Kichwas.7152

I've seen this glitch also in one run.

So it is a known bug. Good to know.

If you get stuck in it, you're run is lost. We wiped and tried again, I think 3 or 4 times - and once it glitches at that spot it seems to always glitch at that spot until you just break up your group, leaves fractals, and come back later.

> @"asterix.9614" said:

> So anyway I am interested in Shaniqua peak fractal because of the name. It sounds hood and out of place in gw2,

>

>

> Thank you

Heeeelllloooooo racism...

That's not the name by the way...

But... like... WTF kind of post what that?

I don't know about T2. I'm not that far into fractals.

But I've done it many times now on T1 and when it goes badly it's always the same things.

- people don't stand behind the rocks. I knew what to do with them the moment I saw them as this mechanic was ripped from modern FFXIV where it's in a leveling dungeon for the current expansion among other places (but that leveling expansion means I've seen it already a few hundred times).

- People don't get the crystals to jump in the air - or they all run for the same ones and ignore the others and even as this happens no one changes direction, but instead try to out-pace each other. It seems a simple solution is in order: call it pre-pull. get the one CW or CCW of you - call that, and everyone knows what to do.

- people let stacks of the dark orb get too high because they glory hog taking them beam to be 'the one who saves us all'...

- people don't rez downed teammates. I have found that this fight is such that, if your DPS isn't that high - you should actually rez 'greyed out' people and get them back in. The incoming damage is often pretty low at many points and if someone has the boss occupied... rez the dead people. Unless you've got high DPS and can power through it, you want them back up for when the gimmick mechanics hit - just in case someone fails one, you need all hands around to bring downed people back up.

- I have seen one run where it glitched. Out of I think 5 or 6 runs now. The crystals you need to get to jump in the air - we did that... and then it never transitioned to the next phase. We used /gg to wipe, and it glitched again. We did it again, it glitched again... we gave one last attempt, and it glitched again... so we gave up and left. This glitch is rare, but if it does happen you run just ended... I believe something we did in the first attempt triggered it... but unless I see that glitch again I won't have a point of comparison.

This has become my favorite fractal. It has some basic mechanics you can learn after a little bit of time, that you mostly don't just zerg through with berserk gear and stacking like everything else in pre-raid GW2...

- Which fractal is it again where you need to push lightning orbs to towers? That's the only other one I've seen with "something non-zerg fest" going on... So my second favorite even though I have less success at it (people always try to push all 4 orbs at the same tower... often one person runs around trying to take other people's orbs that were going to the right tower, and move them to a wrong tower).

But having come from a mechanics heavy MMO like FFXIV, this is the kind of content I like - where each fight requires learning a strat. And the fact that the 'hardest fractal in GW2' takes it's mechanic from a 'leveling dungeon' of FFXIV... that speaks volumes about where player skill is at with regards to mechanics here...

ps: I've been doing this is almost all exotic gear - with only ascended accessory and rings. Just barely enough agony-infusion to qualify. One a condition tempest and a power mirage... So not great gear. It's not about gear - it's just about mechanics. The boss's health is fine where it is.

> @"The Greyhawk.9107" said:

> Is it just me or has there been a rash of Necros going around the past couple of weeks?

Yeah... I got 'tricked' into replying when this showed up on my list of current threads...

deleting my response because, I may not be able to delete the actual post, but the thread is a necro'd thread...

enough classes already have them...

It won't make a difference in outcomes, all it does is discourage people from ever taking interest in a format.

If the "noobs" are sucking on your team, causing all kinds of stupid... guess what - they're doing the same thing on the other team too... so it's all balanced out in the end...

Better to encourage them so they grow to like the game style, decide to learn how to play there, and everyone benefits.

Someone that trained their skill up from 'noob' to 'keyboard jedi' in a given game format is going to be much more dedicated to it than someone that comes in having learned everything about the game somewhere else doing something else.

I'm a bit of an example of this myself. I've had a GW2 account since Beta, and I've barely bothered with WvW... I dip in now and then and then go back to my usual stuff. It's not that its bad or anything - it's just not where my loyalties have been honed over time. I don't know anyone there, don't have passion for the things about it, don't recognize the things being spammed in chat trying to tell me where to go or what to do, etc...

- If I'd been playing it instead of other modes, I'd likely be dedicated and quite good at this point.

Instead I'm the very player the OP wants: a maxed out level 80 person in all the best gear...

...who has no idea WTF is going on and is just as likely to split off from the group and gather herbs in mid fight as to help push the goal because... I've got so little clue I can't tell the difference. But hey... I'm an 80 right? In a mix of exotic and ascended gear. So... no prob when I go pick those herbs right? :p

I hate to be that player too... but yeah... don't nerf this.

SOMETHING in this game should require team play and coordination.

After spending the last several years playing other MMOs, its a bit maddening how much of a zerg fest all the fight mechanics are in this one. I'm rather used to mechanics that involve having 8-20 people all learn 16-40 different things they need to be doing all simultaneously without errors in timing or you start the entire fight over again...

I'm not even that good at it. I've got less than ideal ranking in FFXIV savage, barely into elite dungeons in ESO, and started dead last in my last raid group in WoW - but worked my way up to their top DPS before Blizzard took a stance against Hong Kong and democracy and canceled everything from that company.

I have done this place once since coming back to this game and it was insanely hard but, oddly, I can't remember this fight at all - which implies it was one of the parts we breezed through, or it's being described differently than I recall it.

That noted - nothing in there was even have as difficult as the average leveling dungeon in FFXIV. The only difference is that in FFXIV if someone says to CC this, stay out of that, run over that and trigger that, carry the debuff on you out of the group, bring the buff on you into the group, and kill those two at the same time - the entire group is hyper trained to go along with it and WORK TOGETHER...

- It's... not "online bullying" to ask people to work as a team in a team based game...

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> We don't see them, because, according to devs, mixed race pairings do not produce offspring. Might have something to do with small things like Sylvari being plants, and Humans not being native to tyria, but a race that was brought there from some other world.

>

> > @"Astyrah.4015" said:

> > that said, the closest species in GW2, atleast biologically, would probably be Norn and Human (basing it purely on their physiology, appearance, etc.)

> Ironically, of the 5 player races, Humans are the only one (as far as we know) that isn't native to this world, and as such they are probably much, much further biologically from Norn than the Charr, Asura and even Sylvari.

>

>

It's been years since I read about this - but there's some ascpects of our core DNA structure that are a lot like binary toggles this or that way. There's one core toggle to the whole structure that goes a certain way for all life. Now imagine landing on an alien world where it flips the other way - that said if this was the case the humans would not even be able to digest food on Tyria.

That said... maybe more like Earthlings and Gallifrey of Dr Who. As much as they look alike on the outside their radically different internally.

Charr and Asura may or may not be mammals - despite what they look like. Norn are 'mammal equivalent'. Sylvarri are plants.

The norn may have come up filling the same 'niche' as humans - an intelligent primate. But it ends there.

If we were on Earth, the Norn would actually die off. Their too large for their structure. Something is different about Tyria that let it's primate species get to that size. This same something might have adjusted the humans. The first generation of humans to arrive might have found themselves on a world with lower gravity to which they had bones and muscles that made them radically stronger than the humans and charr - an advantage that would fade in only a few short years. If you watch the show 'The Expanse' - there are a few scenes where someone born and raised on Earth gets into a physical conflict with a person born and raised in space and the results are devastating to the spacer...

Consider that a human and a chimpanzee have about 96% of their DNA in common. Humans and housecats are about 90% alike. Humans and humans are 99.9% alike.

**Humans and Norn are 0% alike in DNA.**

Yet a Norn and a Sylvarri are probably around 60% - just as **a human and a banana are 60% identical.**

Your typical Tyrian human has more in common with one of Tybalt's apples than he does with Tybalt...

How many half apple / half human people do you know?

> @"Smattyshmin.7586" said:

> As a person that never got to play the 1st living story, I came in during the second one. It was a little disconcerting to skip to the second one from the PS. I ended up watching the following:

>

> 3.) A 3 hour movie version of LS Season 1: This was awesome. IT was basically like I was there. Not gonna lie though, 3 hours was very long and I had to divide it up to watching it over a week while doing laundry or walking on the elliptical. I don't see many new players that would be willing to sit through this.

>

Watching that now and it's seriously blurry / low-rez but also on point. I left the game midway through season 1 so I've been wanting to fill in context for a while now, and this looks good.

There were parts of season 1 that really bothered me, lore wise; as they seemed to conflict with the basic setup of Guild Wars 2 at launch as well as Guild Wars 1. Those lore conflicts are actually why I stopped playing Guild Wars 2 for a few years.

- so watching this will let me see if they ever resolved that.

A lot of season one's instanced content has been added back into the game in sliced up pieces in the fractals - but without the context I've always wondered how they came across to newer players.

> @"hugo.4705" said:

> NECRO? BAD? I stomp mobs in PvE just spamming 1 greatsword, shroud with a full berserk set. Both specs are powered.

Yeah Reaper is insanely overpowered in a lot of PvE content. If you time shroud and your heal right - you're essentially immune to the world while also dishing out silly high amounts of damage.

In almost any solo or open world content it's almost hard to not be absurdly good.

> @"Kodama.6453" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > > @"Kodama.6453" said:

> > > > @"Gibson.4036" said:

> > > > There seem to be so many meta greatsword builds. It'd be nice to feature expand other weapons if they're adding new ones to classes.

> > >

> > > Yep, that's the reason why I hope that no class gets weapons like sword or greatsword with the next expansion and we see more stuff like scepters, maces, shortbows...

> >

> > Agreed.

> >

> > Revenant should get Axe mainhand or Focus offhand IMO.

> >

> >

>

> I personally prefer to give them a scepter.

>

Yeah I looked them over again and I think I agree. They've got 2 ranged options: hammer and shortbow. Give them a scepter that can hit to 1200. Or pistols or daggers that are ranged.

I could see a 'ghost hunter' theme built around pistols or throwing knives.

I've often used Hammer on guardian , warrior, and revenant in open world and other solo content because well...

It has the best sounds and animations in the game. On all 3 of those. In fact the one class where hammer is good; engineer, is also the one that lacks this cool sound/animation factor... :anguished:

When I pull out Hammer on my warrior or my Guardian the sound effects and animations make it feel like you should own the world, when in reality my Charr warrior is like a crazy catlady granny chasing you down with a plastic broom, while my human guardian is the old lady following behind waving her walking stick at you. /sigh...

It would be nice if it was up to par with other weapons on the numbers so I could enjoy it in group content without feeling like I'm getting a carry.

> @"Kodama.6453" said:

> > @"Gibson.4036" said:

> > There seem to be so many meta greatsword builds. It'd be nice to feature expand other weapons if they're adding new ones to classes.

>

> Yep, that's the reason why I hope that no class gets weapons like sword or greatsword with the next expansion and we see more stuff like scepters, maces, shortbows...

Agreed.

Revenant should get Axe mainhand or Focus offhand IMO.

If not for those hearts... what purpose would any of my characters beyond the first serve other than to wait in the login screen for me to get a whim to go run an old dungeon with that toon over there instead...

The game has an insane amount of wardrobe designs...

...

...that all look way too similar.

The bulk of it all comes down to a few over-repeated themes. Most serious of which is the whole 'thou shalt not show any butts or who unto thee and thine whom shalt be smited most heinously' thing...

That or... someone in the design department has a men in skirts fetish... with a minor affliction for women in skirts as well.

This last week I finally did the grinds for the beetle and the gryphon.

Got both done in a single day each. Granted they were super-long play sessions. I'd say one took 4-6 hours and the other 8-10.

- The only reasons it took this long was on the Beetle there's the one zone-meta event and I did it wrong the first 2 times and didn't get credit, and on the gryphon I did all the group events by joining an LFG group doing a world tour of bosses and they did the ones I needed last, after some 30 other bosses... but because I was getting so much loot and other collections filled up I just shrugged and went with it.

I don't think either was obsessively long. Seemed pretty tame once I actually focused on them.

The base pre-gryphon PoF mounts were all super fast and tied into specific location stories.

I've yet to do war claw or the newer dragon. Well... I did start war claw last night. In about 1 hour I have maybe 6 things unlocked. It seems like all that one would take is finding a WvW group that was actively zerging away and staying with them. Given that the one group I did follow had about 80% of it's members riding the things, I imagine getting it would be easy if I had any clue what I was doing in WvW (people keep calling out weird letters in chat that I don't yet know - if I did, I'd have gotten maybe twice as far).

Guild Wars 2 often looks like a game the devs have developed with one sole meta in mind: maximize DPS and do nothing else. Basically stack 10 Firebrands and go to town.

It's not, but it can look that way because... it's pretty close to that and in some past patches it actually has been that (the 'Berserker gear only' days before HoT came out for example).

FFXIV has the same problem... and the popular DPS meter and DPS checking website over there reinforce this... NOT with the community, but more dangerously with the devs... the Devs have been 'trained' by the community to keep making fight more and more about maximizing DPS and sliding everything else off the table. The importance of buff managing, CCing, debuff managing, and so on have over time been pushed down in favor of making every class do more DPS... even healers and tanks...

The DPS meter there, officially is not allowed. Some believe it can get you banned, but the devs have been 'caught' streaming while using it and a careful read of the TOS doesn't actually refer to things like it. No player has ever been banned for using it - many have been banned for acting like jerks with the data they got by using it... a key difference...

Make a DPS meter here official, and all pretense that there is any class in this game other than Firebrand would... go away...

The devs would just buff up the raw DPS of every class they wanted folks playing, and ignore the others, and start simplifying fights down to DPS checks and nothing else...

We're extremely close to that 'game design broken' line, but not yet over it... In fact I would argue that the reason the 'dungeons' never happened past the launch day set was because they did break that line and the team behind them didn't know how to fix it... This is why the pre-HoT meta used to ONLY be stack in one spot with berserker gear and ignore all mechanics...

- The last thing we want to do is put in a tool that encourages the dev team to jump the last shark left in the line...

I love FFXIV as much as this game, but as another MMO with so similar an issue - it also looks like a warning call to how to break the design here. FFXIV is only barely saved by having a trinity so you can pretend it's not just a one-trick-pony MMO... but this game doesn't have that 'illusion' to mask flaws in it's design... going down the same path FFXIV did would break things here.

A new race shouldn't just come out of nowhere. It should be based on Guild Wars lore.

Best candidates would be the Tengu, Skritt, or Free Awakened in my opinion. Two of those have long roots in Guild Wars, and the third is a very recent and fitting addition.

But some random sci-fi / fantasy image that has no lore behind it, has got to be last in line.

Every single last MMO I have ever played always has at least one post on the first page or two of it's general forums from someone who thought they were buying Skyrim 2 and didn't realize it was a multiplayer game...

> @"Zeesh.7286" said:

> Especially considering how ALL medium armors have pathetic flappy skirts for rogues. Whoever is in the design team needs to be fired. >__>

Chances are they're already long gone.

That said, the game has a huge obsession with hiding butts.

It's led to an extreme overpopularity of the very few armor items that show pants... There's a tiny selection of medium armor tops for females that let whatever bottom they have on show - so you can then wear your choice of either loose or tight fitting pants, and I think one extremely hard to get mini-skirt.

For men... it's as you say... it's like they're afraid insecure males will question their life choices if forced to stare at a man's behind while playing a video game... what other possible reason could exist for working so hard to hide men's butts...

It's just... bad...

We need more options in regular tops. Shirts to vests, fine tops with flourish to them on over to rugged peasant wear. Maybe a necklace top for men. Some harness tops (there's one or two in heavy armor). but just a bunch of tops that don't cover below the belt so that below the belt is then dictated by the bottom you pick...

- Most games handle this just fine, letting people choose a wide variety of 'in genre' choices... Most games don't seem to have been led by a graphic design team with male 'identity crisis' issues...

-

> @"Atomos.7593" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > I'm curious if we might get a new class. Not just new elite specs but a whole class. I suspect not but it would be nice if we did.

> >

>

> This would be great and give me a reason to actually buy another character slot. I would be more interested in this than just new elite specs.

What I want is basically:

Monk, as in the Guild Wars 1 healer and smite-casting class, with it's elite spec being Ritualist.

- with the smite line, Monks could still do some solid DPS with the wand (scepter). It would be more viable in DPS than the Druid is. The Ritualist elite would not be healer focused, but spirit summoning focused - just as the old Canthan ritualist was, it would end up being able to hybrid heal, but mostly be DPS.

I don't think I will get it though.

But the only reason Monk was not included in the base Guild Wars 2 game was they didn't want healers, then they added Druid... which is even more of a healer than Monk was...

So it's time to put a core class back into the game.

I'm curious if we might get a new class. Not just new elite specs but a whole class. I suspect not but it would be nice if we did.

> @"Ganathar.4956" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > One of the other main MMOs I play is Elder Scrolls Online.

> >

> > I'm phrasing like this on purpose. Stop thinking of WoW everytime you jump MMOs. The above analogies are as wrong there as this mapping of WoW to GW2 is.

> >

> > Guardian = WoW Paladin tank

> > Warrior = WoW Warrior tank

> > ...

> > no... we all know that's not true. And, yes, some players log in and assume that. But then they stop trying to play WoW here, and re-adjust.

> >

> > Very few people have this issue after a little time in. The game is NOT suffering for failing to be a WoW clone... so... why would it want to try and be a WoW clone.

> >

> > There's only one "WoW Clone" on the market that did well, FFXIV, and it only did that because of where it differed and when it did so - it focused on story at a time that WoW was massively fumbling with story...

> >

> > There's no need to expect that new players can only play WoW in every MMO they try. If they're here - it's probably because they didn't want to play WoW in that moment. This game can then try to keep them by... not being WoW...

> >

>

> This has nothing to do with WoW. It's about the common archetypes that that these classes represent in general across the fantasy genre.

> I don't mind melee being a good option for ele. However, it should not completely overshadow what is supposed to be the class' main archetype. This goes for all classes.

>

In other words: WoW.

"Common Archetypes?" - that's all basically only as old as WoW.

I mentioned ESO for a reason. Every so often there, we get some of these attempts to map various classes to WoW "archetypes". As ESO is a trinity role based game, they do have an easier time of it... but ultimately it fails to carry over right because... fantasy is just more diverse than that.

Go read something like Andre Norton's Witch World, or Barbara Hambley's Dragonsbane or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and map the main characters to these archetypes... it won't work. That's just three authors out of so many...

At best you have:

LotR -> D&D's narrowing that down to classes (and think about it - what class is Gandalf... really... answer if you've read Silmarillian: none of them). -> Early video games that were knockoff's of people's D&D dungeon sessions -> Everquest -> Everquest Clone known as WoW -> all these attempts to claim stuff is archetypes.

But even that is not as old as fantasy, and is just one line.

It is most pointedly... NOT the line of Guild Wars 1.

One of the other main MMOs I play is Elder Scrolls Online.

You have classes like Dragonknight, Warden, Templar, Sorcerer, Nightblade, Necromancer.

Some people log in and assume:

Dragonknight = WoW warrior tank

Templar = WoW paladin tank

Sorcerer = WoW Mage

Nightblade = WoW Rogue

Necromancer = WoW Warlock

I'm phrasing like this on purpose. Stop thinking of WoW everytime you jump MMOs. The above analogies are as wrong there as this mapping of WoW to GW2 is.

Guardian = WoW Paladin tank

Warrior = WoW Warrior tank

...

no... we all know that's not true. And, yes, some players log in and assume that. But then they stop trying to play WoW here, and re-adjust.

Very few people have this issue after a little time in. The game is NOT suffering for failing to be a WoW clone... so... why would it want to try and be a WoW clone.

There's only one "WoW Clone" on the market that did well, FFXIV, and it only did that because of where it differed and when it did so - it focused on story at a time that WoW was massively fumbling with story...

There's no need to expect that new players can only play WoW in every MMO they try. If they're here - it's probably because they didn't want to play WoW in that moment. This game can then try to keep them by... not being WoW...

I dunno...

I came back to GW2 about 2-3 months ago. And for some random reason I decided to grab my elementalist that had barely even done the personal story, and use that character to catch up on everything from there through to the current content.

At first, I was doing a LOT of faceplanting.

But other stuff even then would go down fairly fast.

Now I'm ripping through creatures like crazy. I still have some survival issues because I have base toughness and vitality. I'm on condition damage builds for both tempest and weaver. I think viper gear mostly

one is sword and staff, the other dagger and staff.

I find when I go into dungeons and fractals most of the group's damage is me. This is a dramatic change for me - I'm not a DPS like player and my rotation has some massive flaws. I get on my other classes and I'm the low person in the group.

Elementalist deals insane amounts of damage.

For that, it's a paper tiger.

That said... before I left some years ago was gear was all 'knights'. I had absurd toughness - I was basically running dungeons as a tank, with an elementalist. It worked. The profession's damage is so good I didn't slow up my groups too much, and I had that absurd amount of toughness where it finally does start to actually reduce damage enough that you get tanky... like over 1800 or over 2000 I think (been about 5 years so... not sure).

- In open world... just go soldiers.

In dungeons or fractals use berserker or assassin. My going condition damage was probably a mistake. The guides all say to go power, but I read over the profession when I redid my gear and just assumed I needed to go condition...

Works either way... but if the guides are right I'd be even more absurdly overpowered had I gone berserker gear...

(that said a common tactic of mine is to just slide into a stack of creatures and cast "Feel the burn" and then slide out - for many open world creatures, given my condition damage; a single cast of that and they're done for, and I can focus on the elites, vets, and champions.)