MarySueLlama.8136

ugh...I just solo'd the 3 story maps for a completely unrewarding cliffhanger? I guess that was a mistake. Not a huge fan of this update, ngl :(

LOL, I think my overall favorite is Tangled Depths, even though after years of playing in it I STILL get lost following the HP trains there ALL the time. Maybe that's what I like about it- even though I have at least one character who has 100% on it, it's so complex that it doesn't feel "used up" or "finished" or "old." I also really like the giant underwater tunnel on the lowest level. (I LOL'd because I didn't expect to see so many other people say they like it when literally every time I go there half the map chat is "OMG I hate this map!") But other than the chak eggs being icky, it's a really pretty map and I really like the Nuhoch npcs.

CORE- Metrica Province/Brisban Wildlands, and then certain areas of the Shiverpeaks but not any particular map there. Timberline Falls would get it if it wasn't so full of leeks and krait. Especially the leeks.

HOT - Tangled Depths, see above

POF - Desert Highlands because it's got the least desert in it. The snowy dwarven area, the wetlands, and the big chunk of brand give it good variety. The desert areas are beautifully crafted, it's just that I don't like hot places. I do have to offer serious compliments on the palm trees- whoever designed those has absolutely been to Florida or somewhere else where you can't get away from them lol. 90% of the top part IRL is just dead tan fronds hanging off and then a tiny green fringe at the top, and you guys NAILED it! xD A meticulous detail that needs to be appreciated.

LW - Draconis Mons, Bloodstone Fen, Sandswept Isles. The first 2 are aesthetically gorgeous and way more fun now that I have a skyscale. And Sandswept I just love the north meta with the eerie driftwood and the sunken chests afterward. I kind of like Ember Bay and Kourna too but not all areas of them. Siren's Landing is awesome but way too small. And Dragonfall is pretty in the Melandru area, but it's just way too flippin hard to get around before you have the skyscale, it's like prohibitively hard and I pretty much couldn't do the meta at all until I had one because I couldn't keep up with the zergs who had them.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS:

I finished the episode yesterday- I enjoyed it overall, but there were a few things that didn't sit right with me:

-When you step in the dark blue stuff (I think in the last instance?) and get the debuff, it says something about it being Jormag's blood or something? And Iceblood Channel, Veins of Jormag, and The Bloodfields are all locations on this new section of map, and when you go flying around in the NE corner of the map to explore, you see a bunch of large pipes with a purpose that's not really explained in the story content. I feel like there was a setup there for us to learn something interesting about how Jormag functions and what both the flowing ice and the goo are, but it's never addressed, and that disappointed me.

-With trying to avoid spoilers here, "A Simple Negotiation" was really enjoyable for me personally, but then my player character's reaction to it ruined the mood. It felt inconsistent with the commander's attitude in the previous episode- the commander witnessed and was forced into literal war crimes, but now chastises an NPC who doesn't like that person? Just no, that was not ok with me. The story has occasionally railroaded my player character to act in ways that I don't personally see as appropriate for how I envision the character, and I know that can't always be avoided due to the storytelling mechanic, but this was definitely one of those times and it was irritating. It would've been nice to be able to choose from 2 or 3 different responses instead.

-The stuff involving the spirit totems in front of the door felt way too cluttered with other players being there, especially while trying to read the chat bubbles of the story characters. People kept chatting in "say" and it was hard for me to keep track of what was going on with the NPCs. These parts of the story should have been in a private instance like the other private instances. I'm not even really sure what happened with Owl because that part went by so quickly and there were a ton of other players running around and being distracting.

-The Wolverine adventure needs to have a different method of exiting the instance, because "Exit to Drizzlewood Coast? Yes/No" kept popping up constantly during the fight, and there wasn't much room to physically avoid it. It was distracting, and I was also worried I was going to click on the wrong thing and exit the instance before I was done and have to start over. Maybe make the room bigger, or have the player have to interact specifically with a certain object to leave.

-As others have mentioned, the notices about different control points being under attack/retaken etc are just too damn big on the screen. Sometimes they make terrain hard to navigate, other times they obscure mobs that can totally see you, and when the story is going on and you're trying to read the character dialogues and story prompts and everything else, it's just too much stuff popping up on the screen.

-This is just personal preference, but the "Epilogue" notation at the end made it feel like this is going to be the end of the Icebrood Saga, and if that's the case, and we don't get any more story until the next expansion, it's a real downer of a way to end a story arc. At least in season 4 we succeeded at stuff. Here, we could see all these problems coming, and we tried our hardest to stop it, but still couldn't do anything. At least some tidbit of good news elsewhere in Tyria, or some sort of new lore secret from Aurene, would've been cool. (Idk, maybe I'm too used to the Taimi stuff where no matter whether we fail or succeed, we at least collect some data we can use to prep for the future. :) )

> @"Lord Erik.6903" said:

> This champion is literally harder than every other bounty save for probably Rubedon, Trembing Earth. He's harder than world boss's, Strike Mission boss's, and many Raid boss's. I seldom see his health below 80%, and he's gotta be one of the most broken things I've seen in the game. You have to practically pray to an RNG god that he doesn't get phase shift, Laser, or Signaler. He's literally got more break bars than every other boss. It would be fine if he healed only once after a bar break, or if there was a bar break healing CD, but he spams it even when his HP is below the 20% mark on the second break bar.

my god, I had to fight him with Phase Shift AND Laser on at the same time today >.> Fought it again with easier ley buffs and it still failed. Feels like I'm never gonna get this bounty for the achievement- Anet, please either nerf this thing's spammy cc healing bar, or else reclassify it as a Legendary so that people know it's a doozy going into it, and it can hopefully attract a larger group of players to come fight it with "Legendary" in its name.

I appreciate very much that they released this episode in spite of current world events- the voice actors are great, and I look forward to the voice version, but I'm really glad to have had new story content to play sooner than later.

This episode overall was well done IMO. Not my favorite, but still enjoyed it.

PROS:

-Probably the prettiest Ascalon-ish map I've seen yet. The stark autumny colors in places like Diessa are a bit hard on my eyes sometimes, but this area is really lovely. (actually not really sure whether it's part of Ascalon or not, but it's pretty nonetheless.)

-Powerful tension created by Smodur- he was a timebomb waiting to go off and it was edge-of-the-seat waiting to see where the shoe was gonna drop. I'm genuinely disgusted by him now, he really stole a lot of the show in this episode and I'm looking forward to seeing him get what he deserves at some point.

-Intense follow-up to Visions of the Past as well, after having done a long, grueling battle alongside the Steel warband and gotten to like the characters. It hit a lot harder to see what happened to them in this episode; honestly I got more attached to them than I am to Ryland, so it sucks to have to fight them in this one. They had some good dialogue in the Visions instance.

-The airstrike horn at the end of the story, and during the meta, is genuinely unsettling, and I saw someone else saying that too. I'm actually more creeped out by it than the sound of the dragons roaring tbh.

-The Tengu journal and rock-carving thing is awesome. It's an interesting way to collect weapon skins, and the area having been inhabited by Tengu makes me curious about its history. (I know that it might not ever come up directly in the narrative, but it still gives the area a certain extra appeal to have "history" to it revealed by pieces of a journal.)

-The cost of teleporting to the different outposts feels pretty reasonable, considering how much currency other things can cost in the game.

-Nice to have something new to use gossamer scraps for, since the bolts don't sell for much on the TP.

CONS:

-I didn't like having to drop the grenade in the hole after getting the choice to say no. I know Rytlock is supposed to be rash sometimes, but idk if he really would've been like "we have to throw it in" as quickly as he did, especially given how much he hates Smodur and how he had literally just agreed with me that something seemed off. It just felt a little hamhanded to me, I feel like I don't want to be given the choice if it's going to be forced to happen anyway--just have some other NPCs steal it from us and do the dirty work or something if it can't be avoided.

-I didn't like running out of chest keys so quickly in the Keeper part of the meta, I'm hoping it won't turn out to be expensive/exhausting to grind the keys and purchase them ahead of the meta.

-I had a pretty easy time getting around with a skyscale, but I'm not sure if a lot of the vistas and journal pages etc can even be reached with other mounts in this map? It looks like it would be tough in some spots. If this map can't be completed 100% without a skyscale, then that's not cool- I don't think every other mount should be made obsolete even if the skyscale has been out for a while, because it still takes forever for a new player to grind the collection for it since some of the components are timegated, and the stinky sausage costs a lot of money on the TP. I'm a longtime player but I've only had my skyscale for like 2 weeks, so the frustration is still very recent, it sucks when you can't keep up with a meta because most people have the mount and you don't. (*cough Dragonfall*)

-I kind of alluded to this before, I'm still not feeling super emotional one way or another about Ryland- I only care what happens to him because he's Rytlock's kid. Maybe if Braham showed up again somewhere, since they had that instance with being drinking buddies and then the scuffle over the bow, maybe that would give opportunity for a bit more depth of character development on Ryland's part or something.

-So the rest here applies to Icebrood Saga in general for me, not just this episode: this Charr civil war is interesting, well-done content, but tbh it feels like there's been civil war amongst the Charr throughout all of GW2 anyway because of the Flame Legion. So for me it's not like, as super crazy-awesome mind-bending interesting as other things could be, when there's the whole GW world to pick from. Reading up on how sometimes the devs don't have time to include certain things in the story (for example, Malyck and the existence of other Pale Trees), I feel like, if there's a limit on what aspects of the GW world we get to see, there's other stuff that would be more unique and interesting than this. We've seen a lot of Charr and Human stuff at this point. A decent amount of Norn stuff I think, though the Bjora lore fell a bit short for me. I'd love to understand more about how Sylvari came to be, though they're also a fairly new race, so there's not a huge ton of history there, and they had a lot of presence in HoT.

How about something like a season focused on Asuran history, like something showing flashbacks of their escape from Primordus and them coming to the surface for the first time- something having to do with Asuran culture itself, and not just having them appear whenever their technology is needed? We got a teaser of Asuran history with Rata Novus, but it still didn't feel like it got explored to a satisfying extent, at least for me. We know that they're not just arrogant nerdy rat people, because we've seen characters like Taimi, Blish, and Gorrik with all different facets to their personalities, weaknesses they try not to reveal about themselves, etc, that kind of thing. We see cranky older NPCs like Phlunt, and that guy in Rata Sum who talks about hanging by his ears from a signpost. What was life like for these elderly Asura when they were kids? How developed was Rata Sum? What made these old people so cranky and cynical when they've got the most convenient tech out there?

When and how did the Inquest start? Why do some Asura run off and join run-of-the-mill Tyrian pirate crews, like in Gendarran Fields or Bloodtide Coast- are they frustrated by technology and the pressure to innovate all the time? Do they want to be around non-Asura for various reasons? Do they genuinely think it's a good business venture, in spite of the danger and the uncertainty of being able to find good plunder? We got a bit of story on the Olmakhan who branched off from the other Charr for example, I thought that was a really cool concept. Are there Asura like that?

Also, how is Zojja doing after all this time?

Some of my wording on this may sound kind of silly I know, but I really do think there's a lot more Anet could do with Asura as a whole- for one of the playable races, they just don't really feel like they get as much depth as the others, they seem more like comic relief characters who are convenient for tech reasons--I'd really like to see the main story of GW2 go in a direction that's a bit less redundant than another Charr civil war. The Charr power-vacuum-without-Branded thing totally makes sense, don't get me wrong, but there doesn't have to be a whole season focused solely on it. It could be a side plot, or something that happens partially offscreen and is discussed by the Dragon's Watch members while doing something else. I'm hoping for some DSD content at some point, and it'd be cool if other aspects of the world could branch out in the story as well. There's a lot of cool stuff in the GW world to choose from.

Like tons of people have already said, we need some sort of "wallet" for all the books from the stories. And voice crystals. OMG would that be nice to free up literally 10 spots in my inventory right now on my main. And it NEEDS to be free, because I think a lot of us would just buy the extra bank space if we could afford it, and put our books there or something. But I know I sure as heck can't afford it.

Also, same thing for all the random gadgets we get from story stuff - Brandstone Multitool, Ley-Infused Lodestone, that kind of stuff. It needs to not be cluttering up the inventory.

The "Sentient" objects you feed bloodstone, emp fragments, etc. to would also be nice to condense somehow. In the same way the Ley Energy Converter hourglass thing is set up, maybe we could have just one item that has different tabs where you can feed them all the different materials.

Thanks

I had an embarrassing amount of difficulty with escaping the Mists on the raptor, so I was pleased by the floating space raptor visuals near the end. It felt so silly and looked so cool that I didn't mind doing it over and over.

I just hope the remaining human gods will do something at some point. I've been frustrated ever since Kormir nope'd out of her library - I don't understand why the PC didn't ask her who the new 6th is, in case it affects a mortal in some region of Tyria ascending to godhood and somehow disrupting the status quo there. It'd be nice to be prepared.

What I don't understand is this: one of the biggest things I remember from Bug in the System was that the plague was particularly destructive towards the Charr test subjects - I think the experiments said something gross about their insides being liquefied or something? Either way, it was bad, and I was like "oh crap, the Charr!" But now in episode 3, the Charr are completely immune to the plague, and a bunch of them are fighting on the front lines. Did I miss something?

Still going on today, this'll be my 3rd time going in trying not to kill her before she pops a 3rd shade. Please fix.

I'm experiencing the same problem today, hasn't been fixed yet.

> @Danikat.8537 said:

> I was really happy about this - mini Trahearne and mini Fogal and Sieran who players have also been asking for since at least when we got a mini Tybalt.

OMG, Anet. Please put these minis in the Black Lion store or something that doesn't depend on random drops. I will never get 3 Black Lion Miniature tickets ;_;