nosleepdemon.1368

6 is the ‘max’, but I believe 5 is all you can actually get.

I find their movement to be too imprecise, specifically the vertical motion makes it hard to judge how many times you need to hit raise/lower altitude to be at the right height to hit a coin/cloud.

You don’t have to do the pillar skipping, it makes even me angry and I’ve done all the trib modes on repeat to get both infusions. Those pillars are super finicky, and the trampolines? God kitten, the number of times I have them NOT activate… RREe!! So what you can do, is where the dart maze is (the bit with lethal darts everywhere and blocks you have to push) head right instead of entering the building. Follow the happy signs and across a couple of cloud jumps to an area that skips straight to the final section.

If you can handle it in bee mode I’d say your fingers probably work better than you think, I always get stuck on stuff as a bee, or go sailing over/under geometry. What makes that particular race difficult in my opinion is the lack of single player mode. You have to contend with other players who block your sight with their furry bums or jump in the wrong direction and you instinctively follow them.

I have seen a few cheeky cheatersons try that with the race, sitting at the start all smug in bee mode ready to beat all us plebs on foot. It does give me gratification when I am still faster than they are with my pixel perfect this and dodge-jump that 😉

It’s almost like you are refusing to see the obvious point that you are not supposed to be able to complete everything ASAP. SAB isn’t your personal achievement point farm. If you want to cut some content to shreds just so that it’s easier on your time and simpler to farm, go do it to something else.

You need to hop from stone 1 to 2 to 1 again to trigger the rock, then back to 2, onto the rock and across to the leaf. Don’t wait to see if the rock triggers once you hit the second stone before moving back, 1 to 2 to 1 needs to be a fluid motion or you will get knocked into the lava.

Yeah it’s a bit tight. You can’t fall in the water section, and getting jammed under clouds in bee mode is pretty spectacularly bad as well. The bee handles like a bus and changing altitude takes a moment to react to your key presses. It’s a bit messy tbh, I just did trib mode instead as it was more interesting anyway.

Nah if he was old he’d be wacky, like the doctor from Back To The Future 😉

Guy looks exactly as I pictured him. What a superb game he and his team created!

OP’s idea of fun is more important, thus everything must change to suit them.

The fastest way to farm baubles is by doing tribulation runs of world 1. The first trib completion of each zone awards around 200-300 baubles. After doing all three plus the daily rewards you will quickly pile them up. You could also do world 2 trib if you are desperate, but it’s a chore and takes 3-4x as long. Once you are practiced, there’s no reason a full world 1 trib run won’t take around 25 minutes, or less if you are mental and skipping save points for a speed run.

In your rather cold and clinical analysis you accidentally proposed to cut two of the most memorable sections from w2z1. The long bridge and raft might be on rails, but they are an interesting set piece. The raft in particular is very cleverly done. You can’t just chop the zones up willy-nilly, and only w2z2 has an inappropriate length as it is both massively longer than the first zone, and somewhat longer than the second. You shouldn’t focus on physical length (ha ha) either, but on time. There are relatively small portions of w2z2 (like the dart maze) that take a great deal of trial and error to complete. It’s these sections that need to be addressed.

It gets more participation than any other event. Source: People with a sense of humour.

Have you no sense of enjoyment?!

Agree 100%. GW 2 basically only exists to provide a contrast to realise the true beauty of SAB. No other game in existence has such a complete lobby from which to launch the ACTUAL game. The fact that it was all an April Fool’s joke makes it even better. Seriously, nothing quite like SAB exists in any other game. It’s a testament to the ingenuity and sense of humour of ANet’s staff. It definitely deserves to be completed … But in the free time of the developers, i.e. when they feel like it. Because once it becomes a full featured line-item on some bean counter’s spreadsheet the magic shall be gone.

I pretty much only play them in trib mode, it’s way too easy on normal and trib mode gives a huge increase in bubbles. I’ve quite a few retro skins to buy too!

Yes! If you look up SAB trib w2z2 speed run you will see it. So when you reach the dart maze you take a right after jumping the bridge - avoid the massive pile of finger missiles and head across the clouds. Once you reach the ‘cloud cliffs’ (dunno what else to call them) there is of course a fully wide bed of surprise spikes the developers thought would be enough to stop you taking that route. Except you can jump at the corner of the wall on the left and vault off it with a dodge jump to clear the trap. You’ll need to watch a video to see the exact location. The trick is to touch the wall at the apex of your jump and hit your dodge jump macro. If you succeed you will vault off the wall and cross the spikes. If you fail you will either be stopped by the wall (good ending) or just carry on into the spikes (not so good ending). It can take quite a few tries but as of this most recent patch it still works. The best bit is since the spikes were meant to be impassable, there appear to be no other traps on your way and you can safely reach the bell/fish pool/final cage area. I also didn’t know about this when doing the weapon collections, and I have never done a zero death run of this zone because of that obnoxious combo of trib cloud and dart hell.

The biggest issue in world 2 was the second zone. It still is to be honest; It’s by far the most arduous trib zone and even speed runs of it take comparatively ages. The other two zones are fine, and I think world 2 would be much better if one of the large set pieces in zone 2 was removed, e.g the dart maze. It’s also a bit concerning that the developers are actively removing ways to skip sections in trib mode, like the block to the right of the first gate in w1z1 that allowed players to double jump. There’s a similar area in w1z2 which allows you to skip the dart maze entirely at the cost of probably face planting into spikes a few times. I would simply stop completing that zone in trib mode if I had to face that stupid cloud in the maze again.

They removed the pebble that allowed you to skip the most annoying bits of W1Z1 by executing a double jump near the first spawn gate. Whhhy? Now I have to roll the dice on having my character glitch and slow down in the bottomless pit corridor. Sigh.

Yeah the most likely way to succeed is to target KT and then aim at the mouth. I use the combat mode freelook camera which makes it a bit easier as the game presents a reticule. I did W2Z1-3 trib mode last night with framerate limiter set to 60 fps and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, except that w2z2 is and always will be the absolute antithesis of good level design.

That would be freaking cool. You could do a full on power arm. I like the way you think OP.

Yeah combat slowdown is something I am very careful of, none of the slowdown I experienced was due to that, it was because of input being received by the game out of order, or processing it out of order. For example in the maze in w1z1 you need to make some jumps over spike traps that require you to be running before jumping. I string together forward and jump fairly quickly. Sometimes the game reacts as if I hit jump first, resulting in vertical leap with little forward motion. Regarding checkpoints, almost none of them launched me, which was a bit annoying in trib mode as I use that leap to sometimes avoid danger. With the frame limiter on though all these issues seem to have gone away - input is registered in the same order as I activated it, dodge jump is reliable, checkpoints launch etc.

I wondered that too, but it is usually rock solid. I think the issue was the frame limiter was off. I recall having activated it in previous years and set it to 60fps for a consistent experience. I fiddled with it after making this post and did the bee race, everything felt normal again. Without the limiter on the variable framerate seems to affect character movement and actions.

Edit #2 - Turn on the framerate limiter to reduce the issues I describe below: I just finished world 1 on normal and tribulation mode, and my God! What has happened? Frequent character run speed slowdown, slow jump, missing ledges, and King Toad is almost impossible to get with the crystal while his mouth is open. Plus, when you do finally kill him the killbox in front of his mouth activates immediately? This doesn’t feel right at all! It’s as if the pixel perfect jump behaviour is all messed up and imprecise, and the timing of things is wrong. I have all effects turned down to get maximum frame rate. Maybe that’s what’s messing me up? I will switch on 60 fps frame limiter for world 2 and see if that helps. Edit #1 - Setting the frame limiter to 60 fps seems to have fixed the inconsistent movement and action timing.