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    Guild Wars 2 It's tough being the Commander.

    October 05, 2020

    Guild Wars 2 It's tough being the Commander.

    It's tough being the Commander.

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 05:27 PM PDT

    Asgeir, Braham, and the future of the Icebrood Saga story

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 12:19 AM PDT

    So I noticed something interesting going back, and rereading, Asgeir's journal "A Burden", and how it possibly relates to the Icebrood Saga story, and Braham.

    If we read "A Burden", and look at the other lore behind Asgeir's fight with Jormag, Asgeir lost to Jormag because

    1. He allowed Jormag to make him doubt his actions
    2. His hunting party was killed, leaving him to fight Jormag alone, and thus be alone to be manipulated by Jormag
    3. He lacked the physical and mental strength to keep fighting
    4. Arguably, he made the mistake of fighting Jormag too head on, allowing all of the above to happen

    When it comes to Braham, we have already been told by the Spirits of the Wild that Braham is now part of a prophecy, and that either Braham must kill Jormag, or Jormag will kill him. Braham has also mimicked several of Asgeir's actions, both by getting a weapon infused with Jotun fire magic, as Asgeir had, and by getting the Spirits of the Wild to channel their energies through him to slay one of Jormag's champions(Drakkar) as Asgeir did Frostfang.

    Looking back on episodes 1 and 2

    1. In Episode 1 we got to interact with Raven, and take Raven's trials. During these trials the Commander comments they are unsure if the decision they made was correct, we began to doubt our choices. However, Jhavi reminds us that Raven teaches there are no right answers to any situation.
    2. In Episode 2 we got to interact with Wolf. Wolf made the Commander and Braham work together to get the Lost Spirit's powers, and pushed Braham to consider his "party". This allowed Braham to turn into the Wolf at the end, when the Commander's life was threaten by Bangar.

    I suspect that in episode 5 and 6 we will meet with Bear and Snow Leopard. Bear will make us do something that requires us to keep pushing through the pain and exhaustion to keep fighting, and Snow Leopard will have us do something that encourages us to use non-direct tactics against Jormag, as fits with those two spirits ascribed elements.

    Essentially, the Spirits are teaching the Commander and Braham how not to fail in the inevitable fight against Jormag as Asgeir did.

    Getting the bow back, and Braham being able to channel the Spirit's powers, will be key in defeating Jormag, as well as the lessons learned here.

    submitted by /u/TheSajuukKhar
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    The King and Queen's Horrorween 2020

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 04:38 PM PDT

    Come one - come all to The 15th King and Queen's Horrorween!

    Tyria's oldest community event returns to the Guild Wars franchise for its ominous 15th anniversary.

    The Snowman King on behalf of her majesty Mad Queen Malafide cordially invites you all to attend this grand Halloween caper.Featuring the famous costume contest, live in-game bands and fan favourite activities you have all come to know and love!

    It is not to be missed, we bring frights and delights!

    submitted by /u/Frozen-Wind
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    The Commander And No Quarter

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 10:26 PM PDT

    [Art] Fish bubble

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 02:20 AM PDT

    First Time Completing a Story Journal Achievement List, I'm Crying <3

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 03:19 PM PDT

    The Weekly Map Recap, Week 27 - Dry Top

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 12:24 PM PDT

    Welcome to the Weekly Map Recap, a series where we look back at one map in the game each week. We'll look with a critical eye at how each map represents its theme, proves faithful to its lore, and implements its design. We'll see how effective its gameplay is, whether the art holds up, and the forecast for the map's long term retention. With 52 maps to date, it'll be quite the journey!

    Links to the previous entries in a reply at the bottom!

    Also, before we get to the recap, you should know that I'm currently conducting a survey on map preference. I'm currently still accepting responses - and I'll be publishing the results in a Weekly Map Recap Special article. Get in those responses while you still can! I will be publishing the results article the week of Oct 18th.

    27 of 52 - Dry Top - Level 80

    So, it's hard to talk about one LWS2 without talking about the other. They exist in a kind of interesting duality with each other: Dry Top is the 'exploration' map and Silverwastes is the more focused 'assault the keep' meta map.

    What's interesting about both of these is that they really show the design team(s) pushing what is possible in map design and gameplay - really raising the bar in preparation for HoT. We see the first true 'map-wide' meta in the Sandstorm, more complex enemy patterns and group composition, and entirely new assets and lighting that will persist through the Heart of Thorns era. We can think of LWS2 as the 'design lab' for everything that comes later. Some of these experiments will work great, and some will work less well.

    There seems to be some sense that folks are either 'pro-Dry Top' or 'pro-Silverwastes' - that if you like one it is compulsory to dislike the other. Though some dislike both: in the survey that I've been running (over 400 respondents so far! Thank you all!) there's a close to 10% proportion of players who do not like either' SW or DT. That's quite high in comparison to other map categories.

    Theme/Concept - 8/10

    Dry Top is all about disaster, resiliency, and overcoming natural barriers. So much on this map is about surpassing the natural obstacles that surround us: whether that's jumping over steep cliffs, growing food in the desert, or surviving in a storm. The unique rewards on this map even complement this theme: insects trapped in amber, metaphorically deriving victory (new weapons) from defeat (the death of an insect).

    Obviously, the Zephyrites have crashed on this map in a horrible tragedy. Whether or not we believe that that story is told well (for those that have not played LWS1), the thematics are clear. Things have gone bad, and we're in a foreign place where everything is unfamiliar and dangerous. Almost all the enemies here are new and the mordrem in particular are highly dangerous compared to vanilla mobs. Success here really requires pulling together and organization - something which was done more successfully here, I would say, than in Silverwastes. If you want the highest tier, close coordination is needed (shoutout to [SAND] who have been a persistent mainstay of our community for half a decade). The sense of thematic struggle in Silverwastes has been weakened by power creep and RIBA farming.

    I mean this is a pretty ghoulish map, all told. Death is everywhere. Even beyond Drooburt, poor soul, the centaurs and skritt struggle to survive in an environment that wants them dead. But the centaurs, and the ley line chamber, show that if you look beneath the surface and persevere there is life to be found.

    Lore - 7/10

    Dry Top has some interesting stuff going on, though not much from GW1. This map was a zone in the first game, but it was a minor one without anything much of interest. There was a hilltop settlement in the original Dry Top with unidentified inhabitants - and there are a lot of theories about the original Maguuma civilization. We saw settlements in the original game (not just in Dry Top, but throughout the Maguuma) that generally appeared abandoned. We see many more ruins in this game, in Silverwastes, Verdant Brink, and the Lost Precipice. Do these ruins tie in to the Mesoamerican-style architecture seen in EoTN's Tarnished Coast - and therefore to the cancelled GW Utopia? We'll never know. There were hints in the Nightfall campaign that a great civilization lived to the west of Kryta, though we now know that the Mesoamerican culture in Utopia was going to be located in the Mists itself.

    Beyond that, we get interesting pieces on Scarlet Briar here, and on the Zephyrites themselves. We got our first hints about Glint's Legacy on this map, and finally ran into a friendly group of centaurs. This last bit was really exciting for myself personally, since I'm a huge sucker for centaur lore. One of my greatest disappointments with PoF was that the centaurs were completely eradicated by Joko after being such a large part of the Nightfall campaign.

    The Zephyrite lore would, surprisingly, go on to become central to the story of GW2. Many will have missed the original Festival of the Four Winds event in LWS1, but even from that early time it was clear that something exciting was going on with the Zephyrites and Glint. The most intriguing lore that GW2 introduces was born in that event - a relief when taken with the criticism of the 'Alliances' of LWS1 and Scarlet Briar.

    Design - 8/10

    This is really the first time that we get a map 'frozen in time', which will be Arenanet's default design moving forward. Previously, maps were supposed to be blank slates that Living World could paint on with new events (such as Modus Scleris) being added seamlessly. Here, we see for the first time a moment in time captured in the events and environments that could not be changed in updates effectively: what would this map be if the Zephyrites ever got rescued?

    Perhaps more significantly, we really see the team reacting to the idea that Southsun Cove had nothing to do. It is clear that the developers were having conversation internally about retention and map identity, because this map blows open the doors on how to make a map unique and have a clear 'role' within the list of post-launch maps.

    This map introduces so many things, most of which I'm not sure it gets enough credit for today. The idea of a meta event that transforms the map physically is only really represented outside of Dry Top in Verdant Brink. This map completely transformed the idea of what a meta event could be - with tracking and clear reward tiers and structures. The timing of events and the coordination of parties across map was something that no map had really required yet, not on this scale - save for the Triple Trouble boss. This turned the meta into a kind of mini-game, rather than simply an event chain.

    On top of that almost everything in this map was new or radically different from vanilla: the movement, the environmental design, the assets, the enemies. While Zephyrite movement skills had been fun in the Festival event, here they radically changed what was possible in environment traversal. This would go on to become the masteries that we see in Heart of Thorns, and ultimately the mounts in PoF. This is where 'alternate movement skills as core gameplay' started.

    From there, the environments really open up. We see the team playing with verticality and playable vertical spaces in a way that they hadn't on a permanent map. This, again, would go on to be a core element of the Heart of Thorns and later maps. In fact, I would go on to say that the Heart of Thorns maps, in their vertical layouts, have more in common with Dry Top than Silverwastes.

    Then you have all the assets: so many of these would become really core to how GW2 maps look even in the PoF days. So much of the desert and ley line environments in Elona, in the Silverwastes, in Verdant Brink, in Tangled Depths... all have environments making use of the assets first built for this map. Throw on top of that a heap of enemies with complex group compositions that are actually tough for your average player, especially at the time. Mordrem wolves quickly became many player's bane.

    What we see here, really, is a series of teams firing on all cylinders. Everything about this map is bursting with new and interesting ideas. What about an event where you have to lasso a moa? Or where you have to sumo wrestle a hylek? Play soccer with asura? It's just so dense with content, and you're doing everything under time pressure (if you're going for the meta) and so there's never a dull moment!

    Dry Top is the development lab for post-LWS2 Guild Wars 2, and the game would not be the same without it.

    Now, of course, there are some really clear sacrifices to accomplish all of this. It is really strikingly obvious that the map was built in chunks, and the connection between different sections is incredibly awkward as a result. The greatest sin here is the connection between Prosperity and the centaur village, Restoration Refuge. If you are a new player and haven't played the story, it's almost impossible to find and incredibly frustrating to navigate.

    On top of that, there are a number of story areas that are 'off-limits' in the open world, for no clear reason. A considerable amount of playable space would have opened up if some more work had gone into making those areas an explorable part of the map.

    Finally, because the map has so many small 'chunks', it doesn't feel large in scale. Every individual section feels quite small and almost claustrophobic. Tangled Depths will pull this off a thousand times better - because there's an incredible sense of connectedness despite the compact environments. Dry Top doesn't have that.

    Gameplay - 9/10

    Like I said, there's just so much variety here. There are an enormous number of new types of events that encourage real engagement with the mechanics. Even bosses like the skritt queen have an unusually high level of mechanics for an open world boss at this time. We obviously don't have anything like the HoT wyverns yet, but we're getting there.

    Enemies in general are just better than vanilla for the first time. Beetles that you can't attack from certain directions, vines that only die if you've killed their offshoots, sandstorms that split into smaller enemies. They're just more interesting, and while karka really primed the pump here, they were only one type of enemy. Here's it's just about everything that is playing with new ideas. It is clear that releasing in small chunks really gave the teams time to raise the bar on enemy design. And there are few fights, even today, that feel as epic as fighting the giant in the sandstorm. It just wrecks groups that are not prepared.

    And each part of the map is different! Each little 'section' has a different group of enemies and a substantially different environment. Fighting golems at the top of the cliffs is very different from fighting groups of mordrem in the lowlands, or plant monsters in the oasis.

    And that's not even talking about the meta! This meta is so much fun when run with a coordinated group. Even today, there are few metas that require map-wide coordination on this level, or that generate the same level of celebration when you reach the highest tier of Sandstorm.

    If you're not interested in engaging in the meta, there's a lot here! This is the first map where we see the 'coin collector' trend, really playing on the movement skills for those who like jumping puzzles. Suddenly, the whole map is one giant jumping puzzle for the first time. There are so many little nooks and crannies - whether you're looking for coins, llamas, or dive spots.

    Art - 10/10

    Again, this map sets the standard in terms of appearance. More than a couple people in the survey results said that seeing the visuals of Dry Top in marketing materials actually brought them back to the game after leaving in LWS1. It was such an enormous step up from vanilla, and it holds up today.

    These assets are strong enough that, as I said previously, they'll be used throughout the rest of the game's life - though never quite in the same combination. In fact, many of the worn sandstone assets here are practically never reused - outside of a corner of Auric Basin.

    It's hard to understate the impact that the leyline chamber had when we first saw it. It was like absolutely nothing else in the game, and just drop-dead gorgeous.

    Really the only knock on the art here, like we see with the design, is that it all feels so disjointed. But if that feeling of small chunks meant that each area had the level of detail that it does, then I'm all for it.

    Long Term/Retention - 9/10

    This is really the first map where we see the introduction of a specific map currency and reward structure. Again, this map was just setting the stage for everything afterwards. Because of this strong structure, and the use of map materials (quartz) in future recipes, this map is still heavily run today. A real community has grown up around it that we hadn't really seen before. Even the Orrian temple metas have never had the sense of personality that [SAND] and other community members have given to Dry Top. Farming Dry Top is the cooler, more fun, less popular older brother of farming Silverwastes. It helps that the ambrite weapon set is, to this day, one of the best weapon sets introduced to the game that is earnable through play. They're just flashy enough, without being over the top, and look like nothing else. When you see an ambrite weapon, you notice.

    Overall - 8.5/10

    Dry Top, for me, represents some of the very best of GW2 map design. Although it is awkwardly evident that it was worked on in 'chunks' - and the flow through the map suffers because of that - so many things work on this map. It has unique mechanics not replicated on other 'main' maps. It has a meta which not only has a clear and engaging reward structure, but encourages strong cooperation and organization for players. It's got just enough nooks and crannies to satisfy explorers. My greatest regrets about this map are that some of the story areas are inaccessible, and there's some sparsely used or wasted space. I think it's an incredible shame that the map is generally unpopular, especially compared to Silverwastes (between the two, almost 60% prefer SW - an incredibly high proportion). Dry Top is a great example of a map that has a clear identity and makes a place for itself in the crowded world of post-launch maps.

    -------------------------------

    That's all, folks! What do you think of today's map? Any fond memories, or strong complaints? How well do you think this map stands up in comparison to all the others? I hope you got your shovels, because next week we're headed to the Silverwastes.

    Don't forget that survey!

    submitted by /u/Jonah_Marriner
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    Does anyone have the old IRL omnomberry cookie recipe?

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 04:51 PM PDT

    This might sound insane... but a long time ago this post was made where someone came up with an omnomberry cookie recipe irl, and back then I made them and loved them. Was looking to try it again, but it seems the forum post with the recipe is gone. Any chance anyone has it saved?

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/209bkp/gw2_team_receives_delicious_cookies_from_player/

    submitted by /u/IceWindWolf
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    Just sharring a screen of my thief ^^

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 06:35 AM PDT

    How are higher level characters with full kit getting into the tutorial?

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 06:27 AM PDT

    Is Anets stealth-nerf-addiction a sickness or a life style?

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 08:11 AM PDT

    Dark Pact had a combo with necromancers dagger 2, when did the stealth nerf happen (it is not documented), if I'm not mistaken this is the 2nd major stealth nerf to necro (the other was undocumented removal of warhorn cripple).

    Do other classes also get such stealth nerfs?

    submitted by /u/sell4fun
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    Need a roaming build

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 03:34 AM PDT

    I play an engi and have full ascended zerker gear including rifle and bolt. My group is starting to do roaming parties. They are a firebrand that's condi and support(switches build and gear when needed) and a power spellbreaker. They would prefer me to be a scrapper for the cleanse and stealth gyro,but any build would work. I do have exotic gear for medscrapper but prefer a dps build. Please help

    submitted by /u/lonlywind
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    ArenaNet verification SMS

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 03:06 AM PDT

    Hi guys,

    I keep receiving messages from ArenaNet, stating

    Your ArenaNet code is: \*****

    I can't file a complaint on their website without logging into my account, which I don't have, since I don't play Guildwars.

    Maybe they'll see this post and send me a DM. I just think someone out there can't access their account because of a faulty 2FA.

    submitted by /u/fnstw
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    (spoilers) The Brand in 1333 AE

    Posted: 05 Oct 2020 07:27 AM PDT

    Just imagine Brand -big dark purple place filled with monsters, which were hold at bay by blood and claws of strongwilled Sentinels.

    Then Aurena come and re-brand it (I see a pun there)

    Now -throw whole of char´s lands is line of happy rainbow colored sparkly land ... how akward must sentinels feel now. And chars in general.

    I finnaly get why so many joined Bengar - I would want go somewhere bloody too if I should look at that new brand for rest of my life.

    submitted by /u/Servel85
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    What is the least played profession in gw2?

    Posted: 04 Oct 2020 01:43 PM PDT

    I am wanting to make a new character and I would like to play as the least played profession but I would like to hear what you all have to say as well. From what I have read revenant is the least played

    submitted by /u/DoshSpanky
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