Robotmoxie.4025

So, I'm having a heck of a lot of fun with this thing. Doesn't mean it's by any means perfect, but check out what I've got going: I set myself up as Deadeye, with Critical Strikes and Trickery as my other lines. I'm using Axe/Pistol and the Midnight King relic, which turns Pistol 4 into a funny button. Critical Strikes: 1, 2, 1 Trickery: 3, 2, 2 Deadeye: 1, 2, 3 If I start combat by marking my target, then hit Axe 2 twice, I'm at max Malice and max Axes. My next Steal Time is going to give me Might, Fury, and Quickness, and allow me to toss an axe that refunds 2 Initiative. So I go ahead and get my initiative back, and chase it with Axe 3, converging six axes on my target. This loops nicely, and I can weave in a Head Shot, proccing the relic for some free Might and extended Fury. On utilities, I'm running Withdraw, Haste, Signet of Agility, Assassin's Signet, and Thieves Guild. I'm honestly not sure if I'd need the crit signet if I had ascended gear and some precision infusions on hand, but I don't. At the moment, it gets me to 100% crit, so I'm happy. In the future, I may be able to free up a utility slot. The big fun of what I'm running is fairly familiar- with Deadeye's "Payback" trait, the cooldown of Thieves Guild can decline so rapidly that you can actually beat the 24 second duration on the skill itself, if you're in a mob-rich environment. This makes what I'm running an absolute delight in open world, especially maps like the Silverwastes, where I enjoy doing much of my beta testing. Quickly set up, secure the kill with Axe 3, and the cooldown drops by 20%. Five kills to reset it entirely, and that comes quick. Looking at it now, you may get more mileage out of dumping Sleight of Hand (I like the Mark cooldown reduction for longer fights) and taking Quick Pockets instead, running with a second pistol and maybe an Energy sigil, so that you get a free dodge in addition to the free initiative, which is always nice, and can smooth out the rotation even more than the easy-access stealth attacks. As I play, I'm sitting at permanent 25ish Might, permanent Fury, and fairly good Quickness uptime just roaming around by myself in zerker gear. I don't think this is a perfect weapon- it has some pretty clear technical issues with regard to flight time and tracking, plus placeholder graphics and icons- I don't need to restate a lot of what's been said in this thread already. Actual thief mains- instead of a thief hobbyist like myself- have much more salient criticisms to make that should be taken in confidence and used to improve this weapon. But it is fun. I'm having a blast. This is the kind of flashy, entertaining weapon design I'd love to see more- as long as it actually works.

I'm pretty sad about how shortbow looks right now. I've wanted to use the Slingshot skin on my engineer for years now, and I've been maining my engineer for longer than that, watching the class grow and change from expac to expac. Engi's in a great place when it comes to healing and damage. Making shortbow a support weapon- and then making it like this, with weak synergy and weak individual skills and weak damage coefficients- well, we're a class that can't weapon swap. We're not gonna lock ourselves into a weapon that doesn't play ball with the rest of the profession. When I say this thing needs a redesign, I mean from the inside out. Keep the fantasy- the fantasy's fun! Bottled essence of this class or that, a brief explosion that results in a second or two of say, necromancer or guardian or mesmer flavor, that's great. But maybe start with the synergies and work backward toward the skills, if that makes sense? Say "I want this skill to count as an Elixir" or "I want this skill to count as an Explosion." For goodness' sake, if you said something crazy like "I want this skill to count as a Turret," you'd at least be cooking something. My personal opinion is that we should be doing more Looney Tunes stuff with the shortbow. The auto-attack should have a stick of dynamite or a boxing glove strapped to it. The payloads should be more reminiscent of the classes they're cribbing- instead of strictly a little vial of liquid essence, maybe a funky little skull-shaped potion bottle or a swirling purple time magic with clock hands, I don't care. What I'm looking for is flavor, and the flavor of this weapon seems to be "engineer can bottle and weaponize what makes other classes successful," and that's both funny and a good idea. Shortbow just ain't pulling it off. Stumbles at the execution. In an ideal world, it would synergize neatly with some aspect of Engineer's traits, and in doing so, exemplify the flavor it's intending to get across. Say Shortbow 5 was something wild like a Turret skill, as I mentioned earlier. Maybe it's a ground-targeted turret that you can fire on any surface. Suddenly that's WACKY for WvW, and it has direct synergies with Turret-enhancing traits, and with Tool Kit, because you can whack it back to health. Can you think of a use-case for a ground-targeted reflective bubble shield with a 900 range? Because I sure can! I feel like I'm overstating my point, so please forgive me, but I feel very strongly about this. Engineer deserves a good shortbow, and not just because I want to use the Slingshot skin. Remember 2012, when the marketing material said that Engineer represented some of the newest ideas in Tyria, and the changes in Tyria's understanding of technology? This is a great opportunity to deliver on that core, original fantasy, by having the class say "Haha, I put your necromancy in a jar and fired it at a guy, and when he died he burst into minions." You know, or anything to that effect. It's a chance to reflect on the attitude of the class and produce a fresh take on it, and y'all... Arenanet, I love ya, but again- you ain't doing it with this.

Alright, after reaching a state of positively nuclear anger, this post is, at least in part, the solution we're looking for. 1) Go to the NORTHWEST corner of the mission area, second floor. You will see the "Dagda's Journal" interactable, along with a wall covered in blue orbs (depicted in these links), a globe, and the Celestial object on the tower opposite of the globe. (If you're facing the globe and the wall with the orbs at the same time, this will be BEHIND you.) 2) Interact with the globe. You're trying to arrange the orbs in such a way that they're similar to the glyph. This is stupid and doesn't translate well. Just mash options 1-4 until they line up in such a way that the Celestial key stops glowing, and you can grab it. ----- The Strength challenge is similar to the spoiled bacon HP in HoT, but with a much shorter and more forgiving cooldown, and it heals 25% of your health. I was counting 5 ticks of damage, then hitting 1. Once I got under half health, I just made 1 my auto with ctrl-click. The Nature challenge is as simple as finding a bucket of water and putting out a burning tree. The bucket of water will be in the same room as the grapevines, which should be to the left, if you're facing the burning tree dead-on. The Balance challenge is on the wall right behind the main portal. Go through the portal in the upper floor where your friends are, then turn around and look at the wall beside Livia. The Knowledge challenge is about alphabetical order. You're looking for a book called "Everyone Loves Wizards" under a nearby *fallen* staircase. Look for rubble. The Obscure challenge is underneath a staircase in the SOUTHEAST. It asks you a riddle. The answer is "a secret." This story chapter absolutely sucks and I pray to all six gods that putting this information together ends our collective suffering.

Ctrl+click the healing skill on 1 and let it autoattack. I was able to complete Strength without even touching the keyboard.

Please, for the love of god, where is the tower. I've been all over the bottom left of the map. I don't see a globe other than the dwarven volcano orb, which is in the extreme west of the map, not the bottom left. My internet got disconnected when this stupid relic was the very last objective of the mission, and now I have to do all the other crap again after wasting an hour running around looking for it, and I'm furious. I feel like I'm going insane. I was having an awesome time until this mission in particular took a big hot dump all over it.

You know, I totally forgot about the fact that leveling was disabled in EotM. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the long-standing community attitude toward the original Personal Story is that it's pretty weak- I'm starting to think it would make the game stronger if people could choose between the two at will. Heck, that's how it used to be, right? I seem to remember getting bored with zipping around maps like Bloodtide Coast or Lornar's Pass until my next story step, and just going into EotM to bridge the gap so I could get through the story faster. I made this thread with the intention of just seeing if we could have a fun day of rampaging through a map I used to enjoy rampaging through, but I'm developing perspective along the way thanks to this conversation. I'd still like very much to just get in there and play together, but I also wish there was a way to put the kinds of things we're talking about in front of Arenanet. There's a pretty clear desire to return to the map, right? It's got some pretty great qualities- but there's just no meaningful incentive for being there anymore. Has Anet talked publicly about this problem? Maybe made any statements in one way or another about what they intend to do? I'd be surprised that they just intend to leave it hanging like this, is all. It'd be reassuring to hear that they had some kind of idea or plan.

When I said "as originally intended," I simply meant "with people in it." As opposed to my little story about us four or five plucky believers flipping objectives in an otherwise empty map. I think your suggestion of it acting as a tutorial experience- especially given what a fast cycle it can be with people in it, and how much of a straight line you can draw between major objectives- is a pretty good one. That said, I like the experience for what it is, and if I were going to change anything about it, I wouldn't start by capitalizing on it being irrelevant to max-level characters. I think there's fun to be had on the map for any player at any level- and this thread isn't intended to make any serious suggestions about what tweaks might bring it up to speed with the other maps. Surely it needs some, but I haven't put any thinking into that. I just want to jump in and have fun with a lot of people like I used to, even if it's only as a special event we host. Sorry, I dunno what you mean by this stuff. But yeah, I did get excited about the teamwork. Everyone I was playing with fell pretty comfortably into their roles and seemed to really be making the most of the tools they had, it was cool. If a bunch of people casually got together like we did, the endeavor that took us a few hours would be much shorter, I think- except for the time spent with big blobs of players blowing each other up. I miss that, too!

I'm glad to have this feedback from y'all. Do you think it's a technical limitation preventing EotM from being brought into the fold as an EBG alternative, or just a choice that Anet hasn't made yet? I don't have the personal coding experience to know which switches need to be flipped and what changes might have to be made behind the scenes- I just miss jumping in and running the loop, and I'd love if if there was some relevant, motivating factor to get people jumping in again. In any case, I'm at least chatting with some old guildies and friends ingame who might be willing to try, maybe set aside some time to run through the map as was originally intended. Nothing concrete yet because I'm still gauging interest, of course, but in the meantime it's so interesting to hear how and why EotM ended up the way it did. I'd really like to see it make a comeback, somehow.

In 2016, Dark Souls had a "global restart" event to inject players into its online community and create a day where, for just a little while, the game was exactly as- or, as I recall, substantially more- populated as it had been in the game's heyday. The online experience was intense, with frequent invasions and plenty of co-operation, and so on. It's in the spirit of this event that I make my suggestion. Now onto the personal stuff: I really, really, really like EotM. For me, it's like Fractals, but WvW. Fast-paced, cyclical, so learnable that losing a commander doesn't cause the game's momentum to implode, and no access to gliders or mounts really makes it feel like stepping into a time capsule, on top of everything else. A few months ago I jumped into EotM and found myself alone. I eventually gathered a party of four strangers and together we actually started flipping stuff. We made it all the way from the green keep to the blue keep, and even took turns running back and forth to generators we'd capped to pay for deploying dusty siege rams that had been laying around in my bank, just so we could bust open the doors to smaller forts and knock their champions around. We eventually made it all the way to the Blue keep, and after several difficult dealings with the koda patrol that brushes near the door, actually broke in and killed the big guy himself. Four people! And it was a blast for an entirely different reason than EotM is supposed to be- it was like playing a sprawling, expansive dungeon where each of us had different roles. I had taken up the role of siege master, since my inventory was stuffed with junk and I had the right WvW traits unlocked, our thief had turned into a quick-moving scout to scoop up resources, and the combat consistency of the other two members- one a guardian and one an elementalist- saw them using their whole kits, area control and utility and all in addition to DPS, to strategically cut our path through trouble. It was the wrong way to play EotM, but it showcased some very old truths about GW2 that I remembered reading about in my Collector's Edition book back in 2012. Old ideas about how classes were meant to engage with the world, about what could be achieved through teamwork in this game, and so on. My weird 3-hour EotM session with these thrill-seeking strangers put it all under a microscope, and I was excited by what I saw. Except for the part about how it's dead, which brings me to the meat of this post. I'm bolding this text for anyone who wants to tl;dr the sentimental stuff and skip right to brass tacks. I think we should collaborate as a community to resurrect this part of the game. Possibly to drum up attention for it and put it in front of Arenanet as a desirable piece of content in need of attention rather than being nothing more than GW2's upcoming appendectomy. The gamemode might need tweaks to have a future- perhaps some access to reward track progress or pips, maybe a secondary set of rewards, or maybe even another Edge of the Mists map to rotate in and replace the familiar old one from time to time, in the name of spicing things up. Sincerely, I don't know which or any of these little ideas would be the best move, but none of them are the point. The point is to get in there, leave our gliders and mounts behind, and have a great time. I'm sure the level of enthusiasm I bring for EotM is kind of uncommon. But if anyone else wants to try this with me, maybe we can start working together to decide on a date, and get some guilds participating. Doesn't even have to be serious WvW guilds, although I'm sure their endorsement would be very meaningful. Let me know if you'd like to try. I'd be thrilled to hear what everyone thinks needs to happen to jump-start EotM, and even more excited just to finally play together again!

I really like the idea of pinning a character. With Deadeye on the horizon, my thief has risen all the way from obscurity to "main" status and I'd love to manually keep him at the front, instead of him being shuffled out of sight when I decide I need to dig through every other character's inventory. A QOL feature I've had on my mind for a while is "even more granular inventory grouping." I want to be able to highlight a number of connected inventory slots- any number, but for my needs I'd probably use a 10x1 strip- and assign them as not being able to interact with vendors, not part of inventory compacting, and not even able to be moved out of that slot until the slot is unassigned. Invisible bags address this problem partially, but I'd rather not commit all 20 slots of an invisible bag, or even have to wait and buy one in the first place, to be able to do some inventory management in the style of a keyring or a pseudo-actionbar. I use the shared inventory slots for items that all my characters benefit from accessing, but this would scratch the itch of "this is my character that's good at farming, so I want all these shovels, keys, machetes, and crowbars in one place." Then I could hop on my WvW character and lock up a different grid of slots that are dedicated to my siege tools.