Author: Zubon

Rangers’ Healing Spring is amazing.

I leveled a ranger, and I unlocked Healing Spring for his first dungeon run. It is a medium-sized, 15-second water field with a 30-second cooldown. Water fields combo for healing and regeneration. The base healing is nice, but the ability to proc regeneration and area heals is what makes this great for a group that uses finishers to exploit fields.

Staff elementalists get two water fields. One has a medium duration but small area of effect. One has a huge area of effect but tiny duration, along with a long cooldown and the rare “must stand still to cast” induction. In either case, you need to be in water attunement, which involves either using both in succession or managing your attunement cooldowns. They can, however, be used at a range, while the Healing Spring happens at the ranger’s feet.

50% uptime on a healing field is great, and that first dungeon group had two rangers. Placement options are worse than an elementalist’s fields, but you can hit “6” anytime without attunement issues. Staying in the field while I attack, I can stack enough regeneration to last until the cooldown ends.

You play a ranger for ranged DPS with condition stacking and a pet. I did not expect to get a great support ability as an unadvertised bonus.

: Zubon

Next year we hope that the Mad King turns them all into skritt.
— Jonathan

Beyond eliminating the primary problem with the Clock Tower, this also creates justification for implementing strange and pro-social mechanics. The skritt are a hive-mind species, so skritt content should be nigh-impossible solo and potentially trivial in a zerg.

Imagine a path with occasional shinies. They draw skritt or their attention, turning the camera or attracting the character like gravity. Reduce that effect based on the number of nearby skritt, so that one skritt would be be forced to look at the shiny (and maybe zooming in) while a group would be mildly distracted. Imagine if having other skritt around made platforming easier, with platforms treated as wider and inclines less steep on the basis that the skritt are clambering over each other like fire ant rafts. How about “as long as another skritt within a meter of you is within a meter of … a skritt within a meter of a surface, none of the skritt involved can fall”? I don’t know how well any of these would play out in practice, but as opposed to the content where you want everyone else to fail within the first 30 seconds, the skritt are the perfect race for developing mechanics that encourage or require helping your friends to the finish line.

: Zubon

Cooking is the only GW2 crafting skill with legitimate discovery rather than following obvious formulas (although Artificing potions can be non-obvious). On many puzzles, people are looking for tips rather than spoilers, so let me give you a few pointers on the skill advancement side.

• You can use the skill advancement spoilers without spoiling the fun. An optimized list of cooking recipes will use the discovery window perhaps a dozen times. At 400 skill, you still have almost all the discovery fun available to you, and all of it is unlocked instead of having red ingredients you cannot use yet. Your Explorer tendencies will help your Achiever reward, but getting the full Achiever reward will not undermine your Explorer discovery. If you want to play an improved version of Doodle God, it is even better at 400 skill.
• You will not have access to everything without leveling. Some ingredients are available only after completing hearts. If your main character is not your cook, however, s/he can buy 10 bags of ingredients from any heart vendor, and now you have a full stack in your storage for your cook.
• In most skills, you advance through discovery instead of grinding. In cooking, you advance quickly and cheaply by discovering a cheap recipe and grinding until it is no longer orange. Bake a dozen cookies, not just one. Consumables stack, so this is also how you avoid filling your inventory. (This also helps for some portion of the weapon-crafting skills, since you can make a stacks of maintenance oils, sharpening stones, and ogre-slaying potions.)
• Dessert is good. Desserts do follow a pattern, so you can learn quickly through pies, tarts, and cookies. Pies are especially rewarding because you make the filling and the pie in separate steps. Sugar, flour, and water are cheap and endlessly available, butter and chocolate are the same at the trading post, and many karma merchants will sell you fruit in bulk.
• There is a farm just north of Lion’s Arch. Finish that heart for cheap, readily available produce.
• Peaches are available in bulk in west Fireheart Rise. Peach recipes give you the difficult points cheaply, and you get the second-best +Magic Find foods in the process.

The discovery aspect of cooking also makes it very different from other crafts in that learning makes it easier and cheaper. The learning curve for the other seven skills is exactly the same curve, so one you know the basic discovery pattern, you know all the recipes for all the skills (+/- 2%). But you still need to farm all those materials, and knowing more does not help that. For cooking, now that you have found hundreds of recipes on your main cook, you can train anyone else 1-400 at a quarter of the cost in 5% of the time. You can get better.

: Zubon

A downside of making the Mad King’s Clock Tower time-limited (both the 90 seconds per run and the 1 week per year) is that it is beautifully done. It has just enough kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria without being too busy. You get a ruined clocktower where the ruins hang in the sky, with gears and rubble swirling, along with green mists, skeletal arms, and constant movement. It feels like there is more than there is, but except for the initial jumble of rubble, it has an elegant simplicity. You want more time to stand in that initial jumble and appreciate the art.

I had hoped for a vista at the top or some way to regard the structure, but you end up inside the tower. You do start with a vista of sorts, a quick pan up the side that shows the path of the jumping puzzle. (There is not a lot of “puzzle”; execution under adverse conditions is the hard part.) It is definitely worth visiting for a look, although do not expect to finish a 90-second run in under an hour.

: Zubon

We have a new contender for the worst piece of content ever put into a game. The Mad King’s Clock Tower is the holiday jumping puzzle for Guild Wars 2.

Begin your mix with every problem caused by character models and camera movement. Add in a map with lots of spinning, with ups and downs, so the camera will definitely be moving around things and objects will be between the camera and your character. Add in a time limit.

Now come the brilliant part: make it impossible to run alone, so that other players’ characters block your view of your character and the platforms. Let any of those characters throw up a speech bubble to block the rest of the view. Implement it during a holiday event and make it available for a limited time so that more players will run it, and all the Achievers and completionists will keep running to make sure the population stays high. Just in case they pass it, add a great reward at the end that is available per-character so they have a reason to keep coming back, with little rewards along the way to give them even more incentive to keep filling the map and blocking the view. Don’t advertise that the jumping puzzle is not a requirement for the holiday meta-achievement.

Take a game designed around the idea that we are all on the same team, then make it so that having anyone around makes things much harder, especially the 2/5 of the races that are much bigger than the others. Not only does having other players around make the content harder and worse, there is no way to avoid them except moving to a low population server and playing during off hours so that there are fewer.

Note that there is no combat. This is actively anti-social Socializer content.

: Zubon

Update: many people (mostly elsewhere, since we do not have many comments yet) are confusing the argument “hard because of bad design” with “hard means bad design.” The difficulty is not the problem — the source of the difficulty is what makes it a problem, somewhat the interface issues but mostly the design that makes the content worse as more people play it. That is a rather critical flaw in a multiplayer game.