Gedd
5081
With nasty, big pointy teeth!
Telefrog
5083
A group of random folks and I stopped a bull that was running amok in the fields last night. Pretty cool. I think I really like the way stuff to do just pops up as you walk around.
Oghier
5084
There are two key bits in there. First, as you said, stuff just happens. Unlike classical quests, dynamic events aren’t a task you set out to accomplish - they’re something that happens, to which you react. Note, many of them have multiple endings as well.
Second, you’ll find yourself doing a ton of stuff with a “group of random folks.” No game I have played does as good a job at encouraging cooperation between players who just happen to be in the same spot. You’re not competing for zero-sum loot rolls or exp. It’s awesome.
They’ve really advanced the genre.
Telefrog
5085
Agreed. So far, (and I’m really not even out of the starting area) I really like the way none of the players are competing for kills or quests. If you see something going on, just dive in! You get XP and attacks form different players can combo together. Very cool system.
I really think I may stick with this.
Yeah it is, unfortunately for endgame at least, they’re kind of discouraging participation in the DEs with the diminishing returns system and fractals and the lack of development of any new DEs eg. on Southsun Cove.
Nesrie
5087
It’s a great game for certain, but there could be a little more Ancient Karka kind of events/raids happening. That was hard, long, pretty Epic and certainly rewarding. That events tells me they can do it, so hopefully in time we’ll see some more. They acted pretty quickly on the fractal level problems too. I sure wish they would fix some of their events. I feel like there is a guy on a bridge somewhere whose dynamic event has never worked on our server, same with some pirates and canons in a jungle.
Zuwadza
5088
Played AC story mode for the first time last night. Man, that’s pretty tough for the first dungeon in the game. The Lovers were a total bitch.
Telefrog
5089
Only at level 10 so far. (I play MMOs very slowly, which is why I hate paying per month.) I think I found something I don’t like. The loot, or lack thereof.
In my ten levels, I’ve found 4 progressively better chainmail shirts that have changed my look in exactly no way at all. The one thing WoW gets right (for me) is that even at low levels, changing your armor makes significant changes to the visuals on your character. It’s exciting to put on the new vest and see how much cooler it makes you look.
Yeah, it’s petty and nitpicky, but the loot look so far is completely underwhelming to me. I hope it gets a lot better.
Byrdman
5090
It doesn’t really; not until you get to the exotic loot.
Daagar
5091
Since there is no subscription, the cash shop is (partially) built around the pretty princess portion of the game. If you want to deck yourself out, it is going to involve a trip to the cash shop or a lot of end-game grinding.
That said, a lot of my alt-itis in GW2 comes from seeing screenshots of how awesome X class or X race looks. Until I roll a new character and then see Y class or Y race. Sigh.
Zuwadza
5092
I got an engineer to level 45 and recently re-rolled as a guardian. Just wasn’t feeling the engineer. Have the guardian up to 15 now and am enjoying it a decent bit better. That said, I took my engineer through Ascalonian Catacombs last night and enjoyed playing a support/utility role with it. Overcharged shot, battering ram and net shot were good for CC, while the various elixirs were good buffs. Plus the supply drop is just awesome.
LockerK
5093
First time I’ve really had a chance to do the Wintersday content, and I see there’s another timed jumping puzzle with a cooldown on re-entry. I thought ArenaNet learned their lesson from how hated the previous one was and decided to not bring something like that back?
JM1
5094
That’s the design. You’ll find individual pieces that look cool - keep hold of them and use the err I can’t remember what they’re called, the things that let you steal the look of another item - so you can customise your gear more. Generally speaking there’s 6-7 “sets” of gear looks from 1-80 before you hit the level 80 looks.
Gedd
5095
In all fairness, they did at least learn to split everyone up, which was one of the chief problems with the Mad King’s puzzle. I feel like it’s not quite as rushed either, and the final jump is also at least into a stationary object. I actually have been able to progress on this one, and made it to the final set of jumps only to fall off about 3 jumps short of the final present.
That said, I’m finding that I really don’t like the timed jumping puzzles at all, although I could probably be ok with them if weren’t for having to wait several minutes to restart if you fall off early. I know that I’m never going to be good at timed jumping puzzles, but I would be willing to probably sit through the number of attempts it would take to complete it if I could just go whenever I wanted.
Nesrie
5096
The difficulty between this one and the last one is almost night and day as well, and I played the winter one, as someone mentioned above, split where I was solo half the time. I finished it twice, one for each character.
Heavy armor has a serious problem of not looking cool until very late in the game. It’s a little silly when the story quest keeps billing you as basically as the elite of the elite, and there you are in the cutscenes with crappier gear than the lowest town guard.
I advise grabbing some higher level heavy armor off the AH and using the transmutation stones to make your gear look less crappy.
On a related note, the underlying cosmetic system in GW2 is SO much shittier than LotRO. At this point I don’t understand why every gear based MMO doesn’t just copy LotRO and not fuck with it unless they have a definite improvement to make. It’s a solved problem. Maybe they planned to sell a lot of level 80 cosmetic tokens…
I’m even finding WoW’s transmog system to be superior.
Sounds to me like you’ve been unlucky. By level ten there are at least three different looks your armor could have. And if you craft your own, that’s another look.
When you hit 15th level you should head out to Snowden Drifts. The armor you get for completing hearts in that zone completes this kinda awesome gladiator style set.
Make sure you examine your story quest reward items before selling them, because sometimes you receive interesting looking stuff, and while you might not want to use a reward due to the stats it has (or because you’ve outleveled it) I have heard the looks you get from some items can be only rarely found.
The item referenced above that moves the look of one thing onto another is called a Transmutation Stone. So when you find something that looks cool, you take that item, and the item that has the stats you want, and combine them - taking the looks of #1 and the stats of #2. What you end up is an item that looks cool and has the stat allocation you want.
The Transmutation Stone? Where do you get this?
