Wars Of Guild 2

[Joose]

The Asura home city is fucking nuts, I've spent ages just wriggling around inside the place.

Its lovely, with its weird floating cubes and underground aquarium.

[Thompy]

I need to do more of the jumping puzzles. I did one in Lion's Arch last night which was awesome. Not particularly long or taxing on the jumping side, but I had a dead pirate's narration to keep me company and the lights kept going out. Probably good things for group bummings on TS.

[Roman Totale]

Anyone fancy some fabulous leaping or World v World this weekend?

[Dog Pants]

YES

[Dog Pants]

Last night I did some fabulous leaping and some WvW, and both were good. The leaping was due to trying to find a point of interest in the wrong place, and after some tricky jumping in obscure places we actually found an exploration achievement complete with chest of goodies and veteran troll. WvW I went into alone (well, sans 5punkers), and just like everyone else I found it initially confusing. However, once I found a battle I was quite pleased at how they ran - assaulting the gates of a keep was going okay, and as long as you got out of harm's way when you died it wasn't too hard to stay in the action. Then the German server we were fighting came from around the side of the keep en-masse and pushed us right back, leaving a trail of corpses behind their lines who had no choice but to res at the home base and trek back to the lines, allowing the Germans to strengthen their gain. Bad for us, but a great system that really felt like a dynamic battlefield with coordinated charges even though, as ever, everyone was kind of doing their own thing. Maybe that's why we were losing, although there was a commander calling out trouble spots which needed more troops, advising where supplies needed taking, and giving status updates on other parts of the battlefield. It felt good.

Incidentally, we have both PCG and RPS on our server. Both are going to be huge guilds and a real advantage in WvW I think. We should keep an eye out for them.

[Roman Totale]

Another jump puzzle last night, and by Grenth's shrivelled balls was it a tough one. In the South East corner of Lion's Arch there is a Fista that is a bit tricky to get to. Once there you can go on a Goonie's style adventure with the aid of a ghost pirate (he's a pirate that's a ghost, not someone who illegally downloads Patrick Swayze films) to find some hidden treasure.

Fortunately for me and Doggers there was a group of randoms doing the same thing (think they were all from the same guild), so we all managed to help each other out. The prize itself wasn't brilliant for me, so it's probably best done at a lower level. Either way though, it was damn good fun.

Edit: lol @ word felcher

[Dog Pants]

There are three jumping puzzles in Lion's Arch. The aforementioned Shark's Maw is the most popular one because you need to find it for the Fista, although I only found it by spotting a random going in. It's by far the most fun one, a brilliant example of how Arenanet have really gone to town in trying to make this stand out from the MMO formula (in fact the whole of Lion's Arch is a brilliant piece of world design). The second puzzle is easier to find and complete. In the NE there's a waterfall with a bridge behind it, and a cave behind that. It has a grumpy ogre in it, and at the back a tunnel leading to a fairly vertical puzzle. I found out about that one after googling the third one, which I found the end of but couldn't work out how to start. This one is hard as nails, and you'd never find the entrance without luck or google because it's a hole in the ground miles away, hidden under a bush, half way up a tower. Find it by going to the Fista in the middle near the traders which is at the end of a plank. Underneath you is a ruined tower, and on the second 'terrace' of that is the hole which leads to a long underwater tunnel and a tricky jumping section, leading out onto a clifftop in the NW.

Of all three I completed last night (and Shark's Maw with an alt), not one of the rewards could be used by my class.

[Thompy]

Worst trailer ever.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4R5Q0ZOTa8[/media]

[spoodie]

That's a strange direction for a trailer and it's a spoiler. I won't say what part but I've seen the final end game or whatever on the Yogscast channel and there's something from it in that trailer.

[Dog Pants]

The spoiler is the bukkake victim, at the beginning, right? Dragon bukkakattack!


I'm totally going to name one of my pets Bukkakattack now.

[HereComesPete]

I totally want to play this game now.

It's a super realistic 3rd person graffiti tagging game with free running set in an urban environment with magic powers right?

[Sheriff Fatman]

Good grief, that is terrible.

[friznit]

I'm a reasonably accomplished armoursmith now (250+), so if anyone wants anything made give me a shout. Mats ofc would be welcome though I have a few left kicking about. I've no real need for all the leather I have, so I'll dump that in the guild bank for someone to use.

Also, I did a first run through the level 30 dungeon - it's quite long and pretty tough going. Someone who knows how to heal is pretty important. The dudes in there hit like trucks.

[Dog Pants]

The first dungeon is 30? Yay! I'm in much need of one. I wonder if we can get a 5punky outing together for it yet.

Regarding crafting, I think the basic mats are going to be coming out of our ears, it's the fine ones that are the problem. I mentioned to Sheriff last night that even having alts isn't any real use, since all the banks combine and everyone can gather everything. Crafting alts just spread the mats thinner, unless you have cooking or jeweller (both of which I've hit a brick wall with). In fact, crafting is the only aspect of the game I've encountered yet that I really think needs improving.

[Dog Pants]

Is Metrica Province hard mode or something? The two jumping puzzles I've found are hard as nails - for a level 1-15 zone one has level 17 mobs all over it. And the big boss at the end carpet bombs the area with instakill AoEs. I've probably spent more money on spawning at waypoints than I have on everything else combined. Did anyone else have this problem?

[Joose]

I didn't find the area as a whole *that* bad. Its certainly a step up from the other starting zones in difficulty, but only a bit.
That elemental bastard and his instakill AOEs is absurdly difficult though. I've taken him down a couple of times, and both times I spent *most* of the time having a quiet lie down.

[Dog Pants]

Just overheard a brilliant conversation between two Asuran kids out in the jungle, along the lines of:

"So we get blue and green Hylek, who are nice, and red and orange Hylek, who are mean. And yellow ones who are sometimes nice and sometimes mean."
"Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if they were all nice and you got purple ones who danced and gave out candy."
"Yeah, but this is the real world, not some fantasy land."

[friznit]

Some of the kids conversations are really quite good. There was a group I found randomly in Lion's Arch playing your typical kids game about who get's to be who and I'm the dragon etc, but as background filler for the lore it was very informative. Clever, if you ask me!

[Roman Totale]

I heard two children in Divinity's Reach saying that Sheriff had offered to show them some puppies.

[Dog Pants]

Friz, Sheriff, Roman, Bits and I completed Ascalon Catacombs last night. Damn it was hard, and took 3 1/2 hours, but I think some good lessons were learnt about dungeoneering in GW2. We knew we were in trouble when we wiped on the first trash mob. I think we were in a WoW/generimmo mindset, and that doesn't work in GW2. With a party of two warriors (Friz, Bits), two thieves (Roman, myself) and a guardian (Sheriff), we seemed to be a little unbalanced anyway. However, the factors that were giving us trouble meant that actually we would have had a similar run of it whichever combination of characters we took. For a start, there's no such thing as 'pulling' in the traditional sense - groups of monsters are linked together, so pinging one means they'll all come. That meant some more wipes as we started to take on three gribblies at once, until we started coordinating and concentrating on one at a time. The other thing was that we were all trying to stick to our traditional roles of tank, healer, DPS etc. The problem is that there aren't really any tanks, and there certainly aren't any healers. Everyone has to keep up minor group heals and crowd controls. So after a few respecs on the fly most of us had moved from our solo PvE builds to something more utilitarian, with stuns and slows and debuffs (call them what you like GW2, they're still debuffs). Once we got the builds down, and were concentrating on ganking one guy at a time, we were making much faster progress.

As an aside, apparently AC has been described as one of the toughest dungeons in the game, and that the trash mobs are harder than the bosses. I think there's more of a conditioning issue to it than that though. For a start, this is the first dungeon (at level 30). People are expecting something like Wailing Caverns, a fairly easy ride for beginners. GW2 starts as it means to go on, and drops you straight into a dungeon that I would compare almost to hard mode end game dungeons in WoW. On top of that is the previously mentioned problem that we had, that everyone needs to do everything. MMO veterans, who are likely to be the ones doing the dungeons at the moment, are going to be well versed in the tank/heal/DPS trinity, and the more experienced they are the harder it will be to shake off those habits. Indeed, Arenanet have stated that the people having the hardest time in the game are veteran Warcraft raiders. It's arguable which is better - the trinity model is a very precise game, everybody knowing and excelling at their role, which GW2's all-in model is more chaotic, far more mobile and reactive. I like both.

So we had a few sticking points, and each time we adapted our play style and overcame. Friz had apparently insisted to Sheriff while they were waiting for the rest of us to stop playing Borderlands 2 that we didn't look up any of the solutions beforehand lest it just become a dungeon-by-numbers. It dragged it out quiet a bit, but I think there was a lot of value in learning the lessons we did, and it certainly felt like an achievement when we completed it. By the last boss we were all switching weapons, dodging AoEs, and ducking in and out of combat. The fact that we could do this dungeon at all is a testament to the handicap system GW2 uses. We had a range of levels, from roughly 30 to 70, and anyone above the level is statted down to something more appropriate. This is almost unheard of for 5punkers (CoH famously did it years earlier) - a group of five of us getting together for a dungeon without one of us being horribly overpowered.

And of course we had some good old 5punky fun along the way; the fabulous pink theme, bumming Gorm the wolf (and repeatedly 'accidentally' reviving him so he would run off towards the bad guys when we weren't ready), and the synchronised dance-off half way through. And deaths. Lots of deaths.