GUILDWARSINSIDER

As time has gone on in Guild Wars 2, I’ve had more than few moments of retrospection on my profession choice. When I was in the middle of a hard jumping puzzle I’d wish that I could be a Mesmer, and when I was getting trounced in WvW, I’d wish I could be a Guardian. Normally, I’d use this feature to tell you why you SHOULD play the Thief. This week, lets try to learn from the bad…

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PCGamer has some video footage for you spoiler-craving folks, eagerly awaiting this weekend’s content release.  The video shows off the Karka in action…and in Lions Arch! Swarms of Karka can be seen swarming the cobblestone streets, leaping out of the water and generally being terrifying.

There is also some footage of the new dungeon, The Fractals of the Mists. It seems as if there are going to more than a few cool encounters, including an Indiana Jones themed Mini Dungeon that I can’t wait to visit. Since everyone is bumped to 80 for this dungeon, maybe I’ll roll a new character. I’m thinking a Sylvari Necromancer named Kali Ma….

Check out the video below and the full article here.

Chris Whiteside, Studio Director at Arenanet, has responded to the feedback from the community concerning the announcement of Ascended Gear.  He states that the goal is not to create a gear treadmill, but a reasonable step in between Exotics and Legendary.  

Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two.

Some in the community have been vocal with their concern this addition would create an undesirable focus on gear progression.  Whiteside reassures players that this will not be a regular event or will players feel the need to chase after the next set of armor.

We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.

Whiteside concludes with a promise of more reward and progression systems.  These new systems, including the new Ascended armor, are suppose to be a new, challenge appropriate awards for new challenging content.

We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards.

 Read the entire official post here.

ArenaNet has dropped a new blog with video of the brand new dungeon, Fractals of the Mist.

It’s built of an array of mini-dungeons, which we call fractals. These fractals are slices of the Mists, fragments of time that have been stabilized by the intrepid asura researcher Dessa. Some of these vignettes from history may be familiar to original Guild Wars players, while others will represent previously unseen events. Because of their eclectic origin, each fractal is built as a distinct, separate experience with themes, mechanics, and art specific to that fractal.

But content designer Leah Rivera did not stop there. The new dungeon will allow access to any level by side kicking similar to the World vs. World system.

Even more impressive is the fact that this dungeon will be scalable.

The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level. It’s a true challenge, but as you hit higher and higher scales, the dungeon will get more and more rewarding. You’ll have to have some serious skills and solid tactics to make it through these Fractals. After a certain point, our new Ascended items and Infusions become crucial tools for survival.

Check out the video and let us know in the forums why you think developers have waited this long to bring scalable dungeons to the market?

Yep.

No changes, just maintenance.

This article was probably a little pointless.

Over on the official forums an interesting thread has been going regarding the current World vs World rewards. Poster Rystlwulf posed the following question:

Are there any plans for rewards from WvW? I’d love to see some incentives for people to participate and for guilds to take, upgrade and defend strategic points.

Suggestions:

1. when a guild takes a point, the NPC’s should display the guild emblem and Tag.
2. guild influence could be earnt based on the duration a point is held and allow guild influence to be spent via the quartermaster on upgrades; and
3. allow guilds and players to earn ranks in WvW as in sPvP – with some sort of reward at each rank.

Love to hear other suggestions as well.

WvW is great fun but to keep it viable you really need to incentivise it and it’s important to do that before enthusiasm wanes not after.

In response Habib Loew wrote,

I can’t say too much just yet, but we’re doing some work related to rewards and character progression in WvW even now. It will be a little while before we’re ready to talk about more details though. Rewards, progression, and incentives for play are hot topics around the office. We all care about this stuff and once we have some more details hammered out we’ll let you all know what we’re up to.

With all the controversy right now regarding the new tier of items it will be interesting to see what ArenaNet has up their sleeves to show the WvW crowd some love. The original thread and response can be found here.

Today ArenaNet announced the addition of “Ascended” armor, a new tier that ranks between Legendary and Exotic. This rare armor comes with a new condition type found in high-level areas such as the eagerly awaited Fractals of the Mists dungeon. This condition, dubbed “Agony”, ticks away a percentage of life over time and can’t be removed with traditional means. Instead, these endgame players will need to forge, via a few Mystic Portal recipes, special armor upgrades called “Infusions” to deal with the Agony condition. In brief: new dungeon will require new armor the further you advance. 

Linsey Murdock also tells us to await a new way to achieve your Legendary weapon, something more like a scavenger hunt. But we’ll probably find out more when it’s ready^©.

For the long version and more details into Ascended or Infused items, head over to the official post!

The new rarity tier – Ascended.

We cover a lot of ground with this week’s entries from around the internet.  We have posts that talk about professions, the learning curve, a discussion on the idea of difficulty and even touch on a little politics.   So, sit back and enjoy, these blogs from around the net.

Dusty Monk, from Of Course I’ll Play It, discusses his current choice of professions, the Mesmer.  It takes him awhile to warm up to the class, but ultimately he is enjoying his progress.

But now that I’ve found a build I’m really enjoying, I’m loving the class.  It’s definitely a fiddly class, in that you want to fiddle with weapons and traits and utility skills to get the most out of the class

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ArenaNet has dropped a brand new video showing off the new content the Lost Shores. With so much information pouring out of every media site you can find yourself missing the latest news on this onetime event so make sure to check out MMORPG Reviews the November Update for all the juicy details and find a way to set aside some time for this event that will change the world of Tyria forever!

No take backs!

Friday November 16th will kick off a whole new batch of content for all types of gameplay within Guild Wars 2 and a MMORPG.com has some details on what we can expect.

A New sPvP Map

The ‘Temple of the Silent Storm’ is a new sPVP map coming to Guild Wars 2 with the November content update. The map takes place on and inside a massive iceberg, which features a large temple that serves as a place of meditation and training dojo for Guild Wars 2’s armored polar bear race, the Koden. ArenaNet is emphasizing a sense of verticality with this map and just like all of the Guild Wars 2 PvP maps, the ‘Temple of the Silent Storm’ will feature conquest gameplay with a twist.

The Lost Shores

The ‘Lost Shores’ weekend event will be a one-off event in Guild Wars 2 that will run between Friday, November 16 through Sunday, November 18.  ArenaNet describes the theme of the event as being a “monster movie, invasion type thing” that will focus on the lore of Lion’s Arch. During the event, Lion’s Arch will be invaded by a new enemy group called the ‘Karka’.  We’re told the Karka will be quite challenging for Guild Wars 2 players and will even feature a number of new mechanics for players to overcome in order to emphasize this. Visually, the Karka will feature a heavily armored shell of sorts that players will have to penetrate. ArenaNet has even worked on a new shader technology that allows players to actually see pieces of the armor fall off of the Karka as they wear it down.

Fractals of the Mists

The ‘Fractals of the Mist’ dungeon is a result of all the lessons ArenaNet has learned from developing the game’s initial dungeon offerings as well as the feedback they’ve received from players on dungeon content since launch. Players will enter the Fractals of the Mist dungeon via a central hub that will feature an assortment of amenities such as repair NPCs and other merchants. Once players have gathered their party members, they will be launched into one of the nine ‘fractals’ that will be randomly selected for each group.

All in all this is going to be a massive game update that will forever change GW2 going forward. You can find the full article here.