Posts by Marty Silverblade

Were you alt-tabbing between full screen and something else? That tends to produce rubberbanding for some reason. If you're a frequent window switcher either play in windowed mode or minimise by clicking the button in the corner.

GW isn't a game you can blitz through. You need to take care in every aspect to get through. This is why I asked you to post your skills+attributes+level+gear initially (and I'll do so again now) and took the time to explain some key concepts to good build structure. Getting better takes learning and realistically that involves failure. We'll help you as much as we can, but aside from beating the game for you you've got to invest yourself into getting better. If you're not prepared to do that then GW just isn't your kind of game.

There are skills that allow you to do so. All professions have access to Resurrection Signet (you should have gotten it in Pre), though you need a morale boost (typically via boss kills) to recharge it. Monks, Rits, Paragons and Dervishes have access to resurrection skills that recharge normally. Given you're /Monk, you have Resurrect and Restore Life available to you from either quests or trainers in Ascalon.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Resurrection

Which mission? The server will kick you off if you don't do anything for 12 hours or something but certainly not five minutes. Possible explanations: you were killed by a mob who wandered out of compass range by the time you looked back (though you can discount this one because you were watching), there was a timer you were not aware of that expired, an NPC you were meant to protect (namely Rurik) moved onwards and got killed promping mission failure, you got killed by something other than enemies (some missions have enemy catapults or hostile environmental effects).

If you got any rock candies then you can sell those for a sizeable amount of cash. Those are what people want. It's better to sell them unopened so you'll still get something if the contents end up being largely trash.

The only melee profession available in Prophecies is Warrior, so that's what you'd have to play if you wanted that. A melee Ranger/Warrior works well though, so if you wanted to be able to use bows, melee weapons, pets and so on (though not all at the same time) sticking with Ranger would be your best bet. It's a better option than Warrior/Ranger. You're ages away from being able to switch secondary professions though, so making a Warrior and seeing how you like that might be preferable if you don't like Ranger or are willing and able to play two characters. Note though that hitting multiple enemies with attacks is something you can only do with a scythe (limited to Dervishes, which are from Nightfall) or with certain attack skills, such as Cyclone Axe. This isn't GW2 or a similarly unrealistic(/stupid, depending on your point of view) game where you can swing weapons around in massive arcs as if they were made of paper.

With respect to your second post:

-The armors you can get from Ascalon City are both better than the upgraded Pre-Searing set. It's nothing revolutionary, just a better version of what you started with. There are a few different sets but they differ only in appearance.

-Play whichever profession you want. Playing something you don't like for whatever reason defeats the purpose of playing in the first place. I wouldn't turn your back on the Ranger based on your experience thus far - the issues you're having will have occured regardless of which profession you picked.

-People recommend Rit because there are builds you can run which are effective even if you have a single digit number of brain cells. This is ideal for GW2 players who play GW1 just for rewards in the former. If you actually give a damn about GW1 you ought to not feel any incentive to play Rit just for the sake of it. All professions are perfectly capable of completing the content so focus on finding the one that suits you the best. You can always make more characters to see how you like them.

-You don't have a lot to work with so I won't be critical, but in terms of builds:
--Power Shot is trash. It's just x damage rather than +x, and if you're not underleveled/facing other rookie issues you'll be spending a skill slot and 10 energy on what amounts to nothing more than an auto attack. If it's worthwhile now then ok, but keep in mind you ought to outgrow it.
--Generally speaking you don't want to split your attributes more than three ways unless you have a good reason for doing so. For a Ranger, Expertise and a weapon attribute (Marksmanship is the only one Rangers have natively but you could get others with the relevant secondary profession) are a given. If you want to take a pet, which you should at least for now, then Beast Mastery makes three. If you want a heal (also a good idea, at least for now) your best bet would be Troll Unguent, which is in Wilderness Survival, so you'll have to split four ways in that case. Heavy attribute splitting is something that plagues Ranger builds generally, so I wouldn't worry about it. Just don't go for five. That's never worthwhile.
--To be clear, you pick a primary and a secondary profession. Those labels are very deliberate. You are a ranger. You do ranger things. Your secondary is there to supplement your primary. If you take /Monk to be a healer or /Elementalist to be a nuker you're doing it wrong. What you should do is look at particular skills in other professions that you can use to complement your existing skills. Given you're /Monk, something like a reusable resurrection skill and maybe a hex removal would be the things you'd look at. Bane Signet (with 0 Smiting) could be worth keeping just for the knockdown. Also know that later in the game you'll be able to switch your secondary freely later while you're in a town, so if you end up not liking Monk you can try whatever else you like.

-A list of skills obtainable via quest can be found here. You can also check skill trainers for new skills.

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With respect to your third post:

-Henchman levels are based on the outpost you got them from. So Piken Square has level 6 ones, but if you went back to Ascalon City they'd still be level 3.

-Ignite Arrows, presumably. Combining it with Dual Shot makes for a nice punch. GW1 has scatter mechanics, so they will flee after a time. At least if they're moving they're not attacking or using skills. I don't know what you mean by "cleave damage".

-I've undoubtedly got some bows in storage which are trash for me but useful for newbs. Add me to your friends list (Marty Silverblade) and I can give you one. Hopefully our timezones overlap.

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As an aside, Nicholas the Traveler is collecting Charr Hides this week. If you want to make financial issues a thing of the past, at least for the medium term, you'll want to trade hides for gifts. You can obtain a maximum of five. Each (UNOPENED) gift can be traded for ~4 globs of ectoplasm, which can in turn be traded for 6000-8000 gold. Here is his current location. He'll move at the end of Sunday (American time, not sure exactly when or what that is for you), so get on it. If we meet up to trade bows I can give you a hand with this if you need.

I'll nominate Frenzy. It's a perfect representation of how GW was meant to be. One of the core concepts it was built upon was that a good team with mediocre bars ought to beat a poor team with meta bars. Skill choices were important of course, but execution was more so. Frenzy is simple in function but complex in application, allowing for skilled players to be rewarded with better results. That it's been meta consistently since day one and yet never been modified says it all imo.

What level are you? I recommend staying in Pre-Searing until level 7-8 before moving on. It's not strictly necessary, but for a new player it'll save some grief. The impression I get is that you're really underleveled due to charging straight through the main quest.

What skills + attributes are you running?

Are you filling out your team? Pre-Searing is built for people soloing, but everywhere else you should have a full party. There are henchmen you can add in outposts if you don't have other people to play with. The Warrior, Monk, and Ele will be your best bet.

Hold alt in towns to show all npcs. Ctrl will show other players in town and enemies in explorables.

Armor can be obtained via crafting or collectors. There are two armorers in Ascalon City who will offer better stuff than you have now. Upgrading your armor here is recommended, and especially pertinent if you didn't grab the upgraded set in Pre-Searing.

Weapons can be obtained via enemy drops, quest rewards, and collectors. You can craft them too but I don't typically find any with particularly worthwhile stuff.

Resurrect your pet by using Comfort Animal.

I also suspect that trying to get to Piken Square isn't something you should be looking to do just yet? Have you done the The Great Northern Wall mission? Or largely cleared the Old Ascalon + Regent Valley + maybe a few more areas around there?

Easiest VQ: Putting aside ones which are trivially easy like Zen Daijun for Factions characters, I'd say Witman's Folly. A combination of generally weak enemies (grawl) with other mobs (imps and shadows) that aren't powerful enough in the group size + context to be of any real threat.

Hardest VQ: Joko's Domain is tough because of the undead Paragon boss that can rez the team super quickly, plus wurms are just terrible to play in imo. 40AL in HM doesn't make for a good experience, especially against those Sandstorm Crags. A non glitched Tannakai Temple is really tough too.

Easiest Mission: Aside from Augury Rock and starter missions, perhaps Thirsty River? I've never had any difficulty with it whatsoever. Actually, Curse of the Nornbear.

Hardest Mission: I'm inclined to say Ring of Fire NM, assuming you don't have heroes or they aren't loaded with meta stuff. It's definitely harder than most HM stuff with a meta team. The front way into the base is a bit harder than it used to be due to updates, and the back way is significantly harder due to the Incendiary Arrows change. The big mobs of spiders will wreck caster balls incredibly quickly. Aside from that, Tahnnakai Temple is worth a mention for being atrociously designed - what you ought to do is take your time and pull carefully but because it's timed you have to be an idiot and rush in to get masters. Of course, most of the Factions missions are timed, but this was the only one with a really disproportionate time limit. Pushing people to go faster is fine if you take care to ensure you're teaching people to play better, but they didn't and people just learned how to be bad. Vizunah Square is another one. Ray of Judgement hurts a lot more (as does Mind Burn and probably some other skills) now given it's over time, plus Togo and Mhenlo love sitting in it. Eternal Grove for obvious reasons. Gyala Hatchery too if you want master's completion. From Nightfall, Gate of Madness is tough start to finish. Grand Court of Sebelkah probably warrants a mention due to being a noob trap, which is the reason it's my favourite of the campaign. Oh, Dzagonur Bastion too.

Tyria would be a no. You need to complete both Thunderhead Keep and Sanctum Cay, which reward 1k xp each.

Cantha... there isn't enough leeway to skip Raisu Palace and Imperial Sanctum, and getting in there requires obtaining heaps of xp. You could probably skip grabbing quest rewards if you group with someone who does it instead and can teleport you through, though I very much doubt you'll be able to do that at every place required. Figuring out how to get past gates would also be a necessity, though I don't know anything about that.

Elona... Consulate Docks gives 1k xp. You'd need a way of mapping the desolation without wurms. It is possible to run through it, though probably not at level 1 and in all parts of the map. So, no. There's also the challenge mission in the desolation which requires killing, though if you clear the middle bit and do all the portal jumping and such then maybe you can get away with it, but there'd be no leeway whatsoever.

Regardless, it's be interesting to see how little xp you could get them done with.

I don't know what "in years" means precisely, but I imagine your issue would be due to a build that's either outdated generally or no longer applicable for what you're trying to do with it. Skill updates may have invalidated the run somehow. Current builds are at gwpvx.com. You may also be missing equipment that is now essential for the build to run. This is also listed on that site.

Quote from Looney

Why I actually came here

I'm wondering if there is a way to pull the url of where an image was hosted out of a post in the archive? I had a collection on there but the image was hosted elsewhere so it wasn't saved and is just a broken image. I can't remember where I had it hosted and I lost the original image so pulling the link out of the img bbcode would help. Is the only way viewing the html source?

As far as I can tell, no. The image links have been replaced with links to the ones on the Legacy server so there's no longer a reference to their original host locations. It's possible using the Wayback Machine though. Looking at an image in my Warrior guide, the Legacy archive source gives me this:

view-source:http://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/15/Img/20f697n.png

while the wayback machine source gives me this:

view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20160601161643im_/http://i62.tinypic.com/20f697n.png

which is what you'd want. If the image host has deleted the image I don't think there's a way to retrieve it though, regardless of whether you've got the url or not. Whether the images were saved or not isn't a matter of whether it was uploaded to Guru or elsewhere, it's a matter of whether that file was still live when Smoke downloaded the all the forum content. If it was elsewhere, like tinypic in the example above, and you uploaded anonymously (I think) then they'll be deleted after a certain amount of time.

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As for the percentage sign issue, if you put '25' (without the quotes) after the relevant character (which can be hard to determine given spaces translate to "%20") it'll load. So for example

http://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/09/09%20Sell/61665588%20Perfect%20Tyrian%20req8%20Healing%20Ankh%20and%20Tyrian%20+15%%20always%20Sephis%20Axe.001.html

won't load, but

http://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/09/09%20Sell/61665588%20Perfect%20Tyrian%20req8%20Healing%20Ankh%20and%20Tyrian%20+15%25%20always%20Sephis%20Axe.001.html

works. That's certainly not practical and I don't know how difficult it'd be to actually fix the issue, but if you really really want access to a broken thread, that's how to do it. Not sure why some threads aren't breaking though. That coffee mug thread has the invalid url characters automatically translated but it's only happening for that thread...

-Are you predominately a PvP or PvE player? 99.99% PvE. Sometimes I do some RA when it's the z mission. I also used to do a fair bit of AB (relatively speaking, at least), though I haven't done so in a long time.
-Are you an altaholic? Multiple accounts? My playtime is predominatly split between Warrior, Ranger, Rit and Ele. The link between the first three is that I mostly run melee builds on them, so it's more about finding variety in the melee space rather than wanting a drastically different playstyle (though I certainly do use bow builds, spirit builds and whatnot too). My ele was the first character I made because I usually play those sorts of characters. Not sure why I gravitate towards melee in GW.
-What is your favorite game to play in? Prophecies, by far. It just has an epicness that isn't as strong with the others. Having areas which exist solely/predominantly for exploration is something that the later games lacked. While having outposts that are accessible to the content and having more content to fill each area is a good thing, I miss being about to wonder out and feeling that I'm far away from civilisation, for example in The Falls.
-Are you a META player or someone who prefers to mess around with builds? Definitely a builder. That's always been the case, but it's becoming practically a necessity now that the skill list is static and the balance of PvE is shot with the massive power creep.
-Do you start a new Prophecies character and go to post right away, or stay to reach 20 in pre to get the title? Do you keep a permanent pre character? I'm a completionist, so I make sure to do all of the content before moving ahead. That typically gets you to level 6-8. After that I usually did a bit of charr fighting and left around level 10. I had no interest in getting to level 20 or having a perma pre. Since then I've created two more chars in Prophecies and got them to level 20, mostly for the challenge but also for the title. Disappointing though that it makes most of Prophecies trivially easy.
-Do you (or did you, lol) get a Droks run for better armor? Maybe you get a ferry to the docks in NF? I used to get runs. It was cheaper to pay 1.5k for a run than to upgrade as I went along. Nowadays I usually just get myself over to the crafter near Sanctum Cay who offers 51/61/71AL gear and use that until I get access to the prestige armor crafter I need, which is nearly always in Prophecies.
-Do you play through missions, or run through them as much as possible? Are you a speed clear player? As above, I'm a completionist. I must do every single quest+mission and map every area with every character. I am not ashamed to admit I keep an excel spreadsheet to manage my progress. I have done a total of one speedclear, which was FoW as a 100b Warrior.
-Knowing you can safely party wipe in EotN dungeons, do you prefer the party wipe to res and play faster, or struggle to res one by one? I prefer to stay alive, though I'm not really in a position to wipe very often nowadays anyway. Screw ups consist mostly of a couple of deaths which are easy enough to recover from.
-Do you prefer doing missions and dungeons with or without cons? Without. They're a crutch. Nowadays they're probably more about speed, but it's still a no.
-Are you always looking for a large guild to join, or perhaps you prefer to go it alone? Do you prefer to play with people you know or random players you meet online? I've never been a fan of big guilds. If a social circle is big enough such that I'm not able to get to know every person reasonably well then it's too big for me.

It looks like our experiences were pretty similar. I don't typically buy games on release unless I'm certain I'm going to like them enough to play them through several times, and there were enough red flags on GW2 to prompt me to wait. I played the free version when it came out with a friend of mine, mostly out of curiousity than actual interest. I'd heard enough post release that indicated it wasn't a game for me and that objectively it had it's share of issues, but I'm not the kind of person to disparage something without having personally investigated it so I gave it a go. I think I got through three areas (I'm playing a Norn, so shiverpeak ones) before quitting. My friend stopped at the end of the first area. The fact that 95+% of the content was mind numbing busywork was impossible to get past, and the combat was as uninspiring as I anticipated. Needless to say, I didn't invest in HoT. There were plenty of other issues I had too including but not limited to:

-I don't like the aesthetic with the gear either. Even in GW1 where the designs aren't deliberately over the top I prefer the more realistic ones. Immersion is very important to me. All of those new features, like the spiderman webs, just looks ridiculous to me.

-I strongly dislike the lack of instances. Instead of carefully considering what to do with your resources (party slots, skill slots, attributes, gear, etc) and needing to use them appropriately to overcome challenges, you can just get more people. Successes don't feel rewarding. I understand that there are some GW1 style instances later on but I don't care enough to get anywhere near them.

-I can't physically tolerate the massive fights. I don't have epilepsy or anything like that, but I had to fight this boss at the end of the first area and when there's all these flashing lights and animations and whatever my brain just thinks "cbf dealing with this" and I just tune out entirely and button mash (not that combat was more than button mashing anyway).

-It doesn't really seem like it's about anything. I was happy when I saw that personal quests were a thing, but then I realised that's pretty much what the game consists of. There's the living story, but season one is not available anymore and season two needs to be unlocked with some kind of payment, and I get the impression you need to be an established player to engage with it anyway. I could have been mistaken, but I didn't feel like it was something that was within reach. As such, it was do a bit of personal quest (which I like but is not close to satisfying in it's own right) then do 10 levels worth of busywork for the next bit.

Overall, it just seems like an odd mishmash of elements that either don't fit together and/or aren't good enough in their own right to make me favour playing GW2 over something else.

EDIT: I should say though, that not everything about my GW2 experience was awful. The character creator/graphics are good, even though I don't care at all for the art style. Cartography is done better than in GW1, though I dislike the vistas.

Hello and welcome!

DoA doesn't need to be scary. When I tried heroing it the first time I was surprised at how much easier it was than I was expecting. If you're comfortable doing vanquishes and other HM stuff then you should not fear jumping in and seeing how you go. It's been made significantly easier due to power creep (mainly the Mesmer update), the restriction of environment effects (1, 2, 3, 4) to HM and the lowering of health thresholds on Enraged. Aside from Foundry and the start of Gloom the difficulty is pretty much on par with standard vanquishes. In NM, it's more about not getting caught in bad positions rather than general toughness - you need to constantly be alert for instant spawns and patrols. Sometimes it's hard to know when these will occur, but if one causes you to wipe at least you'll know for the next time. In particular, take your time at the end of Veil when you're killing the tendril things and at the end of Gloom, as killing each Darkness results in five more enemies spawning.

As for which profession, Assassin is the strongest option as per usual. Death Blossom + Save Yourselves > PvE. Slotting Lightbringer's Gaze might be worthwhile. As for heroes, there isn't anything in particular that you'll need that you wouldn't already have. SoS Rit + ST or SoGM Rit + 2-3 Mesmers + Minion Bomber/Master will form the core of your build as it typically should. Mobs tend to be larger than normal so there's a larger than normal priority on AoE damage, but again, you'll have plenty in a standard setup anyway. Do make sure to have Shatter Hex though.

Don't forget to display your Lightbringer title for a free 5-40% damage and 1-8 points of damage reduction.

FWIW, I'd start with City, then do Veil, then Gloom, then Foundry, which is conveniently the order they open up. You don't need to do all of them in one go though, but it does get you more rewards.

Recent videos (links for other areas and builds are in the description). They're for HM so the defense will be overkill and some other elements would be different (namely, Asuran Scan isn't strictly necessary) for an ideal NM clear, but they'll provide functional builds if you're not comfortable bringing your own and show you what you'll be coming up against.

(This forum is fine.)

Their energy doesn't run out because they have Ether Renewal. Note they don't have things like Power Drain or Leech Signet like the Mesmers and that they're running Wastrels Worry/Demise. You might be able to fuel the Eles in the same way but that would presumably cost more skill slots than it'd be worth - perhaps sacrificing the elite slot is better than speccing Inspiration and using another 1-2 skill slots. There's also the issue of having so many interrupts that your team won't get a chance to use them for energy management, though I don't know at what point that actually occurs. For a lot of fights you probably could get away with not having ER or speccing Inspiration but then you'd have to wait for them to recover 50+ energy after each fight, which would be awful. Regardless, one of the goals of the build was to ensure the team never ever runs out of energy regardless of the situation (which is not necessarily something you should strive for, but is good for people who have no clue what they're doing) so if spending the elite slot on ER is overkill then so be it. If you want to have a free elite you could run a Necro primary instead, relying on Soul Reaping + Signet of Lost Souls for energy. There are certainly people who prefer it this way.

4210 hours 51 mins over 141 months.

This is all experimentation; I haven't seen the code or a how-to guide on how the myBB forum search works.

-It's not case sensitive. Searching for 'REQ 9 ONI BLADE' (without the quotes) returns the same results as 'req 9 oni blade' (also without the quotes).

-Using quotes binds two words together - searching for "oni blade" (with the quotes) returns only threads containing those words in that order. Searching without the quotes returns threads containing either 'oni' or 'blade'.

-If you wanted to find req 9 oni blades your best bet would probably be to just search for "oni blade" (with quotes) and then just manually sort through the results to find the req 9 ones. If you put in "req 9 oni blade" (with quotes) it won't return a thread if a user has written "r9 oni blade" because it doesn't match exactly. Attempting a search more specific than "oni blade" would most likely either leave out wanted threads and/or include some that don't contain oni blades at all. To be absolutely certain you don't miss any oni blades you'd probably be better off searching just for "oni", though the forum won't let you search if the search terms contain fewer than four characters.

It seems overwhelming likely now that the official Curse provided archive (i.e, guildwarsguru.com) will not be restored. Relevant thread here. In short, they said it would return "shortly" last August and since then they haven't even found time to answer an email regarding its status. However, thanks to Smoke Nightvogue and Kevin, we have created an archive here on Legacy, which can be found here.

Basically it's a wrapper for the client that allows for modification of how data is sent to and received from the server. Needless to say this violates the EULA, though they claim nobody has been banned for using it. The name comes from the various bits of functionality it contains which may or may not be useful depending on what you're doing. The website contains a list of these, though it's down atm. Off the top of my head (I don't use it myself), there's things like automatic consumable usage, a custom compass and other UI tweaks, custom hotkeys, a chat filter (intended primarily for blocking gold sellers and other rubbish I think), an ingame clock and notepad, dialog hacks and bulk material purchases/sales. I also recall seeing something about a flag for each hero (not just all and the first three), but I'm not sure whether that's been implemented or not. Check the website when it comes back.

Evidently my previous post didn't establish the point I wanted it to. I have been addressing your points, though perhaps not as directly as you might have liked, so I'll do so explicitly now in an attempt to hopefully put the matter to bed. Your argument consists of two points:

Firstly, that the two creatures are both digitigrade and mounted and that the riders have a lance. This is clearly the case and I haven't disputed it.

Secondly, that the details are more or less irrelevant. We agree that the details of each creature have nothing in common as once again it's quite clear that that is the case, it's just that our evaluation of the significance are polar opposites. This is what I was trying to explain to you above. You have labelled the details as "cosmetic", "superficial" and "irrelevant", as if they could be casually slapped on on a whim five minutes before the design was due. This could not be further from the truth. Real life creatures evolve such that every single element of their being is as best suited to their environment as it can be, and digital creatures ought to be no exception. Evolution is not an accident and neither are the designs. Every element of the design will go through a dozen or more iterations to ensure it makes as much sense as it can.

Take eyes for example. Some creatures have eyes on the front of their face while others have them on the sides. The significance of the former is that being able to put two eyes on something allows your brain to triangulate the position of something, creating depth perception. The downside, or the significance of the latter, is that you sacrifice field of view. Predators typically have front facing eyes because they need the precision to hunt, while prey typically have the latter because getting caught by a predator is the most significant threat to their existence. There are exceptions - monkeys do not hunt but need precise vision to move through trees, and crocodiles have side facing eyes but hunt primarily through stealth rather than pursuit. There are also many other eye related factors to be aware of - nocturnal creatures benefit from having larger eyes so that they can collect more light, for example.

I explain this because artists, good ones at least, know this kind of stuff. They scrutinise every element because a single difference in a single element can be the difference between a creature being viable in it's environment and it's extinction. By labelling the details the way you have you trivialise the effort and expertise that goes into the designs. They don't get paid just because they're good at photoshop. Once you understand how much effort goes into getting from the starting point (mounted digitigrade creature, rider with lance) to a finalised creature it's clear to me that the assertion that the GW2 creature is adaptation of the GW1 design seems unlikely. You can see that American football is an extension of rugby because there are key similarities in the rules and the general objective, but there's no way in which you could take basketball and morph it into American football without scrapping the whole thing. As I said in an earlier post, I'm sure when they wanted to revisit mounted creatures in GW2 they would have dug up old concepts if they felt there was any value in doing so - it's certainly not unusual - and it's possible the GW2 creature borrows from several of these designs (including the one you posted), but I see no reason to believe that it's a direct implementation.

The difference between us is scope. What you're saying is akin to declaring that basketball and American football are the same because they both require a ball and the time is split into quarters. If that's the level of analysis you want to perform then sure, those two designs are pretty similar. Certainly a lot more similar than say, basketball and knitting or basketball and sleeping. My point is that such a comparison is so shallow it's not very relevant. If you asked 1000 people on the street whether they thought basketball and American football are basically the same I'd would expect the vast majority, if not all, to say no: oval ball vs round ball, grass surface vs hard court, highly specialised roles vs more general ones, players split between offense and defense vs no distinction, infrequent scoring vs very high amounts of scoring, large active rosters vs very small rosters, frequent substitution vs very limited substitution, high amounts of body protection vs little, contact vs no contact, relatively few games played per season vs a lot (meaning the significance of any one game is much higher), etc. Would you be happy to declare all of those to be "superficial or cosmetic" differences? I'm betting your answer will be no. I've never doubted that the two designs have some basic biomechanical similarities (though still fewer than you think there are), or that they've got big melee weapons. It's that beyond those simplistic views of the creatures they have very little in common.

Two minor points:

-Commenting about the weapon types was a mistake. The artistic direction of the equipment between the games is entirely different so there's no value in evaluating whether one influenced the other. The GW1 weapon is clearly a practical weapon. The GW2 weapon, regardless of whether it's intended to be a lance or sword, is clearly not. Hard to take anything of value away.

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Quote

I've given examples that GW models can and have been used multiple times and look drastically different.

False equivalence. Adapting a resource (a technical issue) to save time has nothing to do with the design of the creatures, unless they designed the creatures specifically so they could reuse those assets, but that changes everything.

Your argument: if you ignore everything they don't have in common they're pretty much the same. That's got to be one of the biggest cases of cherry picking I've ever seen. These two creatures have three things in common: that they're being ridden, which is a very primitive concept that is not at all unique (some GW examples would be Dagnar Stonepate, who rides an ice drake, and some Stone Summit Monks/Mesmers who ride armored dolyaks), that they both have three toes on each foot (inconsequential), and they they have large weapons (which is a direct consequence from being mounted, so not significant). Absolutely everything of consequence is different. It's very possible that the writing and/or design and/or gameplay teams wanted a larger focus on mounted creatures in GW2 and referred back to the Utopia concept you posted - among many others they would have made for every game - but within the scope of the concept they're massively different.

Guru thread: http://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/14%20Trader's%20Outpost/00013%20Where%20are%20the%20EL%20Henchman%20Tonics_%20updated%2012-28-11.001.html

You're vastly overestimating the similarity of the two. It would be fair to say that they share a common influence (i.e, the T-Rex), but aside from that the differences are pretty stark. One has soft skin (hence the armor) while the other is tough. Their heads are not remotely similar. The weapons are completely different, both in terms of type (lance vs sword) and style (reasonably realistic vs stupidly oversized jrpg nonsense). The shoulders are in different positions, meaning their arms could be used for different things. Their hips/legs are similarly different. The expressions of the creatures also suggests the relationship between rider and mount could be different. Frankly, these two creatures have next to nothing in common.

As for the Utopia development, it's hard to say. Concept art is one of the first things that gets done. For all we know, that image could have been created when NF was at the end of it's development cycle, prior to the realisation they wanted to transition to GW2.

Skill updates from about 2010 onwards were strictly buffs. Presumably Anet didn't want to push anyone away given the declining amount of new content and the arrival of GW2 so they didn't want to nerf anything to any meaningful extent and spoil anyone's fun. (There are exceptions, of course.) As such, "bad" professions such as Mesmer went from generally unwanted to game breakingly powerful. I don't use that term lightly. Rits are also stupidly powerful too.

In addition to Zaishen quests (people typically prefer to do these in hard mode though for better rewards, so if you're not comfortable with that it'll be harder to find people), there's also Nick gifts, which are immensely lucrative. All you need to do is collect a bunch of random collectable trash, trade it for gifts (max five per week), then sell to others for ~3 ectoes each. If obsidian armor is on your bucket list then you'll be glad to know it's significantly easier to attain than it used to be.

Birthday miniatures are generally worth only a token amount nowadays. A lot of people just delete them, though the gold and green ones can fetch a couple of ecto. You could also hang onto them (sell/delete/attempt to give away any duplicates) so that you can dedicate them in the Hall of Monuments, if you care at all about that. You'll need EotN to access it. The exception to this is that seventh year gifts have a very small chance of producing previously limited minipets - be very careful not to trash these if you get any.

Welcome back! Given your decade long absence I'd advise you to just treat yourself like a new player. Make a new character, preferably in Prophecies (the pre-searing community is still strong) and just play through it and relearn everything, because I'm sure you've forgotten a lot.

Joining a guild would be ideal. Given the age of the game, a significant proportion of the population stick to high end stuff so it'll help a ton to find people in the same boat as you. Also realise that some areas game will seem empty, but this is because that for standard everyday stuff people typically fill their team with heroes and then just go do the thing rather than sit around in outposts. Again, joining a guild will help connect you with people and organise activities.

There really isn't any value in sticking to the European servers. I live on pretty much the opposite side of the world to the American servers and I don't get any meaningful lag. In PvE a bit of lag doesn't make a difference anyway.

If you're committed to playing GW, picking up NF and EotN would be good investments. While they're expensive for their age you get a ton of content. Also, I think you might be forgetting about henchmen. While NF and EotN offer heroes (which are customisable), the pre-set henchies are more than capable of getting you through the content if you can't find people to regularly play with. Anet updated their skills some time ago (except for the Prophecies ones, for some reason) so some of them have bars which are close to meta anyway.

True, though the thread would have benefitted from making that explicitly clear rather than potentially distracting from the real issue, which is without a doubt much more serious.

Account and Technical Support is for people who are having trouble getting the game to run, either properly or at all. It's a thread that doesn't actually belong anywhere because they don't provide official GW1 forums, but if they did it would belong in the main discussion forum.

While action on this would be good, I'll wait until I see action before getting taking heart from anything they say. Or don't say, if they prefer to close/delete the thread to avoid acknowledging the issue. Can't say I have high hopes.

Also, I don't see how bundling in people trading GW1 currency for GW2 currency (or vice versa) along with gold sellers is fair. The GW1 eula (and I would think the GW2 one too) does outlaw currency trading, but that seems to be a different issue. Do the exchange rates make it more profitable to convert ecto to GW2 gold and then sell that or something like that?

(That thread doesn't belong in Account and Technical Support - fwiw, there would be more attention if it was in the right place.)

There is no easy way unfortunately. You're just going to have to screenshot them one by one and then manually cut and paste them into a combined image.

^This sounds crazy. Have you known of people actually doing that or is it something you just invented?

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Aside from specialised PvP formats (e.g, a 1v1 PvP tournament) the most common thing I've heard of people doing is dodgeball tournaments with everyone using all superior runes and Lightning Orb to create one hit kills. I imagine the interest in doing so will have dropped given the yearly appearance of the Dragon Arena, though.

I'm well aware of that, I was just pointing out it's not specifically W10 that does it. In any case, your example is backwards - given this is faulty rather than poor behaviour it's more likely that newer hardware will cause the issue. I've seen some games that are dependent on certain instruction sets in AMD cpu's that aren't included in the newer ones, causing characters to appear as black blobs if you're not using one from that era.

With the command line argument. You may be familiar with -image, which forces the client to download all files before loading the log in screen. Forcing DirectX 8 requires -dx8 instead.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

Not sure what causes it (it's not Windows 10 - I'm running it and have no issues whatsoever) but everyone I've come across with the problem has fixed it by forcing DirectX 8. I've seen other solutions suggested but they don't seem to work for everyone.

My understanding is that all White Mantle and Peacekeeper foes from WiK are capable of dropping them, it's just that the drop rate is miniscule. I've never had one drop myself either.

I get that too but there's a 'Continue to Discord' button as well. Did you ever accept the invite link to the Guild Wars Global discord? That's probably the difference between us.

I'd just have two forums which contain everything related to participation in PvE and PvP content. So for PvE it'd contain builds, quest/mission discussion, chestrunning discussion, farming, anything related to PvE titles (eg, cartography), speedclear stuff, etc. PvP would be about builds, formats, etc. Tbh if someone wants to talk about PvP they go to teamquitter, plus there isn't really the scope to talk about builds like there is for PvE, so I doubt there'll be much activity in such a forum regardless.

In addition to ditching the Professions subforum, it would be ideal if the PvE and PvP subforums were broadened to include things like mission discussion and tactics rather than being specific to builds. There isn't really a place for this atm.

Yeah, the timestamps now display a fixed time rather than one relative to your timezone, which is a very poor solution. A post I just made is stamped "04-02-2017, 21:56 UTC" while in my location it's Feb 5th 8:56am. If I need to determine what time a post was made in my local time I'm going to have to google it every single time. That'll make determining when it's ok for people to bump significantly more annoying.

Revolution displays the number of likes given and received along with the post count, join date ,etc, as well as showing a list of people who liked a post at the bottom of it. Neither of those appear on Wintersday. The liked list appears as white text with a shadow on a white background though. The thumbs up icon is misaligned for me too.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, if we're going to have a likes system installed, isn't reputation kinda redundant? It's never really been clear what it's meant to be for anyway.

EDIT 2: Also, I'd personally prefer for the total number of likes somebody has given and received to not be listed on every post. Listing the people who liked a post on that post (as it happens now) would be all I'd like to see.

Works flawlessly. Thanks!