Kill Ten Rats

Presentation affects perception affects enjoyment.

Guild Wars has 8 dungeon options. I have run them all. I am pretty much out of things to do rather than re-do, and do I really want to grind a dungeon 19 times to get an armor set?

Guild Wars has 33 dungeon options. Every dungeon has story mode plus three exploration paths (four in Arah). I have run 15 of those 33. I am less than half-way through. Most of the endgame lies before me, and having run all 8 story modes, it is all immediately accessible.

How you count matters. If you think of the three explorations as the same dungeon, doing all three in a night is a groan-worthy grind. If you think of the them as different dungeons, doing all three in a night is quite a varied experience. Some dungeons will lend themselves more and less to either interpretation; some have a choice of paths before you see the first enemy, while others have significant overlap.

The November monthly achievement set includes “run 5 dungeons.” Some forum-goers are up in arms about this. Do they really believe that of 33 dungeon options, they cannot find 1 or 2 worth running weekly? ArenaNet is batting 0 for 33? They more likely see 8 dungeons, all of which will have at least 1 problem on at least 1 path, so all the dungeons are borked. How you count matters.

: Zubon

I understand the angry soloers, but hey, you lose that argument. MMOs will have some achievements that encourage and reward group play. It’s kind of a thing, you know?

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

Need a break after the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event? Too bad. ArenaNet had other teams ready to lay up content right after the Mad King’s exit. Martin Kerstein stated that hints from the November content update would start with the same patch that takes out Halloween.

So what did the update bring? Continue reading [GW2] Lost Shores, Beached Whales

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

I had a blast for Halloween in Guild Wars 2! It was one of the best holiday events I can remember. I sadly did not get to participate in the new meta-events in Kessex Hills, Queensdale, and Gendarran Fields, but I made sure to try every other new thing at least once. One whole night was dedicated to the Mad King’s Tower, which was the most  controversial addition to the Shadow of the Mad King.

The lead designer for the Mad King’s Tower, Josh Foreman, has taken the brunt of feedback head on. This amazes me. Not only is ArenaNet’s policy to let their employees have a voice, but Josh is stepping directly in to the line of fire. I believe that this humanizes the relationship between player and game. It reinforces Guild Wars 2 as a service for a community. Continue reading [GW2] On the Sleeve, On the Mad King’s Tower

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