Posts by Marty Silverblade

  • Interesting OS Axe I Found

    I see nothing remarkable about this.

    Max damage for each req can be found here. To save you a click, it's 6-24 (or 7-20) for a req 6 axe.

    Inherent values are dependent on rarity, not requirement. A x^50 mod on a rare weapon will be either 14^50 or 15^50. The lowest req a max inherent can drop at is the lowest req an item can drop as rare.

  • The weird ones (250e CLAIMED!) - Answers revealed ;)

    I've looked at this upwards of half a dozen times now. I can see two things which are GW related but that I wouldn't consider NPC's as such (presumably you're using that term loosely), one thing which appears to have been placed artificially but has nothing to do with GW and one thing which might be something but I'm not sure because I can't quite determine what it actually is.

  • Solo Advice

    Guilds are absolutely still around. They're the basis for most player interaction nowadays - people don't typically group up for random missions and such because it's just easier to do that kind of stuff with heroes, plus there's more of a focus on high end stuff given the age of the game. Outposts may seem empty but that's because people are out in instances doing things. Being in a guild will allow you to be connected to those people, and potentially get together to do stuff.

    Also, playing with heroes and henchmen is shortened to "H/H". Playing "solo" means being a one person team.

    Also also, if you're not already there, switch over to the American districts. Pretty much everyone is there.

  • Solo Advice

    If you remember very little about the game I would recommend starting in Prophecies. The slower learning curve will give you a much better opportunity to learn how your profession works and general PvE things. Heroes are not necessarily a boon - their builds can be customised so they can potentially be much better than henchmen, but they can also be worse if you don't have many skills unlocked or don't understand how those professions work (which is overwhelmingly likely if you haven't actually played them). Hench bars are generally pretty good nowadays so you really shouldn't look at heroes as a big priority.

    Play whichever profession you want. If you give us an idea on what things you're looking for we could give you specific recommendations, but choosing solely based on which is the most powerful is inherently stupid. You're meant to be enjoying yourself, remember? One thing I will stress though, is that there are no "bad" professions. ArenaNet gave up on nerfs in 2009 or so, so all skill updates since then have been buffs, leading to a massive surge of power creep. You'll see people say things like Paragons and Rangers are bad, but they aren't. They just aren't game breakingly overpowered like Mesmers or Rits. You can comfortably clear the game in Hard Mode with any profession.

    Other advice? Don't skip content/rush ahead. Take your time to immerse yourself in the game and learn as much as you can.

  • Get to know me, Kevin!

    Sorry to hear that. One of my former coworkers was in a relationship for 10 years only for it to not work out. I can't imagine what that must feel like.

    Regarding sport, I was talking in terms of being a fan, not personal participation. That's not obvious, in retrospect. Soccer (football, as you'd call it) is the main interest in Belgium, is it not?

  • Grand Court Sebelkeh Hard Mode Guide

    This video doesn't actually provide anything useful outside of pausing halfway up the initial pathway to allow the Margonites to ball, and even then you haven't made that obvious in any way. All this video demonstrates is you steamrolling through content with what appears to be garden variety hero meta bars, which is of very little interest or use. This mission is a noob trap (and probably my most favourite in NF because of it) and if you want to help people get through it it's imperative to explain why: an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence. In most PvE situations you can get through with team builds that are weighted heavily towards defence - builds with an anemic offence don't get punished outside of things going slowly, which isn't obvious to people if they haven't seen what a properly balanced team can do. This is not the case in Grand Court of Sebelkah (and, not incidentally, the other major noob trap Thunderhead Keep) as the constant stream of enemies forces you to keep up offensively, and if you don't you'll eventually get overwhelmed even with a loaded defence. What people often do in this situation is think "well, we died, so obviously we need more healers" and then drop a damage dealer for another monk, which then makes things worse. It's the responsibility of the backline to keep people alive, but what people neglect is that the offence in turn has a responsibility to kill things in a timely manner, hence the THK Monk strike in 2005. Oftentimes you can remove defense from a team build and the survivability doesn't drop because the damage you include in its place more than makes up for it. Killing things is always the best means of keeping your team alive. I've seen people, even in normal mode, running four backliners. Again, an absence of offence is as much a problem as an absence of defence.

  • Guild Wars Remade

    I saw the reddit thread the other day. I see no reason to interpret this as anything other support dodging the question in a PR friendly way. People make petitions all the time, and none of them get anywhere near enough attention to get Anet's attention, let alone get them considering doing something in response.

  • Guild Wars Remade

    Converting GW1 to run on the GW2 engine is going to take a hell of a lot more than just updating character models. In fact, that's almost certainly a triviality compared to all of the other systems that'll need translating. Doing it the other way - putting the newer models into GW1 - would be more feasible but stylistically it wouldn't work, putting aside the fact they have zero motivation to work on GW1 at all.

  • Old but important Guru content.

    As per this thread, the Guru archive is currently offline due to infrastructure changes brought about from the Twitch acquisition. It ought to return, though we don't know when. There are people who believe we won't ever see the archive back up (I am not one of them, at least not yet) and are working on a full content port to Legacy, though this is still very much a work in progress.

  • Guild Wars Guru- archive down?

    Quote from Khalija

    Yes, it will come back. I'm sure we just have to wait until the dust has settled. From what I gather there's a lot of internal organizational stuff going on atm since it just happened.

    Perhaps I'm being naive, but even with how poorly Curse have handled things I think considering the Guru archive to be a write off is premature. If it's still not up in two months time then sure, but give them a chance.

  • Game Update: September 8 2016

    Quote
    • Fixed a bug in creature AI that could cause creatures to stop using skills.
    • "Change Mailing Address" on the account management menu now redirects to the Customer Support website.
    • Requesting to trade with a player is now subject to spam limitations similar to chat; if a player spams trade requests, they will be temporarily unable to make requests. The current limit is 5 trade requests per 30 seconds.
    • Corrected a Message of the Day time for the Anniversary celebration.
    • Fixed a crash bug.

    For those unaware of what the first update is referring to, see this reddit thread.

  • Documenting missing areas

    If you visit one of those pages (eg, Team Arenas) the dropdown box links to a number of places you haven't got, like the hero battle maps and the outpost itself. Also, I read recently on some wiki page about the carto texmod file that the developers (of the mod, not Anet) tried repeatedly to get into the Ascalon Academy arena (the little PvP bit after you choose to leave pre-searing) and failed, even though they had enough players, and suspect it may be closed permanently. Hardly definitive evidence of course.

  • GUESS THE GUILD WARS SKILL!!!! RULES

    I was looking at it through a technical game theory/design perspective so my comments may seem harsh in comparison with the attitude people have when playing it. I'm not trying to tell people how they should be playing, be the fun police or anything like that. I don't know how other people feel about the competition, but I certainly like the idea, it's just not really functional in it's current iteration. If people are enjoying it then by all means continue with the current format.

    Here's another idea, based on Mastermind: you pick a skill. This skill has four properties - energy cost, campaign of origin, profession and skill type (casting time and recharge time would work as well if it works better with more properties). Each player can submit one guess per day. You pick one of those guesses at random and say how many things it has in common with the skill you picked, but not which one(s). For example, if you pick Hypochondria and I guess Pensive Guardian then you'd say (if you select my guess) I've gotten three correct. Interestingly though, you're better off trying to guess a skill with nothing in common with the skill you're trying to find so you can definitively wipe out those options. For skill type, grouping some of them together may make for a better game, though I haven't thought about it in a lot of depth, for example Spell or Attack or Shout/Echo/Chant or Stance/Signet or Glyph/Form/Ritual/Trap/Non typed.

    If you're more into the puzzle aspect rather than the competition you could also consider creating puzzles on a third party website and linking them here.

  • GUESS THE GUILD WARS SKILL!!!! RULES

    Problems with the current format in no particular order:

    -You don't seem to have made up your mind whether this game is meant to be for individuals or a team effort. The existence of a prize defines this as an individual contest. In rule suggestion B you say "This is to encourage people to ask questions that help everyone, rather than selfishly trying to win with a lucky guess", but why shouldn't we be selfish? Prize only goes to one person. Logically, I want to take whichever course of action benefits me the most and everyone else the least. However, that isn't possible because all info is public. If you wanted it to be a team exercise (presumably trying to guess the skill with the least number of questions), your format doesn't work either - our success will be defined by which questions you choose to answer. In either case it doesn't matter if someone asks a really clever question - from an individual perspective it doesn't help because everyone learns the answer and from a team perspective it may not help because you may pick a less efficient question. You need to clearly decide whether this is an individual or team and define the rules for that purpose.

    -Due to the number of skills in the game we have no choice but to ask the same narrowing down questions every time. The chance of guessing the skill correctly without having had 8-12 questions answered is so remote it isn't worth trying. It's going to take a week and a half before it actually gets interesting. Furthermore, given you only answer one question a day, we might as well just leave the narrowing down to one person and then all jump on board once the possible options are down to a dozen or so. If you want to keep a similar format to what you have currently, what you should do is to choose information to reveal each day and leave player interaction solely as guesses. This would also give you the freedom to provide as much or as little information as you want. You could also do something a little more abstract, for example make statements such as "these two guesses have something (the same thing) in common with the answer". That would make it more of a puzzle as it would be up to each person to determine what the clue is referring to. You're still going to have the above problem though.

    -The possibility that someone could correctly guess the answer first and then not win is utterly nonsensical. You must confirm guesses either way at the first opportunity, otherwise it just becomes a matter of favouritism. The person who wins is decided entirely by you, as opposed to solely the merits of the participants. However, this biases the competition to people with a similar availability time to you. You could wait until 24h from your previous post and then pick randomly (via a random number generator) from the correct answers if multiple people get it right.

    Food for thought:

    Games of this format fall onto what's known as a skill-luck matrix. Chess, for example, is a high skill-no luck game and poker is a high skill-high luck game. Both of these are played competitively at a high level. Your format is a no skill-moderate luck game, which by definition are uninteresting. This needs to be remedied one way or another. Here's how you could create a high skill, moderate luck game: keep everything strictly individual. Users ask questions/guess solely via PM and you also respond via PM. The objective is to guess the skill with the fewest questions. This alleviates the above issues entirely. Downside is that everything happens behind closed doors so while it's a much better game it doesn't really work as well as a forum game.