Rasimir.6239

The demographics of players that enjoy playing personal story and those that enjoy playing 5-man instanced content aren't necessarily the same. I know plenty of players that like to play the personal story, but haven't ever played all dungeons (regardless if story or explorable mode). On the other hand I also know players who have played dungeon story modes on several different characters while rarely if ever finishing the personal story. Both story archs are in game. You are made aware of both (by npc mail in the case of dungeon stories), but have a choice to play either, both, or none of them. Mixing them would make both paths mandatory to anyone who wanted to play either part of the story, taking away choice. Changing the dungeons to scale from 1-5 players would also require some pretty big rework in some of those stories, with probably minimal benefit to the game, since the number of players that would (re-)play the dungeon story modes in addition to those already playing is likely tiny. If you want to play story mode dungeons, put yourself into lfg, write something like "story mode, 1st time, watching cutscenes" so people know what to expect, and have fun! Or if you're on EU and don't like to put yourself on lfg, feel free to send me an in-game mail. I love playing story dungeons and will gladly join you for a full playthrough 🙂 .

To be fair, it's not simply about finishing, but about finishing it on 9 different characters. That's quite a different beast (although I'll probably do it anyway, I really enjoy this story 😉 ).

Wild guess here, but has anybody tried to see if the harvest temple strike mission counts for that part of the collection? Other story steps in those collections explicitely state "play the xxx story or strike mission". I'm wondering if this might work the same way.

That was 30+ wins in addition to numerous faild tries for me. A friend of mine even made it to more than 50 wins before she dropped her 2nd coat box. Another friend got two boxes dropped in the first two kills (in addition to the guaranteed one). That's rng for you, there's always outliers in all directions. Of course I especially remember those that I had bad drop luck, not the ones that dropped easily. On the other hand I've already gotten a bunch of mackarels without even trying, and if it hadn't been for this post I probably wouldn't even have realized it. We seem to have a very different approach to this kind of content. I don't grind in this game. If I have a goal, I keep it in mind, and if I happen to be in the vincinity of an area that helps me toward that goal with nothing better to do, then I'll have a go at it until I don't enjoy myself any more, then go do something else. For the last nine years this approach has served me well with enjoying the game and getting to all the goals I set my eyes on (although taking a couple of years for some of them probably isn't everyone's cup of tea).

Are you sure the collection step isn't done? I did the story on both a soulbeast and a dragonhunter (one pof, one hot elite) and got the collection entries without problem at the end of "The Only One".

How about 30+ vinewrath kills for the two carapace coat boxes needed for the luminescent coat collection (at a time when the vinewrath event was far from a guaranteed kill)? How about killing dozends upon dozends of smokescales for hours without a drop of the pristine smoke claw for the Dark Harvest collection? How about spending countless hours killing jade constructs in Bloodstone Fen without the drop needed for the Aurora collection? Those are just a few examples of collections where I've been unlucky with rng. There are plenty others in game, all the way back to the core game. rng is rng. It's been a part of this game since forever. In most cases of account-bound rng items the chances are decent enough that you get the stuff on the side, without much (or any) grind. Ignore the achievement, just fish whenever and wherever you feel like it, and mackarels will accumulate.

You can, but only if you are on that story step yourself. You can't just join an instance if you haven't played the story up to that point on the character. I've been playing story with friends, and we all got achievement completion just fine, no matter who opened the instance. We all were on the same story stop though, just going into any instance that's not your personal active story step doesn't work.

That kind of encounters isn't entirely new with EoD. In fact, the experience of meeting more of "those" kinds of players in game has made me not pursue new content straight away for a long time. There seems to be a certain kind of player that is drawn to new games or game releases, rushing through them, and feeling the need to show their self-perceived superiority to others by ridiculing them publicly for not being as experienced, not having bee-lined for max stats/level/rewards/whatever, or simply having different priorities (e.g. enjoying the journey vs. "beating" the game). Don't get me wrong, I am certain there aren't all that many players that (conciously or unconciously) play games to talk down others, but with new releases you are bound to get an unproportionate number of them. Give the new content a couple of weeks until the "new shiny" has worn off, and things will go back to normal.

Honestly I think what we (as a community) need most is patience. EoD released 10 days ago, and I think it's doing a decent job showcasing more of the game's mechanics to players. What it can't do is magically turn all players into experts overnight. If it succeeds in making people more aware of what they can do, and possibly making some interested enough to find out more, then that's definitely a plus. Still, the change won't be instant. People need time to learn, to notice things that work/don't work. Come back in half a year, and I'm sure you'll see a higher level of awareness among the general playerbase. Will all players "improve"? No, definitely not, because not everyone is susceptible to this kind of thing. But plenty of people will pick up what EoD is showing them. It just needs some time to sink in and generate enough experience to really show.

There's also the fact that a lot of people tend to see dps numbers as the be all, end all, totally ignoring all of the other contributions to a successful fight, e.g. the person that boosts the damage done by 5/10 people by giving boons, or the one taking care of a mechanic that tanks their personal dps but is crucial to the encounter. It's hard to correctly quantify fight contributions, especially in mechanically complex, non-organised encounters. I've been playing games with dps meters before, and found an unfortunate number of players that would concentrate on maxing their individual dps in team encounters to the detriment of the whole team. If everyone would recognise the limitations of dps meters (which don't exist in a void) and use that information responsibly, then I'd be all for it, but experrience has shown again and again that too many people don't do this.

I've really enjoyed it. The first half has a kind of relaxed, down to earth, every day feeling to it, and gave me a lot of time to talk to everyone, read everything, and explore the world around the story. Somewhere along the line I noticed I was getting more and more curious of how it would play out, and in the end I put in a couple of long gaming sessions because I couldn't wait to find out how things ended 🙂 . What I especially liked were all the additional conversations, written texts, and recordings all over the place, that gave you back stories or additional infos on character actions and motivations. They nicely rounded out the story, sometimes filled gaps that I assume were left out of the main path to not "torture" those that don't care for the story, and some even got me emotionally involved. I vividly remember talking to Ivan after finding him with Gorrik in Arborstone, and talking to him there, even though it was just a small side conversation, really left an impression.

I second that. I'm having a blast!

There's nothing character bound about jade bots. Once you have unlocked them on one character, you can craft/buy modules for every one of your characters, just like other pieces of equipment. If you just want basic use of jade bot features (like zip lines), simply craft or buy a tier 1 jade core for each, an investment of less than 2 gold per core. Or you can share the core between characters by putting it in the bank/a shared bag slot before logging off one character, then grabbing it with the next one you log in (cores can be equipped/unequipped on the fly and are not bound) if you don't want to invest that.

Yes. I caught it when I hadn't even caught half of the fish available in Seitung. I'm still missing the other two exotics though 😉 .

If you own the previous expansions, there are plenty of hero points in those to finish all three specializations, so you won't ever have to set foot in Cantha if you don't want to. The story has nothing to do with specializations. The only thing related to specializations and story completion is the collection for a unique ascended weapon per class (but can be done even on characters of that class that haven't put any points into the newest specialization).

Doing the breakbar tutorial at the training ground is a mandatory part of the (early) EoD story.

The Living World Season DLCs are not just story. Each one has a story chapter as well as access to a map, achievements (that often are small quest chains in themselves), and plenty of unique rewards.

Either the expansion is too recent and the dailies just haven't come around yet, or they've listened to the multitude of complaints from people owning expansions that would've rather done the core Tyria dailies that are the replacement for accounts without expansions.

That gear (berserker stats) is great if you built for direct (power) damage and are satisfied with your survivability. Ascended gear is needed for higher tier fractals not because of its (slightly) higher stats than exotics, but because it has infusion slots where you can slot agony infusions. Agony is a fractal-specific mechanic that damages you unless you have enough resistance (through the mentioned infusions). The higher the fractal level (starting at level 20), the more resistance you need to negate the effects of agony. You have a chance to drop ascended equipment in fractals, and can buy ascended rings (that you can infuse and attune for additional infusion slots) with fractal currency. The natural progression is to play lower fractals, use your currency to get your rings of choice (up to 6 infusion slots from 2 rings) and agony infusions, then branch out from there either with lucky drops, crafting (with materials you gained from fractals and other places), or fractal vendors . If you are open to different kinds of instanced content, you can also buy ascended equipment from raids and strike missions (all links are examples, check the wiki for additional vendors). There's also ways to buy ascended equipment for wvw and pvp currencies, gain pieces from achievement/collection rewards, and more. If you haven't done so, check the wiki on ascended equipment for a full overview.

As far as I've noticed, the recipes that work with mostly/only cheap vendor-bought materials (e.g. apple sauce) don't work.

First of all, farming specific resources is not the best way to go in this game. Most loot is spread so you get a lot of different stuff all the time, that is useful for different projects. To figure out where to get stuff, check the wiki. It has extensive information on pretty much anything you can find in game. As a rough guideline, obsidian shards can be bought for karma in the Straits of Devastation, occasionally drop from chests in the Silverwastes, are rewards in most (all?) wvw and pvp reward tracks, and more. Globs of dark matter are a (not guaranteed) salvage reward from high-level exotic equipment. Empyrial fragments, dragonite ore, and bloodstone dust drop from different sources all over the game, e.g. champion bags (bloodstone dust), jumping puzzle reward chests (fragments), or world boss reward chests (dragonite) among other sources. You will find that none of these materials drops in large quantities, but all drop from different sources that add up just while playing. I suppose you have checked your material storage to see if you've already got some of the stuff you need? By the way, except for fractals (that drop enough ascended boxes on the way through the tiers that you can usually deck out your character(s) without crafting) you are totally fine with exotic equipment. If you want a word of advice, don't give yourself the headache of trying to farm materials that aren't meant to be farmed. Imo you're much better off spending your time exploring the game and honing your player skill, since that has a much bigger impact on what you'll be able to do in game than ascended equipment ever will have.

Did you by chance miss this thread:

This doesn't make sense. Traditionally roleplaying games were always a mix of combat and puzzles. If anything I'd say today's games are more combat heavy than the ones I played when I first got into the genre (about 35 years ago ... yes, I'm ancient 😉 ). There's nothing lazy about creating puzzles, on the contrary, and EoD really has them well integrated into both storyline and maps.

Not race specific, but try being creative on the form you fill out for your travel permit. Rama has some interesting stuff to say about that a bit later in the story 😉 . The first individual line I noticed was when talking to Kasmeer at the end of the Cantha intro instance, and asking her how she found us so quickly. Her answer went something like "well, Empress Ihn asking Queen Jenna if she knew something about a Charr, an Asura, and a dragon crash-landing on a Canthan beach was kind of a giveaway". I laughed out loud at the fisherman and his three cats, especially the awkward pauses in that conversation 😉 . I'm also guilty of dropping Navan in the water on the way to Kaineng (it was an accident, really!), and Rama referencing that incident much later on was nice to hear, too.

To be fair, there are real, non-fictional players that fall in the 2nd and 3rd category, but I agree with you that those are few and shouldn't define the base line of what this game's story asks from the players. Fortunately the game allows any story instance to be played with up to 5 people, so there is a work-around for those people that works with a lot of the problems. This story step unfortunately is outside of an instance, but as mentioned above, with a bit of patience there are ways to do this with minimum jumping (or even no jumping) required. The first group actually is a non-issue in this case, since the heart around which the raptor jumping sequence is centered, explicitely directs players to the raptor unlock in New Kaineng City (just a few steps away). I took it more as an introduction to raptors for non-PoF players, just like the intro story of PoF (where you had to jump gaps on your new raptor, too, if I recall it correctly).