Bursting.1976

Did they make capturing bases in South Drizzlewood easier in terms of standing on the capture point after the boss is killed, or is it just me? Haven't played in South Drizzlewood for a while. If it was changed, thank you devs for this. Edit: South Drizzlewood is actually pretty fun now. The only thing I may change now is the way map instancing works for Drizzlewood if there are too many instances of this map, so that players who don't use the LFG tool can still get bunched up into an active map that tries to capture bases. I'm not sure how the map instancing system works as only ArenaNet knows, but if it doesn't work well for Drizzlewood in its current implementation, I would change how it works to this system for this particular map, to make it more active.

GMs and the CS team will never disclose any action taken against players. This is pretty much standard for all MMOs. Only thing you can do is report in-game or discuss issues on the forums.

I would say get all of the season 4 ones first. It added 2 new mounts (roller beetle and skyscale), the PoF mastery points are very useful, the story interested me more than the others, and the maps have a wide variety in landscapes and good rewards. If you can only get a few of the season 4 episodes, get episode 3 which will allow you to unlock the roller beetle, and episode 6 which has an active map and great rewards. Unlocking the skyscale will require you to have all episodes of living world season 4 unlocked though.

You don't need to do it, but I guess it's nice to let the other players also tag events. This is because for events like the cull enemies you can just hit an enemy once and run away, and still get a key after the event completes. So doing as little damage as possible allows as many players as possible to hit these enemies, and when the event is over all of these players will get keys, instead of just a few players that could have completed the event by themselves.

Caffeinated skritt. :p

When playing a non minion necro reaper the reaper's shroud (F1) skill is important for survivability. Knowing when to use this skill in combination with other skills can greatly improve survivability. For example if I am taking heavy damage I usually use my heal utility skills first and then enter reaper's shroud to become invulnerable, and when the shroud runs out my heal utility skills are off or nearly off cooldown, giving me an additional heal after for extra survivability.

I started out playing WvW mostly but then started to enjoy PvE more. There are lots of daily activities to do in PvE now like achievements, crafting and mount unlock collections. In terms of open world, the hardest areas I found were Heart of Thorns expansion maps and Dragonfall. In WvW the action can be very quite in off-peak hours. In my experience, there is quite a bit of lag now in both WvW and PvE, especially in living world season 4 maps.

It's fine. I used this kind of build all the time on my necro. You can even solo group events in dragonfall with non minion necro reaper. As mentioned before the wells and signets are particularly useful utilities.

I was able to kill it on my first try on my berserker warrior and didn't have any difficulty with this particular fight, so I can't really help you there. I do agree that some of the bosses mechanics are boring and just a have a lot of health though. Also I didn't know that you have to get Balthazar down to 20% lol. Was wondering what the threshold for that fight was. I got him down to 10% until the cutscene forcibly started. =)

My thoughts as well.. compared to what it was the Warclaw has been completely gutted in WvW.. and still people are calling for more nerfs.If the WvW community hate it so much then Anet might as well make it better in PvE.If hardcore WvW players complain about that well they only have themselves to blame for demanding so many nerfs in the first place. I wonder if they added a way in PvE to also unlock it if it would justify buffing the warclaw in PvE more? I wouldn't mind since I unlocked it and have used it in WvW for ages now already. May as well allow everyone in WvW to be on a more level playing field while playing the mode. Most people in WvW already have it unlocked by now I think.

Welcome! Charrs are awesome. :)

It can be pretty annoying to unlock, especially the requirement to capture a keep, if you can't join a squad. Even harder for Australians playing in off-peak hours when there may not be enough players in WvW wanting to capture a keep.

I hear you, the Springer is completely overshadowed now. Only use ive had for it is in those few hearts needing a stomp. Like the garden in sandswept isles.And I rarely use raptor or jackal, just too satisfying to use the beetle. And far faster. I still use the jackal sometimes for the sand portals. But I can't even remember the last time I used the raptor, after getting the roller beetle. The beetle is just way more fun to me. I think that the raptor's speciality was supposed to be in jumping across chasms, but there are so few of them and you can get past them with a flying mount anyway.

I got the gift of aurene from dragonfall meta yesterday and it's account bound. Would love to be able to sell it since I'm not interested in min-maxing gear, but it's not a big deal.

The core Tyria maps are a large reason for why I started to play and still continue to play. They are beautiful and fun to play in. I hope Cantha will be more like them in many ways.

Just noticed this part. I'm not entirely certain that the next expansion will have new mounts since we already have most of the different "types" of mounts such as flying, land and underwater now. If there is a new collection I'm not thinking that it will necessarily be a boring grind full of fetch quests. The collections like the griffon and skyscale might have been made by different teams. I think the underwater skimmer collection got the balance more right between story, fetch quests and event participation. For that reason, I won't say that future collections will necessarily be a fetch quest grind since if this team is different they seem to have found the balance better.

I'd like to see this as well.

The skyscale dramatically outclasses the griffon, which I almost never use anymore. Why you ask? Unlike the griffon, the skyscale does not have forward momentum, plus it doesnt need you to constantly hit space to keep flapping. And you can cover a lot of ground with 4x dash with the skyscale if having bond of vigor, letting you hit ledges that the griffon never could reach. You dont know what you are missing. Just farm eternal ice in bjora marches and exchange it for the currencies. I farmed x250 of each in a single day, from early morning to past midnight. And that was before bjora marches. And do not judge the skyscale on the rent-a-scale. It gets much better with the masteries. Plus theres MANY volatile magic trails in the air of ls4, as well working with the karma trails in IBS. Keep taking volatile magic and your stamina meter refills, letting you have unlimited flight while you have VM to munch. It does however not work with unbound magic from ls3. I have more than 250 of everything already the mats aren't the issue its the stupid fetch quest after fetch quest..Yeah, for me this was the "hardest" part. Just when you think it's over, the next step requires you to do another one. You can probably get it all done in a couple of days but for me this would be mindlessly boring. I had to do it over a few months.

I honestly don't care about the pre-order bonuses. The only game that I ever pre-ordered had practically no bonuses but I bought it because I knew for certain that I was going to play it with another friend when it released. I'm more interested in what features the expansion will have in deciding whether to pre-order it or buy it after release.

The combat system in this game is unique and fun. I find the combat in a lot of MMOs boring after playing GW2. The combat in ESO is the only other one that I have found to be particularly fun.

The aesthetics, variety of landscapes and numerous events happening all make core Tyria one of my most favourite areas in this game even though all my characters are level 80. Ever since the underwater skimmer was introduced, I absolutely love exploring all parts of Frostgorge Sound now.

If you have a "tanky" profession character that you enjoy playing, you may want to choose to play this character through HoT again solo to try it from a different perspective. In my experience squishy professions have a much tougher time solo because you need to be able to avoid high-damage attacks with dodges or are severely punished. So I tried HoT with my revenant and it wasn't too bad, but when i tried it on my mesmer i was getting downed constantly. I guess i just don't really have a great build for surviving high damage blows on mesmer like i do on revenant. But yeah, honestly, it wasn't a horrible experience journeying through HoT areas on my rev, but it was a pain on my mesmer.Yeah, I also found the herald rev much easier to solo with and could solo champion mobs in Auric Basin lol. My personal experience is the opposite because some of the hardest hitting normal mobs of HOT, like Smokescales and Shadowleapers, die in 1-2 hits because they have 1/4th the health of Orrian Risen. This means, going for high damage / offensive builds is the better way to play HOT, assuming you use active defenses and CC. As an example that I like to give on that matter, on my Core Thief (before I unlocked elite specializations), built for full damage (Berserker), I could use Steal to teleport to a Smokescale, which would daze it for 1 second, enough to move behind, use Cloak and Dagger, then Backstab and you have a dead Smokescale before it can even react. That's how fast they die. Or on me Elementalist I picked the trait that casts Lava Font on being downed, entered a field with Pocket Raptors, cast Lava Font under myself, then wait for them to die on it, if they managed to down me, the second Lava Font was enough to kill them so I'd simply rally. It's not that you need "tanky" professions to enjoy HOT, but you do need to think a bit creatively and use your imagination instead of auto-attacking everything to death. I don't find it difficult on any profession, but that's probably because I'm used to dodging and adjusting to the mechanics of mobs. A lot of people don't seem to like this aspect when doing HoT solo, so for them a more tanky profession may be easier to play with since you can just stand and absorb more hits. On my herald rev I could ignore virtually all of the mechanics of non-champion mobs, and just stand in one spot and dps and heal.

If you have a "tanky" profession character that you enjoy playing, you may want to choose to play this character through HoT again solo to try it from a different perspective. In my experience squishy professions have a much tougher time solo because you need to be able to avoid high-damage attacks with dodges or are severely punished.

I am of the opinion that mounts should have been restricted to PoF maps, but of course it's too late for that now. The older areas weren't really designed with mounts in mind and some of the mounts make the exploration trivial when they were not be meant to be quite that easy.

Yeah, I don't think changing it now would be good. It's not hard. The only slightly challenging part I found was the fight with the 4 djinns, but even that's not that tough if you separate the djinns in the hallways and rooms and have someone kite while the others take down the other djinns. If anything, I found the fight with the legendary corrupted facet to unlock the griffon more difficult.