3921

I will most often play whatever character has the smallest frame/stature for PvP. Playing a lurikeen in DAOC was awesome as you were completely submerged in any area that had water lol.

3922

Which raises the question, what class are your kids?

-Tom
3923

I wish NCsoft would get their crap together. I can’t log into the game because it recognizes my old Guild Wars account, but won’t let me link because the password got mussed during the NCSoft hack of 2 years ago. And of course, no one gets back to me from their support and there’s no way to just change your password like normal… so I can’t play. yay

3924

Isn’t their support ticket/site separate from their client login? Have you tried that?

3925

Getting a bit fed up with frequent broken dynamic events. It has become a great joke to everyone now that things break so much. I thought they fixed this crap?

Also, while the game does a great job encouraging non related people to work together, it does everything in its power to make actual grouping painful.

Grouping with my friend consists of a ton of the following conversations:
Them: Where do we go now?
Me: i can’t see what you did (I am slightly higher level so redoing old stuff), you need to lead the way as i have no way of knowing what you haven’t done yet
Them: I don’t see any quests, they are all +3 or higher
me: Did you miss something?
Them: i don’t know
Me: i don’t know either

You need to be able to see party member reputation quest status on the map.

I do think the game is too luck based in leveling. If you run across a lot of dynamic events, you will level in a fun way. If you get unlucky, which i have a couple times so i know it isn’t just my friend missing stuff, you will run in to content gaps a few times where you have no reputation quests around your level and just wander around hoping to run in to a dynamic event. This type of leveling sucks and is not fun.

3926

It would be nice if they did something like LOTRO did, where it shows you everyone’s progress or completion… in this case it would be of the area’s hearts and maybe the map’s progress. We use voice chat to overcome these issues now.

3927

Maybe I’ll sound like some sort of apologist for the game, but I can’t recall having either of those things happen to me more than once in leveling one character to 80… though to be honest I did level Artificing to near 400 and I did a bit of WvW, so I may have gained 15 to 18 levels from that, so it’s only 60+ levels in the field.

But in all my adventures I can’t recall issues completing hearts. Busted dynamic quests, sure, I’ve seen those. And broken skill points, sure. But not what you describe.

I agree that AC is a pretty tough instance to start people on, and that CM (and Twilight Manor, which is the level 50 dungeon) are much easier. I honestly don’t understand why they made the first dungeon so brutally difficult.

I’m not sure you need all the tools you list above - I’ve never felt compelled to have cooking consumables or artificer potions, but I do understand combos, and I keep my gear pretty up to date. Having people who understand their class and how it interacts with other classes does make AC much easier. I have done story mode maybe three times and the last time I did it, with a bunch of Wanderers, it was smooth as silk, and even those nasty 3 pulls of Monk + Elementalist + Warrior weren’s too terrilbly bad - I don’t know if it’s the group makeup, or what, but we just clicked.

One aspect that makes things easier is if people spec a bit more defensively. As a Mesmer, I always have Feedback and Null Field equipped, but I swapped out my standard Radiation Field for the Phantasmal Disenchanter, who removes conditions.

One thing that really helps is to call targets - ctrl - T on a mob and everyone will get a callout to target them by hitting T. Plus they get a big red targeting icon above their heads. This helps ensure everyone is attacking the same mob.

Another thing is to realize that people will get downed, and you’ve just got to get them back up (or let them run back from the waypoint, since there’s no real penalty to doing so, outside of the downed debuf).

People will get more aware of their class and abilities over time, all I can say I guess is hang in there!

3928

I think the expectation that people will get disabled frequently and that you need to be prepared to both support them and to act effectively when you’re disabled, is one of the hardest things for long time mmorpg players to get used to.

I’m still trying to convince my friend that you can often revive yourself simply by attacking a minion that is nearly dead. Very few people do this and most group boss fights outside have minions spawning in which are perfect to get a rally off.

3929

It’s been on and off, but every now and then when I’m grouped with people, I see the little renown heart under their face icon in the upper left of my screen. So when that’s being shown you know if they’ve completed the heart where you’re currently located.

As for finding stuff to do, there is almost always 2 (or more) zones to level in, so if your friend has worked in one zone, you can both go to the other one. Heck, you can both go to the starting zone of another race and work on that together. I think there is pretty much always 2 zones of appropriate level content.

I guess I’ve had pretty good luck with dynamic events (though yeah, there are starting to be more and more busted ones, and it is sort of mind boggling how they don’t seem to have some sort of way to bop them back into action). Whenever I see other players around, I tend to gravitate towards them, and if by chance I see a dynamic quest circle, I make a beeline for it. Frequently quest leads to quest and before I know it, I’ve run all over the zone doing stuff.

3930

Believe it or not, I have heard stories that you can combine the 2 legendary swords, Sunrise and Twilight (I think that’s the other one), to get a different legendary greatsword (each one of these has some sort of particle effect - one in the daytime, and one at night - supposedly the combined one has a different particle effect all the time).

3931

If your friend has no idea where he should be going, there are bigger problems than the party interface. What if he were solo?

3932

Yea I’ve got a ticket in and am still waiting. I had a longer post, shortened it to point out one aspect of how stupid their site is:

I cannot reset my password via e-mail as it says my e-mail does not exist in their system (from CoH/CoV/GW). Then as I try many different old passwords, I get e-mails AT THAT VERY E-MAIL ADDRESS saying “password attempt failed at IP address… if this was not you…” And I cannot make a new account because I already tried to register GW2 via the merge deal with previous account… even though my account merge failed.

Nice job NCSoft.

3933

:-( That does sound frustrating. I am not even sure they have password reset even enabled at this point, due to the hacking issues. I was under the impression account issues are way at the top of the list in terms of support.

3934

I also have one of these I enjoy for that reason, and the name. My female Asuran Thief is named Patent Troll.

3935

Yep you’re probably right. I think Ascalon is probably the exception and once I get some better groups should be able to work through it. In all the groups I have run with we’ve had the most trouble with the “Lovers” fight and that is where the groups fell apart. I’ll try and get some guild runs happening and see if we can knock it over.

I should pay more attention to the forums as an ArenaNet rep has stated quite openly the 5-man content is uncompromising and designed for well organised groups with good communication. He also stated they have no intention of neerfing the content and in some cases they are making bosses more difficult to match the trash.

The Cadaceus group I ran with didn’t use voice but we were highly organised in as far as we made good use of the targeting command to focus DPS. It was a good run.

3936

On the subject of broken dynamic quests I have submitted 12 tickets in the last week for stuck events in various zones. Very strange but I have experienced more broken events now than when the servers were overloaded in the first week and everyone was zerging the content.

3937

They were resetting the servers daily to handle all of the broken events due to load. That isn’t happening daily now and as a result more and more broken/hung events are showing up. It’s unfortunately but hopefully they are iterating themselves through the process much the way they did with the TP issues.

3938

What’s the confusion?

3939

That’s projectile finishers through an ethereal field. :P

3940

New Patch

A few notables:

-Fixed various broken events and skill challenges.
-Discovery crafting may now use items directly from a player’s bank.