whatever.

I like Taimi, I really do, but I don't really want to spend a season searching for a cure for her. Honestly, I don't get why Aurene didn't just offer to brand her in an attempt to cure her of her ailment.

> @"Aaron Ansari.1604" said:

> The devs did confirm, in the last Guild Chat, that the torment pre-dates Kralkatorrik consuming Zhaitan's, Mordremoth's, and Balthazar's magic... and, likewise, the Forgotten's attempts to convert him. Wherever it came from, the event was far before any of the history we've ever heard about.

Did they? I got the impression they said the torment was caused by those, but that there was something else making matters worse for him along with that.

If it did and I'm misinterpreting what they said, I'd find it interesting if something else had orchestrated it somehow. I kind of like the idea of an older god being at work here. Something older than the elder dragons or at least of the same age but more sinister and planned. Arachnia had a lair in Guild Wars 1, and didn't Abaddon essentially consume her power? Was that before he started venturing down the path of corruption? What if the two are connected somehow?

Might be a stretch, but there's also that mysterious being in the Deepstone Fractal that we know nothing about. Speaks in a weird tongue and apparently likes spiders a lot. Maybe now that we've finished Kralk we could start diving into some new lore, or at least lore that has been hinted at in very minor forms like that deepstone being.. and its relation to the Eye of The North campaign.

Wasn't there something about "facets" in relation to the Eye of The North campaign using the same language that the Deepstone Fractal boss uses? Though if I remember correctly that was about the gods and not the elder dragons as they weren't really known at this time.

And do we know what drew the Gods to the Artesian waters so long ago? Was it explained that it was solely Zhaitan's magic residing within them or underneath them or did the magic that drew them to those waters predate Zhaitan?

> @"Kidel.2057" said:

> > @"Kumouta.4985" said:

> > Nonetheless, i don't see how it's not just a better springer.

> Read the previous messages. It's even explained with screenshots in the first post. Since you can't fly up forever (even with bond of vigor and masteries), you need ledges to regain stamina and green flight meter. The skyscale can't access the same ledges of the Springer because of the stupid auto-grab.

>

>

Not only that, but I'm not convinced the height gain from this mount is higher than the springer. I tried using the mount earlier on a cliff and got all the way to the top, but couldn't quite push my way up 3 centimeters without using my adrenaline to give me a boost of "flight juice." But I know if I had gotten it on my springer I could have made it. Something seems off and it needs a higher canopy in general.

Bond of vigor for all other mounts works as an enhancement, but bond of vigor for Skyscale seems like a necessity and a crutch. Why design a mount that REQUIRES a mastery like that to perform at its full potential, when none of the other mounts require that? Is it just to incorporate the mastery into something so that people have to get that earlier episode to have full use of the mount? I mean they're going to most likely have them anyway, but I didn't really think about it until now.

No other mount REQUIRES bond of vigor for full use except for this one. And even with it, it's still subpar to all of the others with the exception of infinite hovering. And infinite hovering is literally just useful for afk'ing because you still descend if you move in any direction from that point. Obviously the beetle is the only thing designed after bond of vigor was added, but even it doesn't require the mastery.

I'm torn between thinking, 'man, the mechanics for this mount must have taken a lot of time and work' and... 'man, they just copy and pasted as many mechanics of the other mounts and probably the scrapped spider mount.. and created this clunky underperforming mount for the sake of generating hype and skin sales.' Then, they make the mount such a nuisance to get due to timegates that they wind up dwindling interest in players that could potentially buy said skins, as well as killing all of the hype they generated before the episode launched. lol

As of Tuesday they will have had a week to take feedback from all of the people using the story version of the mount and about the timegates, so I sincerely hope they take a second look at what they can do to not only improve the collection process but the general design of the mount's mechanics.

I was kind of hoping the livestream was holding back on the possibilities of this mount, but it's looking like the livestream was in fact the absolute peak of its performance. Which is odd, because the gryphon even if a hidden mount, had so much potential that took awhile for people to discover and truly master. And the masteries for it were really well integrated.

> @"Aaron Ansari.1604" said:

> > @"AlexxxDelta.1806" said:

>

> > I don't get this. Why would they leave intentional hints about _something_ in there when they don't even know what that _something_ is supposed to be yet. The line about not knowing the origin of elder dragons internally makes no sense to me. Even if the mother hint refers to Kraik specifically and not EDs in general, they should already know the origin of at least one. Him. I didn't watch the guild chat but from what you posted it looks like they are making it up as they go along. Not a good way of telling stories long term in my opinion.

>

> Your interpretation may vary, but what I got from the guild chat is less 'we have no ideas whatsoever' and more 'we've had several ideas floated and aren't locking ourselves into any one option at this time'.

>

> Ditto for the bits about scattering seeds and not knowing the original intent behind some of the story elements. It doesn't sound like they're taking a shotgun approach, where they're throwing things out blindly and then stumbling over a few of them again later. I suspect they do have hopes to revisit each and every one of them, but no way of knowing whether it's possible. It sounds like many of the high-level story decisions are based on things out of the writers' hands; they mentioned, for instance, that the decision to make Kralkatorrik the main antagonist of S4 and up the stakes to world-ending proportions was informed in part by the fact that they didn't know at the start what was coming next- S5, or an expansion, or something else altogether... and if it _was_ going to be S5, they didn't know what changes might be made to the format that would impact the stories. I believe they mentioned that decision wasn't made until around Episode 3, and I doubt it's a coincidence that they also said that's the time where they really began working out the finale and Episode 6.

>

> Not that any of this is new- we heard similar statements about S3 and HoT. I agree that it's likely been detrimental to their ability to tell long-term stories, but the company seems to believe that's worth the trade-off of being able to iterate on things that don't work and and adapt to changing visions and goals.

It also seems like with something as linear in narrative as this season was, that make things work as we go methodology may have been an unnecessary obstacle to overcome when designing these episodes. Season 3 was kind of all over the place and much more open in scope, so I think that probably worked well for them. But with this story I can imagine how it could have resulted in some major setbacks or redesign as people changed their minds. Probably part of the reason we had such issues with Kourna. And I can’t imagine how hard it was to keep what consistency they could manage with different teams working on different episodes.

You’d think, even if the details are small, there would at least be some overarching story timeline guiding them enough that those changes required during those decisions are at least minimal enough they don’t require whole episode reworks or new conception.

And they may be, it just felt like that wasn’t the case and hasn’t been for quite some time.

> @"LucianDK.8615" said:

> Sounds like people here is trying to make the skyscale a replacement for the griffon, which its not. Its just a situational mount. From my experiences and what I understand of the mechanics, it will mainly be useful for ascending flat horizontal surfaces that is far too high for the springer to jump.

That’s what it seems like it should be, but it isn’t. Springer is still better. Because the Skyscale may be an inch away form the top of something, but even with the pretty much one time use adrenaline jump boost may not make it, and then you’re stuck and having to glide back down to a lower ledge and start over. It’s basically the exact same way the springer functions currently except the springer has the advantage of standing on very narrow corners where as the Skyscale will just stick itself to the first non-horizontal terrain it can find and then you’re stuck.

I also don’t think the current ascend height is really that much of an advantage over the springer.

If you think the masteries will make this mount completely different, just watch the livestream. Even the developer demonstrating the mount gets stuck on a cliff and has to constantly find ways to go back down and start over and that’s with him demonstrating the masteries. Lol

It’s just clunky and arbitrarily restricted to the point of being so niche that it’s main purpose at this time will be the aesthetics of riding a dragon. In terms of actually fitting its own niche the only real niche it has and does well at the moment is that someone can hop on it and hover in the sky away from mob attacks giving the player a safe place to afk. Which honestly isn’t a terrible thing to have, but it deserves more. Especially with the effort involved in obtaining it.

And I don’t think a lot of these opinions will change with masteries unlocked.

I really don’t get the decision to have something cling to a wall and punish it for clinging to a wall by freezing it’s adrenaline gain or bond of vigor, and I really really really don’t understand why you would make a mount that for some reason can cling onto a wall all day long, but not actually climb when it needs to.... especially if any form of gaining adrenaline to use the propelling mastery is essentially shut down during the process.

If it clung to the wall, kept adrenaline gain, and was able to propel its way up an entire cliff without having to glide down to a lower ledge, it would still be so slow at ascending the cliff that it would merely be a slower alternative to the springer and not a replacement.

> @"Gambino.2109" said:

> Question guys, if Anet was to rework this to eliminate these terrible time gates.. after the first wave of players went through it..

>

> Would you (being one of those first wavers) be upset knowing that you went through with this and suddenly everyone else doesn't have to?

>

> Or would you be happy no one else has to go through this discouraging nonsense, like your friends/family guildies or anyone that comes along and questions how difficult it is because they wanted to give it a try.

I’ll be upset that I went through it, but at least it would indicate that this may not happen again in future releases. I do hope they improve the functionality of the mount either way though. That would certainly ease some of the annoyance of it all. And honestly, given this collection, I really don’t see why they couldn’t use this as a way to incorporate and in game obtainable skin for once. Even if it’s just minimally different with more due channels and something as subtle as different horns or an due changeable aura from the 20 different Magic’s we exposed the hatchling to. Maybe even a way to imbue it with some of Aurene’s magic as her parting gift. You’d think she would want to in some way given how much they helped her out during the story!

Also, it would be a good change for my Guildies. A few of them still have not touched or finished the other mount collections. It’s a good activity that they can do together or that we can help with, but if they’re all locked out of certain stages of the collection due to the timegates, then other guildmates that can’t play in the same day wouldn’t be able to.

I think we will retain our current position. Aurene can be involved in the sense that she rebrands current branded with hers and gives them their free will back possibly, and could even offer is reinforcements in future battles, but I don’t foresee her being directly involved as it would be pretty one sided and I doubt they would want to do that. Especially given that the stakes will probably not be as high for quite some time.

If anything, they might set Aurene up to be a guide to us like Glint, using her telepathic link to us and her prophecy as a way to lead us to future fights without actually fighting our battles with us.

Or she might just be off and busy fixing some of the current damage done by Kralk or even Zhaitan and Mordremoth. It would be interesting to see her essentially “cleansing” some of these areas and us seeing the fruits of her labor further down.

It’s hard telling what direction she flew in based on the cinematic because I couldn’t find an area that resembled where they are standing in Dragonfall.

Well, I’m wondering if despite the suggestion that the spheres of influence are taken in completely by a chosen dragon, if they’re not actually splintered or fragmented somehow and able to be used in a lesser form by multiple dragons. Thus why Mordremoth and Zhaitan used their base spheres so much more and other elder dragons using their spheres merely as enhancements or extra tools when they need to but stick to their primary spheres as it’s what they’re naturally most attuned with. I guess you could say it’s simply because of what they’re used to, or that those abilities are so new to them they don’t know how to use them. But i could see it just as easily being that they simply aren’t capable of wielding them with the same amount of power as their original host.